A platoon to commemorate the achievements of Alan Kertz, lead gameplay designer of Battlefield 3, 4 and 1.
Chapter 1: Alans greatest achievements:

BF1:
•GAS GRENADES
•The bayonet charge
•Auto-lock melee with up to 80 damage
•second shot spread increase
•auto grenade regen (cte)
•sniper rifles have a "sweet spot" to ohk
•all grenades are impact
•model a-10 hunter
•hipfire only with gas mask
•fire grenades
•flares set you on fire
•mortars
•mortars can spot while firing
•mortar projectiles can be controlled in flight
•lmg's get more accurate while firing
•GAS GRENADES
•hero classes
•suppression
•all the grenades (Light AT (all class), AT (Assault class), Smoke, Gas, Incendiary, Mini, Frag, Impact)
•Lack of gun variation
•Cavalry class sword range
•behemoths for the losing team
•conquest scoring system (holding any number of flags contributes)
•standard health packs heal hero classes at standard rate
•no all kit primaries
•vehicles can repair without exiting
•vehicle quick repair/mobility recovery
•Heavy tank
•shots can ricochet off vehicles
•GAS GRENADES
•recons get AT rounds for bolt actions
•place-able shield for recons
•grenade launching crossbow (support class)
•rifle fired grenade rounds (medic class)
•tripwire traps (incendiary, gas, HE)
•recon trench periscope outlines spotted players through map and can be used behind cover
•gun ranges limited by spread, not recoil
•bomber rear gun can outdamage fighter planes
•Mortar equipped landship, and Artillery truck
•Light flanker tank has no ammo pool
•poor map design
•GAS GRENADES

BF4:
• 15g turning SU-50's at launch
• 2 second tv missile reload at launch
• uselessness of stealth jets at launch (and still really)
• mbt law
• staff shell
• mobility hits
• visual recoil
• HUD clutter extreme mode
• 35 second countermeasure cool down time
• tv missile not 1-hit vs air vehicles
• zero spread AA 30mm
• tv missile 40 damage vs infantry
• mach 2, infinite range, auto aiming, mobility hitting missiles (AKA active radar)
• trying to fix bf3 hover camping by lowering ceiling to optimal hover camp height
• massive imbalances between US, RU and CN vehicles
• tank shell and rpg not 1 hit vs air
• attack heli zuni-rocket OP patch
• G36c uselessness
• commander uav's in rush
• jets could not take off from runway on SA launch
• lock on RPGs in beta
• dmr uselessness at launch
• 1200m AA 20mm range
• V-40 mini's
• stealth jet cannon still useless against infantry
• stealth jet 20mm cannon OP, 25mm and 30mm pointless
• m2 slams excessive range
• revolver delay
• scout heli>attack heli
• lock on everything
• AA mines
• sniper smoke trail
• rhib boat stronger than attack heli
• transport heli miniguns useless, now OP
• flares and ecm are random by design
• attack jets have tv missile
• jets have proximity scan as an option
• suave suav
• people can take boat driver seat while driver is in tv missile
• OP ucavs until patch
• Remote Mortars
• no below radar
• M320 explosive variants
• XM-25
• Starstreak HVM II
• attempted rock paper scissors balance logic in an fps

BF3:
• suppression
• imbalances between US and RU vehicles
• indestructible c-ram (sorry Jetkiller)
• 1 hit tv vs tank patch period
• tank shell not 1 hit vs air at launch
• various reactive armor issues
• stinger/igla range increase
• RIP canister shell
• nerfing attack helis into oblivion and making them more OP simultaneously
• guided rockets OP at launch
• MAV (Micro Assault Vehicle)
• elevator MAV (sweet dreams)
• super OP AA at launch
• USAS frags
• OP suppressers and INV scopes for ages
• M26 Dart (never forget)
• infinite mines and c4 until eventual patch
• firestorm and kharg spawn points
• Noshahr Canals Large c-ram placement
• Wake Rush
• Kharg Rush
• 4 Class system with only 2 useful classes
• IFV>MBT (APFSDS+reactive OP)



Chapter 2: BF3 Player Stereotypes (personal stereotypes available on request)

assault rifle only user:

• picks one assault rifle and doesn’t use anything else
• plays tdm or infantry focused conquest maps
• avoids other classes like the plague
• 3+ k/d, 1k+ spm
• often plays with friends revive training
• does surprisingly well in vehicles
• nemesis is metro lvg spammer
• uses alternative camo occasionally
• has 100 star assault dogtag unlocked, but uses m16 kills tag to intimidate the enemy

conquest only infantry:

