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?
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.
