Pretty much. The stats back up DICE's reasoning, and the fan backlash is totally unwarranted. /r/BattlefieldV is usually a shithole, but with the news of 5.2, it's been especially bad: karma farmers posting "lmao mg42 in 5.2 will take like a hundred bullets" and getting thousands of upvotes. They don't want meaningful discussion on the patch, they just don't want it in the game.
I agree with the sentiment that it needs to go into a CTE first, but there's very little doubt in my mind that this patch is both needed and will be good for the game. People screaming about DICE pandering to "Christmas noobs" and whatnot is so mind numbingly stupid, I don't even know where to begin. It's as if one person decided to make shit up that's completely fucking wrong because it sounded right to them, someone else heard it passed off as legitimate reasoning and believe it, and things spiraled out of control from there.
It ticks me off. Game dev is hard! DICE has the data to prove these balance changes are necessary, and if you want to see the stats for weapons to understand why the BTK changes are necessary (not the TTK, because they've said time and again that the goal is to create new effective ranges for weapons while maintaining their old TTK within those ranges), you can go to Sym.gg and compare every AR, every SMG, every LMG, every MMG. You'll find that their RPMs are basically the only thing that actually matters, since they all do the same damage.
This post is mostly just me ranting, Os. It's not directed at you.
The spotting change however will probably bring ton of headaches. Wait until people are incorrectly spotted in grass or through objects and smoke. That is one area that does not need to be tampered with any more, and certainly not by auto-spotting enemies within view. That being said, plenty of good games, like Enemy Territories Quake Wars, had red doritos and wasn't any worse because of it. So maybe it's won't be bad here once you get used to it... wait and see. I don't think it's needed but we'll see if the game is worse because of it.
I agree. I think this is a particularly weird decision that won't solve the problem of visibility in places where soldiers should stick out. Instead, it'll likely punish soldiers who are actually camouflaging themselves in the environment at a distance. I'm skeptical as to whether the change from the existing 8 meters (people act as if this is a new feature, when it's not) to 15 meters is going to be as substantial as backlash would have you believe. Given the BFV community has shown it's completely unable to understand positive change (BTK changes) from negative change (2018 TTK changes), I'm for once just going to err on my own gut feeling: this is a mistake, and this will be the change DICE will revert or reduce.
