This utilizes the exact same skillset as keeping your red dot on a moving target.
No, it most certainly doesn't. Keeping your red dot on the target, is based on the preceding knowledge of where your target is at and where your target is going. This knowledge isn't gained instantly, it is limited by your reaction time.
Suppression can happen in an instant. There is no preceding knowledge of the exact moment you'll be suppressed. It certainly doesn't announce itself, so it's not possible to react. You can certainly adapt after the fact, but at that point, your aim has already been thrown off. At which point, it may cause you to lose the firefight.
Losing a firefight because a random bullet flies by, is no matter what kind of reason you may put forward, not a fun experience.
You are implying that gunplay is the ONLY skill that exists in Battlefield. This is disingenuous. Emphasizing smart choice of engagements over gunplay isn't reducing or removing skill-based gameplay, it is shifting the focus from one skill set to another.
This is entirely false as well. You're misrepresenting my argument.
My argument is that suppression, in practice, doesn't lead to smarter choices of engagements. My argument from the very beginning has been, that it introduces a random element to gunfights. Besides, it's not just shifting the emphasis, it's actively sabotaging gunplay in favor of whatever you perceive the advantages of suppression to be.
I think we've both had our chances to bring forward our arguments regarding this matter. Quite honestly, I don't think we're ever going to agree on this one. So let's agree to disagree.
Suppression can happen in an instant. There is no preceding knowledge of the exact moment you'll be suppressed. It certainly doesn't announce itself, so it's not possible to react. You can certainly adapt after the fact, but at that point, your aim has already been thrown off. At which point, it may cause you to lose the firefight.
Suppression, when done right, does not happen in an instant. Even in BF4 this was not the case. It was a gradual buildup to max suppression levels. IIRC, each bullet contributed 5% toward the maximum suppression threshold (LMGs suppressed more than this), and the effects of suppression scaled accordingly. If you were only 5% suppressed, your recoil would only be increased by 5% of what maximum levels of suppression would increase it by. This was absolutely predictable.
The biggest problem with suppression in BF3 was that it affected bullet spread, but I agree that it also built up too fast. This can be adjusted very easily though. IMO bullets from assault rifles, SMGs, and carbines should contribute 2% toward the suppression threshold, requiring 50 bullets to become fully suppressed. LMGs should contribute 5% toward the suppression threshold, requiring 20 bullets for a player to become fully suppressed. LMGs could also have access to a weapon attachment, lets say Tracer Rounds, that would cost attachment points and have the effect of doubling the outgoing suppression from the gun (bumping up the LMG's contribution toward the suppression threshold to 10%), but this would come at the cost of making the LMG user's projectiles more traceable.
I agree that we are on opposite sides of the equation here and we may never agree on this. And that's okay. I do appreciate you taking the time to explain your thought process and reasoning and engaging in this discussion.
It was a gradual buildup to max suppression levels.
This is entirely dependent on the amount of bullets flying in your general vicinity within any given time. If anything, it contributes to the randomness, because those increments may change at an incredible speed.
Let's say somebody shoots a 3-bullet burst from an assault rifle towards you, but misses. That immediately stacks for 15% suppression. That already triggers the suppression threshold. Another example, let's say you're being shot at from a 800 RPM assault rifle, a number that's not out of the ordinary. That's about 13 bullets a second, or 65% suppression per second. In other words, suppression can easily trigger within less than 1/4th of second.
That's pretty close to the human reaction time, and that's not even taking into account the additional time it actually takes to make complex decisions and take action on those decisions. You may consider that predictable, I certainly don't. If it makes you miss even a single bullet by even the smallest degree imaginable, mid-burst in a firefight with another person, that may very well be the difference between life and death.
Even if I didn't consciously notice that I missed because of suppression, this feeling of inconsistency in the gunplay is certainly noticeable. It's like playing with trash netcode, you can't exactly know when bullets don't register, but regardless of that you just feel there's something wrong that you can't quite put your finger on.
but I agree that it also built up too fast.
Let's be honest, if you lower the suppression per bullet, suppression itself becomes much less viable. At which point I'd wonder, why even bother?
That's about 13 bullets a second, or 65% suppression per second. In other words, suppression can easily trigger within less than 1/4th of second.
This is why I am proposing decreasing the amount of suppression contribution each bullet has in comparison to BF3/BF4 levels. Adjusting the suppression contribution of non-suppression focused weapons down to 2% should resolve this. Under this system, it would then require 33 bullets to reach the same 65% suppression threshold you referenced, which is more than an entire magazine. LMGs would retain the 5% suppression contribution, as their emphasis is suppression of enemies.
Let's be honest, if you lower the suppression per bullet, suppression itself becomes much less viable. At which point I'd wonder, why even bother?
There are so many answers to this question.
I think the better question to be asking is, what is the benefit of NOT lowering the suppression contribution of each bullet of non-LMG/DMR/Sniper type weapons?
I'll try and chime in here with more of an anecdotal preference that might shed some light on why I agree with twing1ea on their suggested suppression mechanics.
Part of what made the Battlefield 6 Beta so wonderful was this sense of immersion. Not that it was trying to be a full-fledged military simulator per say, but that there seemed to be this mosaic connection between the background visuals (explosions, AA fire, jet combat), the map content with dilapidated buildings and scattered equipment, the firefights & vehicle physics, and gun play. It all boiled down to one word that underscored the entire experience: chaos.
All that to say, the "randomness" and "annoyance" you describe suppression as being, is actually quite in line with the themes that this game espouses. You're in hell. You're in a battle for survival in a world that is destined to destroy you.
Not every part of a game can or should be optimized so that your "skill" or lack thereof can or can't get you out of the gunfight, objective battle, or team strategy you're attempting to control - that is the inherent beauty of a game like this; once again, the chaos.
If I am running a flank with my buddy and we get pinned down between a couple of rocks and I look up the hill only to hear the sharp crack of a sniper (hopefully without a dorito on its head) and am forced back into cover, that is an amazing situation. If I can then haphazardly (in the heat of the moment) try and work out a strategy with my squad mate to escape, and involve the use of his LMG to give us a glimmer of hope in extending the thrill of a standoff with that sniper, you now have a challenge that is worth experimenting with. The fun, in my humble opinion, is truly in not knowing the outcome, not being able to perfect the outcome, and simply, taking a chance on a strategy you hope pays off. If it doesn't - you've learned something, you had a fun engagement, and you get to work figuring out how to do it better the next go around.
If the game were simply perfectly balanced where suppression has a certain formula, and you can figure out the counter-formula to combat it, things get stale EXTREMELY quickly...chaos and randomness is the name of the game.
Well said! A huge part of Battlefield's core to me is the idea that not everything is in the individual's control.
A lot of the changes that BF6 makes are a shift to delegate more power to the individual player, and fundamentally I believe this is the wrong direction.
That's a great way of putting it - too much individual control/convenience.
