In responce to the topic started.
Why do you define statpadding as laying ambushes for enemies? Statpadding is not when you confront a fully armed enemy who is fully able to shoot back and kill you.
People who are new to the game arn't completely stupid, they know that you shoot the other guy.
I was new once too, and it took me a while to get used to BF2 from BF1942. People killed me a lot. Now I am over that, I am an accomplished player, I have learned to use each of the weapons, (maybe not the jets,) and have found my niche in a couple of classes, (Sniper and Spec. Ops.) Yes, I have learned most of the places in the maps, but that didn't take me long. I was Lance Corporal when I was confident with most if not all of the maps, (some people on here will know that this is kind of a dead point as I was a Lance Corporal for a very very long time.)
I play games where I don't know the maps, and yes, it's tricky, but I cope, and get shot a lot. BF2 happens to by my speciality game, and I'm going to use my skill to have the best time I can have. I never think that I'm causing people to have a bad time, as I get shot too. you die in these games.
Hell, sometimes I end up scoring the most kills and most deaths on a map. I die more than the people who are new to the game, yet I still have fun.
When I was starting out, people wre pretty good to me. Granted I started playing 2 August, and the game was fairly new about then, I was rarely taunted and called a 'n00b'. Still, I try to return the favour by never calling people 'n00bs', unless I do it jokingly with a smily face at the end, and mostly to my teammates. Sometimes I suggest to someone who has just had quite a few GL kills to "Use bullets," but I never start complaining, saying "OMFG 'Nade Launcher whore." A few times when there has been a Sniper, or a tank I type to my teammates, "someone get rid of that fucking tank," but I don't see anything wrong with that. i'm not calling the tank commander a "tank-whore," and to be honest, I havn't seen a lot of it going around.
Maybe on BF2S here we do complain a bit about "n00bs running over our mines," or "Base raper n00bs in tanks," and the exlusive series of "n00b-t00b" posts, but really those arn't aimed at people who are new to the game. A n00b hardly describes a person who is new to the game, (the word kind of sounds like 'new' but dosn't really relate to it,) it is mearly a word to describe a person who annoys you in a computer game.
As to your point about complaints that 'Someone stole my jet/tank/chopper/etc." that is very relevent, and quite honestly, i am sick of the whole thing. People say "Practice in singleplayer," which may be a valid point, but flying against bots is quite different from flying against people. I don't like it how this unnessisary pressure goes on me every time I pilot something. If I do one mistake someone's going to say, "I'm better than that, you should have let me fly," but the point is, I wanted to fly, I wanted to have fun, I play this game too mate and if I want to fly and I get a veichle that can fly before anyone else, I am fucking going to fly. I think most people feel this way, so to the people who lke hogging their favourite veichle, let someone else have a go!
Wow, what a long rant. I seriously didn't think I'd write this much.