Why do devs keep putting lag compensation into FPS shooters? FFS. If you have good connection, get ready
That brings me to the next crippling aspect of BF3. Hit registration, at least on the PS3 version, isn't good for anything. How can you fire a 800+ round per minute weapon and only hit somebody once? You'd be surprised how often it happens in BF3. At 800 rounds per minute, you're firing 13 bullets per second...that means every tenth of a second you're firing 1.3 bullets...so if you pop out for half a second, empty half a clip into the guy, and get a SINGLE hit-marker....? Yeah, figure that one out. I've had far too many instances to even bother counting where I have sat there and emptied clips into somebody, and none of my bullets made any contact. I message the people killing me so fast and they say they didn't one hit me, even though that's how it turned out on my screen. Just like Call of Duty, I find my screen to be UP TO A FULL SECOND behind my opponent's screens, making gameplay next to impossible.
Another flaw: VEHICLES. Dice has shown their complete incompetence in this aspect of Battlefield 3. Vehicle warfare is awesome, don't get me wrong. There's nothing cooler than watching an attack helicopter fly over your head blowing a building to smithereens, or the ground-shaking fire-power of a tank charging up the middle of the map....but the problem is DICE has gone too far with vehicle health numbers. For example, the javelin is completely useless against all tanks, IFV's, and such vehicles. Why? The person in the tank can deploy IR smoke faster than you can lock on and shoot a javelin. You have infinite use of IR smoke, and thus a javelin is unable to hurt tanks. Not to mention "javelins only do vertical attack when SOFLAM'd" and can only lock onto ground targets. LOLOLOLOL. Vertical attack is the ONLY thing a javelin does - that is what it was built for. Say you even get lucky enough to hit a tank with a javelin...well you'll find that you have to hit the tank 3 or more times to get a kill...that means it takes at least 30 seconds to kill a tank, in which time the driver can simply drive out of range or will have shot and killed you.
Okay so no javelin - what about other anti-tank measures? Your other two options are just as useless, as you'll find it takes 7 (SEVEN) hits to a tank to kill it. Even if you hit it in the back, it's a 3 hit kill (once again, in that 30 seconds the tank driver will have driven off or killed you, then the engineer simply gets out and fixes the damage in a matter of seconds). So as you can see, unless you've got 4 engineers working to take down a tank, it's not going to happen. I have been in countless hundreds of rooms where a single player in a tank with an engineer repairing him is able to hold the ENTIRE other team at bay. Even HUMVEES and JEEPS can take MULTIPLE rocket hits.
So now we come to the aircraft. You'll find that it takes 2 hits to bring down even a helicopter. That's right, the vehicle that could be brought down if you threw a rock into it's rotary can take TWO hits before it's killed. 99% of the time if you get the first hit (which is unlikely due to, once again, unlimited use of anti-lock-on measures), the pilot will simply bail out and you won't get a kill. So the minimum numbers of shots to kill a helicopter or jet is, once again, 3 (anti-air defense measures will make your first rocket null every time on all but the most noobish of pilots). In that time, the pilot will simply fly away or kill you.
This poses a problem for people who want to play as infantry, as you have no reliable measures to handle enemy armor or air. The recon class lacks any tools to even damage vehicles, the engineer takes 30+ seconds to kill anything, the assault rifle class can't hurt tanks, and support only has C4...I have seen very few successful C4 tank kills against a skilled driver and gunner (as one of them will have proximity scan), and generally it's a suicide even if you are successful.
One of the final crippling flaws to this game: why oh why are people who know exactly NOTHING about guns allowed to keep making shooter games? There are so many crippling flaws with this game it's simply not even funny.
1.) Headshots. A headshot is a headshot. So why does every gun minus bolt action snipers, shotguns with slugs, and the two revolvers have headshot multipliers? You are not allowed to kill in one shot to the head, with the exception of the handful of weapons I just listed. A standard pistol takes 3 headshots before the game will give it to you! Headshots with calibers as small as .22 can be lethal. A .45 or 9MM virtually blows a head up (I have accidentally hit game in the head before while hunting, and it's messy).
2.) Bullet drop. As an avid hunter, I know a few things about long-distance shooting. I can tell you that my farthest kill while hunting was a 615m shot. I can tell you that I aimed only slightly above the animal's spine (rifle sighted to be dead-on at 200m), and in the time it took me to blink after the shot, the animal was down. Now, the time it takes a bullet to travel that far in BF3? Several seconds. And how much bullet drop is there? At least 40 feet of bullet drop. If you throw a suppressor on your sniper, then you are looking at over 100 feet of bullet drop at 500m+ shots. Go watch YouTube videos of "record" shots on BF3 if you don't believe me. 2000m shots taking 7 seconds to hit the target (aiming nearly 2 scopes high), when in real life you'd be looking at maybe a 2 seconds, and maybe 2 mil-dots high.
