It's certainly an improvement, but IMO, there are still too many SMGs on the battlefield. A couple of nights ago I was playing on a full 64 player server playing Commissar's House, and 18 players on my team (Russian) had SMGs or semi-autos, with only 12 using rifles. One reason for this was the fact that, despite the fact that tanks were disabled (as they are on most servers, for good reason), there were still 4 AT class slots (satchels, AT grenade -- not AT rifle), and all of those players were using SMGs.
So in summary, things are getting better, but I think that either TWI should eliminate AT classes from maps when tanks are disabled, or make those classes use rifles instead of SMGs.
Anything that truly improves the game play and boosts the community is fine with me. But I have just a quibble about semantics here. You first say too many "SMGs" but then you count semi-autos with them in your ratio, and so seemingly only count the bolts as "rifles" (and probably didn't count snipers which are mostly bolt-action, either). When you meant to count auto and semi-auto vs bolt-action you should call it that instead of "SMGs" (a category which does not include semi-auto
rifles) vs "rifles"(a category which includes not only the non-scoped bolt-action rifle but also other rifles like the Tokarev SVT/AVT and the scoped snipers) because the actual numbers will look different depending on what you are calling your categories. At the end of the day you might still say it is too many of one or the other, I'm not really debating that, but there will be a difference.
Also, the assault class itself is not without ambiguity because the experimental weapons Mkb and AVT are selective fire meaning at times they are used like a semi-automatic rifle and not like a machine gun. So the Mkb introduces the german-invented category of the "assault
rifle" and the AVT is an attempt at that type of hybrid apparently to make up for shortages of machine guns. The Mkb is probably ambivalent (equally effective) as full or semi auto and probably used more in the game on full auto than semi, but the AVT is way easier to handle in semi-auto mode, effectively making it an additional elite rifleman more of the time. These guns could be counted as .5 machine gun on German side and .5 rifles on Russian
.
But finally and most arguably, it's unfair to call for no SMG-carrying
engineers (what you call AT) when there are no tanks around. Engineers are available when there are no tanks because there are
destroyable objectives on the map, which can make a significant difference in battles. And because these objectives are usually in or very near to contested objectives, the engineers have to get up close in the hot zones with the assault troopers, and they may often need to defend themselves in close quarters for which, historical or not, the SMG is well-suited in terms of the game situation (also, if there are tanks around, they're usually behind their own line and an engineer has to get waaaay more close to enemies than an AT rifle does if he wants to serve as AT). Taking away engineers just because there are no tanks or taking away the SMGs from the engineers would be just bad news.
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