To be quite honest BF2 is what started this road to nowhere. The ranked vs unranked at least. The good part was you could still host an unranked server without a GSP, the modding community was at least still somewhat available and you could create local accounts to play offline on LAN. The problem for the unranked modded servers was they couldn't keep their players because everyone was too focused on leveling up to care about game content. Then 2142 ultimately became the final nail in the coffin that took most of that away even though essentially it was just a BF2 mod sold at full price. Lets face it, 1942 was the last fully functional Battlefield and probably mainly because it was someone elses product in the beginning. Even with 1942 you had the stat tracker websites that people became obsessed with their KDR and Win/Loss ratios but at least that was being done on the side and not in your face like the whole ranking system. Now that the console porting has been introduced it's gotten even worse from the flight controller and options aspects.
And yes, I'm a bit bitter because the Battlefield series was a huge step in the right direction for the FPS genre and as someone who watched gaming evolve from the Commodore 64 to what we have today I'm a bit irked to see game tech de-evolving into a mindless game of ranking and cool special effects with little or no real content to make that next leap forward. Where's the 128 player support the original Battlefield creators were preparing to support a decade ago? Where have the naval vehicles from Battlefield gone? Battlefield to me was about full force combat utilizing every branch of the military cramming as many players into a huge map area as possible and letting them run wild. Over the years we've accepted less just in hopes that the next Battlefield would be even bigger in scale but everything since then has been scaled down. Think about the maps like Desert Combats El Alamein or Desert Shield and now look at Project Firestorm and tell me they are even close in comparison... All the action is too centered in the middle of the map now with ceiling caps for the jets and enough lockon weapons to make them practically ineffective. Caspian Border is problem THE best map the game has to offer that feels like home.
Sorry for the long winded response but for someone that started at the beginning and came from a community of gamers that enjoyed the public teamspeaks and made a lot of great friends in doing so I'm absolutely driven insane by the "Quickmacth" community where servers can stay populated for days and when it crashes maybe 2 of the 64 players return to support the server to get it started again when EA is imposing the 4-8 players to start ruleset. :(
--Red
