>>715114640 (OP)
Devs didn't understand them and didn't know how to balance them. The idea that military flamethrowers could kill a man at ranges that a pistol would be used for and that, when enclosured, those flamethrowers could kill entire bunkers of people was completely unknown.
Like look at the M4 CS 1.4-Source reload animations. Very few devs knew shit about guns.
Then, once the destruction became known, people didn't know how to balance them for fun gameplay. How do you make insta-touch death fair? (because that's a flamethrower). You can't do it with range, because that's extremely hard to balance on anything that isn't ARMA milsim scale.
You can't make them true to life without making them extremely limited because then you have flamethrower wars and the gameplay gets degenerate.
Then you have fire animations and burnt textures. It gets to the point where devs just don't bother. So many devs have chosen that path. It's to the point that old examples of flamethrowers outnumber "modern" ones like Rising Storm or CoD WaW.
Then there's the fact that the time where flame throwers were "effective" essentially started in WWI and ended in WWII with extreme cases in distant history and the modern form of these weapons are all dropped by aircraft or indirect fire.
