This is the fundamental disagreement behind this issue, I think. I'm a person that couldn't give a good gorram about "gun play". To me there are plenty of things other than assault rifles that contribute to the fun. In fact I find the circle-strafing and bunny-hopping of "gun play" to be moronic and unfun.

Which, whatever, everyone's idea of fun is different and all that after school special crap. But I'm not interested in being forced into that playstyle just because the people who like it won't adapt to mine.

I hate bunny hopping. It is silly, unrealistic, and in no way a practical way to advance on an enemy while firing a weapon.

Same with side to side quick strafing. No one does this in reality, it is only in FPS's and I wish it too could die in New Eden.

Because removing bunny hopping = standing still.

Go watch our military units (Seals, Recon, hell any unit at all) advance / retreat in combat. None of them jump up and down like morons while advancing and firing. Doing this is ridiculous, unrealistic, and would cause you to fall over due to recoil / losing your balance. It's stupid, and the only reason it exists is because the controls allow it. Just make it so you can either jump or fire. Not both.

This is what I was trying to say, albeit poorly.

Future or not, bunny hopping is just ridiculous. And to say it isn't is just... wow.

I'm not an FPS player, there's no FPS for me to go back to. It's also largely transparent to me, since thank god DUST gives me the option of using vehicles pretty much exclusively. Then, behold, a thread pops up calling for infantry-only game modes. This translates to a game mode that all non AV infantry will use, because it's easy mode for them. So what happens to me and my dropship? I'm stuck either in infantry game mode with you ground pounders or in the vehicles mode with other HAVs and AV infantry. Given the extreme cost of vehicles it'd be impossible to support that playstyle with such a division. In other words, an infantry only game mode could very easily result in the obsolescence of vehicles outside of corp battles.

So, to pull a complete 180 and bring this topic back where it started, infantry only game modes are bad.

No! That is a bad Movado.

Never add restrictions, if anything lift restrictions.

Sandbox games do not benefit from adding restrictions.

Here we encounter fundamental issue #2 with this discussion: the myth of the invincible HAV. I do like that your mental image of me is that I'm just trololo-ing through the map mowing down enemy troops with impunity. I'm not going to bother pointing out how easy it is to kill a HAV with any reasonable amount of AV. You'd just say some crap about how you shouldn't have to deal with that. Let's instead talk about why vehicles are necessary.

You see, there are a lot of games out there, those crappy generic FPSes. Call of Duty, and all of its clones. You're more than welcome to those. You can be as infantry only as your heart desires there, because they're not like DUST. DUST is a sandbox. This will be especially true if (as I dearly hope) they implement an open world structure. Even if they don't, they've discussed in at least one video 5km by 5km maps and have hinted at internal tests of 64v64 players.

Can you imagine trying to fight on a 25 square kilometer map with only infantry? It'd take you fifteen minutes just to find one enemy. You're going to need vehicles to get around at that point. HAVs are going to be an important strategic piece in those games. At best you'll be shooting yourself in the foot by developing bad habits fighting without them. At worst you'll be stifling those game modes by channeling all the infantry into your silly infantry-only matches. Then we just have another Call of Duty clone.

TL;DR: this isn't Call of Duty, vehicles are here to stay and you're either going to have to deal with them or die to them.