Okay, so after playing some DB again I really had this one point confusing me (besides the well known ones) that I really don´t understand in therms of game design. Maybe you can help me out a little 
So what always threw me of when I played DB or was active on the forums, is what actually is being told to us about how the game is supposed to be etc. and how the game is actually becoming like. Besides the thing that you just slowed down the “fast paced” game, there seems to be a much bigger misunderstanding on my part.
And that is the competitive aspect of the game. From the very start a lot of communication from the side of SD made it obvious that the game is going to have a strong competitive touch to it. Some quotes that underline this are probably just a few months old. What I have seen so far however, doesn´t actually feel like this is being the case. I am not even talking about how fun or not the game is, or any judgment like this. It is just obvious that the general direction of the game is more casual oriented then actually competitive, or what I at least understand with that. Quiet often changes have been made, or not, that actually are very controversial in therms of how a bigger audience would take them. At least that´s what I feel like. At the same time the same changes have a massive impact on the competitive side of the game, and unless we are all dumb asses on those forums, they are actually very negative in most cases. And by negative I mean, that they actually take lot of depth out of the game, while actually giving nothing in return from the competitive side of things.
Famous example for that would be the classless objectives. On pub they are controversial since most of us usually remember that being an objective “n00b” was a very relieving thing to do when you were new to the game and actually struggled with the shooting and just the game overall. With proper pub matchmaking, this obviously won´t be that much of an issue anymore, what still leaves things like identification with the class/role etc. open to debate. On the other side I think they improve the pub experience to some extent. So I can imagine that when you think about this for an extended time, for pub play this may be a reasonable change.
But this absolutely 100% leaves out the competitive side of things. From a competitive point of view, this just takes away a massive amount of tactical depth. At the same time it almost “pollutes” the game making different game elements like for example the spawn system and the way how you could play with it, almost irrelevant, This could result in even more changes that actually take away even more fascinating game mechanics. As much as I want to belive, that those mechanics aren´t being removed but replaced, there is no replacement I could find right now. So in therms of competitive, just massive chunks of fun are being cut out for mostly controversial casual improvements.
For me it seems like the competitive side of the game has actually almost 0 relevance, and all the decisions are being made only based upon how a big audience may take them. I am not judging this honestly, we are living in hard times and stuff and I can´t tell if casualizing actually is something good or bad for a game (even tho my experience says that it´s quiet bad, what I think gets underlined by the top games in there respective genres right now). But I just feel trolled when someone from SD posts about how important the competitive aspect of the game is to them, and how it´s supposed to allow players to apply there indivudual skill into the game and 2 weeks past that everyone is 1/4 medic and can pick his allies up.
So the thing with most of those “controversial” changes is, that they are supposed to make the game more appealing, easier to grasp and actually allows the people to access and play which ever merc they want. Okay, so if that´s the direction we are going here, I can totally understand that. But then I see something like merc restrictions in the game, where you can only pick the 3 mercs you decide before a game and my mind is blown. So much competitive potential has been sacrificed to make this game as less limitting to the player as possible just to introduce a merc limitation of 3 per game. I remember, one of the arguments for the classless objectives was to allow people to play whatever merc they want, after all people may have payed for them and such things. So regardless if I think this is smart or not, I guess it has at least some reasoning behind it. But them comes this thing, the load out. And I just ask, what is the plan?
All of this isn´t meant in a judgmental way. I am just confused, and would appreciate some clarification about the competitive side of things, and why we have stuff limiting the mercs you can play in the game while the actual goal always seemed to be to put as few restrictions on the player as possible.
cheers,
onYn