So I tried BF after a long pause... (little bird)
So after about 3 months pause because of helicopters I finally fired up Battlefield again, queued my beloved Obliteration, and what do I see? Shocking plot twist: the enemy team is once again being carried by some legend in a Little Bird, mowing everyone down. Screenshots attached from when I joined and when we lost, because of course we did :D Honestly, it's just not worth it. I grabbed the Igla, and the moment the guy sensed someone locking on, he was 98% below radar, and the remaining 2% he was either off the map or popping flares. Pure skill, obviously :D I can't believe DICE just doesn't see this in their logs... one guy carries the whole team while everyone else just tags along for the win. I know I read today that they're tweaking the below-radar stuff, but right now it's genuinely not worth playing. I'll give it another shot after the update. For now I'm off to other games. But hey, the graphics do look nicer :D
Please Keep Supporting Gauntlet Going Into Season 5
Feedback for the Battlefield Developers — Please Keep Supporting Gauntlet I wanted to give some feedback about Gauntlet going into Season 5. I'm disappointed to see Gauntlet leaving because it became one of my favorite ways to play Battlefield. What I like about Gauntlet is that it isn't just about getting kills. You have to adapt to different objectives, communicate with your squad, know when to push or defend, and change your strategy depending on the situation. I've actually been practicing Gauntlet and rebuilding chemistry with my squad because I wanted to eventually try competitive Gauntlet. I'm willing to adapt to Rapid Royale and give the new direction a chance, but I don't want Gauntlet to disappear completely. I'd like to see it return as a regular playlist, a rotating mode, or eventually even have a Ranked Gauntlet option. I'm not asking you to stop developing other modes. I just hope the players who genuinely enjoy Gauntlet and its competitive potential aren't forgotten. Please keep supporting Gauntlet. There are players who still want to play it and compete in it. — BSAGAMINGINC / 431st CommandoPositional Audio: threat boosting may be masking distance and occlusion cues
SUMMARY I believe Battlefield 6's enemy audio can provide good directional information while giving much less reliable information about distance, occlusion and vertical separation. My working hypothesis is that some of the gameplay-based enemy prioritisation added to improve footstep audibility may be interfering with the acoustic relationships that allow a listener to judge physical distance and obstruction. In short: enemy audio can be highly audible without being spatially interpretable. BACKGROUND I have close to 3,000 hours in Battlefield 1 and at one point reached 3rd globally for MVP. Sound was a major part of my BF1 gameplay. Using headphones with Creative Sound Blaster SBX virtual 7.1, I became able to rotate towards enemy sound sources extremely quickly and often place my reticle very close to the correct location before visually acquiring the player. In Battlefield 6 I initially used the same SBX system. I later moved to a personalised HRTF-based virtual 7.1 system through Equalizer APO, customised using measurements of my head and ears and including headphone-specific correction. I extensively tested both during actual gameplay and found the personalised system better, with my longer-term gameplay tracking also indicating improved performance. However, the problems described below remain, which makes me suspect the main limitation is upstream of the final headphone virtualisation stage. THE PROBLEM Horizontal direction can sometimes work extremely well in BF6. I can hear an enemy, rotate towards them and identify the approximate bearing very quickly. Distance, obstruction and vertical position are much less dependable. Examples include: Footsteps sounding extremely close when the enemy is substantially farther away. Players on another floor sounding as though they are on the same level. Difficulty distinguishing a player in the same acoustic space from one behind a wall or in an adjacent room. Apparent footstep distance changing in ways that do not seem proportional to actual movement. Excellent localisation in one situation followed by misleading information from apparently similar cues in another. The problem is therefore not simply whether an enemy can be heard. It is whether the sound accurately communicates where that enemy physically exists. POSSIBLE CAUSE The BF6 patch history shows several changes intended to improve enemy movement awareness. These include increased enemy movement volume, increased distant movement audibility, additional emphasis for enemies behind the player, offscreen enemy boosting, changes to obstructed-footstep levels, higher footstep priority to reduce culling, revised distance separation and direction-dependent ducking of the player's own weapon when a nearby enemy is present. I understand why these systems exist. Being killed by somebody you never heard is frustrating. However, I wonder whether the accumulated prioritisation is now interfering with the natural cues required to estimate distance and occlusion. A listener judges distance using several interacting signals, including overall level, spectral balance, high-frequency attenuation, direct-to-reflected sound ratio, transient definition, reverberation and obstruction filtering. A distant or obstructed player would normally become quieter, duller and more dominated by reflected sound. If BF6 then increases that player's prominence because