Musings on the Battlefield: Throwing Your Last Grenade.

IF ONLY I HAD THROWN MY GRENADE!

This past weekend, I spent part of my days watching the World Cup and part padding my score on BF4 with the Premium Member's 100% Bonus thing. I thought it interesting that during the Colombia v. Uruguay match there were comparatively few players on multiplayer. Maybe there is a relationship.

My goal was to break into 115 (I needed about a million points) but, alas, the gaming gods were not on my side. Instead the entire day was a stutter step of glitch/freezing and hard rebooting (see my post on the subject regarding Lancang Dam for insight into my continued trouble with the game's instability). It was during a particularly long session of Conquest/Operation Locker that the above was captured.

First, the timing couldn't have been better as you can plainly see (just to add insult to injury, this was a 1400 ticket match that I had been playing for God knows how long). But what may not be so readily evident is also the inspiration behind today's post: I didn't throw my last grenade.

I know. It seems like such a small thing to forget and in actual size it most definitely is, HOWEVER, it is because of its size that it is EASILY forgotten, case in point: the picture above.

A little backstory: I KNEW THIS LUCKY SLOB was hiding in the tunnel and could have put an end to his MISERABLE LIFE if only I had THROWN MY GRENADE. But I didn't, and that's the point.

So often we are in the heat of battle that we don't stop and think, "hey idiot, throw your grenade". I do it all the time too. Still, a helpful reminder to focus on the little things is always a good idea, so here you go: ALWAYS THROW YOUR LAST GRENADE.

Try to keep that in mind the next time you play and see if it doesn't pay off.

On to more serious issues. One of the big questions I have had about the game is its fidelity when it crashes. "Are my game totals accurately accounted for when the game freezes and I have to reboot?" is something I worry about given the high number of software/system failures I experience per gaming session. WELL, I AM HERE TO TELL YOU THAT MY FEARS seem to have been assuaged.

Yeah, I know, I hate to admit it, but I cannot argue with hard data. After each crash, I made note of my numbers immediately afterwards. My running tally showed that I was definitely getting my points and that they were reasonably, if not completely, accurate.

This is comforting on many levels, but most importantly it demonstrates that EA and team recognize that there is a problem with system instability and they have developed a means of dumping the score to memory before it's lost.

Now if they could only fix the cause and not treat the symptom, what a world it would be.

I was just getting started.