Copy-and-pasting this post from reddit, as I feel it needs more attention. This was written by reddit user mczbot. Edited for brevity.
"Let me take you back to Splash Damage’s prior game: Brink. A game with a lot of potential in itself, marketed directly and heavily towards competitive gamers but rushed out too early. However, it was not the games state of delivery or the horrendous performances that killed Brink in a very little timepan. For all the flak Bethesda got as Publisher in the aftermath, the two final nails in the coffin were Splash Damage’s own. And everyone who has been around back then will sadly realize the same trend happening again in Dirty Bomb.
With Brink Splash Damage and Bethesda went the way of marketing and catering towards the competitive player. It was suppossed to be the “next CS” – which was a smart move at the time with a shrinking competitive scene in Counterstrike at the time. Imidiatly after the launch they announced a 50.000$ tournament in cooperation with the ESL which had LAN Finals held on the IEM Mainstage at the Gamescon Cologne. This announcement jumpstarted a competitive scene quickly. There were hundrets of teams competing and it was more then easy to find practice games pretty much around the clock in europe. It also brought big name organisations such as Dignitas, Epsilon and mousesports into the scene pretty much imidiatly on its creation. However, marketing so heavily towards a particular subset of the entire gamerbase also brought an imidiate problem with it: Only a very few could realisticly compete for the prizepot in question and with no stable league system to keep everyone in the scene involved pretty much every team that failed to qualify itself for the 32 slot tournament imidiatly quit the scene, as there was simply nothing more to play for these guys. I sincerly hope that the guys at DirtyCups dont repeat this mistake and focus on the vast majority of teams and allow them to build a solid foundation on which on top of it there can be tournaments aimed specifically for the top end of the scene. Because the biggest and most organized “pro-scene” wont keep a game alive and worth playing – as Painkiller painfully showcased – its mid to lower end teams that compete for the fun of it and build that strong foundation any game needs.
Anyway, back to Brink.Those who kept playing cried out repeatedly for Splash Damage to balance the weapons and characters. For those of you who havent played Brink: While the game had classes, the build variation in it came from how you build your character. You could chose between three model types: Light, Medium and Heavy. The ligher your model was, the more mobility it had at the cost of healthpoints. The heavier your model was, the bigger your access to “better” weaponary was aswell. Sadly, in the original version of the game, a light weapon – the CARB-9 – was by far the best weapon in the game due to its high damage and relatively low spread. But speaking frankly, it was pretty much the choice of weapon for every player because it was the only gun that sort of rewarded decent aim, as the spread of every other weapon was simply too big to be considered competitive. This caused to render every build but a Light Model with CARB-9 relatively unplayable on a competitive level and probably even on a pub level. When SplashDamage finally adressed this situation people hoped they would do so by making the other weapons more viable. But here is where they sadly shit the bed and killed off what was already a shrinking scene with one simple patch: They decided the best way to go about balancing was not to make the other weapons usefull, but rather make the CARB-9 as ununsable as the other weapons. This patch was so bad that even Teams that were still competing for the 50.000$ prizepool imidiatly stopped playing the game. It pretty much only left 4 to 5 teams in the scene willing to endure playing a so inherently flawed game in order to grab a bit of the cash. Safe to say, after the tournament was done so was Brink.
When DirtyBomb got into Open Beta and with its first patches i personally thought Splash Damage learned from their mistakes. With the introduction of aimpunch I’m sadly proven otherwise. While many people are up and in arms about the introduction of the new merc Phantom, this cruicial balancing issue is slipping through the cracks of the community and is sadly not discussed enough.
With the changes to the revive mechanic Dirty Bomb instantly became more aim-based. In the current meta even your medics primary Objective is to win the aimduels and the “dm-ing” portion of the game, while throwing out medpacs to tip the tide in a close battle. A welcome change from medics just running around with their pedals out and having little use to the game besides reviving people. We saw how big of a change this was with sick6 completly annihilating the what was considered best team in the game so far, Planetkey Dynamics, in the recent LowLandLions Cup. This result didnt come as a suprise to people actively playing the game, as Planetkey’s biggest strenght always have been their impressive medic work and good crossfire setups while not necesserily being on the same skilllevel aimwise as other teams, while sick6 on the other hand always drew from their impressive aimers, namely OLBAA, newb and Adetonian. So the balance change didnt favour them as much as other teams. The addition of Aimpunch however completly screws off the balancing. While superior tracking and aiming should now by rewarded due to the revive changes, it really isnt. The guy who lands the first headshot will now any engangement, because the player hit by the aimpunch usually doesn’t have enough time to recover his aim. Aimpunch as a mechanic in itself doesnt have a place in a game which aiming is focussed around tracking people rather than flicking. It rewards bad players, as they can win engagements they shouldn’t simply because they had the first jump on someone or even worse – had the better ping. Aimpunch in Counterstrike works because it is a completly different game. It exist there to punish the player that didn’t invest in a Kevlar. It plays a part in the economic system of the game. In Dirtybomb it achieves little to nothing but making aimduels more luckbased, which should never be the goal of a competitive shooter.
So why did aimpunch get introduced in the first place if it makes little to no sense in the confiments of the game mechanics? My personal guess and fear is as a bad bandaind helping with build creativity and loadout balance. With only a few perks being deemed usefull and thus only a few loadouts i’m afraid that Splash Damange decided to introduce aimpunch to make the augment “Focus” a viable choice. For those of you who are unaware (and by the bad wording on the cardtext i wouldn’t blame anyone for being so), the perk Focus reduces the “flinching” aka. Aimpunch when Iron-Sighted. However, this works with hipfire aswell, not just with Ironsight. So in a nutshell: SplashDamage actively added a function to the game which screws with the entire concept of the game only to make an augment viable. Lady’s and Gentlement, we have the CARB-9 patch again.
If Aimpunch doesnt get removed and done so quickly i fear the game will die a sudden death. The mechanic is anti-fun, anti-gameconcept and serves no purpose but to be a badly placed bandaid on a smaller problem which is the uselessness of certain perks. I for one would welcome SplashDamage rather introducing new and intresting perks rather then trying to make some work that have been proven to be useless. Think of it this way: What is the point in playing a shooter if the shooting mechanics aren’t fun and rewarding?"
But i still enjoyed my time on 1942, bf2, and 2142.