Hi there! Sounds like an interesting project, I'm a psychologist too! Maybe you're on discord or something and wanna chat a bit about gaming psychology?

As for the stats about how many fps gamers have played battlefield, I guess noone here can give you a precise answer. I assume anybody with substantial fps experience on the device (being a fps hero @ pc doesn'T help too much with fps @ console) has heard about the series and probably would have a "not too hard" first time. Don't know how many really played it though.
Does it have a campaign? I suppose newbees will always have a pretty hard time online (facing more experienced players, possibly even cheaters), while the difficulties of campaigns and offline games is usually designed to be managable for anybody.

(PS: playing FPS with a controller is... cancer :O )

and the anwser is PlayMorePromode.com

Played a fair bit of BF4 on PC. Have not played Hardline (except 20 minutes on somebodys console)

"How likely is it that someone plays first-person shooter games but doesn't play Battlefield?"

Only a very small percentage of people "play" Battlefield. Likely a higher percentage of people have tried (one of the many) Battlefield games. Even between military shooters there are enough options (COD, CS, ARMA, PUBG, Tom Clancey, etc etc) that BF is only a small market share (yet big enough to make a lot of money). Hardline is mostly hated in the BF(4) community from what I can tell.

"And if a person doesn't play FPS games but is pretty good at other Xbox games, could they pick up Battlefield pretty quickly?"

No not really unless everybody was new to the game then it would be fair.

Counter-Strike is a game you can pick up quickly. By comparison BF is filled with far greater number of confusing game mechanics that will take longer to understand. Understanding them isnt critical to playing, but its critical to doing well on the scoreboard.

Its filled with cheap tricks that can rack up kills and rewards players who put in the effort (playtime) to learn all those cheap tricks. It has a progression system that unlocks weapons the longer you play (takes 100s hours) so the game does not even pretend to be fair to noobs.

Its a fun game, its just not fun at first when everybody is more experienced.

what kind of gaming experience that I want my participants to have.

Its a big difference between experience of singleplayer game, LAN game with couple freinds, and generic online shitfest. All I remeber from my first hours of BF4 was dying and respawning. New players will easily die 30 times in 30 minutes against random experianced players. Im not sure that gives anything worth remembering.

Take a look at some of the ARMA 2 / ARMA 3 servers and mods they are running. That game offers much more open world, slower pace, and objective freedom to the player than Battlefield. Its also probably more confusing to learn however.

There are servers for GTA San Andreas that have 1000's of players also. It never officially had multiplayer thats why they are pirate modded servers. "GTA MTA" and "SA MP".

Those are 2 games I can think of that let the player do whatever they want rather than forced objectives.

Seems likely this is just a way to drop that link in to me… that URL isn’t anything to do with psychology, other than the mindset of cheaters perhaps.

Yep, he cheated (pun intended), sneakily edited the post after getting approved, to smuggle in a cheating site link. I took the liberty of removing it. Wonder if there's a way to lock his edits without locking/nuking the thread, not to hurt people's feelings ;)

It's a spam bot, why just not ban it altogether?

FWIW, the original source text seems to be from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/cz3z..._question/

Probably safe to just nuke this, as I doubt that person is still asking the same question.

nukekthxbye