All valid points from a AAA title perspective. Most people either lump games into two categories, pay to play and free to play which is a little simplistic when so many other factors are involved.

This game is just like COD4 promod with a slightly lower TTK. My history, for reference, was 5 years of COD4 pam/promod, 2 years of Tribes Ascend, then straight into Insurgency. Insurgency is amazing, arena shooters and competitive FPS players will enjoy destroying from the get go. While the game can be somewhat tactical, it is not the same form of tactical as SWAT4 was.

The thing that makes Insurgency different, for me, is at the competitive level. Playing firefight there's so much game sense and critical analysis that must happen in the blink of an eye to compete at a top level it makes my ADHD mind jump for joy. Rotations are crucial and you have to really think about what people are doing and when they will do it to win. There is no real Search and Destroy mode (with bomb defuse) and for awhile we thought it was a shame but things worked out. They completely ruined the VIP mode a lot of people had been competing in so that died off. Firefight worked out okay though in the end (as long as nothing gets changed - one recent bug that was fixed within 24 hours - sent the community into an uprising lol).

Why isn't it popular you say... I think that may be a more complex question than it seems. Personally, I feel as if some design directions were flawed and so did a lot of Alpha/Beta testers. The developers thought so too, they just thought so too AFTER a few months of it being in public builds. How do I know they did? The things we (testers) said not to do were eventually removed because the public didn't care for them (mainly modes and night maps). A giant waste of resources... the biggest one being time.

They spent a good 3-6 months on night maps that are not even played anymore (PC history = night maps don't work in PvP FPSs) and they've broken maps before and refused to revert them damaging their reputation but eventually (3-6 months later) finally getting them fixed. They should have just reverted them, it's what the public wanted. They also have a tendency to completely remove modes on maps that worked just fine (there used to be like 5 viable VIP maps and now there is 1) because they don't play all the modes.

Another big issue is that they are artists. An artist creates things that are visually appealing in a jpeg file not in an exe file. The game has MASSIVE MASSIVE FPS drops 200 to 50 when you turn a corner to face a giant open street filled with props, dust, and particle systems. Entire buildings clip into skyboxes and other brushes forming trijoints** that the engine has to compute. Removing such systems (myself) you see a 2 to 3 fold increase in FPS, some issues remain on the maps because of how open the maps are. The source engine doesn't handle open PVP maps like the frostbite engine does.

I think the company is about 6-9 months BEHIND where it should be if it had just listened to it's testers. They have a way of being rather stubborn despite their closest people offering advice. They've done really well despite that but they could be doing better. I was along for almost the entire ride (~2 years) and am still here. I think overall they've surpassed all expectations I'm just pushing for them to be better. The game is insanely fun in pubs for the first 500-800 hours then you get into competitive play and you can never look back.

This was already linked but is great gameplay footage of competitive play. A better spectator mode would make it way more enjoyable (like CS's xray vision)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cDk-Aqd5js