Bare with me, Il get to the point...
I still believe that Battlefield 2 was the greatest game in the Battlefield franchise to this date. It was a much simpler game, it wasnt the case of the players/team with the highest level/rank or the most amount of disposable income that wins the round, because they got all the fancy gear. Whilst the new players have next to jack and have their arses handed to them every time they try to play, until they endure the game long enough and somehow rank up or fork out a fortune to get to a moderate level to start enjoying the game, like pretty much every modern multiplayer game out there these days.
In Battlefield 2 everyone had the same kit and the only way to differentiate lower level players to the higher level ones was an unlocked gun for the class of their choice (Which may or may not be better than the stock gun you had for whatever faction you were playing on), and the skills they learnt.
BF2 also lasted so long because it also had such a strong modding community which the game supported, which EA and Dice refused to support anymore after they released games on the Frostbite engine claiming "Our game engine is just too complicated for mere mortals to mod" which turned out to be absolute codswallop. Now Battlefield games like Bad Company, BF3 and BF4 that only have a shelf life of about a year before a new one is released, rendering the previous version obsolete.
BF2 had such fun and iconic mods like Project Reality, AIX 2.0, Sandbox, Nations at War, Wookie Sniper Mod ect. these modders made these mods because they loved the game and wanted to make it better in their own way.
In turn BF2 was still going strong for well over 3 years.
I miss BF2 and all other games from that era.
Now you just going to get some kids that are going to change some of the games textures and start charging money for them just to make a quick buck. Steam already has an issue of having its Store flooded with tat, games that are just awful in every way, made to the same childish quality in which these "developers" charging money for the same reasons. Customers have to sift through piles of garbage in order to find a game or mod thats remotely interesting, Steam refuse to self regulate or have its own quality control and thats just ONE of the biggest problems with Steam.