With all of the respect the way you are fixing this issue feels like an insult to your player base. I think everyone would agree that 100 company coins are basicly nothing so anyone can get STUG IV now if they so decide. Because of this some players might say there's no reason whine about the problem anymore but I honestly think this whole issue highlights a bigger one within the game:
-Neither EA or DICE seem to be really interested in fixing bugs and issues or balancing the game in general. There's no season pass which great for players in general but it seems like it has also caused DICE to lost any interest of properly improving the game and honestly why would they? There's no extra money coming in for that and there's propably going to be new battlefield alpha version pushed out (as a finished game) in less than an year because that's how you get money from remaining franchise fans. After all you don't want your players to play old game for too long instead of buying new one. If they lose all interest in 10 months maybe they are ready for next wreckfest in extra 2. It's costly to balance game properly so lets throw in some new mission chain each week to keep players focused to them instead. Do you know what kind of games use similar attention hooks to keep players login each week? That's right those would be free to play games with microtransactions. It doesn't really matter if someone were to get epileptic seizures due flickering bug with recent patch so why would you be focusing on fixing something like that instead? I'm sorry for that I'm trying to keep it more civilized so please read a bit further would you.
If you do actually care about your customers then consider the following:
-Your customers deserve a working product without having to worry if the mission they are doing will be bugged or the game itself will crash every 15 minutes with DirectX12 enabled. These issues should be prioritized properly and fixed quick enough so players dont have to wait multiple weeks for something hopefully getting fixed.
-They deserve missions that are properly balanced without unrealistic objectives which force players to give up on teamplay and winning in in favor of missions that take long time complete. Excellent players like Levelcap struggle to complete mastery missions (for exsample M95/30) because the requirement of kills being on objectives is ridiculous when you add that to other requirements. Does that make mission more fun or rewarding - not really and there's difference between fair challenge and "once in the blue moon"-missions. I'm sure you got plenty of experienced players (many who were previously seen in main menu's "How to"-video series) around willing to give you advice how to create these missions.
-Tides of War itself feels like something thrown in to the game without enough planing or testing before releasing it each week - either missions are complete joke and take zero effort or they are set in the way that frustrate players and make them toxic as needed objectives are too specific or take too much time to grind through *cough* Armored Fist anyone?
Personally I play quite bit so I had around 16 or 17 of needed 20 kills for the missions before you changed it. After that I played more and got like 4-5 more kills and saw mission completion text which would have ment earning STUG IV the way mission was set to be. It was boring and frustrating at times as I felt like I was forced to play certain way instead of normal infantry focused playstyle I usually go with. Do I feel bad that everyone can get the it now? - Absolutely not as you really shoulnd't lock balance features like that away from new players like you did with few guns at least for a while during first campaign.
The actual problem comes down to how long it took you "to "fix" the issue and way you did that so lets look at few points here I would like to highlight:
-You made a mission without proper planing and testing if it felt reasonable, some players got angry and you propably looked statistics and expected incoming anger which you wanted to avoid at all cost. As an emergency plan you lowered the requirement to measly 5 kills - a quarter of what it used to be hoping enough players would pass mission now.
-While doing so you didn't actually check whether it would actually work coding wise or not and I think we all know by now how well that went.
-This would have been great time to man up, apologize and fix the issue properly giving STUG IV to everyone who had completed the mission. You could have also offered proper discout in company coins for those who didn't get it done but tried to. After all changing missions "In a last minute" is basicly same as admitting it didn't work properly and some players propably gave up soon after trying the mission.
-Instead I assume you decided that fixing the mission was too much work and chose to ignore that all together by forcing players who earned it properly to buy it instead. Somehow I have really hard time seeing you as some sort of good samarian carrying almost free gifts to us unfortunate souls wondering how basic math for these missions actually works.
At the end I feel like I have crarify something: I dont hate battlefield francise nor do I hope it "all to burn down" so I can laugh for EA & DICE's downfall. Instead what I actually want is to play good and balanced Battlefield game which we all can enjoy without expecting bugs and problems every time you press the play-button. I want the francise to continue with good games instead of waiting it to sunk to lake of greed while the last remaning sailors still floating yell how this all fault of pirates and sovinists who don't know what they actually want. I can only hope that wont be the case in future but until then I'm only left with pride and accomplishment for buying STUG IV for almost free price of 100 company coins.