Unfair? In which way it was "unfair"? Or is a meaning of the word "unfair" somehow escaping me? Damn... 
Obviously it's unfair for the green player fresh from the screens of the latest blockbuster COD, who expects to advance under a hail of bullets and gloriously defeat his foes.
These are also the same people who use the phrase "balance" in a way that would give Germans an STG 44 class as an "assault" kit.
Personally, I play Forgotten Hope with the mindset of suppressive fire. Rounding a corner
while emptying a drum of hot lead in the general forward direction does seem to be more effective, but only because the reckless player who tries to jump out an off you will most likely get a few doses of poisonous metal to the face.
At longer ranges is where the reckless player becomes an assassin with a deathwish. Whiping a strand of supersonic death over the position of a player provides the same incentive to hide behind a pitiful mound of dirt and sticks, contemplating the highlights of his life, as a cracking rawhide whip wielded by an unshaven archaeologist would. The player simply flops to the ground in beautiful FPS glory, instantly sees the player with the crackle toy, calmly aims across the clear, unobstructed battlefield, and gives that player a kiss from his service rifle.
Now, this might seem like a totally plausible scenario in that wonderful place we like to refer to as "Real Life™," but only if every soldier in a conflict was a perfectly fit sociopath with a blood lust, and the battlefield had been swept clean and manicured in anticipation of the big event. Otherwise, there would be crap all over the ground, and the machine gunner would be a concealed shadow behind a cackling dragon from some Eastern tale, the sight of which would immediately slap you into the ground with a fist of primal instict, long before you can form the thought: "hmm, I should stand still and carefully shoot at the area a meter or so behind the muzzleflash."
As it is now, unless you, the machine gunner, can paint the landscape with the soldier in your sights before, or immediately after he sees you (approximately .48 seconds after the first shot), then you are probably not going to stay a virgin for long, and your cherry is going to be popped all over that guy behind you.
From the perspective of gameplay, this sucks. You would be better off putting your MG in semiauto mode and taking shots like that, which would make it harder for them to find you, have little effect on your deadliness, and completely negate the entire purpose of the machine gun. How to fix this? Well, first and foremost is to ignore the incessant bitching from brats who think an MG nest is a target and not an obstacle/nightmare, second is to reinstate the suppression effect (our computers can handle it nowadays anyways), and third is to give deployable/stationary MGs a bit more cover seeing as the game engine wont provide this naturally.
With these three, easy steps, gameplay is shifted back to a more interesting and intense state, allowing the player base to figure out for themselves how to deal with a torrent of bullets in a way that wouldn't make a veteran shudder.
