so what are the changes in the past 6 months

Cobra, are you possibly some kind of researcher or journalist by day? Because I can't see many other sorts of people devoting such rigor to sourcing their forum replies and it's fairly impressive.

As a former top MMO trader/gambler and alliance director from EvE Online (now retired), most of my playtime would go into background research and to predict gaming trends/post-patch influence on the virtual economy. That's one reason why I like to source everything. You should see my bookmark list

I see now, a researcher by night. Now that's really your true colours then.

The problem is that Relic seems to take 2 steps backwards for every 1 step forward. In mid-January they said they were happy with balance and the game and they were right, it was pretty good. That was right after they had reverted the awful pathfinding bug they introduced a few months before.

Then they go and muck it all up first with one-shotting AEC then Advanced Cancer commander.

And they left the game this way for months.

Finally they give us a bone and actually have a live beta as a kind of sorry letter to the community. The beta goes well and there are positive changes. Then for some reason they give the USF heat-seeking one-shotting mortar teams and don't change it for a month.

Always, it seems like 2 steps backwards for every step forward.

Compare to 3 years ago the game is better. RNG is much, much less prevalent. Squads were one-shotted left and right on launch by random stuff like bazooka shots. Vehicles were decrewed way too much. Deep snow is mostly gone (but still enough there for me to veto all snow maps and for snow maps to see zero play in tournaments). Mines no longer one shot units exiting buildings.

The game isn't perfect still. There's still an annoying amount of built-in input lag built into the game. The engine is horribly optimized such that even the highest end computer chugs when there is an explosion on the map. The pathfinding is mediocre. For some reason you can't mute the other player. For some reason, you can't rebind keys.

Granted, these are things so hardwired into the code, the new programmer or programmers they have working on the game probably don't find it worthwhile to fix. That's understandable, but stuff like ghosting sandbags is still in the game.

I just wish they would give one patch where they say, "Ok, let's just optimize and remove all the nonsense. And then we can mostly leave the game as is."

It's laudable that they've kept supporting the game in a way but again, every step forward seems to be combined with 2 steps backward which is why the community is always aggravated.