Quoted from "Hau_ruck"

Vincent, are you saying that all the weapons in BF4 being basically slight variations on the same thing was good? Sure it may have been balanced but it was boring and lazy too. Now positioning and cover are more important than ever and there is no clearly dominant "meta" gun in each class. Goodbye BF3's M16 and BF4 AEK. And good riddance.

Not quite. I would put it differently. I do admire the fact that every weapon is subject to the same stat foundation and that variety is balanced from there. Damage is based on calibre and range on barrel length. At the same time you have different mag sizes and differences in handling through overall size of weapon and it being a bullpup. You have to really admire the simplicity.
And with this foundation of every gun being mechanically the same, you will find the one weapon per class that suits your playstyle the most. You can have the accurate PDWs with a low ROF, or the crazy TTK-gun, you can also choose something in between. You can play the mobile bullpup LMG to make it handle more like an AR. But the most important thing is, you can stick with your choice in any situation, be it the UMP-9, the QBB, the F2000 or the ACE52. The underlying mechanics allow the use even outside of the average engagement distance and, most importantly, the mechanics and the actual feel of the weapon correlated nicely. Plainly beautiful.
There might possibly be meta guns, that offer better performance depending on the engagement, but the difference was marginal, even in BF3, and the outcome was dictated largely around positioning, getting the drop, aim and reaction, tactical reasoning etc.

When I played BF1, I had engagements, that I could not have won, because my weapon was wrong and there was nothing within that class to handle it and the game forced me into these engagements. Further I had weapons that just felt instinctively wrong, again, by design. Weapons that magically got more accurate, or equally magically inaccurate after the first bullet. Weapons that missed although my aim was on point, which was easier to do because of a lower ROF and lower recoil.

BF1 made a lot of mistakes, but the real reason it was abandoned by everyone I know is because it felt so wrong and unfun in the core aspects of a shooter. People can overlook shitty map design that BF4 had as well, or restrictive server rules, or the death of community features, but an inconsistent and instincitvely wrong feel of guns, that kills a shooter's vibe. Maybe, if I had used the AEK or the M16 in BF3/4 more, my K/D would have been 0.02 higher, but does anybody really care?

Quoted from "VincentNZ"

When I played BF1, I had engagements, that I could not have won, because my weapon was wrong and there was nothing within that class to handle it and the game forced me into these engagements. Further I had weapons that just felt instinctively wrong, again, by design. Weapons that magically got more accurate, or equally magically inaccurate after the first bullet. Weapons that missed although my aim was on point, which was easier to do because of a lower ROF and lower recoil.

If all you want to do is tapfire, Medic SLRs fit your needs.

To me this just sounds like someone complaining that BF1 doesn't play like BF4 and that they have to learn to play with new gunplay mechanics.

Quoted from "NoctyrneSAGA"

Quoted from "VincentNZ"

When I played BF1, I had engagements, that I could not have won, because my weapon was wrong and there was nothing within that class to handle it and the game forced me into these engagements. Further I had weapons that just felt instinctively wrong, again, by design. Weapons that magically got more accurate, or equally magically inaccurate after the first bullet. Weapons that missed although my aim was on point, which was easier to do because of a lower ROF and lower recoil.

If all you want to do is tapfire, Medic SLRs fit your needs.

To me this just sounds like someone complaining that BF1 doesn't play like BF4 and that they have to learn to play with new gunplay mechanics.

As said, this is my personal opinion based on my experience and from my 60 friends on origin that dropped the game even before TSNP. The consensus was that the game felt shit, and unfun. I acknowledge the fact that they had to do with rather limited weapon choice, and I see the appeal the game has to some people, especially here. I mean it is spreadsheet heaven; all those little numbers dancing around must really make some hearts tingle. The balance is even there on paper, I'll grant them that. But with all their stats they forgot to reimplement the fun for the average joe, that only has a sporadic interest in deep game mechanics.

I am not all for tapfiring, I understand that for the min/maxer it is a rather stale mechanic, when you do not have to take into account most effective burst lengths and the optimal moon-phase for the engagement distance. I am just arguing in the same way as I did for the last five years here: A game needs to feel good in the first place, and CoD always managed at least this, and so did BF3 and 4. If then the numbers add up as well, I am fine with it.

BF1 hasn't shifted the armor meta very much from BF3/BF4, the vehicles are just very different in design play, but the net outcome is the same. All of the titles have had major vehicle balance issues, the issues are just different every iteration, especially the ground vs air balance.

BF1 actually took a step back relative to BF4 in that if you've got complete air dominance (ie a major skill imbalance), ground armor is basically fucked since there is no dedicated AA vehicle that spawns independently of the other armor spawns. But then it clears up a lot of the issues that BF4 and BF3 had with dominant combos of laser guided weapons, ability to eat up 3+ shells with no health damage, chain firing the main gun (AP + STAFF was a bad joke, so was 25mm HE + 25mm Sabot in BF3). But then it adds a bunch of useless vehicles and crummy locked-abilities. So really its a wash, pros and cons and ultimately a good design.

Armor has always been able to mop teams that don't provide adequate opposition. That's just part of how BF is designed. I've certainly never been able to pull off the 80+ kills per round I could in BF4 tanks, but I would say I'm overall killing more guys per round and dying less: my vehicle KPM, KDR are all higher than BF3/BF4.

Poking through my stats in over 10 years of BF games through 6 titles (too bad I can't get BF2 or BC2 stats) and things are remarkably consistent, with most variations due to mechanical changes in the game (ie BF4 I had higher accuracy because of using so much canister, and my vehicle KDRs in 2142 being over 20, but 2142 armor was "special"). But I think that sort of disproves the notion that BF1 ruined the game, hell, at the higher levels of design, its not a game that has changed all that much since BF2.

BF3 had, hands down the worst small arms meta of ANY BF game ever released, which I think is exceptionally bad. I have no idea how you add a ton more weapons but end up with an overall Meta not that different from 2142. BF4 just added more junk on top of mediocre balance. I think they finally hit a nice place with BF1 after some rebalancing of offering meaningful balance but with an arsenal of more than 2 guns per class, which is where they were coming from before they caught the "moar gunz iz betta gunz" plague in BF3/BF4.