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Thoughts on playing Battlefield 4 in 2023 (Mental Sickness)

March 16, 2023

I’ve been playing a lot of battlefield 4 with a friend and on my own. Here are my thoughts:

Pros:

  • I get to shoot a gun at other people in a game. Any time of day I can join a server and be shooting a gun at strangers.

  • The guns are very nice. There’s a lot of variety and pretty much everything is viable.

  • It’s the only multiplayer game that works for me properly on my shithouse 4g connection thanks to the insane amount of trust given to clients and other bizarre netcode choices.

  • You can disable the chat! I don’t have to read the steady stream of invective from other players. If people get on my nerves I can just make them vanish with a single key, thank the lord.

  • The emblem creator is fun. I miss creativity and personalisation options in games that aren’t just spending money to show off the premade thing.

  • When everything lines up it’s honestly quite a good game. Nice positive feedback loop when you’re out there capturing points and turning the tide with a pal.

Cons:

  • Very strange way of allocating points that disincentivise objective play. Why does making a control point neutral give you 100 points but capturing it fully give you 400? It chucks 10 points at you for sitting on a point as it captures but if you get shot before it fully caps you lose the lion’s share of the reward. It’s common to be the first guy on a point, clear it out and make it neutral, people spawn in on you and then be the unlucky fella who gets sniped by the lav from 500m away on a hill. Result? You got 130 points out of a potential 600 and the satisfaction of knowing you helped. No, give me a fair proportion of the points! I’m like a dog and I need perpetual external reinforcement.

    Similarly, you can be the guy who disables a fully loaded transport chopper with two beautiful rockets and then some other guy - probably a twat in a tank or jet - can swoop in for the finishing blow and you end up with…. 80 points for a vehicle kill assist while the other guy gets showered with ribbons and points for their incredible work. This one is the most painful if it wasn’t for the satisfaction of knowing you inconvenienced a sky god for 15 seconds.

  • The cheating problem. Cheating is extremely common and hard to detect as hack makers have been working around fairfight/bf4db’s stat tracking detection methods for many, many years. Punkbuster is long dead and there are streamlined ways to ensure your public hack executables are personalised to avoid signature detection. Hacking is also extremely effective in battlefield due to the low TTK and general chaos that creates deniability - slap ESP and a trigger bot on your man and suddenly you’re punching well above your weight. If that bores you then go all out and tell the server you can fly around at 500mph and your guns do 99999 damage per shot and the server will go “sure, i trust that claim!”, Get caught due to reports or a wary server admin forwarding footage on to bf4db? Rebuy your account and get back to where you were unlock wise in no time with a tool assisted spm of 5000. Or just steal somebody elses.

    …or perhaps it’s not more common than your average FPS but the increased player limits on servers just means you’re statistically more likely to run into them every game. It just feels far worse than any game i’ve played, or perhaps i’m getting older and less tolerant. If we’re being honest here, hacking is endemic in modern military gun style FPS games and don’t believe anybody who tells you otherwise. Thankfully in battlefield they all seem to congregate in 24/7 locker/metro servers like maggots on a bloated corpse.

  • Vehicle Lords and all of the absolutely insane design choices to make Vehicle Lords virtually invulnerable without 3-4 people coordinating very hard to kill them (which naturally doesn’t happen in public servers, i’m sure in a testing environment on a LAN it happened all the time though).

    Why can vehicles go into third person to eliminate any ambushes? Fuck you that’s why. Why can the armoured vehicles turbo boost out of danger at 90mph when you ambush them? Fuck you. Why is disabling a vehicle borderline useless? Why does ecm recharge so fast? Why can pilots pilots jump out and back into their vehicles to evade locks, fire rockets and swap seats to restore chopper rotors to full power instantly - mysteries abound. A competent chopper pilot & their chum can single handedly decide the outcome of a 64 player conquest game, and if it’s a more infantry focused, replace chopper pilot with LAV driver.

    Ah, but I guess there’s a moderate skill curve associated with it and you need to know when to take risks and when to pull back to safety. forget it, that makes it all okay, they deserved to win!

  • Half the servers are reporting phony player stats to entice you to join their half empty servers and the VIP slot economy is insane. You will be split up from your friends or booted from the server from time to time.

  • You can’t use the fun toys without grinding unlocks or paying the troll toll (buy battlefield 4 premium edition). Even then you need to grind out attachments and do stupid DLC grinds in dead game modes to get some of the nice toys like the airbust UCAV or MPX.

  • The playerbase is full of people called stuff like [AZOV]HITLER FANATIC, [troll88]JEWSLAYER and Putinator_You_mad_yes?[RUS] so on. I caught a guy with proscribed terror organisation national action’s emblem too. Reported it and EA said that “it did not violate rules” five days later. Oh, right then lads. What a world!