3.) Damages assigned to the guns. Here's something for you: the Mk. 11 (SR25) shoots a 7.62X51mm NATO round. DICE has assigned it a damage of 50-34. The MK14 shoots the exact same round...but has a higher minimum damage. Semi-auto snipers all have incredibly reduced damage, accuracy, and do not have the ability to make a headshot on the first shot. Sniper rifles lack the ability to kill in one shot, which completely nullifies the recon class. With the pathetic ballistics in the game as explained above, hitting a target at long range once is doable - twice, is nearly impossible (4+ hits for semi-autos to get a kill at range) Here's something else: a shotgun shell is a shotgun shell. EVERY 12ga shotgun shoots the EXACT SAME ROUND. What has DICE done, though? Semi-automatic and full-automatic shotguns are HALF DAMAGE and have a 6 foot spread...at 3 feet away.... Again, as a hunter I have plenty of experience with shotguns, and I can tell you that buckshot is lethal at 100m. In Battlefield, however, you'll find that unless you are POINT BLANK (within 5m - and even in the case of the USAS12 that isn't enough) you can hit somebody 10+ times and not get a kill. You can switch to slug ammo if you want, but once again you have the same problem. The semi-automatic and automatic shotguns suffer from 25-50% reduction in damage, huge increase to recoil, and massive decrease in accuracy. As it now stands, shotguns are so weak and limited that you are better off getting a light-machine gun and hipfiring to clear a room. Just today I was playing, took the USAS12 for a spin with buckshot ammo. Came into a hallway that was 2-people wide. There were 4 people sitting there. I emptied all 11 rounds at the 4 of them. No kills. My highest assist kill? 75%. So I walked into a situation where a shotgun should absolutely SHINE, and I got 4 kill assists after being gunned down. Not much later a similar situation happened, but this time I had an M60 LMG...I walked into the hallway hipfiring..killed all 6 people.
Damage drop at range is also ridiculous in this game. So assault rifles have a maximum damage of 25. It drops clear off to 18.4. If it were real life, and a gun had a maximum damage of 25, it would drop off to maybe 23 within realistic range. The slowing of the bullet actually increases the damage it does, as instead of tearing clean through the target, it will now hit the target and "tumble" through it - dealing much more trauma to the area. For example, the United States military says the M16 is accurate and deadly at 500m+ with IRON SIGHTS. It's not until over 900m distance that the M16 is considered to no longer be effective at engaging single targets, but is still effective at that range for suppressing fire.
4.) Patches (A.K.A. ruining everything). This is where DICE shows their complete incompetence. The foregrip reduces your accuracy while aiming down your sights by UP TO 175%!!! This is their solution to "balance things out." Because too many people were using the attachment (because MOST military rifles have foregrips as standard...FFS DICE), they completely nuked it, and now the only people who use it are hip-firing scrubs as it gives you better hipfire spread. The foregrip now only reduces horizontal recoil, and not vertical recoil (vertical recoil is the SOLE purpose of the foregrip in real life). The suppressor reduces your bullet velocity so severely that if you are shooting at a target 100 meters away with a suppressed weapon they can sidestep your bullet with ease.
The problem with DICE is their solution to "fix and balance" things is to completely destroy them. Look at frag rounds. Were they overpowered? Absolutely. But when was the last time you really saw them used effectively? Not since the patch. It now takes 4+ direct body hits to get a kill with frag rounds...Shouldn't a direct hit from a HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE ROUND deal AT LEAST the same damage as a slug? They nuked fire-rate, reload rate, explosive radius, and damage, to the point where frag rounds are now completely useless. But they didn't just stop there. They also went on the attack with buckshot and flachette ammo on full-auto shotguns. The USAS12 is now the weakest shotgun in the game, firing only 9 pellets per shell (compared to 12 in the pump shotgun) and having the largest spread in the game, to the point where even at 3 meters you're lucky if half of those pellets make contact, and you also have to take into account damage drop starts at just 5 meters and drops off to its lowest at 20meters...your shotgun is useless at anything but point-blank. That means you'll frequently find that you'll hit a target with all your rounds in your magazine, and deal less than 20 damage to them. Also, the USAS12 comes standard with a 30 round drum-magazine. I have only seen two games that have accurately depicted this - Socom Confrontation and Army of Two. Dice just won't realize that guns have natural limitations. You simply need to be ACCURATE TO REAL LIFE, and you'll have a perfectly balanced game. Fully-automatic and semi-automatic shotguns, for example, suffer from increased spread due to short barrels (it's what makes them so potent in close-quarters combat) and increased recoil simply due to the amount of lead you're firing. Pump-actions on the other hand have very tight spread, and are very lethal at 50m, and still semi-lethal at over 100m, but suffer in close-quarters because of that tight spread. A full-auto or semi-auto shotgun is SUPPOSED TO BE OP IN CLOSE QUARTERS. But as DICE now has things set, you're more effective with hipfiring an LMG if you want to clear a room than you are with a shotgun that was purpose built to clear rooms...
Overall a pretty game with amazing graphics and audio...but it is a complete letdown. Lag comp will absolutely have you getting owned if you have a good connection (unless you're a noob who throttles their connection like most of the "legends" do to get lag comp to work FOR you instead of AGAINST you). Ballistics need a major overhaul before the game is playable. JUST BE ACCURATE TO LIFE, DICE!!!! Stop trying to balance the game by ruining it!