EA Shepard apparently posted this on Steam forums
Still terrible wording.
"There's real frustration about expectations vs what shipped; our messaging around progression eligibility wasn't clear."
While there might have been some question about exactly what would offer full XP, they directly said that the guidelines for retaining full XP for an experience would be more lenient than in 2042. This would imply to a normal person that maybe the 1 HP bots with triple HP humans servers would not have full progression, but that servers running official game modes just with bot backfill would have full progression.
Additionally, we were fine with "what shipped" as long as it worked past the first day. EA couldn't deliver on its promise to provide every person who purchased a copy of the game with one free server to host and the load was too much, even though they also assured us in the week before release that their servers were ready. Instead of swallowing it and fixing it by adding more servers, they tried to cheap out and give people less incentive to host portal servers. The game shipped with full progression in portal for official game modes even with bot backfill. EA removed that after the fact, and is now making its community managers gaslight the community to cover up their false promises.
To be clear, they could have removed stat tracking from the get go. Very few people care about stats in Battlefield, and they haven't been a useful metric since BF3. And even those were warped by XP boosts that affected SPM - this is something that could have easily been remedied by having separate values for Game Score (not affected by boosts and used to calculate SPM), and Level Score (affected by boosts, doesn't factor into stat tracking only leveling up) - but I digress. Just disable K/D tracking on bot backfill servers if you want to placate that crowd. No one will care about that.
As for labeling, my experiences are labeled as full progression on Portal website currently but aren't that way in game.
There's also the issue of 64 player Breakthrough servers only having 48 players, 32 player Rush servers only having 24 players, etc.
I think that response is fair. I'm not supporting mindless unlock games that do nothing but keep killing players for XP...etc, however there needs to be XP for servers that offer either normal play or things like Zombies where you still get progression for playing a mode that is different but still a game. I think this is a fair middle ground if they are enabling it for legit servers and killing off the bot farm servers.
Shepard apparently posted this on Steam forums
Still terrible wording.
We're repeating 2042 all over again. "Sensible XP-per minute caps"? That's exactly what 2042 had and it was awful. You could only earn so much XP in a hybrid Portal match mixed with humans and AI.
They keep trying to solve the issue by making it as complicated as possible as they did in 2042. Shepard stated they're removing Bot kill stats etc from player kill stats, that's the right thing to do but not denying XP and putting caps in place.
At the end of the day, who are they punishing? It feels like they're punishing everyone instead of the abusers or you know just not having enough server capacity for everyone because even after the change, there's still not enough capacity.
Verified Modes must give FULL XP. End of story.
Would like to see a poll of whoever checks where they are on the leaderboard. If I could toggle "take me off the leaderboard" and get the progression back, I would.
Didn't even realize there was a leaderboard... I could care less where I'm at on it.
