[CrankyTRex]

Well, when I left PS2 it wasn't because of minor balancing issues like sniper rifles. It was because I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment playing the game, and I suspect most people who try it and bail feel the same way.

There's just very few opportunities for an individual, particularly a newb, to feel like they did something important, which is due to the combination of low TTK, awkward base design, and bad spawn/heal/territory control mechanics. Instead of fixing how one captured bases, they just dropped the lattice on everything and officially made the game a meat grinder.

Meat grinders are fine for games with rounds and points like CoD because then the sense of accomplishment comes from winning a round, but PS2 is open ended, so that isn't an option.

All the potential MMO avenues of accomplishment like levels, skills, quest rewards, and such are blunted by the whole cert system which is designed around revenue generation. Obviously they're not going to spit out a new gun or camo for you every couple levels/achievements because then you'd be less inclined to pay money for certs, and similarly the amount of certs required for anything of note has to be high enough to encourage paying instead of playing.

And it's not terribly organic at grouping people together outside a zerg either. A small group of five guys have pretty much no chance of heroically stalling a larger enemy assault and thus build some form of camaraderie such that they might stick together for a while. If you're outnumbered, you might as well just leave rather than fight to the death.

So once the novelty of the scale of it wears off, there's not much reason to stick around unless you happened to make some friends with an outfit.