Why do I bother buying these games?
This game shares, for my tastes, the same problem that all the Battlefield games share; completely ridiculous difficulty for the newbie. There's simply no way, as a new player, to ease into the multiplayer. All you will do is die without ever firing a shot, repeatedly, ad nauseam.
I'll admit it; I suck at shooters. I don't play them often at all, and when I do I prefer the single-player type (Bioshock, Max Payne etc...)
BF: BC2 multiplayer looks like a lot of fun when you check out the varied video reviews. Then you log in as a new player, and you die instantly.
Again
...and again...and again..and again...and again and again and again and again and again and again.
No matter what you do, you're dead before you've even moved 50 feet, and you'll never even know where the shot came from. This is all courtesy of one of the most brutally, mercilessly difficult and frustrating games you'll ever play.
I bought the game today, played multiplayer for one hour, and have already removed it from my hard disk, broken the DVD in half lest I ever be tempted to reinstall, and thrown it in the garbage.