I jumped in briefly last night to check it out. MG Littlebirds all over the place murdering people. If the LB doesn't get you, snipers all over the map will. It was complete dogshit.
Fobbits are farming xp building useless shit because that is all they can do until the T3 hammer, which got moved back.
It's like the devs don't play the game.
You touch on the core of what frustrates and disappoints me so much about this game. It feels like the movement and shooting mechanics (t4 armor aside) are fairly solid, but the core underlying structure of the game feels flawed.
Incentive structures are all over the place. There is very little incentive for me to stop my XP and money grind to help my team win. Unless I am assault or medic, it makes more sense for me to just drive endless circles dropping off supplies, or building endlessly than it does to swap kits around chasing whatever is needed to win. The three way team mechanics and people being able to choose and not be auto assigned has caused a sorting hat problem on top of that. If you want assault, go green. Build be blue. No idea what the fuck red does.
Balance is going to be unachievable. Attack Aviation is and always will be either too powerful, or overly nerfed. It has global presence that can put it anywhere on the map in no time. So its not like some infantry top tier kit. The infantry guy can be a fucking monster, but he has to walk to wherever he needs to go and can only shoot what he sees. A good helo pilot can be all over the map ruining everyone's day. So you either balance for the top tier pilots and then all the rest of the pilots are mad they can't make money flying, or you balance for average joe pilot and they are happy ruining the game for the rest of the players.
And lastly, the devs seemed surprised every time some no life gamer goes all in on the most efficient way to do something. Anyone with half a brain cell should have expected boosting servers on the community side. They are banning people for it, but was that even in the TOS? How did you not expect people to do that? Any gamer worth their salt saw that one coming, why do you even have an official economy tied to community servers in the first place? Last season's 'short trip' driving exploit were people just dropped shit right outside the base? People on reddit were telling them it was going to happen before the patch dropped, and if reddit can figure it out and the devs can't, that's not a good sign.
The devs have done a pretty good job making a game that feels good in its technical aspects. I enjoy flying, shooting feels good in general. Movement overall feels smooth. But when they put their incentive and gameplay loops on top of that it feels empty headed. The devs kinda come off as preening casuals who have some 'ideal' of how people will play based on their private in house testing scrims.
What they really need to do is hire a couple basement dwelling no life trolls with a vocabulary full of gamer words to sit in their meetings and tell them how they will break and exploit their game and basically write reality checks for the devs in turn for an actual paycheck.