• engineer or support class
• hates tdm
• negative k/d and sub 400spm
• claims to ptfo yet has negative w/l
• hates jets with a passion
• never changes squad perk from sprint
• often spams hackusations
• spends an excessive amount of time matching their camo to the map
• always referencing battlefield friends in chat

pub jet:

• hates everyone and assumes everyone is out to get them
• nemesis is the 1v1 pilot
• high ego from doing well in OP vehicle
• very ordinary at other aspects of the game
• gets a buzz out of hackusations and rage
• baserapes without mercy given the opportunity
• been effectively killed off by Australian no jet servers

console pilot:

• high ego from raping in 12v12 conq
• gets a nasty surprise having to deal with maa and 32 iglas
• blames any deaths on opposing pilot
• very prone to extreme rage
• still thinks they are gods gift to bf3 despite sub 2k/d when doing nothing but fly
• very strange ideas about how bf3 vehicle balance works

1v1 jet:

• wonders who the best dogfighter is at least 5x daily
• sub 1kpm in pub jet games
• nicest person ever in private servers, uncontrollable rage in pub
• has a good laugh at pub jet pilots
• nemesis is a conquest infantry player with a stinger
• hates maa with a passion
• cannot do anything but jet to save themselves
• freelook frightens them

bad heli:

• hates jets and aa with a passion
• flocks to no jet servers
• can’t tell difference between viper and havoc
• often gets tank shelled and tells themselves the tank just got a lucky shot
• will try to solo in heli at any opportunity
• will try to get the heli even if it’s obvious there is a crew wanting to fly together
• awful at all other aspects of the game
• highest killstreak is 50 despite 400+ heli hours

hovercamper:

• always wanted to be an astronaut
• anyone can do it really
• could beat them if they came just a little lower
• they just got a lucky shot
• only beat us cause our jets suck
• bet we could win in a 2v2
• please 2v2 us
• please

conquest tanker:

• an evolution of the conquest only infantry
• flocks to no jet servers and complains about helicopters
• sub 500spm
• uses wacky loadouts
• 2000+ hours but hasn’t got any better since the 1st 10
• gets destroyed very quickly on infantry focused maps
• will take aa at any opportunity and sit at the back of the map happily

metro lvg spammer:

• medic or support player
• fairly impressive stats until you notice 100k+ lvg kills
• abused the hell out of the m26
• rages at team for being anywhere but B stairs
• nemesis is the assault rifle user
• has at least 3 100+k/d metro favourite battlereports

sniper:

• sub 300spm
• still tells themselves they are in some way a team player
• uses jets on no jet servers to get themselves into obscure places
• never been anywhere near the top of a scoreboard and assumes those spots are reserved for hackers
• will camp in a maa given the opportunity
• if killed by a jet will spend remainder of round in base aa
• will teamkill high scoring players if unchecked

tdm support player:

• negative k/d
• never drops ammo, equips ammo perk to compensate
• has a worryingly large number of kills with some very strange weapon setups
• has a youtube channel with at least 1 c4 trolling montage
• if map switches to conquest, gets in nearest tank gunner seat and spams all day
• complains about m16 users non stop
• friends with badmin
• has awful computer

badmin:

• over 30
• awful stats
• claims to have a job and a life but inexplicably always seems to be online
• failed year 10 maths
• jammed caps lock key
• heavy drinker
• has kids that he really should be spending more time with
• uses premium only dogtags as a status symbol

knife user:

• female and lets everyone know it
• uses spawn beacons in tdm and metro 3rd floor
• thinks players respect her for using a retarded weapon
• gets a lot of attention from lonely tdm support players
• avoids vehicles apart from attack heli gunner seat
• has knife kills dogtag

gheeeeee:

• More concerned about battlelog profile color co-ordination than any other aspect of life
• befriends ‘famous’ players to work up the bf3 social ladder
• capable of doing well in jet and rages if things don’t go perfectly
• has over 20 chats open in battlelog at any one time
• has bad dreams about getting stats reset
• mysteriously is friendly with most badmins
• will happily play with 200 ping if it means pissing off Greiferkiller

bf3 god:

