A game of snipers

(RectalTerror) #1

I just don’t get it, DB USED to have the spirit of Enemy Territory, it was about reviving, giving ammo, well, teamwork. Can this still exist when 42% of a team is snipers?

Sure, ET had snipers, BUT ET was 16vs16 minimum! You wouldn’t end up in teams where 8 players were snipers, yet that’s exactly what happens here.

Really I’m done with this game, I’ll come back when there will be fun servers. Fun servers are what kept ET alive. I don’t give a shit about competition when there is no competition anyway. Winning a match is just about the luck of being added to the side that’s mowing down the other side (& here again, it has to do with the fact the game is 7vs7, because… statistics).
Bring me fun servers as 20 vs 20 players with 2-snipers-limit, just like good old ET, and sure, the first objective will never pass because the game isn’t designed for that, but I don’t care.

And, once again, allow me to cheat like snipers do. Snipers can chain 2 headshots per second, ruin a match, and the only answer we get from SD is “if they are not cheating, then there is no problem”. LIKE THAT CHANGES ANYTHING FOR ME. “oh, I can’t pop my head anywhere because I get instakilled not even seeing where from [because to hide the fact that lags is a major drawback in a fast game, of course the game now hides the bullet origin, so that you never see yourself shot behind walls anymore], BUT I SHOULD BE HAPPY ABOUT IT, BECAUSE THOSE ARE JUST GOOD, THEY ARE NOT CHEATING!”.

And I fully understand this is where the game is heading. The game put snipers on top of scoreboards, and that was months ago, meaning: it wasn’t even a bug, it was by design. Put snipers at the top, meaning the game wants MORE snipers, and that’s exactly what happened.

Snipers have no recoil, no cooldown, no wobbling, can instakill an entire team in a row before reloading, and yet it’s with Jav that players seem to have a problem. Jav can instakill… once… and then no more for 20sec. Jav can instakill several at once? Sure, but so can snipers as well !!
& that too is abnormal. Sniping in Enemy Territory was hard, there was wobbling & recoil.

Anyway, as I’ve already asked in the past, allow me to “get good” like snipers can. If you’re fine with good snipers chaining instakills, then allow me to do the same, with objectives.
Ever heard of track&field? Give me that for repairing. That, or make me solve math problems, whatever, but something that can allow me to GET GOOD and ruin games too. I wanna repair an EV in 0.5sec BECAUSE I GOT GOOD AT IT, why can’t I?
I wanna 100% heal people in no time using a track&field method, not by holding a key, because that’s not something I can improve, I can’t ruin games from that.

(hoyes) #2

I agree that snipers are very out of place in db. Having characters that can 3d spot someone and insta kill with seemingly no cooldown should not be in this game. The justification that people have for this being allowed is the fact that it is ‘hard’ , and while I agree it can be unforgiving against good players, once someone has got good at sniping and barely ever misses, they are completely and utterly busted with little to no counterplay.

Its quite sad that the only reason the community mostly is fine with snipers is because a good sniper is rare, and that because its so rare its fine for a person to completely dominate an entire server, as a ‘reward’ of sorts. Its actually quite sad that in a game that focuses on gunfights you have a weapon that you have to hope someone misses in order for you to kill them. By SD just making them more frustrating to use doesn’t make them less frustrating to fight against. All it does it reduce the likelyhood of a sniper, giving the illusion of balance.

I think aimpunch should be brought back for snipers on a larger level. IMO snipers should be about killing players who are out of position, not about dominating an entire lane with no retalliation. If an opposing player shoots a sniper before they shoot him, the sniper should not be able to shoot back. The sniper has spotting to stop this. A fair compromise I think.

(RectalTerror) #3

Its quite sad that the only reason the community mostly is fine with snipers is because a good sniper is rare, and that because its so rare its fine for a person to completely dominate an entire server, as a ‘reward’ of sorts.

Yes that sums up my thoughts perfectly.

This being said, it’s rather common for a good eng to also change a match completely when he happens to be the only one caring about the obj, and the other team let him sneak & repair. Fortunately there is no map that’s just about repairing or escorting, thus, in things like Bridge or Chapel, even though I can generally pass the first half alone in a bad team, the last part requires teamwork, and that’s perfect like it is.
And it’s less of a problem when the spirit of the game used to be about objs, not just about killing.

