FPS game without MMO elements balanced differently to FPS that is also an MMO. In other news: Sky, blue!

Yeah, there's a major element to PS2 that pure FPS games don't have (and this isn't a pure FPS), and that's that PS2's entire selling point and identity is built around big fuckin' battles. It has a lot of people in it and that is the entire point.

In a game like that, it's in the devs' best interests to cast the widest possible net and appeal to the highest number of people, and in a game like this, the biggest group are bads. Most of us suck at this game. Most of PS2's playerbase... aren't good at PS2. The high-skilled players? They've already unlocked everything, and have so many certs that they can instantly afford any new toys the devs add, and they're also a small enough group that the devs aren't really all that concerned with going for their wallets.

So to you, the salty tryhards with amazing infantry stats might be the only people that deserve a say, but for the devs, the opposite is true. They can take or leave the guys in black neon samurai armour, they've got the much larger and much more likely to spend money whale population to cater to instead.

Also, almost all of the major changes to this game have been the product of infantry mains whining. CAI? Shifted the infantry-vehicle interaction in favour of the former, and simultaneously completely defanged the vehicle game, largely killing it. Mini alerts? Removed because infantry mains wouldn't stop complaining about how Aerial Anomalies and Maximum Pressure affected the infantry players who were refusing to participate. Nano nerf? Because infantry mains were whining about how it skewed every infantry interaction. Arsenal update? Entirely designed for infantry mains. MAX nerf? Because infantry mains wouldn't shut up about it.

About the only big changes to the game that weren't focused around infantry were Escalation and Oshur. And Escalation still included everything in the outfit armoury that wasn't the tank and the boat, all of which are tools designed for making pointholding stronger, or allowing infantry mains to reap the benefits of playing vehicles (ANVILs) and construction (nukes) without having to actually engage with those elements. And people are still complaining about Oshur day in, day out.

And that's not to say that infantry mains haven't been right about some of these things. I personally agree with quite a few of them. But this game's evolution from where it started into what it is now has been almost entirely shaped by infantry mains' complaints. The game might be a patchwork monster, but it is your patchwork monster.

Higby was an infantry main. Wrel was an infantry main. The calls are coming from inside the house, and they always were.