Leaving Planetside 2 is very, very tempting at the moment.

So now the death cam turns players who can't even use sound and damage icons correctly into GOD level advance players. I don't think so

Good balance gets you FPS players. The ones that say popular and last the longest always have the best weapon balance.

This hurts stealth in the form of flanking.

The majority feared that this would hurt sniping, but that was never my primary concern. This game consists of an overwhelmingly high amount of people who lack situational awareness and when a faction entrenches themselves...they gain a sort of tunnel vision fixated upon their enemy's position due to the intensity and chaos of battle. They start ignoring hit markers, they don't look anywhere but towards the enemy within their direct field of view.

This lets people with the Stalker Cloaking device and Crossbow to flank and then take up a position behind this hotspot...and systematically eradicate the oblivious soldiers who die and never once realize that they're being shot from behind. Now your faction can push forth and crush the entrenched position. It's not just Infiltrators who do this either, Light Assaults, even Heavy Assaults have done this to some degree...and rarely do these players ever turn around. They're so fixated on what's ahead of them that a single person can dominate them from behind.

Now...people are given artificial situational awareness upon death, when the chaos subsides and they can properly assess the situation. They look at that mini-map and go, "Oh...I was an idiot, there was someone behind us." Now, they spawn relatively close to that position and have an understanding of what happened...alert their allies...and the flank has failed before it ever truly had a chance to shine.

Death is rewarded, exploitation of inadequate skill is punished.

I still don't see the issue personally, You flank you killed a bunch of people, Now you dig into your new spot and start fighting ALL other FPS have the same thing using kill cameras.

Then you try to flank again.

They still have to wait for the respawn timer, Then run back

They developed a snarky and interesting AI to combat that fact...they have different personalities and chat with one another throughout the course of battle to give a sense that you're playing with more people than you are. It was a clever tactic to drown out the fact that it's just an arena shooter.

You're new players, sure...

Those organized squads are a different story...and if everything that's been requested of the development team since launch was met...we'd have enough people around to have huge organized squads going at it all the time. Fix some of the chaos through information and what not...and you can implement extreme faction flavor.

Heh...

Yeah, every first person shooter has a kill cam...because they dumb down anything beyond twitch based mechanics. I stopped playing first person shooters after Counterstrike popularized this type of mentality and spent the majority of my first person shooter experience in Delta Force: Land Warrior...which didn't have a kill cam and didn't focus entirely around run and gun gameplay.

The issue is that your tactic came to a stall because people were given your position...not because they realized what was happening but because they were literally given your location. It's the same thing as giving someone an autoaim ability because they lack proper aiming mechanics. Situational awareness is a skill, just like the ability to aim...and now situational awareness has been given to players who die.

Death is very fleeting in Planetside 2...that timer isn't anything relevant when the spawn locations are often very, very, close to the entrenched locations.

You're saying a MLG emphasis is bad BECAUSE it leads to SOE doing a better job of balancing the weapons?

You have to realize though, that there is no MLG emphasis now (probably never was) and that lead to the new "n00b friendly" death screen (which was almost a kill cam).

With MLG Planetside -would- be:
More balanced between weapons
More balanced between factions (most things TR specific are broken and/or inferior atm)
More skill-based (no new boring lock-ons)

But MLG is gone. So I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
Do you mean to say "catering to elitists" and accidentally wrote "MLG" instead? Because MLG is an actual gaming competition company, not an anagram for "Majorly eLitist Gamers".

I call dibs on your stuff.

I don't really see any strong direction in the game development at the moment other than them trying different things to keep people playing and trying to make some money. MLG barely seems like a consideration any more. To be honest it always seemed like a a way of promoting the game and getting it out there than any serious drive to be the next esport game.

I understand that they need to keep the cash flowing to pay people to keep the game running well. But I do feel a bit frustrated myself with how the updates seem to add things that are not super well thought through and some things that are enjoyable and viable seem to be breaking a little too often.

I have yet to see anyone that mainly uses Coyotes for A2A combat. The few people that have attacked me with them were either ganging up on me, or dealing more damage with their nosegun. In fact, I can't remember the last time someone killed me with an ESF in the air with anything other than a nosegun(or ramming).

I'm sorry you're not smart enough to keep from being spawn camped.