Quoted from "NoctyrneSAGA"

Quoted from "tankmayvin"

Quoted from "NoctyrneSAGA"

I also don't think FPS/RTS require a visual exam to be meaningful.

Otherwise any one of those games that have had easily identifiable models to shoot at would be meaningless.

I think that a military-themed game that entirely omits the concept of concealment, target identification and even tactical reconnaissance is really missing a massively important gameplay element. Concealment and detection is one of the biggest aspects of warfighting, and it is something that should have a meaningfully abstracted mechanic in any wargame of any sort. Even silly fantasy ones.

3D spotting as implemented in BF, especially in the pre-present context where you don't have any 4C technology, completely trivializes concealment/detection.

It's not a "visual" exam. It's about what sort of gameplay you want. I'm all for de-trivializing concealment/detection. I don't think removal of 3D spotting is the best way to do it, but it certainly needs to be massively clawed back beyond just adding jamming/spoofing. It also just needed to be straight up nerfed.

The visual exam analogy is equivalent to saying that 1v1 engagements are a motor skill exam. They are, but it's not a bad thing.

This is why I've advocated for Passive Spotting.

It eliminates the enemy detector Q Spam and makes spotting someone require that you realize they were there in the first place.

I have no problem with making spots require this effort to work because one guy having good vision is able to inform other teammates this way and everyone reaps the benefit.

Even if I don't pass the vision exam, a teammate that did can still help me out.

That would be great, and also incentivize gadgets. Not all players should/will able to equip spotting optics and high-powered rifle optics.

I'm not sure what you mean by passive spotting. I'd prefer a tagging system, where a player must tag a static location where they see something, instead of putting up a magical contextual flag that directly reports the nature of the target and it's movement. Simply reducing the cone of acceptance and requiring players to ADS through an optic to get the redberries to pop up would go far to fixing the existing system.

WOT, WOWarships, and War Thunder do pretty good jobs at simulating the fight for information and I think BF could learn a lot from those products. Since BFV seems to wholesale rip off from all sorts of other titles, might as pillage those ones too.

Passive Spotting = Lock On style spotting.

Track the target for X seconds to trigger a spot

Static markers are good as an extension but not replacement. They appeared in MGO3 too.

Really they should just rip MGO3 off because information warfare was such a key component. Could use a few more mechanics on the Decoy but alas it got "nuclear inspected" before it could be fully realized.

My problem with the Siege system is that I can have 24/7 eyes on someone but I'm still only giving a static call out every few seconds.

If I have constant visual on someone, I would like my information feed to also be constant.

Seeing as other people can't see through your own eyes or read your mind, it's not really reasonable. More specifically, it exists to fill the role of voice callouts, both in-universe and taking place of VOIP. The problem is... its far better than voice comms ever could be. It extends beyond its reach and provides far too much information.

Providing too much information to the player is extremely detrimental to gameplay, because good decision-making is about making the best call you can, with the limited information you have. If everyone knew everything, we would be playing chess, or tic tac toe.

Well that is technically true, but you have to bear in mind what tools we have in terms of communications instead of spotting. We have the chat and we have VOIP, which is both borderline unusable, since it is cluttered with nonsense. The game is also too fast-paced so that even squad-only based communication is worthwhile. Even if you figure out where the enemy is you still have to get that information to the teammate and then he has to understand it. The process is unbelievably complicated. Then there are also 63 other players around on a huge map and providing accurate intel via chat or voice is highly unlikely.

Stuff like this works well enough in R6 and CS where you have five enemies in a very confined space with clear lanes, so callouts like: "Last one at crate 3" is fully sufficient. This can never translate to a BF in the same way. Even in PUBG we have better spotting capabilities because engagement ranges and therefore times to kill are dragged out and since fights happen rarely they are also in confined areas, so you actually have the time to make a more precise callout. "Bearings 175 Red House on the right, second floor, right window, distance 150m". Additionally you can even pinpoint the exact location on the map. Try that in BF.

Judging from the stuff we saw from the trailer in terms of spotting and map usage (nothing), we can basically get no info across in the nick of time. So much for tactical. It is just plain nonsense. And of course you can say that BF4 went overboard with spotting, and I might tendencially agree, but it is rather hard to exactly pinpoint when you died through being spotted, and the counters were simply not used. You could spec fast unspot and you could use a suppressor on any weapon which would greatly diminish the time you show up on the minimap. But that stuff can never be properly examined, even on symthic.

I think if people complain about spotting they should at least be honest that they never did anything to even attempt countering it with the tools the ingame tools. This works the other way around, the T-UGS and especially the MAV were rather unused gadgets. Personally I always played Recon with an always active T-UGS a Suppressor and the according perk kit, and it turned out rather well.

