For me the "original sin" of AoS was the removal of the need to jump to climb cubes. I'm sure many will disagree, but that was the first crucial shift away from the "dig/entrench first" gameplay which made the game different, special. With the required jumping, digging tunnels and building flat roads to quickly run around (either to better swarm the enemy territory or run back to defend your intel/cap the enemy intel), was the natural top priority, as hopping on the hills mostly led to a quick and meaningless death. With the "run & gun" style made so more viable, a rift between "builders" and "attacked" rose. Because before just placing a cube meant forcing someone to jump, making aiming harder; so every kind of construction was at least "influential" on the outcome of a shootout. After that it was just disappointment little after little. I didn't know "Ace of Spades" was a Vietnam thing; I just thought that the game fitted flawlessly with the WWI context, because of the "simple" rifle you were given and the entrenchment which was so typical of the WWI conflict. When I herd about the addition of an automatic weapon and the expansion of the arsenal, I though about some kind of support stuff, like a fixed machine gun (like the Lewis gun someone mentioned in a reply) and then maybe a mortar. Certainly not a SMG, which felt really out of place and was never balanced, or a shotgun which was even more senseless. Those two weapons only served to cement further the "run & gun" gameplay. But as a conventional shooter it never stood a chance against other conventional FPSs, which do the run & gun gameplay in a much better and richer way. My dream about AoS will always be that silly-ish replication of the WWI "trench first" battle field. Of course Iceball direction is for its devs to choose; these are just my 2cents about my experience with AoS, and why I utterly loved it in those early days.