EA's Battlelog announces plans for a Spring Patch for Battlefield 4 that will add include new weapons, a rebalancing of existing weapons, a return of the Gun Master mode, netcode updates, and more changes for the military shooter sequel (thanks The Escapist). Here's word:

DICE continues to constantly improve Battlefield 4 to make the best gaming experience possible. In the Spring Patch (releasing late May for all platforms), we’ve listened to your feedback and gave you what you wanted – more guns!

FIVE NEW WEAPONS
Some of the weapons are old fan favorites, others are picked based on their unique gameplay aspects. These are the five new weapons:

New fan favorite Assault Rifle
Picked based on its unique burst gameplay and massive fan desirability

New Carbine
A unique bullpup carbine with built-in vertical grip

New PDW
A unique PDW with built-in silencer

New Sidearm
Unique long range “sniper” sidearm using magnum rounds

New LMG
Magazine fed LMG, which with the new weapons balance, plays in between a belt-fed LMG and an AR – your “run and gun” LMG

FULL WEAPONS BALANCE PASS
In the Spring Patch, we have also revamped the damage, falloff and suppression model. With this pass, we’ve touched every single weapon in the game – and how they play.

Our goal has been to create distinct roles for the weapon classes, and award skill of the player through increased recoil and by bringing back the 2-bullet headshot!

A representation of our new damage, falloff and suppression model in Spring Patch

If you are interested in more details on what has been changed in relation to weapons, please visit our Community Test Environment subreddit (Open Weapon Balance wikipage).

RETURN OF GUN MASTER
Next up, we are bringing back Gun Master game mode – which gained its popularity in Battlefield 3: Close Quarters.

Gun Master is played like a Team Deathmatch game. The twist is that you don’t get to choose the weapons used. You swap weapons every time you get two consecutive kills on an opponent and whoever is the first player to get a kill with the final weapon wins!

The mode will contain the following five presets with at most 18 different weapons in each:

Standard
This setup contains rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols and ends with the M9 bayonet

Classic
Classic rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols ending with a M9 bayonet

Pistol
In this preset you can only use different kind of pistols, ending with the survival knife

DLC
This mode will let you play with DLC weapons – including the Phantom bow

Troll
Seeing how Gun Master is a “party mode”, we had to make a silly weapon list too! This one starts out with ballistic shields (as weapons) and it’s downhill from there

PC STABILITY & NETCODE UPDATES
Lastly, we set out to significantly improve client stability on all platforms and have applied fixes for the most frequently occurring crashes on each.

For PC crashes, we used the Battlefield 4 Community Test Environment to confirm our fixes. We focused on crashes and issues with the game client and server – not crashes related to outdated graphics drivers.

We urge all players to update their graphics driver to the latest stable versions, keeping overclocking to a minimum for the best results with Spring Patch.

PATCH NOTES
For details on what exactly has been improved in the Spring Patch, we’ll publish the full patch notes closer to release.