Battlefield 6 will soon receive updates that let you earn more XP per shootbrawl, rank up faster, and unlock gadgets and weapons attachments sooner. The tweaks are coming in response to frustrations about sluggish progression that have seen players pack the game’s community servers with XP-farming matches against bots.
“We’ve heard your feedback around the pace of progression,” the developers cry out to us from the corpse-strewn deserts of social media, “especially how long it can take to unlock hardware such as gadgets, and weapon attachments. We know progression is an important part of feeling rewarded for your time on the battlefield.”
So what changes are they making? Firstly, they’re bumping up XP from match completion and daily login bonuses by 10% and 40% respectively. Secondly, they’re reducing the XP required to unlock the first 20 attachment ranks, meaning you can “start earning useful attachments almost twice as fast”. Be warned that if you’re already making headway with a particular weapon’s unlocks after the update goes live, you might see some weirdness on the UI, “but this should resolve itself once a match is played while using that weapon”.
In other news, assignments (multiplayer challenges to earn cosmetics and such) that once required career ranks 20, 23, and 26 will now require career ranks 10, 15, and 20, respectively. The devs are aware that this doesn’t address wider misgivings about assignments, without going into details – they’re “actively working on reviewing them, but it will take more time to develop, test, and implement these changes.”
It’s all in the name of making Battlefield 6’s online arsenal-growing feel “smoother and more rewarding while still keeping that sense of achievement when you complete a milestone”. It’s also in the name of stemming the flood of bot factories in the community servers section.
“Over the past week, many of you noticed that we reached maximum capacity on community servers,” the devs go on. “After reviewing the data, we found that a large number of these servers were created primarily to earn XP, inflate player stats, and earn special accolades through defeating bots.
“We completely understand the motivation behind this, like faster progression and a way to test setups without pressure, but it’s led to some unintended side effects. With so many servers focused on farming XP rather than active play, it’s become noticeably harder for players to create and find experiences to play with other people.”
Battlefield’s Community Experiences, EA rather primly point out, are “meant to be a space for creativity, experimentation, and connection, where you can easily find and enjoy great modes with your friends and squadmates”. They’re not supposed to be Operation Firestorm-sized treadmills. There’s an overfamiliar op ed to write here about how live service operations of Battlefield’s stature routinely grind away their own sense of play. I will spare you that. Instead I’ll say that some of my most relaxing experiences during the Battlefield 6 review write-up were bot matches. It’s so cute how they play-act at flanking and taking cover.
Aside from greasing the progression chute, EA are “developing adjustments that are intended to diminish the number of XP farms taking up server space while further emphasizing playing with friends on both custom and verified experiences.” Once they’ve carried out the associated backend maintenance, they expect that “all experiences, both custom and verified, will need to be republished by players before they can create an active server”.
Look out for these updates “within the next week, potentially sooner depending on testing and verification”. The devs close by acknowledging other complaints about “visibility, weapon bloom, vehicles not spawning, and more”. They’ll be patching those issues down the road, having already wrestled the hydra of bouncy ladders and overclocked sniper rifles.
Seems like the new field-battler is a hit, clogged-up levelling system notwithstanding. Yesterday, EA announced that it’s the best-selling Battlefield so far.
