The best army ops team yo

Below i a post of what I sent to Tots back in October, and never got the authorization to post public. We use stock .ini's as modifying even the basic graphics parameters have unintended consequences.

Hey Tots,

I was going to post the below "research" to the forum in the e-sports section, but would like to get your opinion prior to posting. I don't believe I'm posting anything secretive, just not sure if you want this info to go out to the masses. Please note that I did this research out of love for the game, and wanting everyone to be on a fair playing field. I don't believe any of the .ini changes i made are even frowned upon, they are of the most basic performance changes. Let me know what you think though. The last thing I want is to break any forum or game rules.

There has been lots of talk recently about what .ini tweaks are allowed, and seems to be the consensus that .ini tweaks that are not hard coded in the game serve no competitive advantage.
3EQZVS8.png
I did some research today, and found that that claim is false. I tried to take some footage of a few things happening in a very small time-frame to show the differences between a stock .ini, and even a slightly modified one using only "performance" based settings. For all images below, the stock .ini is on the left, and the modified is on the right. For transparency's sake, i will post the changes that I made to the .ini per some postings here before.

#AAEngine.ini
[Engine.Engine]
bStaticDecalsEnabled=False
bDynamicDecalsEnabled=False
MipFadeInSpeed0=0
MipFadeOutSpeed0=0
MipFadeInSpeed1=0
MipFadeOutSpeed1=0
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE
MinSmoothedFrameRate=1
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=148

[Engine.Client]
DisplayGamma=2.6
MinDesiredFrameRate=120

[TextureStreaming]
PoolSize=4096
MemoryMargin=2048

With that out of the way, lets get to the meat of this post. The below screenshots the players view with "Performance Settings" and the spectators view with a Stock .ini. I know there are some slight visual differences, but all in all, what will be talked about will be the same. This footage is 60fps, and i can upload if needed. I tried to take each SS from the video at some significant frame where the player lost health, cross hair was on a certain object, or any other serializing point.

2:49- Mid fog grenade, you can clearly see the difference if you look at the right doorway, the "performance" .ini clearly has a worse view through the smoke. Kind of backwards, but this just goes to show that there IS a difference.
http://i.imgur.com/ECMZboV.png
2:48- Back to a normal shot, things look very comparable even though there's definitely differences in the smoke penetration, all in all though, bushes look the same. I'm sure there's other .ini settings that you can modify, but I do not want to take that risk.
http://i.imgur.com/ECMZboV.png

2:47- This image really shows that you can see more through the left side of the smoke on the "performance" .ini, its more transparent, but there is more of it. It will get more interesting soon, i promise
http://i.imgur.com/G9pubBh.png

2:46- This starts to show where the player get shot at from e-spawn window. Quickshot did a great job here peeking through the cracks, though, I'm not the most excited about this turning into a "shoot through cracks game"
http://i.imgur.com/CqHfXnE.png

246.2- You start to see the differences in motion blur here, I'm not sure where this is called out in the .ini settings, but you can tell that it will give the advantage to the modified .ini here as their screen is much less distorted.
http://i.imgur.com/vpqvO75.png

246.3- More of the same, the stock .ini screen is much more red colored, and motion blurred.
http://i.imgur.com/vpqvO75.png

246.4- The modified .ini now has much more red on the screen, and is more impacted by the shot than the stock .ini. This still contains no motion blur, and the stock .ini is less impacted by the red overlay.
http://i.imgur.com/5oa0bZh.png

So, after this research its hard to determine which is better, and which is easier to live with. They for sure have their own place where one is better than the other. This does show that there is distinctive difference between the two, and .ini's should have more restriction than current. I'm all about getting more stable, solid fps. However if each player is running around with different advantages / disadvantages, is this really a fair firefight anymore?

I know AA2 was a different ballgame, where you held your .ini's to a gold standard, and didn't share your settings with everyone. I believe we need some sort of reform, either Dev made, or per league. What are Basic .ini changes? Are they allowed? Advanced? Many unknowns here.