EA just confirmed the most popular class in the Battlefield 6 beta, and it shines a spotlight on a major balance problem

With the Battlefield 6 beta in the rear view, EA's had some time to tally the numbers of its record-shattering playtest weekends and share some fun stats.

Over the eight combined days of the beta, players caused over $196,760,386,367 in structural damage, shot down over 9 million helicopters, and zapped each other to death with defibrillator paddles over 7 million times. As for total kills? 4.9 billion, or over half of Earth's population. At least 30 million of those deaths were revived.

Beyond big numbers being big, the most interesting takeaway from the graphic concerns class pick rates. While three of the classes had nearly even pick rates—Support (26%), Engineer (23%), Recon (19%)—Assault was the clear winner of the beta with a pick rate of 32%.

If you played the beta, you don't have to guess why that is: Assaults had the special ability to bring a second primary weapon, and there was no better backup to have in the beta than the overpowered pump shotgun. The shotgun was so dominant that it earned its own stat, racking up over 337 million kills. That stat also has an asterisk: "Tuning in progress."

Yes, the shotgun's low spread and high per-pellet damage were overtuned, but its prominence was a consequence of two unrelated factors of the BF6 beta: small maps and the assault class. Battlefield Studios' decision to only test small to medium maps created the perfect conditions for the shotgun. Were players forced to take the shotgun as their primary weapon, its limited range would be a liability on Liberation Peak or portions of Iberian Offensive, but that disadvantage was erased by simply picking the Assault class.

The shotgun meta was also the product of BF6's default open weapons format. As BF Studios has said in earlier blogs, the Assault's weapon sling was an effort to define its role on a team, because it went ahead and erased its previous role (being the sole class with an assault rifle) by letting all classes use all weapons. If the consensus is that the third weapon sling is a bridge too far on the power curve, I wonder if BF Studios will return to the drawing board to figure out what an Assault is.

Of course, over in the Shangri-La of the Closed Weapons playlists, Assaults excelled at what they said on the tin: frontline fighting with the most versatile guns in the game. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Assault had a higher pick rate in Closed Weapons simply because Engineer and Recon were sparingly deployed for actual sniping and anti-tank support.

That's how Battlefield was always meant to be played, after all: the unique powers of Engineers, Recons, and Supports made them specialized classes with a naturally lower pick rate than a bog-standard Assault. That class balance lives on in niche milsims that spawned from Battlefield 2, like Squad.

We'll see how other factors, like the addition of a few genuinely big maps, will shake up the balance when Battlefield 6 launches on October 10.