Quoted from "VincentNZ"

Well that is technically true, but you have to bear in mind what tools we have in terms of communications instead of spotting. We have the chat and we have VOIP, which is both borderline unusable, since it is cluttered with nonsense. The game is also too fast-paced so that even squad-only based communication is worthwhile. Even if you figure out where the enemy is you still have to get that information to the teammate and then he has to understand it. The process is unbelievably complicated. Then there are also 63 other players around on a huge map and providing accurate intel via chat or voice is highly unlikely.

Stuff like this works well enough in R6 and CS where you have five enemies in a very confined space with clear lanes, so callouts like: "Last one at crate 3" is fully sufficient. This can never translate to a BF in the same way. Even in PUBG we have better spotting capabilities because engagement ranges and therefore times to kill are dragged out and since fights happen rarely they are also in confined areas, so you actually have the time to make a more precise callout. "Bearings 175 Red House on the right, second floor, right window, distance 150m". Additionally you can even pinpoint the exact location on the map. Try that in BF.

Judging from the stuff we saw from the trailer in terms of spotting and map usage (nothing), we can basically get no info across in the nick of time. So much for tactical. It is just plain nonsense. And of course you can say that BF4 went overboard with spotting, and I might tendencially agree, but it is rather hard to exactly pinpoint when you died through being spotted, and the counters were simply not used. You could spec fast unspot and you could use a suppressor on any weapon which would greatly diminish the time you show up on the minimap. But that stuff can never be properly examined, even on symthic.

I think if people complain about spotting they should at least be honest that they never did anything to even attempt countering it with the tools the ingame tools. This works the other way around, the T-UGS and especially the MAV were rather unused gadgets. Personally I always played Recon with an always active T-UGS a Suppressor and the according perk kit, and it turned out rather well.

I see TUGs and MAVs all of the time in BF4. The problem is that those gadgets utterly suck for scoring. The MAV is basically troll tier but does very little compared to boots on flags. The tugs is amazing directly on flags, but does little if the engagement range stretches even to the fringes of capture zone.

All of that plays into the general suckiness of recon in BF4.

So BF has a weird problem in that 3D/map spotting is simultaneously powerful but not very rewarding.

The only good gadget spotting tools are the ones you can fire: flare gun and motion balls. But those require a dedicated ammo supply to be useful for more than 1 very short life.

What's overpowered is Q spamming, which is free and gives you an insane amount of info. Or the AOE gadgets that area spot almost the entire useful portion of the map in LOS of your vehicle. On a heavy tank with nearly 100% uptime that's insanely powerful.

Quoted from "Novan Leon"

Battlefield intelligence should be valuable, but many games tend to make it TOO valuable, to the point that it dominates the meta in games with strong spotting mechanics like Battlefield, Ghost Recon: Wildlands and The Last of Us.

• The Last of Us boiled down to using silenced weapons and stealth perks almost exclusively.
  
• Ghost Recon: Wildlands is all about spamming drones and speed-rushing to abuse 3D spotting.
  
• Battlefield 4 was filled with players running assault rifles with silencers simply because of how difficult it made them to find while running and gunning. Intelligence and counter-intelligence gadgets were virtually mandatory for players looking to rack up a high K ratio as an infantry player.
  

These should be viable tactics but they tended to dominate the gameplay due to minimal risk and maximum reward, and IMHO they're just an uninteresting ways to play the game since you spend most of your time chasing dots on a minimap or shooting at markers on a screen, sometimes barely even seeing the player in question.

IRL Battlefield intelligence is more strategic than tactical, and by introducing it to the tactical side of the game you create these sort of "metagames" where it's more about spotting your opponent than actually engaging the enemy in gunplay. Perhaps I'm exaggerating slightly, but my point is that I think BFV's de-emphasis on intelligence and return to focusing on gunplay is a refreshing change (assuming it's implemented properly).

You're bullshitting. Silencers were by far the minority based on my playing experience. And I've played a LOT of hours in BF. Yeah, map spotting was hugely powerful, but checking the mini-map also costs time and diverts attention from shooting/moving.

I don't know what games you're playing, but in my experience most of my kills/deaths are not with spotted targets/enemies in any of the BF titles. That isn't to say that spotting isn't powerful (sometimes in an OP fashion) and doesn't impact the meta-game or whatever you want to call it. But it's also not all-consuming and dominating the way you'd make us believe. It's actually much more useful for people lobbing HE in fire support than it is in gunplay. At <20 engagement distances you don't always have the time to meticulously refer to the minimap while fighting. Q spotting and other free things like the commander drone are the problems, not things that entail a cost to the player to use, even if it's an opportunity cost.

IRL, you're bullshitting even more. Tactical intel is huge. Warfare is mostly about logistics and intelligence, not fighting anyway. So if you're arguing that BF should reflect IRL more, you're actually arguing against yourself.