I've noticed and I've heard people say that spotting doesn't always work for them, and I found this (http://denkirson.xanga.com/722757523/bad-company-2/)
Spotting, like the repair tool, uses "overheat" to prevent excessive Socialize use.
The player is capable of about four Socialize button presses in rapid succession before overheating and being inoperable for five seconds.
With the cooldown, the fastest continuous rate that a player can spot without overheating is once every two seconds.
The Power Tool fires at a rate of fire of 900 RPM. That's a "shot" every 0.066 seconds.
With each "shot", it gains 0.041 heat. Constantly fighting against that heat is a cooldown of 0.5.
The two combined with the rate of fire allows the Power Tool to fire 125 times over the course of 8.3 seconds.
It repairs 5 points of damage with each shot.
With the 0.3 second delay before the tool starts up, that's 625 vehicle health repaired over 8.6 seconds.
Holding the trigger for 8.6 seconds will cause the tool to overheat.
For reference, All armored ground vehicles have 1250 health.
Also, the Repair Tool delivers 15 damage against enemies and enemy vehicles per "shot".
I didn't know spotting "overheats". It's kind of annoying though since it often misses people you're pointing right at. I hope it gets improved with time.
(Understand it has to time out otherwise people would just spam the spot button for points while looking around - just wish it was more reliable so it didn't need to be pressed so often.)
That's interesting as I had kind of reckoned that you can spot four people at once and then it stops. Good find.
BIG-P
The cool-down is a good idea, but it's irritating when you can clearly see someone but are unable to mark them :(
Still, I suppose it's better than people sitting somewhere and spamming Q...