A few points:
#1: This is the case with ALL PvP games, especially now that we have rankings and tracking of kills to deaths and such which people can see, not to mention achievements. You saw in in MMORPGs like WoW with people farming honor and HKs, you see it in pretty much every FPS game ever invented. Winning games oftentimes does less for someone's personal profile and achievement tally than simply going after kills.
I've long felt that in competitive games designers should award points for, and only track, the completion of objectives on people's sheets. Making killing players irrelevent other than a means to the end of doing something.
#2: Sniper-type and stealth-kill classes are always overplayed in pretty much every game that has them. Being able to set yourself up undetected or in relative safety and kill an enemy with one shot (or a couple) is going to be what everyone does. In part because it's relatively easy to do for the results you get, and also because it's rather "cool".
By "cool" I mean that the highly trained special forces guy is something people would rather be than the assualt rifle/heavy weapon carrying "duh, me shoot things" grunt which might be a mainstay of the game for certain jobs, but ultimatly tends to be fodder for snipers.
#3: Being support generally tends to be boring, almost everyone wants to be the flashy guy who kills stuff and gets supported, rather than the unsung hero who does the suppoting. Even in MMORPGs you always see the damage dealers like Archer-types, combat mages, Rogues, Berserkers, Blademasters, outnumbering the tanks, healers, dedicated crowd controllers (unless they can also do decent damage and solo efficiently), and others. The same exact mentality.
The truth be told though game designers have not modified the current systems because it tends to work when you have coordinated groups where the same people get together again and again. Also people have gotten used to the existing structure, and will whine if massive changes are made.
That said I've long been of the opinion (from the rare occasions when I've done this kind of FPS, and my experiences playing online) that designers need to pretty much scrap the current systems. For example I honestly do not think that stealth and sniping classes belong in a PVP enviroment, especially given that even if stealth detection exists, it will still be heavily overplayed no matter what you do. Pretty much in a fighting enviroment the focus should be on fighting (so to speak) with no type of character being given a relatively easy time (no matter how the proponents of that class defend it).
I also feel that in MMORPGs developers should look away from character classes and more towards creating an enviroment where any character can learn any skill set, and over time most will become polymaths. Allowing people to more easily take turns doing specific roles
in PVE groups, and also removing "specializations" from PVP which is ALWAYS going to lead to imbalances. Even when balanced on paper, there is still always an issue of balancing effort vs. results. Sort of like how many people who play fighting games like Street Fighter and are able to back off from the heat of arguements, will typically admit that while not unbalanced on paper the problem with "shoto fireballs" is that they are very, very easy to shoot and spam, and while strategies involving them are counterable, it usually takes much more effort than a simple down, forward + punch. A few sites have broken it down into how many movements/button presses it takes for each character to counter a fireball, or fireball/zoning strategy in comparison to how many moves it takes to perform (with the cooresponding arguement that the more movements and presses the greater chance of comparitive failure from an input being missed or whatever).
The basic point is that I'd simply say that the Recon shouldn't exist, ditto for the Team Fortress 2 Sniper, and other similar characters. Complaints about them being universal, for more or less the same reasons, leading to the same "it's only a problem because your a nub" arguements which go on forever.
Basically "BF: BC2" apparently messed up by trying to imitate other games, and brought over the same exact imbalance and arguements that other games of the type have (or arguably they continued it).
It's just like people always whining about insta-kill melee (and shotguns to a lesser extent). It's a mechanic that should have long since been done away with despite the defenders of both. Even Penny Arcade has joked about this one.
No need for flames, as I said, I am generally not an FPS player, but I HAVE revved them up once in a blue moon when somewhere else, and more importantly have been listening to the endless, repetitive, arguements which seem to come about with every single title. Really everything the OP said about the "Recon" is pretty much what is said about every other similar class until the elitists show up and say "it's not the class, you need to learn to play nub".
