The thing to get here is that this isen't just about Realism, because this is a videogame, something inherently fake and unreal, something that can only try to mimick reallity, so this is just as much about game design.
You can try to make a game as realistic and true to life as possible, we could make an MP shooter that is even more realistic than ARMA2 in it's individual features, if we just had the time and money to spend on such a thing, but how would it play? Probably nothing at all like reallity, like real combat, because this is a fake medium, and as much as it can look real, it can never feel real, the clousest it will come is to immerse you, but nothing more.
This is where game-design comes in, you want gameplay that feels authentic and real, immersive even? Then you gotta shoot for something other than 100% realism, you have to incorporate abstractions from reallity that duplicates the results you want to get from the gameplay, and what works twords thouse ends is not allways what's technically the most realistic.
Want an example? Well how about Bunny hopping, any "realism" game worth it's salt has mechanics in place to stop this from happening, usually in the form of a huge stamina drain on jumping. But is that realistic? NO! In real life i can probably hop around like crazy for a solid 5 minutes before i am to tired to continue, so it is not realistic at all for jumping to have such a stamina drain. But does it work? Hell yes, and games must incorporate such systems lest you want to see some really stupid and silly stuff happening on the servers and ruining the immersion of the game.
The best you can hope for in a game in terms of realism is that it is a good "Tactical shooter", a genre of shooter that aims to create realistic and belivable gameplay with as much realism as it can get away with. The old R6 and Ghost Recon games belonged to this genre, Op Flashpoint did, ARMA does, RO:Ost did, but Ro2 does not.
You can argue till you're blue in the face that individual features of Ro2 are realistic (though some of them you'll have a hard time selling to me, like the reload or weapon switch times), but when you watch a guy storm a building with his hipfired MG-34 and clearing it out Rambo style, it's all for nothing, this kind of gameplay has less in common with reallity and real life military tactics, than it does a game of Quake3 Arena, it is pure arcade.
And that is where Ro2 falls down, it does not incourage, and much less force realistic, belivable and tactical gameplay, sure you can choose to play it like that yourself, but nothing stops anyone else on the server from choosing differnetly, and unfortunately, their fast paced arcade style play usually ends up the dominant style, they are the instances that will stand out in your mind when you think back on the game you just played, the one that often works the best and gets the most kills, and this forces you to play faster and more recklessly aswell to counter it (not to mention what witnessing this sillyness does to your sense of immersion), and thus, the tactical play grinds to a halt and breaks down.
Ro:Ost and Ro:Ca were not perfect, they had their pitfalls same as anything (some of which were solved or much improved upon by the DH mod, others we had hoped Ro2 would address), but for the vast majority of the time, they did succeed where Ro2 fails, they did force tactical play, they did create an incredibly immersive atmosphere and combat environment, and it was only twords the end of the game's lifespan that this started to crumble, because by then, people had years of experiance in how to circumvent the game's mechanics.
Ro2 only does that if you're lucky to be on a server full of likeminded players who seek that style of play, but the moment a good R&G player joins and gets his hands on a powerfull weapon, that cookie pretty much crumbles, and most servers play nothing like that to begin with sadly.
This is where Ro2 is losing so many of us "vets", it's not about the small picture, it's not about any individual feature, no, it's about the big picture, how it feels, how it plays, how it does, or rather, doesen't immerse us.
st forcing tactical play other than avatar's inability to move like a normal human being? Guns are as deadly in Ro2 and they're also more accurate which should more than balance the fact people are faster.