• capable of 10+ k/d in any vehicle, map or game mode
• has a favourite vehicle and weapon but doesn’t rage if someone else takes it
• multiple 100col accounts
• blames themselves, not others for any deaths
• has played other battlefield titles
• knows every glitch and bug in the game
• has one perfect loadout for every vehicle and never deviates from that
• has played competitively at one stage
• over 60 ping is unplayable
• under 120fps is unplayable



Chapter 3: The love song of A. Kertz

This is how I picture you: You are on the coast, with me (probably wearing my limited edition battlefield 4 t-shirt), walking along and thinking about the sweet nothings you might be whispering to me in my sinewy, bowflexed arms that night.
You are a bit flabby around the waist, and you could probably use a few more hours a week at the gym, but you are still looking pretty good.
You have a sparking gleam in your eyes which I can see myself in, still oblivious to how absolutely gorgeous I look at that moment.

Why, Mr Kertz it is in this manner that your good looks and game balancing endowment may do more harm than good in the world.’
Patrick Bach looked down in critical abstraction. ‘Probably some one woman on an average falls in love, with each ordinary game developer. He can marry her: she is content, and leads a useful life. Such men as you a hundred women always covet — your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you — you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in the world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more — the susceptible person myself possibly among them — will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Women are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine women, but the ninety-nine men they might have married are saddened with them. There’s my tale. That’s why I say that a gameplay designer so talented as yourself, Mr Kertz is hardly a blessing to the industry.’

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between active radar and woman?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced nvariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the
stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come. Kertz thought she'd
have come by now. He sat and thought. He was in the living room. When he started waiting one
window was full of yellow light and cast a shadow of light across the floor and he was still
sitting waiting as that shadow began to fade and was intersected by a brightening shadow from
a different wall's window. There was an insect on one of the steel shelves that held his audio
equipment. The insect kept going in and out of one of the holes on the girders that the shelves
fit into. The insect was dark and had a shiny case. He kept looking over at it. Once or twice he
started to get up to go over closer to look at it, but he was afraid that if he came closer and saw
it closer he would kill it, and he was afraid to kill it. He did not use the phone to call the woman
who'd promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to be the time when
maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and think him
disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she'd promised him somewhere else.

She'd promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time. Finally he gave in and
called her number, using just audio, and it rang several times, and he was afraid of how much
time he was taking tying up the line and he got her audio answering device, the message had a
snatch of ironic pop music and her voice and a male voice together saying we'll call you back,
and the 'we' made them sound like a couple, the man was a handsome man who was in
law school, she designed maps, and he didn't leave a message because he didn't want her to
know how much now he felt like he needed it. He had been very casual about the whole thing. He'd had to do some shopping. He'd had to lay in supplies. Now just one of the insect's antennae was protruding from the hole in the girder. It protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy soda, Oreos, bread, sandwich meat, mayonnaise, tomatoes, M&M's, Almost Home cookies, ice cream, a Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake, more Oreos, and four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon.

No more Oreos. They make Oreos, don’t they, right? No more Oreos. I don’t like Oreos anymore!

Nabisco. Oreos. Right, Nabisco? Right? Oreos! I’ll never eat another Oreo again. Ever. Ever! So I’m going to talk to them. I don’t want their cookies made and sold there. I just don’t want it! It’s unfair to us!

