If I had taken the time to copy and paste all the advice I got after writing about my poor showing on the fields of battle that are Battlefield 3, I could have hit my word count, taken my fee, boarded my Nintendo branded Pegasus and flown it to the Xbox mansion where all us game writers hang out. (It really is a magical place.)
Problem with that plan? 1. None of that stuff really exists, and 2. Guilt.
See, it wasn't just people giving advice that struck me. Some of it was damn good advice. And plenty of folks seemed to genuinely want to help. It turned out that sucking at Battlefield 3, and sucking at games generally, was a lot more common than people might think – certainly more common than you'd expect in a core gaming community like the one fostered here.
Click here to read Sam's original piece: Love is a Battlefield (3).
I admit that there was a discontent that immediately followed that article going online: now the admission was out there, I was supposed to feel better, right? I didn't. And could I expect a return from the community? The last place you might expect salvation to appear was in an internet comments thread.
But, lo. Those that identified, sympathised, empathised. And those that came with ideas, freely given.
So, in honour of those generous readers, and in honour of my, in some cases more than doubled scores, here is my experience with a select few of those tidbits that have reignited my enthusiasm for Supply Efficiency. Get some.
1) Just Have Fun
Overwhelmingly this piece of advice won the day. Some delivered it in what I took to be soothing tones, while others seemed to think my preoccupation with my own lack of skill was a bit weird and made them shuffle about awkwardly. Regardless of how delivered, “have fun” was both blisteringly obvious and not at all obvious.
The intent of that original piece was to describe how one could still enjoy a title while being so ludicrously bad at it, so I obviously missed the mark a bit. But the frequency with which gamers suggested that it was ok to just take it easy and, you know, play, made it apparent that many of you are a lot more sensitive than you might let on. Yeah, that means you.
Hey. No one's judging.
Don't look at your feet. Own it.
Happiness is a huge explosion.
2) Your Sidearm Is Your Friend When On the Run
Right you are, chum. When on the run in the Support class using your sidearm is key, because the SAW doesn't shoot straight.
I never expected this to actually work. The dude who suggested this buried it among several other very good suggestions, and of all of them, this seemed the least likely to have a positive effect. My experience with the handgun hasn't even been patchy, I thought. Patchy would actually be a big step up.
The Support class continues to feel like a natural home for me, and I haven't moved off it despite several suggestions that I pick up the Assault class (see below). The SAW, with its ability to fix and hold steady, allows me my second most useful attribute on the battlefield: wall o' bullets. But firing from the hip with it has exactly the same accuracy as, and is in no way different to, an octopus hurling marbles at rising helium balloons from a bouncing dune buggy while doing Zumba. This is known.
Moving from cover, stowing that badboy, and keeping a pistol up has proved to be an excellent way to either pick up a sudden, unexpected kill, or at least send more experienced players backing the hell away once I open up. Even ahoof, it's a lot easier to hit what you're aiming at.
The inability to cluster rounds without having the SAW steadied is so well known, that anyone with half a brain merely stands still and calmly puts one round in your melon while you're jerking about like a marionette. It's so undignified. The sidearm changes things.
3) Play Conquest
The idea of playing Deathmatch was broadly reviled, and that was something I had already discovered myself. What's important here, though, is that I had considered the solution to be Rush. It allowed an ammo supplier/suppressing firer plenty of opportunities to burrow in like one of 500 known species of sucking lice (or Anoplura) and defend.
There's a stack of reasons that Conquest is better, all of them non-frag-points-scoring-related. And as a result of making this tiny change not in how I play, but in what I play, my scores have sky rocketed.
Here's probably a good place to point out that the advice seemed to be aligned to one of two core intents: make me (and anyone reading) a better BF3 player, or provide options for higher scoring to thus improve the stats, rewards and collectibles of the character. The former, undoubtedly, harder than the latter.
The move to Conquest hasn't done much for my skills, but after only a few rounds I went through two promotions: the opportunities for re-supply and for suppression/assisted kill bonuses have been huge. If you're battling with inching up your rank, try making this move.
Become a Conquestador... these guys are doing it wrong.
4) Slow Paced Players Are Always the Ones Who Win
This was coupled with “stay cool...” which has to be pretty good advice not just in Battlefield 3, but in life. If more people stayed cool we probably wouldn't be in the financial mire we're in. Actually, chances are we wouldn't even have games like Battlefield 3, because there would have been no wars to base them on. We could wear jeans to work and jandals on first dates. Hooray for staying cool.
I wanted to address this because the part about pace doesn't actually match the experience I have had out there. Slow pace, in the world of the novice equals certain death. “Don't run around like an idiot,” also formed up part of this suggestion, and I can agree with that; the idiot bit, at least.
But do run. Goodness, do. Run as a matter of self preservation. It's the cowards' advance. You can't out run a bullet, but it might get you to where a bullet, you know, isn't, a bit quicker than walking.
5) You Should Try the Assault Class
This is still up for debate, but there was enough Assault advocacy that it couldn't be ignored. Because I continually feel as if I am trying to balance an ice cube on a knifeblade while aiming in Battlefield 3, I feel that this may not ever be the right fit. In my order of preference, the character classes go: Support, Engineer, Assault, Recon. And Assault only beats Recon because of the number of times I have been humiliatingly unzipped by someone's knife.
I would be very interested to hear if anyone out there has actually moved to the Assault class and cemented it as their go-to as a matter of preference, assuming they started with an “easier” class, like Support.
To me, friends, Assault is too much like showing up at a party before anyone's arrived. Conspicuous.
In war, that's the last thing you want to be.
Turning up several months early for a house warming party can be quite the social faux pas.
Any and all further advice and discussions welcome below!
Sam Prescott is a freelance gaming journalist based in New Zealand. He writes for IGN as a form of catharsis. Why not follow him on IGN and Twitter?
Source : ign[dot]com
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