they are behind the listener, offscreen or otherwise considered an important threat, the listener can receive conflicting information: some characteristics of the sound suggest "distant or obstructed" while its overall prominence suggests "very close". The direction can still be correct, but the perceived distance or amount of obstruction becomes much harder to judge. That is very close to what I experience during BF6 gameplay. WHY CONSISTENCY MATTERS In Battlefield 1, repeated exposure allowed me to build a very stable relationship between what I heard and where another player actually was. The important quality was not simply loud footsteps; it was consistency. A particular combination of loudness, filtering, reflections and direction repeatedly corresponded to a particular physical relationship between me and another player. That consistency allowed the process to become almost automatic. BF6 is much harder to learn in the same way because similar acoustic cues can apparently correspond to very different distances, levels of obstruction or vertical positions. Increasing audibility therefore does not necessarily increase positional information. SUGGESTED TEST It may be useful to test the complete enemy-footstep mix at fixed distances such as: 3 m -> 5 m -> 10 m -> 15 m -> 20 m Then repeat the same movement with: Direct line of sight. A wall between players. The enemy above or below the listener. The enemy in front versus behind. The enemy onscreen versus offscreen. The important question would be whether the resulting acoustic progression remains predictable. Does a player at 15 m consistently sound farther away than one at 5 m even when rear/offscreen threat processing is active? Does adding a wall consistently increase the perception of obstruction? Does a player below the listener reliably sound different from one on the same floor? It may also be informative internally to repeat these tests with threat-based boosts temporarily disabled. If distance and obstruction become easier to judge, that would suggest the underlying spatial-audio system is not the main problem; the interaction of the additional prioritisation layers may be. CONCLUSION I am not suggesting that all enemy prioritisation should necessarily be removed. The systems presumably exist to solve legitimate audibility problems. However, I think BF6 may currently be prioritising: "Make sure the player hears that an enemy is a threat" at the expense of: "Accurately communicate where that enemy exists in the acoustic environment." For me, BF6 can often tell me very clearly: "There is an enemy behind-left." But it is much less reliable at telling me: "The enemy is approximately this far away, behind this amount of geometry, and on this vertical level." The distinction I would encourage the audio team to consider is: AUDIBILITY versus INTERPRETABILITY. Making an enemy more audible does not necessarily make their position more interpretable.Store - The Year of the Horse
Hey EA, I missed the store featured recommended purchase for the "The Year of the Horse". I understand The Year of the Horse was a mid-season event in Battlefield 6 that ran from February 17 to March 3, 2026, celebrating the Lunar New Year alongside the Season 2 update. I see other older ones that keep re-appearing normally for Sale - but I never see this one again. Please can it be re-post on the STORE and offered to purchase for Players? Kind Regards, KennyBBringing gauntlet to season 5
Gauntlet was one of the few modes that actually felt like Battlefield trying something genuinely different. It combined the large-scale, objective-focused identity of Battlefield with a more concentrated format. To me, it felt like an evolution of Conquest rather than another conventional battle royale. Battle royale already has an extremely established formula across the industry. Gauntlet gave Battlefield something that felt more distinctive. Removing that mode in favor of emphasizing another BR-style experience feels like moving away from what made Battlefield different in the first place. I started Season 1 at around 0.7 KD and eventually reached 1.5 KD, 10,000 kills, and 6 million points. Gauntlet was a major part of that progression. If the population isn’t sufficient for a permanent playlist, please consider making it a recurring rotation rather than removing it entirely.Removing Gauntlet Won't Move Me to Rapid Royale — It'll Move Me to Another Game
understand EA's explanation that Gauntlet currently represents a smaller portion of REDSEC play and that maintaining too many playlists can hurt matchmaking. What I don't understand is why removing the mode entirely is the answer. I've put hundreds of hours and thousands of matches into Gauntlet. It's the reason I've continued playing Battlefield 6 this long. I'm not sitting here deciding whether to queue for Gauntlet or Rapid Royale. I'm deciding whether to play Gauntlet or play another game. If Gauntlet disappears, I'm not moving over to Rapid Royale. I'm moving to another game, and judging by the reaction from other Gauntlet players, I'm clearly not the only person who feels that way. The other frustrating part is how we got here. Gauntlet has gone months with major issues, received very little new content, and we're now apparently going to reach the removal of the mode with the Interdictor still broken. Players repeatedly raised these issues while continuing to play the mode. Now the population being smaller is part of the justification for removing it. Maybe Gauntlet really is a small percentage of REDSEC today. I don't have EA's internal