The Good, the Bad, and the BF3..

So after a few days of playing, and realizing yes, it's beta and much will be improved upon release, my thoughts so far.

BF3 is definitely a beautiful game, with all the textures and bits set to high, it looks amazing. Along with the visuals, the sound is amazing. Animations (I love vaulting over stuff), and movement seem very fluid. Unlike some I'm totally alright with prone being included, no surprise, I play recon a lot. (well not recently, but..) Considering how easy it is to die in the game, being able to move forward without getting shot from a mile off by a shotgun is welcome..
The issues with dolphin diving seem manageable as the animation to get down isn't instantaneous, and now that I'm a bit more familiar with the game is basically just easier to finish your opponent off if they do it.

The Operation Metro map, is claustrophobic, and plays very much like a CoD map which doesn't showcase all that BF3 has to offer, and maps like it will most likely be relegated to the rotation scrap pile in the end.. Though think of how different it will play if all those people who sit and snipe with flashlights just become targets for incoming mortars and artillery. Changes the map up considerably if all the player options are open to them. Basically it wont play the way it does now a few weeks after release.

The much maligned web interface. At first I hated it, clunky and stupid. Though you know what? It's not THAT bad once you get used to it. Instead of long game load times, and a server browser that NEVER shows me all the servers updated; I can find my friends a lot easier outside the game and load into it once I've got my server. I call that part a draw.
Where it shines though is in articles like this:

origin-account-bans-threatened-for-playing-on-modded-battlefield-3-beta-servers

Before anyone gets all "Nazis!!!!!111" on EA, think about it for a second. Your stats are uploaded real time to the website (cool feature), all your previous games are saved so you can go back and relive the one or two maps where you performed as well as Blackice does regularly. You can see your upcoming unlocks as everything is happening. In real time. If you cheat, you do it in real time. No 3rd person website to scour over, EA can tell if you're being a cheating twat by having applications pour over the stats to find people who clearly are having better than should be possible results. Got banned by punkbuster? Guess who knows immediately and can sanction you for it if it continues.
Remember that article above? Are you going to risk your ability to play BF3 over it? How about that shiny new SWtOR? If your account gets banned because you're an asshat, it could be more than just your FPS time that's at stake. I call that a win for EA and gamers generally quite frankly. Either way it's too big to change, so it's here to stay, but I think I'll be alright with it.

I'll touch on it quickly, the squad/team setup as it is now is stupid, and it needs to be fixed. If the outcry is big enough it's fixable, so I imagine it wont stay the way it is if EA wants to compete with MW3.

Now for the bad. Client side hit prediction. It appears to be what BF3 is using and it's terrible. The really bad news is, netcode and elements like hit prediction aren't anything they can or will change before or after release.
The basics of it are that both my machine and yours handle who hits whom, when and where. They send that information about our firefight to the server, but whoever's information gets their first is the winner. The problem is your machine doesn't know what my machine is doing until the server relays it to you. So whoever has got the fastest back and forth to the server is going to have their info processed first potentially. So if I get my hit prediction to the server and processed first, you're going to lose the firefight; unless my client tells the server I'm a useless noob who can't aim.

That's why it seems that sometimes you're being hit and killed even though your machine showed you getting behind cover WELL before you were fragged. That's why sometimes you seem to be "insta-killed"; you got popped, but your opponent had already seen you and shot at you enough to kill you just as your client was registering the incoming fire and your response to it. Not good.
Add to that client side hit prediction made worse with cheats.. Imagine that above, now add to the fact that guys will see you coming around walls and have mods to insta hit you in the head or from a mile away. Your client wont know what hit you until it's all over but the re-spawning.
Terrible terrible bad.. No developer should be doing things this way, unless they've got the most robust anti cheat apps going, and are taking slower connections properly into account.

From what I've seen so far after looking into it a bit, THAT's the issue that to me is the biggest downfall for BF3.

Chances are I'll play it for a while, but it wont hold up if anything new and exciting comes up. (Must... Not.. buy... RAGE... ) I thought I'd be conflicted when SWtOR came out if BF3 was still going strong, but I don't have any doubts about that any more.