What Am I Supposed To Do Now?

Hello Fellow GraWists,

It is with a heavy heart that I report to you today with the sad news that my beloved Ghost Recon Online.... has.... has..... finished open Beta testing..... I.. I'm sorry.. just give me a moment *sobs into headset*.

Right, anyway I suppose I beta give you an overview of how the testing went and what you guys can look forward to in the near future (1 Cookie if you noticed the awful pun!). Plus there is some good news to give rise to happy thoughts coming too!

So, as you may already know I was somewhat in love with GRO and even with the problems from the end of Beta Session 2 (read massive crouching bug), I couldn't wait for the 3rd session to get under way.
After entering the arena again I was pleasantly surprised to find this glitch had gone and now the game was running far smoother (for me at any rate), with improved frame rate even whilst recording, which is always nice.

The complaint many people were having was that, as a supposed browser game, it was pretty intensive on hardware but to be honest after downloading about 5GB of content this was anything but a browser game, and quite frankly, trying to play with a core 2 processor and Intel family graphics (which uses your main RAM as it has no dedicated) would be easily seen as naive!

So it was plain sailing I hear you cry... well no actually. Although the game breaking glitch had been fixed it did seem there some other smaller and slightly more annoying bugs that crept into the build which I shall address now.
Firstly, the grenade bug. This isn't a balance issue as such, more of a preemptive strike. Basically what happened was if a grenade was thrown past you, even way past you, for some reason you took hit damage. Now this wasn't direct impact damage, it was just a random kick in the balls as it sailed past. This is only a problem when you are on about 50 hp and someone lobs a grenade downtown only for you to get killed by what i can only describe as a shock-wave. Honestly, some of these guys would have been superstars in the American Rounders League or whatever it is. Fortunately even with my limited programming knowledge this seems like a pretty easy fix in as much as you can't use radioactive grenades because the person throwing them would have luminous genitalia and that would be a dead give away.

Second up into the Flads Fail list is the Heat Perk. Now I better start off by saying this is my favourite Perk and as a result I ended up 7th in the WORLD for suppression after closed Beta, which I think qualifies me to give it some criticism. Lets begin with Mk2 Heat and Wide Emitter (a purchasable add on). This to me is OP (over powered). There is only really one place that this can be countered from, distance wise, and that is the long sight lines at the end of  Korolyov Towers (point C). Other than that you are pretty much able to suppress entire teams across whole widths of the map from a distance of 70m, which in this game is a bloody long way. Maybe a change to say 50m would offer some sort of balance considering how early it is available to people, which is level 12 Assault.
Next is something that you only really notice once you get used to the perk and how it works. Basically you can intensify the heat source by scrolling the mouse wheel. This is supposed to increase the power on the target but reduce your field of effect. What happens though is that you get fewer hit points and it even stops effecting the target fullstop sometimes, which needless to say is annoying. This has probably cost me somewhere in the region of 10 kills with Heat and sometimes those kills can be game changing!

However, with that out of the way I want to assure everyone this game has come on since the last maintenance period and the Devs have done a great job listening to the community and making the changes that were suggested.
The only real thing I see left is some balance issues, visa vie the mentally overpowered top end shotguns and LMGs.
If you can snipe with a shotgun or out gun an SMG with an LMG in CQB (enough with the abbreviations already!) then i'm sorry but there is a problem.
The NS2000 shotgun is a beast granted but people were using it in a similar fashion to the Pentagun in session 2. Basically once unlocked it was like being in Godmode. One shot kills from all of 50m is not cool and the people that used it were equally uncool and more often than not, kill whore try hards.... my least favourite of the try hard family.
The LMG that seemed to be unstoppable against any other gun was the M249. Before everyone start saying QQ I understand that this gun, even IRL is very, very good. If it wasn't then most armies in the Western world would not use it as the go to support gun. However, I very much doubt that given the time it takes to bring that 150 pound lump of metal to bear, it could out do an SMG in close quarter battle even with split second differences in reaction time. It just wouldn't happen. Period.

Wait... wait, there is one more thing niggling me..... The damn spawns in Conquest. Now I moaned about spawn killing already so I am not going to get back into that, this is a far more constructive idea.
When playing with decent players on both sides the critical point of the match by far is the C flag. This one flag is the difference between winning and losing. I ended that sentence there because as far as I can see when you are in a game with evenly balanced high level players once C is gone you are really in trouble. It isn't so bad when there are noobs playing because it becomes a lot easier to punch holes back into their advances, but with Vet's playing the problem is almost terminal.
My suggestion to Ubi is that the spawn of the team that just lost the flag should be 50% closer to the next objective than they currently are (which is a long, long way!). I feel this will offer the team that just lost a flag a much better chance to create a far more effective comeback, thus putting the game into more of a to and fro power struggle where skill genuinely comes out on top, instead of the steam rolling stampede that is created. If anyone says teamwork this and teamwork that, you are kidding yourself. Alot of the time it boils down to luck and I think it would be better for everyone if skill at the top end of the game prevailed.
I also think by doing this we get into the a balanced area that makes it more fun for new comers yet more challenging for experienced players, which can only be a good thing.

So, with that all out in the open how can I conclude this somewhat endless post? Well it is easy.

This FREE game is freaking epic! I waxed lyrical about Future Soldier when it first came out but then the problems started kicking in and made it a miserable experience in quite a short space of time, however this game seems to blossom and grow the more I play it and that makes Flads happy!
The comms from the Devs has been good, the GM on the chat has been a massive help too. The ingame ticketing service has allowed fairly trouble free reporting and the game itself plays out very nicely across the board (must.. not... mention.. spawn rape....).
All in all it has been one of the best beta experiences I have had the honour of being involved with and that is down to the people that play as much as the guys working behind the scenes. Thanks to everyone for making it such a great testing session and I can't wait to play against/with you in the near future.

Cheers

OldFlads