numbers, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But I think it's fair to ask how much better the mode could have retained players if it had received more consistent support and its major problems had been addressed sooner. And these aren't necessarily inactive or casual players being lost. Some of us still playing Gauntlet have hundreds of hours and thousands of matches. We're exactly the kind of players a live-service game should want to retain. If matchmaking is genuinely unsustainable in some regions, please try alternatives first: rotations, regional availability, broader matchmaking options, scheduled Gauntlet periods, or even making it available less frequently. Anything is better than simply deleting the mode. Rapid Royale may be successful. I hope it is. But Rapid Royale succeeding doesn't require every Gauntlet player to suddenly want Battle Royale. Gauntlet and Battle Royale offer fundamentally different experiences, and removing one doesn't automatically create demand for the other. Gauntlet isn't competing with Rapid Royale for my time. It's competing with other games. Remove Gauntlet, and for me, the other games win. Please reconsider removing Gauntlet. Give the mode and the players who are still actively supporting it another option.Attack Helicopter — Killing Machine. Mobile Anti-Aircraft Unit That Never Gets
Dear DICE Team, I am writing this because it is painful to keep playing like this. The Attack Helicopter is a true killing machine — powerful radar, strong weapons, can strike and retreat, and always receives attention and adjustments patch after patch. Meanwhile, the Mobile Anti-Air vehicle is left behind, forgotten, and placed at a clear disadvantage every single match. The imbalance is obvious: - Missiles lock-on too slowly while helicopters attack and leave before we can respond - Missiles sometimes fly straight into the ground instead of climbing toward the helicopter - Thermal smoke blocks OUR vision completely — we lose sight of the very targets we are supposed to stop - Helicopters have "below radar" protection, flares, and countermeasures that reload fast — we barely have anything to reliably counter them - We send videos, screenshots, and detailed feedback over and over — yet nothing truly changes Infantry gets updates. Helicopters get fine-tuning. Every other vehicle gets looked at and improved. But Mobile Anti-Air? It stays broken, weak, and neglected. I have to ask — why is it like this? Why does everyone else get balance love and improvements, while Mobile Anti-Air players are just ignored? Do DICE truly hate this vehicle and the players who choose to use it? Is it so hard to give us the same fairness you give to pilots? We don't ask to overpower everything — we ask for equality. We ask to be able to defend our team without being an easy target from above. Please stop leaving Mobile Anti-Air behind. Respectfully,
Battlefield Is Dead: When Skill Became Secondary to Spending
After watching EA seemingly destroy what made Battlefield special and turn BF6 further and further into a Call of Duty-style game, the chances of this becoming the Battlefield that longtime fans wanted seem to be dying by the day. The lack of Oceania servers for Ranked RedSec has also completely undermined competitive gameplay for players in this region. Being forced to compete on US servers with 150+ ping means Oceania players are starting with a significant disadvantage before the match even begins. When you're trying to compete at the highest level, that kind of latency matters. Then there’s the ridiculous cost of staying competitive. We’re now at a point where a high-end gaming GPU can cost at least $6,000, on top of the cost of the game, Battlefield Pro and the growing number of microtransactions. At what point does competitive gaming stop being about skill and start becoming about who can afford the most expensive hardware and who is willing to spend the most money? If someone can spend thousands of dollars on hardware, subscriptions and additional purchases just to gain every possible advantage, while another player has genuine skill but doesn't have the money to keep up, it raises a serious question about what competitive gaming is supposed to represent. Skill should be the deciding factor, not the size of your bank account. Sadly, BF6 feels like it is moving further away from that philosophy. Just look at the player base. Despite the enormous amount of money that has been poured into the game, many of the hardcore Battlefield players from the old days have already moved on to other titles. Some came back briefly to see what BF6 had to offer, only to leave again. And now, with the reported $55 billion acquisition of EA by Saudi Arabia, it feels even more like the Battlefield franchise is becoming about monetisation, corporate interests and extracting as much money from players as possible rather than delivering the skill-based, competitive military experience that made Battlefield legendary. As someone who has been playing Battlefield since Battlefield 1942 on PC, this is genuinely disappointing. I remember when Battlefield was about large-scale warfare, teamwork, tactics, vehicles and individual skill. You bought the game and competed on a relatively level playing field. Your performance was supposed to come down to how good you were, not how much money you could spend. BF6 has lost sight of that. For longtime Battlefield fans, that's probably the most disappointing part of all. The franchise that once stood for something unique is increasingly looking like just another monetised shooter fighting for the same audience as Call of Duty.
