I’ve been playing since 2002, and the support classes in BF2 and 2142 were pretty much worthless beyond camping and handing out ammo.
See - you keep comparing this game to real life roles of said weapons, but this is A VIDEO GAME. It’s purposefully altered from reality for entertainment and fun. They’re not supposed to be REALISTIC representations of weapons, more than they’re supposed to be AUTHENTIC representations of weapons.
There is a difference, and those two terms are not synonyms.
Slower tanks would not increase teamwork and planning - it seems you’ve forgotten that the VAST majority of games played in Battlefield will be between 32 random players on a team that are barely going to work together at all.
The only thing slowing down tanks would do is increase how worthless tanks would be, and how easy it would be to kill them. They’d have no mobility in a game where infantry literally have HAND HELD WEAPONS that can destroy them.
And considering all automatic weapons in that game have notoriously bad weapon spread past their effective range, you won’t be doing much sniping with them - which is good for your fear of a “sniper fest” because automatic weapons have been and always will be the most used weapons in the game.
Lastly, all EVERYONE having bolt-actions would do would increase the amount of campy-ness in the game TENFOLD and would slow down the game more than any other in the franchise.
^ And that’s coming from someone who literally ONLY uses bolt-action rifles in these games, you can check my BL profile for proof.
BF has never been a skill shooter - it’s always had more arcade-y aspects in terms of shooting more than it has ever had a system based on raw skill. Most gunfights boil down to who shoots first - the infantry game in BF has always been easy and straightforward - it’s the presence of (until now) overpowered vehicles that made playing purely an infantry role more of a chore than an enjoyable experience.
The only reason people reference BF2 as the “OMG IT REQUIRED SO MUCH SKILL WTF NOOBS NEVER PLAYED THAT S***” of the BF franchise is because the game was restricted to PC only back then, and not many casual (mostly console) gamers really had beefy enough PC’s to run that game back then, and PC gaming wasn’t as popular as it is now.
If they remastered BF2 in the Frostbite Engine, casuals would play it just as much as they play BF now. They might actually dislike it purely because of how worthless some of the classes could be and how BLATANTLY overpowered some vehicles could be.
Battlefield has always been casual - just because back in the day there weren’t enough casual gamers around on PC to make a difference doesn’t change the fact that it was STILL a casual, arcadey shooter. I played BF2 probably more than any other BF title I’ve played (every single one of them) and my experience back then is pretty much the same now - just with less complaining because there was a much smaller playerbase, and less of a platform to complain on.
Maybe you should go to the Verdun forums and suggest that they amp up the game in size a bit, because that’s exactly what it sounds like you want - You don’t want a Battlefield game set in WW1 - you want a genuine WW1 game set in the Frostbite Engine.