Just today a player wrote “this game is too easy” in the chat. I ask him how a competitive game could even be “too easy”, & that “easy” only means he ended up on the good side. He replied that it’s too easy to kill. And yes, of course, he was a sniper…
Then I tell him that fortunately the game isn’t about killing, that you can kill a lot in a losing team. He then says he doesn’t care, he’s only playing it in-between Overwatch games (which I don’t think is just about killing either but whatever). That pretty much sums it up: snipers don’t give a shit, they’re only playing for their K/D ratio.
Which makes me wonder: if the game now hides levels, it could as well hide K/D ratio, MAYBE that would reduce the amount of snipers!

(LifeupOmega) #4

Yeah, pretty much summed up my feelings. If I recall, snipers were no where near as annoying in ET either due to their recoil (ignoring the scripts for a second) and their one shots not being true one shots, giving players time to actually react - that coupled with no spotting led to a much less disruptive, and fun to fight class in the end.

SD didn’t do it right at all, we had instagib jumping snipers in 2015, and from there they just made them clunkier over time - leading to a much more annoying to play, and still annoying to fight series of mercs. The obsession with snipers having to one shot is pretty harmful to the game, and I don’t think it was ever actually trialled once in the 3-4 years of beta we’ve had - if it was it was behind closed doors with no word about it.

One shots on this level are incredibly out of place, and for a game that was once toted as 1. having higher time to kill with a focus on skill based gun duels, and 2. not wanting to bring in a rock, papers, scissors type way of picking mercs, they kind of dropped the ball with the recons - a good recon on the other team necessitates your own recon, and then the game becomes “who can pick the other recon so we can actually start playing again without having to play Budget Counter-Strike by holding a corner for half a minute”. Peaking? Good luck with spotting being so prevalent and with so many places to hide sensors and the like.

If you fight a recon, you have to hope they miss their shot, you have effectively zero influence on that - it is a hitscan weapon, you will either die to the shot or you won’t, and only if they miss do you get the chance to kill them, and you better do it fast. That isn’t fun or exciting honestly, it’s miserable.

(Press E) #5

Yeah, it just annoys me that a good sniper can pretty much lock down an entire area single handedly. And even if you get a couple shots in, you’ll be dead the next second anyways unless you can find a better position for your sniper duel.

For a game with a high TTK, idk why the devs thought sniper weapons would be a good idea. And not only just one either. They literally add nothing to the game, and matches are almost always better without one.

I suck at sniping in most games, but between their weapons and spotting XP, they’re still very easy to do reasonably well at.

It’s like how sparks was in terms of combat before she was nerfed really. Only a few people could play her to her full potential, but once they reached it it was absolutely stupid. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s really much that can be done to something that, at its core, doesn’t fit in with DB at all.

(ostmustis) #6

standard reply is “ITS FINE BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO AIM LUL”

idk, I dont see snipers in this game at all, they dont fit in, they cant be balanced well, it runs counter to every other weapon in the game, spotting (which is also super unfun), makes the players more passive and it will never be fun to play against in db (shotguns are pretty similar but imo not as sever).

just remove all the recons or add a game mode free from the shitty recon cancer. but I guess the sd way is to just let the player base bleed out instead.

(DarkangelUK) #7

Genuine question (I also hate snipers btw), SD seem dead set in retaining bad mercs because people paid real money for them, and I suspect people purposely bought them for their sniping. What could SD realistically do to help mitigate backlash if they removed snipers (the guns, not the mercs) from the game?

(Eox) #8

That’s the reason I never made a thread about those snipers : I hate them too, I also think they can utterly ruin a game alone and are incredibly broken by design. But I cannot find a way to either tune them so they become more fair to play against or find something that would ensure that nobody complains if we remove the sniper rifles.

(nokiII) #9

Remove recons, refund people in rads. They got this option now with their new premium currency.

#10

The removal of recons would be a dream coming true, although I doubt it’s going to happen. At the very least I want the body-shot damage of sniper rifles reduced, having to retreat immediately because you are effectively dead with only ~35 HP remaining is absurd. The balance there between effort and reward isn’t right.

