Jumping into the cockpit of a helicopter in Battlefield 2042 can often be more trouble than it's worth. You gain a fat stack of miniguns and missiles, but taking to the skies also means becoming enemy number one for every RPG-strapped engineer on the other team.
Any pilot worth their salt is used to dodging rockets, but Battlefield streamer AsheBF has it much harder. When he takes flight, he's often greeted by a squad of stream-snipers dedicated to killing him and only him. Ashe says he's been getting harassed in-game for almost a year, often by the same group of people, but he puts up a very impressive fight. AsheBF has essentially spent the last year in a kung fu training montage and mastered the art of being like water, except he's dodging missiles instead of fists and also his body is a helicopter.
Here you can see him essentially 1v24 a helicopter, two jets, ground vehicles, and god knows how many engineers steering manually-controlled RPGs in his direction (as shared by Jake Lucky on Twitter):
Caption This #Battlefield #Battlefield2042 #BF2042 @Battlefield pic.twitter.com/bUbaKaKUyIMay 29, 2023
An intense, suspenseful, and undeniably cool display of helicopter dominance there. It's impressive how long AsheBF, who almost exclusively takes the pilot role in Battlefield, is able to last with so many crosshairs on him, but he's not John Wick-ing across the skies because he loves the thrill. He's forced to play this way because wherever he goes, stream-snipers follow.
In a stream earlier today, AsheBF says the harassment campaign against him started because of a "small beef" with a few players and has been going on for about 10 months now.
If you, like me, are curious if AsheBF is overselling how many players are specifically going after him (after all, every Battlefield player wants to be the one to blow up the helicopter) and how often they show up to ruin his night, this clip of Ashe dodging eight sequentially-fired Lis rockets is pretty blatant, as is this clip of him getting pelted by rockets the moment his helicopter spawns in the air, or this time a gang of enemy soldiers showed up to teabag his dead body.
While there is a way to block players within the Battlefield 2042 client, that apparently does stop them from joining your lobby. AsheBF could theoretically create his own Portal server, where he can decide who stays and who goes, but as pointed out by Battlefield YouTuber EndersFPS, there are few enough players in the region AsheBF plays in (Oceanic) that nobody would join. So he sticks to official EA servers, where his stream-snipers apparently have a reliable method of meeting him in the same lobby.
In an interview with Lucky, AsheBF described how the harassment has gotten more personal as of late. The previous night, he noticed that one player had changed their gamertag to the real name of a longtime Battlefield friend who'd recently committed suicide.
"I feel a bit like my soul is being ripped from me, you know what I mean?" AsheBF says to his chat in the clip below seconds before being spawn killed.
Vault Lis @Battlefield #Battlefield2042 #Battlefield @EA_DICE pic.twitter.com/PbXCuAHR0lJune 18, 2023
These are just a few of a dozen-plus examples AsheBF has shared on Twitter in hopes that DICE will take notice and ban the players involved. I've reached out to DICE for comment on the situation and will update if I hear anything back.
In the meantime, AsheBF is feeling hopeful all the new attention on his conundrum (and let's be honest, his amazing piloting skills) will lead to a solution. He started today's stream by thanking viewers for sticking with him, and moments later, won a dogfight against a stream-sniper who'd shown up right on schedule.
