First of all, thanks @ATFGunr for the awesome tip on Portal. I unlocked several more guns in my Portal bot match and got some of the weekly Battle Pass stuff done too.
Then I went back into the land of Real Internet People and figured I'd try out Haven since I hadn't seen it yet and...hoo boy. It's a really cool map, but man, urban warfare.
Squads won't stick together and I end up on my own. I move, I die. I move slowly, I die slower. I don't move, I die from behind and don't actually contribute. Just endless Sundances and Borises with scatter grenades and sentry guns everywhere. Meta loadouts and level S200+. While I'm out here at level 75 with my newly-unlocked AKS-74U, which is positively antique in BF2042, because I dunno, maybe it was an heirloom in Mutti Falck's family from when her Papa Falck was with the East German border guards or something. But it's got wood on it, which makes it awesome no matter how crap it actually is.
Finding groups that stick together is almost impossible, and of course if you're by yourself in this game, you're messy messy roadkill. You might get one guy but there's always three more. The low point was when I was cowering...uh, strategically concealing myself...in a blown-up building and a Sundance came leaping in through the hole in the wall. I opened up first, got the first THREE FREAKING HITS WITH AN AKS-74U on her...and got deleted. Instantly. While she was jumping. Hack? Nah. Somebody with really good aim, and better reflexes than me.
But I'm not giving up, I'll keep poking away at it. It'll get better, maybe. It probably will, in fact. And if it doesn't, well, there's always the next Battlefield. Although if the past two have been any indication of how they'll treat an old broken-down part-time FPS gamer, I'm not optimistic.
Besides, going 4-14 on Haven still beats sitting through the all-day meetings I'm stuck in at work the next two days. :D
(Oh, found a Hardcore CQ64 server and tried it for a bit. Would've been better if I hadn't gotten stuck in a squad by myself. Oh well, at least I bookmarked it for later.)
