Re: WEEKLY MISSION "Grin Reaper" has been disabled.

Battlefield has been based off real wars ever since its existence....using real countries as sides, axis/allies,  germany, italy, us, brittain, china, russia. battlefield 2 and 3 took place in mostly middle east regions while us was at war over there...nobody had a problem with that.....its a simulated war game....let it be.

I think its more to do with the combination of the name "Grin Reaper" and it being a Russian helicopter

- ie "haha funny play on words of Grim Reaper because of smiling shark tooth skin given to helicopter which is currently killing people" - obviously the skin was done up before this week but the combination of skin, name, type of helicopter could be interpreted as making light of a terrible situation and obviously the developers want to avoid that.

I doubt this will prevent them from releasing skins for Russian vehicles / weapons altogether, it will probably just make them review their names and designs to try and make sure they don't include skins which seemingly make fun of war or death.

The thing is fortnite / apex and every other microtransaction game has been pushing towards this mantra - cotton candy coated LOL death LOL, "killing is fun!" happy smile aesthetic, where everything is a joke or a meme or something dumb to grab attention.

It's possible that Dice will need to change their skin design, naming philosophy to something more realistic / brooding / somber otherwise this "Grin Reaper" situation may happen a every couple of weeks.

In regards to removing Russia from the game, the conflict in the game is fictional and its kind of hard to remove one of only two sides in the game, both lore and games design wise.

In any case there are only so many militaries of a decent size with a similar level of military technology for games designers to choose from, hence why US, Russia and China get singled out.

Its hard to make a game balanced when one side has modern tech whilst the other is using weapons and vehicles that are from 40 to 60 years ago - which is what most of the world is equipped with. It's also hard to market a game where both sides have crappy tech - which is how a lot of armed conflicts go down.

There are also many militaries with advanced tech such as countries in the EU, but at that point you have to choose individual weapons / vehicles to represent an alliance of many countries - ie should a German Leopard 2 be used or a French Leclerc? You can have both, but its extra time spent, and there are still all these other tanks from other EU member states to consider.

In short, we will see Russia in games for a while yet because they tick all the boxes games design wise for a balanced team. Also if Russia bans the game for being featured as one of the militaries its not as big of a sales blow compared to China banning the game.

Couldn't agree more. Removing a skin doesn't do anything other than * off all the people that were in the middle of acquiring it. "Oh yay, my helicopter that's already in the game doesn't have a grinning face on the front now...That will solve the Russia invasion of Ukraine!".

What's next? Change every label in the game that has "RU" or "Russia" to a made-up country? It's a game...it's made-up! If people can't handle make-believe, maybe they shouldn't be playing violent video games?

They didn't disable content for China Rising in BF4, or even make a peep about the Uighur Genocide and other humanitarian rights issues across the world going on...Why does this sort of thing matter now all of a sudden? Do we just pull content every time something we don't like or agree with happens? What about all prior BF titles? Should we replace all models with fluffy bunnies and kitty cats?

I completely understand the sensitivity of the situation, but this seems more like virtue signaling than anything else. If they really cared about the people of Ukraine, they would completely remove Russia from the game. Relabel everything to a fictitious country or faction like CelicaGTX said. I mean we already have ridiculous No-Pats, just make it the Allied and Axis factions.

At the end of the day, I can still play as Boris (Russian) with an AK-24 in an MI-24 Hind and kill people for in-game incentives for progression. Did they disable my ability to get T1 on the MI-24 Hind so I don't get a new skin for it? Nope.

What is going on in Ukraine is terrible and hopefully ends as soon as possible with no more lives lost, but this is a video game with a Russian side. Doing a weekly mission for a skin doesn't mean you support Russia or the invasion.

I can only hope this break in weekly missions makes them look at them a little more closely and put some effort and logic into the missions. Why is a skin for a helicopter have tasks that are completely unrelated to the skin? How about some synergy here. If the reward is an LMG skin, make some tasks related to LMGs perhaps. This is not rocket science, but it seems like almost every design choice in this game was made and approved by people that have no clue what they are doing.