Battlefield 3 will have “years worth of unlocks and rewards”

This is grand, as long as they’re properly paced – I put over 50 hours into BF2 and made it to rank 6.
By comparison, I prestiged twice in CoD 4 in the same amount of time.

*sigh* ranks and unlocks really are the bane of online FPS games…

You dangle a virtual carrott in front of peoples faces and they become selfishly competitive. Instead of playing casually for fun, or competitively for a team, people just play competitively for themselves and the whole thing basically becomes one big grind-fest.

It’s such a cheap and unnecessary way of getting people hooked on the game.

hope they make something for the higher ranks.
im rank 38 now in bad company 2 and there is nothing else left to unlock for quite some time now

@2: Disagree. For me i was never about winning medals, but when i did, it added something positive to a defeat or added an extra flavor to winning. It’s cheap, yes, but highly effective.

@1 That is and has always been the worst thing about Battlefield. I was amazed to see the very same levelling system I hated back in Battlefield 2, survive all the way into BC2. It was never a good idea, it was never fun to grind.

I don’t know why, but CoD4 didn’t really inspire me to prestige. In MW2 I was actually excited about it, probably because the balancing was spot on. Two hours and you had weapons with the same characteristics as all the higher tiers.

It would be nice if they manage to do something similar with BF3.

@2 So rewarding people for their time is bad? Personally I think it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re one of the few that can really get into some kind of abstract reward system where it’s more important to get a warm fuzzy feeling than actually win, and I’m sure there are plenty of mods out there to give you that, but for the vast majority of people, that’s just boring and uninspiring. I’ll take an actual carrot over an imaginary one any day.

@5

People should play the game because it’s fun, not because of some lame metagame keeping items from them.

So who’s to say that being rewarded for your efforts isn’t great fun? Is this some kind of natural law in which unlocks cannot possibly be entertaining?

I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t allow people to progress while playing online. It seems to me like people are loving it.

I’d say it’s a lot more “meta” to have to imagine your achievements, rather than actually being able to show them off in the form of ingame tags or trinkets.

@2

I had the same feeling, then i played Brink hoping it to be ”different”.

Well it was, in a bad way. I realized you need to have something to work towards or it’ll get stale real quick.

This sort of thing is potentially very dangerous if not done right.

The main problem comes when people only want the top rank graphic, so they spend all their time trying to find exploit after exploit to boost their way to it as much as they can.

In MW2, we had nuke boosters… I can’t tell you the amount of times I played player after player with the top rank, but who could hardly shoot straight. Or the amount of times I went into a Cage Match (1v1) only to hear the other person immediately ask me to “do headshots”, just so that they could get a gold cammo.

I think there’s much, much less of that in BO, because they managed to identify the problems and stop people from exploiting them. The correct balance is very, very difficult to strike and takes years of tweaks, updates and refinements to get right.

If it is done right, then ranking up is one of the biggest things that make some games so addictive. Competing with fellow clan mates or people on your friends list to reach a higher rank is the sort of thing that makes you get home from work as soon as you can and playing until the early hours of the morning.

The only exploit i remember from the top of my mind is the Friendly Fire+Medkit combo in BC2, which didn’t really affect other people that much. Compared to Call of Duty, BF games have very few exploits, except people ruining maps by chopper whoring ofcourse.

@10 BF2 had a fair few, I remember Dragon Valley was notorious for people hiding underneath the map.

I hope they do it very similar to BF2, I only got to Gunnery Sergeant position or something but it was still rewarding as hell even if it did take long. In BC2 you can rank up easily after two rounds if you do rather well, in BF2 it never gave you that chance to rank up so quick.

Things like cheating or camping is just a constant in online shooters. It doesn’t matter what system you have, people are gonna try to worm around it.

Not that there’s any reason to make it easier for people, like the private lobbies in MW2.

Ultimately it’s all about making the system fun. Playing forever and getting next to nowhere like you did in BF2 was pretty pointless to me. You see guys running around with better guns, and you want those better guns, and making that worse than it has to be is discouraging. You need to feel the progress.

In BC2 it was pretty terrible since the guns didn’t really have any sort of intentional balance. Going up against a bunch of guys with AN-94′s or medic trains with M-60′s is just not fun. For me the key is having some basic weapons and then upgrading them as you go along, so you’re still able to compete on virtually the same level, but also still have something to go for.

@6: They do! If the game wouldn’t be fun, why would they even bother trying to unlock rewards?

@12

Not true. Once you hit lvl ~30+, it takes alot more than 2 games to rank up in BC2. I’m currently lvl 36, and you need 200k points between the levels at that point, and lets say the average game rewards you with 5k.

Well yeah, there was almost nothing to unlock in BC2

Good thing there will be many rewards but I personally hate weapon unlocks. Every weapon should be available right in the beginning. There are other ways to reward the player.

sounds good. as much as i still enjoy cod. the prestige system is really not working. i´d almost go that far to call it broken – or at least extremely uninspired. in blops i prestiged twice. no need to do that over and over again for more slots that i don´t need and some gold weapon color that even looks shite. i think it´s cooler to be a prestige level 2 guy and then kick the asses of all these so called level 15?, 16? “whatever the last prestige level is” veterans…

i really prefered the system in bc2. there wasn´t more progress but ranking up after a while too, because you just unlocked everything. but that took some time. seems like they improved that now. i think it´s important for games like this to have a good progress/unlock system. it can suck but if executed well it can definitely motivate.

look i dont mean to be out of line here but i have been reeding through and saw dsb compearing bf to cod. i dont want to come across nasty but this is battlefield not call of duty i am gland the ranking system is diffrent it is one of the things that seporates the two games if you like cod play cod is all im saying and i mean no offence

I’m talking about fundamental design. If the Battlefield series ever wants to break 10 million copies, it would do well to stop wasting peoples time.

I’m sure there are a few weirdos out there who love wasting their time getting nowhere, but it was never a great thing about the series.

“It would do well to stop wasting peoples time” – I think that nails it really. To a casual player “years worth of unlocks” is not a good thing. I got a job, a family, other fucking games I want to check out etc etc.

If EA want to capture a large portion of the fps market from those *other guys* they gotta make BF3 rewarding for guys & girls who only get to play it a couple of hours a week.

The unlocks from Battlefield 2 were one of the main reason’s I loved that game so much. I get a real sense of reward out of it that really makes me go back again and again for more.