This is the account of one Very Rev. Alan Kertz, a famous game designer. We’ve found ourselves overwhelmed by criticism skulking in the shadows of Stockholm. This is the tale of me and other men trapped at DICE since that last frightful year, the tale of our downfall both actual and moral, the tale of love and hatred, the tale of men as they are. We beg forgiveness for our actions and ask for understanding. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Kertz sliced the polyester sportswear of the plastic loli lunchbox Patrick Bach and his friend Daniel Matros were reading Tim Kjells notes out of. Kjell belongs in a loli lunchbox because his writing is juvenile, and we eat developers like him for breakfast (or, in this case, naked lunch: an inconsistency with the metaphor/idiom which you could probably explain away by saying something to the effect of, “breakfast, being the most important meal of the bright gay day, ought to be composed of writers of much higher refinement/caliber /’taste’ [and here (re: ‘taste’) the metaphor/idiom actually holds very nicely] than Kjell but in contrast lunch could be considered a meal eaten without much thought to the quality of the food in part due to the compressed time frame in which one tends to be forced to take that meal and in part due to the conditions in which one finds himself taking that meal to (or with) friends. Conversations (childishly rejecting Kjell, sharing bed secrets with other devs, pretending to be educated, and so on and so forth) where one is usually sufficiently distracted that move one (almost) to tolerate the terrible smushed up ‘tuna salad’ pre-packaged “sandwiches” from the break room vending machine, illustrated with drawings that are supposed to be words in some oriental language that should describe the content of each item but are pointless when every single item is “tuna salad” pre-packaged “sandwiches”. Kjell, in his prosaic ineptitude [which, by the way, would take some doing to conflate directly with foul tasting tuna salad sandwich (and definitely depends on you hanging on, tightly, to the two meanings of the word ‘taste’ in these contexts)], is the perfdsadsadasfds Bach (using the occidental order for names) to snack on during that metaphoric daily tasting ritual. This idiomatic gambit runs the risk of equating or conflating consumption of ‘games’ with literal consumption of food, which, if you’re of the type that believes a game “ought” to be “more” than “entertainment,” can be a bit of a thornbush to wsexaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy lmaoooooooooontically cut yourself, metaphorically/idiomatically speaking. Of course you could take the angle that we (humans) need food to live in the same way that we need games, but then your reader would probably be left, imagine the scene with me, be left scratching their head at the end of your collaboratively-produced virtuosic post-modern anonymous masterpiece in .pdf format (quick reminder, DjVu is superior) wondering, “but author[s], why do I/you/we forever need games?” in which case us, (the forever living un-dead authors), have to ask your/themself[ves] two questions:
1. What is this intrinsic need you claim humans to be at the mercy of viz a viz consume video games. And from there we can extract.
1(a). Can you prove it in the same way we can prove a need of food [namely that humans who don’t consume food die and so need in this case is shorthand for require in order not to die (which may be a possible angle of attack e.g. “I don’t mean need as in need in order not to die but as in…” bla bla and so on you know [le_Zizek_face_ascii.rtf])] and then
2. Why didn’t your collaboratively postmodern codpiece of “literature” demonstrate the so-called need of its own merit?
This is the kind of thing that an author/authorial collective ponder[s] when composing a heartbreaking work of staggering genius such as the one you are about to enjoy.)
And so did his happiness affect the nature all around him.
Meanwhile, the game was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty. It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.
In a queenless hive no life is left, though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives.
The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday sun as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of honey like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way. But one has only to observe that hive to realize that there is no longer any life in it. The bees do not fly in the same way, the smell and the sound that meet the beekeeper are not the same.
To the beekeeper’s tap on the wall of the sick hive, instead of the former instant unanimous humming of tens of thousands of bees with their abdomens threateningly compressed, and producing by the rapid vibration of their wings an aerial living sound, the only reply is a disconnected buzzing from different parts of the deserted hive. From the alighting board, instead of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey and venom, and the warm whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor of emptiness and decay mingling with the smell of honey. There are no longer sentinels sounding the alarm with their abdomens raised, and ready to die in defense of the hive.
There is no longer the measured quiet sound of throbbing activity, like the sound of boiling water, but diverse discordant sounds of disorder. In and out of the hive long black robber bees smeared with honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do not sting, but crawl away from danger. Formerly only bees laden with honey flew into the hive, and they flew out empty; now they fly out laden. The beekeeper opens the lower part of the hive and peers in.
Instead of black, glossy bees- tamed by toil, clinging to one another’s legs and drawing out the wax, with a ceaseless hum of labor - that used to hang in long clusters down to the floor of the hive, drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately in various directions on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a neatly glued floor, swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings, there is a floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees scarcely moving their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared away.
The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the super. Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the combs and keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex structures of the combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about the combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they were old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers, having lost all motive and all sense of life.
Drones, bumblebees, wasps, and butterflies knock awkwardly against the walls of the hive in their flight. Here and there among the cells containing dead brood and honey an angry buzzing can sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of bees, by force of habit and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with efforts beyond their strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or bumblebee without knowing why they do it. In another corner two old bees are languidly fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another, without themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile intent. In a third place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack some victim and fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or killed, drops from above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap of corpses.
The keeper opens the two center partitions to examine the brood cells. In place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees. They have almost all died unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they had guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only a few of them still move, rise, and feebly fly to settle on the enemy’s hand, lacking the spirit to die stinging him; the rest are dead and fall as lightly as fish scales. The beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark on it, and when he has time tears out its contents and burns it clean.