[BUG] So, why is this a thing

Agreed 100%

I turned off the in-game Music too. I dug the Music, but as you said, it just got in the way of hearing game sounds so important in playing the game.

I wish they made a version of high end graphics and sound version that was designed to fit competitive gameplay. High End now is like watching a movie where the sound and visual effects team just drowns out the actual dialogue or obscures what the characters are doing on the screen. I know from experience how hard it is to get Art Devs to create art that facilitates gameplay, many of the Art Devs are obsessed with look and do not care if it affects functionality or the game's theme.

It's not an exploit - but dev's mistake. edits to the INI have been explicitly allowed officially, so you can't call exploit something you are allowing.

Alright for this to be a 'fix' we need to see some drastic changes in how things work first.

• Particles for all tracers, and especially on the Muzzle Flash of the TR weapons and the VS sparkly weapon tracers needs to drop by about 50% if not more. I'd like to be able to actually see the head I am aiming at and NOT get lagged to sheit by Lasher and PPA spam.
• Smoke Particles need to be re optimized to drop around 10 to 20% same for explosions, they are ridiculous fps tankers if you go into any fight that is not BF4 or CS:GO scale.

Why? Dropping down to no particles, which I have done, gained me roughly 30 fps in large fights and 50 fps in small fights, simply due to the lack of the ridiculous amounts of particles being thrown around everywhere. If this will not be fixed, me and many others will continue to look for new ways to get rid of as many particles as we can to be able to play this game in some reasonable hitch free fashion. As quite frankly, without such drastic user file changes we cannot.

That is untrue, if you've ever played a competitive FPS, you would know this.

Competitive Counterstrike players would CONSTANTLY find new things they could exploit in their config folders. Or map exploits...

You know what the honorable ones who cared about their game did?

They told valve/steam immediately so that it could be fixed.

The people who were using this, knew it was an exploit.

Which is why they didn't bring it to the developers attention.

And if you didn't realize it was an exploit, you're simply a person who doesn't understand game balance.

Devs themselves said that changes to INI are allowed. I don't care about balance if something is in the game and is allowed. Tomcats in the game and are allowed, even though they seem unbalanced to some. Vulcan-H is in the game and is allowed even though many think it's unbalanced..... Making example of CS or other teams is not relevant.

Now to throw a wrench into this discussion - looks like SOE has locked/removed/close their original statement and are possibly trying to backtrack. Here is the original thread with the statement (now inaccessible for me)
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/important-client-modifications.54265/

Imagine being able to change the .ini files to stop the day-night cycle, avoid smoke, avoid Flash grenades, the blurred vision of Concussions or any other vision-obscuring element in the game. In one go you can reduce the effects of multiple weapons in the game!

Any type of alteration to either the .ini files or the graphics that can overcome features in the game, actually overcome some features in the game, should be fixed. Smoke grenades being negated by low-graphics? you instantly make Smoke grenades and underbarrel grenades useless but also make HS/NV scopes have almost no reason to stay in the game.
Not to mention it's just another blow in the face of LA capabilities. As if giving smoke grenades to other classes wasn't bad enough, or making Flash grenades have about the lowest utility compared to Concussion or EMP grenades.

The fact that the developers actually allow .ini alterations is mind-boggling if these can actually overcome entire game features. Why don't they just start handing out altered .ini files with various alterations for advantages to players who want them eh? Hand out some ESP mods along with it to keep track of any player nearby as well, and perhaps add some aimbots and damage amplifiers along with it why don't they?

The way smoke currently works dose not matter in the least. Players can spot and be spotted though it and even if they did not know about spotting I'm sure most know about hit indicators. In smaller fights smoke gives away your location, In larger fights you hinder your own team as much as the enemy and that is not even talking about the frame drop/hitching the some folks have.

Can anyone recall how many times smoke was able to brake a stalemate at biolab airpad in the last two years? I'm sure we all have been on both sides of the smoke at one point or another with or without HS/NV. All I can remember is either killing people by spotting in the smoke or catch them coming out of it while listening to my team ***** about a friendly who is spamming smoke. This might of been just me and everyone else has seen or had smoke used in a tactical way that tipped the scales of battle.

Sidenote: Recon darts and dildars negate most movement/placement advantage one might even have with smoke on their side. Smoke needs to be reworked into something meaningful or removed from the game but that's just my two certs.

I wonder how complex it would be to tie that setting to the rendering of other things in the game, such as cloaked infiltrators, mines, autoturrets... that would curb this sort of abuse right quick I imagine.

Exactly so. Which is why I am wondering why RadarX removed the official post about ini modifications? After all, this simply makes it look like the company are trying to rewrite history and copies of the original post are easy enough to come by. They surely cannot be that dense? Changing ini settings has been specifically allowed and was not considered an exploit. That's a fact. Removing the post and pretending otherwise does not change that fact. Much as I and others here might not like how some are trying to get round the smoke issue, the attempted rewriting of history and calling something that is specifically allowed an exploit is a more worrying development in itself and doesn't speak well of DBG's honesty or transparency in dealing with genuine exploits, or that players are able to get the most from the game.

I'm getting a little worried now. How many people have actually tweaked their ini files to make smoke ineffective? whenever theres too much smoke, i pull out the infrared scopes but to turn it off completely in a ini tweak? That's madness.

I believe this has been fixed in the latest patch....

"Misc

• Smoke grenades have been adjusted to still have a tactical impact at lower graphics settings."