Thanks to the mortar method of gaming the system, the community mission has turned into something of a social experiment more than a vehicle kill-fest. I jumped on one of the servers floating around the sub set up so that players can go farm mortars with each other, and it turned into this jumbled mix of players trying to trade mortars, players trying to grief those players, and strangely players still trying to play the game normally. It became this wild game of trying to meet up with supports from the other team and devise some system of exchange without being able to communicate with them, and avoiding the griefers from either team messing that up.

I had the luck of starting out with a squad of players who all had mics. We'd travel to wherever the cluster of supports blew up, which we ended up calling "mortar markets." When you get to a mortar market, you can either stand in a group or try to get someone to work with you on an individual basis. The groups were either first come, first serve or players took turns, but the turn based groups were fairly precarious since it only took one new person to show and not follow the rules to disrupt the whole system.

At the same time, the quest to get someone to trade mortars on an individual basis started becoming this complex mating dance. If there were more of your team's supports at the market than the enemy's, it became a real competition to try and get new arrivals to place down their mortars for you first. I saw players shoot at their feet to get their attention, do wild dances by jumping-kneeling-swinging melee, or running and throwing down their own mortar first like a bribe.

Sinai was a particularly fun map for markets because the mortar market would always spring up outside the G-flag where it was less vulnerable to grief attacks. Watching all the supports run across the open desert was like something akin to the ancient Silk Road. A few of us in my squad completed the assignment a bit early, so we went back and got a vehicle to ferry the merchants and serve as "guardians of the market."

The markets were easy picking for griefers, especially in vehicles since everyone had mortars and ammo equipped. Personally, I choose to believe they're all folks who spent a good deal of money on battlepacks when the Desert Gold first came out but was unobtainably rare and can't accept that now anyone can get it by grinding mortars. Overall though, it was a fun afternoon and definitely a Battlefield moment I'd have never thought would happen.

For those interested in trying for themselves, server browser search:

• PC: Tickwick
• PS4: Desert Gold, or Kaboom (password: mrtronly)
• Xbox: getgold

Edit: I'm increasingly seeing this called the Christmas Truce. I dig it