I found out about it through Twitter by following one of the BF community managers. The omission of it from the official forums is just another embarrassing mistake for a franchise that is rock solidly reliable in disappointing fans.
The Discord meeting was pretty bad and what you would expect. Basically a wet dream wish list for all things to make jets OP and break the theme of the game with the inclusion of deprecated weapons:
*313 Speed control
*Attack jets
*No spread cannons
*JDAM bombs
*Unguided Rockets
*Vehicle Killer 30MM
*TV Missiles
*ECM Jammer
*Cannon splash damage
*Momentumless Flight
*Wildcat Nerfs
There's no shame, no self awareness, no effort to view things in the context of a multiplayer game. Just all me me me. "Make this MP game a SP experience for me because I am a jet pilot and my skill ceiling is so high that you normies will break your neck just trying to look up at it."
It's frustrating because for example, the cannons are really well balanced now. The 25mm does great damage vs infantry and air vehicles but can't pierce armor while the 30mm can pierce armor and do good supporting damage while remaining decent vs air vehicles. But too many pilots want spreadless cannons and momentumless flight so they can farm infantry all day long and boost their Twitch followings.
Instead we should be focusing on:
- Increased blast damage/radius for AGM against tracer dart environmental targets
- Spotting Flares
- Smoke Bombs
- Maneuverable flight while using free-look and rear cams
- FLIR
One takeaway I got from it was when I brought up how tracer darts can now be fired into the environment creating the ability for a recon to mark a place on the map where a jet,heli, IFV could then fire the A/GGM missile to attack infantry. I asked a dev who was there why the damage and blast radius of these weapons was so low (50 damage and super low blast radius) and if that was intentional was there some other purpose to the environmental tracer dart capability that maybe I was missing?
The Dev replied that "AGMs are made to deal a good amount of impact damage with moderate blast damage, never meant to be used on an environment to kill infantry with blast damage and i'm sure tracer dart+AGM has exposed this a lot more. will take a look see how we are doing there but they will not become a nuke bomb to clear out infantry waves when combined with the dart 🙂 thanks for bringing up."
This leads me to believe that the different teams aren't coordinating with each other sufficiently and there's a vacuum in the position where there should be leadership managing all these different teams and creating a cohesive experience. Rather, it seems like the teams are competing with one another and operating in silos. What is the purpose of being able to fire the tracer dart into the environment if the weapon damage is ineffective. You're literally wasting a missile. Why isn't the gadget person talking with the vehicle weapon person to make sure the weapon profile is updated to make it useful against environmental tracer darts? The environmental tracer dart thing is such a cool concept that is wasted right now because there's nothing to really do with it currently.
I'd hoped with a new director we'd see some changes but feels like more of the same.
