Spring Patch Weapon Goals

I just can't convince myself that the devs sat around a table and asked what can they do to "blur the line between skilled players and newcomers" and arrived at suppression

You'd be surprised. Take a look at this screencap from a magazine (it was Game Informer, IIRC), where Patrick Bach was interviewed right after BF3 was announced: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/783/complicatedk.jpg

Full quote reads as follows:

“We could implement it, but the question is ‘How do you get the threshold lower?’ That’s not by making it more complicated. Our challenge is to make sure that anyone that just jumps into the game will get it. One of the biggest problems with Commander was that only two people could use it. Some people liked it but most people didn’t care. They just cared that someone gave them an order or that their squad could play together having fun on their own more or less. Then the more hardcore people went into the Commander mode and learned how to use that. You could argue it was a great feature, but looking at the numbers you could also say that no one uses it. We tried in Bad Company 2 to give that to the players, so you could issue orders to your squad, and you could use gadgets like UAV that only the commander could use earlier – giving the power back to the players so everyone could use it. That made a big difference. More people could enjoy the game. We lowered the threshold for everyone because we gave it to everyone. We now know where the boundaries are for keeping the strategic depth and complexity while lowering the threshold to get in."

While the quote in question speaks about lack of the Commander mode, you can see that DICE's approach to game design was to make the game simple, to avoid adding any features that would make the game complicated, or harder to play.

Why are things like health regen, armor regen, suppression, all-squad spawning, spawn protection, MANPADS etc. are in the game? To make it easier, to reduce the skill ceiling. Nothing less, nothing more.

Why do we need a separate mechanic to simulate suppression? Why can't we shape the gameplay to actually make suppression a thing without screwing people up?

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