If you preorder, you get the first DLC for free. So if you think you’re going to cave and end up buying it for full price anyway, you might as well get it now. I’m hoping we’ll get enough SDMBers to fill a 5 man squad regularly - we have more than 5 now, but some of those people don’t have that much time to play. I’d like to be able to usually at least fill up one squad.
I’ve pre-ordered as well and should be around for some squad fun.
My Origin handle is elninost0rm1, I think. If it’s not that, it’s just elninost0rm. I’m at work so I can’t check.
At least on the Xbox 360, it sort of waxed and waned as they fine tuned the relative performances; originally like you say, nobody had the SOFLAM, so there was a lot of helicopter flight and they were lethal. Then people started using the Javelin/SOFLAM combination a lot. Then they nerfed it by making flares work against it; not only did it break the lock, but they prevented the lock for a while.
Plus, whatever that active countermeasures option was pretty much prevented lock-on at all by anything; if anything that was seriously overpowered.
Combine that with the fact that not very many people really took the SOFLAM, and it was a situation where at least on the 360, helicopters were always valid. Granted the transport helicopters were of limited utility- the only things I ever saw them handy for was circling high and serving as a mobile paradrop spawn point over an objective in Rush, and for distracting the bad guys if you had a particularly good pilot- they could swoop in and let the door gunners lay down a lot of suppressive fire, and then swoop out while the ground guys ran up unmolested.
Anyone know what time they are releasing the game? Midnight tonight or sometime in the day tomorrow?
Either way get your beer and nachos ready for tomorrow night!
Ooooh, also gotta dig out my joystick for heli action.
Launch is midnight eastern, about 6.5 hours.
I don’t think BF3 platoons carry over to BF4, and it doesn’t seem like BF4 platoons are implemented yet, but go ahead and join/use our BF3 platoon to get everyone on everyone else’s friends list for now.
If you haven’t seen it, lookup “Battlefield friends” on youtube. Good way to relax while waiting for launch.
I VPN’ed my way to the single player yesterday evening. Man, this is officially the best looking PC title so far.
Some of the scenes had my wife thinking I was watching a movie:
“Babe, are you watching a movie or playing a game?”
But of course, graphics aside, it’s still a hand-holdy, heavily scripted, extremely linear FPS military romp very much a la COD. 
I’ve picked it up for XBox if anyone else did. I am NoSpillBlood
Had a lot of fun last night with the Doper crew.
Game is definitely a blast so far. You’d think I would get bored of it at some point because they are essentially rehashed versions of prior games, but they always seem to add new layers of immersion.
They seemed to revert a lot of the changes from things that people disliked about previous games. Some noteable exceptions are things like queuing while joining a server. They removed it. Why? Nobody wants to say “let me know when someone leaves!” over and over to their friends.
Anyway, not really enough time for a lengthy review but I enjoyed it.
My mic didn’t record last night! argh!
But I’ll be putting up some shots from our run on the tank and the time I collided with a friendly heli, as well as the time we were literally and repeatedly stomped on by an unfriendly one, which was hilarious.
I missed the action last night 'cause of people coming over announced!
But I got a short clip up on youtube at least:
More tank gameplay with the SDMB group. Featuring ElNinoStorm and yours truly 
BF4 is $30 on origin today only, but also you can apparently generate a $10 coupon for it using [these instructions from slickdeals](bf4 for $20 http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/107426/ea-origin---battlefield-4-pc-digital-download)
Having a lot of fun with it. The M2 SLAM mines are the greatest things ever and the possibilities on where you can place them is limited to how sneaky you are.
Thanks for the heads up! I went ahead and pulled the trigger at that price.
You new people, add me on steam and/or battlelog. Same name. Play with us, we play most nights. You should be able to add me here.
And join our mumble, silverbolt.blue//fangsolution.com 32768 - remove the slashes. There’s a glitch where the first time you log on you need to hit your push to talk button before you hear anything.
Where is the vehicle customization menu on the PS3? I did look for it until I started to unlock the good weapons, but I can’t seem to find it.
Nevermind, I figured it out.
I picked this up when Origin had it for $20 with the coupon and I’ve played a few rounds. It’s quite fun.
The naval combat ads caught my eye as I was a huge fan of titan mode in BF2142 and it looked like titan mode on steroids.
Signed up started dl yesterday should start showing up as onesweetjedi shortly