I just wrote to /u/trollingisfun who is the mod over at /r/bf4. I asked him his thoughts on opening a sticky thread for known issues on BF4 for the reddit community to report. I think the community here has a lot of power to catalogue known issues in hopes that the thread could be used a resource for solving the issues. I know that’s pretty blue skies but I think it’s worth noting some of the issues regardless.
I began gaming online with Socom, back in the earliest days of console online gaming. It was amazing, you only needed to purchase the adapter to get online and that was it. The multiplayer experience was incredible, it was a novel idea that you could communicate with team members to play objectives and from what I remember as a 11-year-old at the time in 2001, the community was helpful and respectful of its players.
While it’s true that current generation console games like BF4 can offer the player more customization, bigger maps, more players, astonishing graphics, and crumbling skyscrapers! (When I first saw this on the Siege of Shanghai I was honestly in awe–Although there was a lag spike–in the early days of Console gaming I used to get booted from rooms if too many people shot AT-4’s or M203’s or used other explosives, so to see how dynamic maps are becoming is inspiring.
BUT Publishers are losing sight of what should be the single most important thing to them, the players experience after the purchase.
It doesn’t matter if you can offer new features: x,y, and z if standard mechanics that are essential to the players experience, which in my own opinion can be boiled down to: consistent connection (in terms of both connecting to servers and then smooth gameplay), and perceived fairness of gameplay (balance of maps, weapons, and game modes–here I write perceived balance because there will always be those who will always find issue with a game, for whatever reason)
So that this isn’t confused with a rant, I think that it might be helpful for our community to be more engaged in respectfully identifying and cataloging issues for BF4–it’s one thing to say, “I can’t join any servers” and it’s another to say, “I’m playing on XBox One, and tried to join the serves in the following ways… I have run into these specific issues and received these specific error messages when attempting join.” I’m not saying that this thread is useless, but I think that these kinds of “complaints” could be formatted into one thread and organized to be concise but descriptive in order to have a resource to turn to and say, “respectfully, these issues exist in this game that cause disruption and can prevent players from enjoying the BF4 experience.”
I think that as time goes on, due to tight timelines for game releases and super high expectations regarding features, that the communities themselves will have to be better organized and faster at responding with information that game testers/developers just may not have seen.