(bgyoshi) #11

Am I really the only person that can reliably avoid snipers to the point that I stopped caring about them???

There’s no way

The snipers that can reliably headshot you while you’re strafing, jumping, and crouching while firing at them are so few and far between that you can assume they don’t exist. For the rest of them, all you have to do is avoid the path they’re watching and flank them… or don’t flank them and simply avoid their path. The other team will be down a player in any engagement and if they aren’t, then the sniper moved, and you can use that path again.

I can understand the frustration of a good sniper but these forums really need to make a choice. What are snipers? OP? Worthless? They can’t be both OP -and- worthless and yet the most common complaint is “There are too many snipers on my team snipers are so worthless you always have topscore snipers with negative k/d making the team lose” and then of course we get these threads enshrining snipers as god tier classes that can’t be beaten

Sorry you don’t get it both ways.

(Teflon Love) #12

Both actually. There’s basically 3 scenarios:

  1. One team has a great sniper, the other doesn’t. As a result, the team without sniper is usually down 1 or 2 players most of the time, resulting in an imbalanced game.
  2. One team has a bad sniper that drags the team down and does not contribute in any meaningful way. Even with a KDR > 1 they are often useless because the just collect cheap and tactically pointless kills where they just regularly shoot the worst players of the other team that would have died soon anyway.
  3. Both teams have snipers on an equal level. This results in a meta game where both snipers mostly deal with each other, effectively reducing the number of active player by one for each team.

The remarkable thing about this is that in no scenario sniper contribute anything to the fun other people are having (unless one considers it fun to be carried to a cheap victory like in scenario 1).

(bgyoshi) #13

The problem with your claim is that i can replace the word “sniper” with any class and it still holds true

This problem is not unique to snipers

(Teflon Love) #14

YMMV but in my experience snipers are pretty much the only mercs that can ruin games that efficiently.

Playing any other merc badly at least has some use as long as you move with the team because you act as distraction where some fire has to go to. And all the others methods of one shotting at least have to be close to you and can be engaged or have a delay.

(RectalTerror) #15

They don’t need to be removed, just tuned so that it results in players picking them less, resulting in max 1 sniper per team on average.

You can totally & safely remodel teams, that’s exactly what they did when they bumped snipers to the top of scoreboards. There were less snipers before this change.
Perhaps it was to force snipers to use their tools by giving more XP when they do, but the result sucks.

(RectalTerror) #16

They’re less & less rare you know. And for some reason, when there’s a bad sniper he’s always in your team. He’s useless, doesn’t care about the objs & eats a precious merc spot. I hate them as much in my team as in the other team.

And “avoid their path” isn’t valid when most maps only have 2 paths (which isn’t a bad thing, because the few maps with too many paths, are the ones that suck)

And as I wrote, snipers play for themselves. It doesn’t even mean that they will help their team by killing everyone on sight, sometimes they do kill everyone and their team still loses, because they won’t bother defending the objs. It still SUCKS, and it sucks for BOTH SIDES, which is pretty bad for a team game. In some matches, you’re pretty much playing as gun meat for snipers to have fun, they should be paying you for that!

In any case, the game is 7vs7 at best, often 6vs6 (& I’ve stopped playing ranked where it’s even worse). A game like DB REALLY requires 3 key elements: repairing, reviving, refueling ammo [I will not say “protecting”, because as long as they have ammo, these 3 classes can do a good job of protecting as well]. These 3 kind of mercs are game changers. But how often do you find all 3 in your team? A sniper is a wasted slot, in a game that already doesn’t have enough slots.

Yeah, and other mercs also can escort EV’s, which isn’t something that requires much skills, and something that snipers fail at as well.

(HammerOfDawn21) #17

They could make the bullets into projectiles instead of hit scan and increase the hit box size to compensate, also make the gun louder.
Make them powerful enough to one shot kill anywhere above legs but with a reload time of 3 secs. (to be accessible to new players)

Remove the ability Gib downed players with a sniper.

You’ve got a Merc who’s deadly against stationary targets doing objectives, not so deadly against other players.

Or they make it so that the snipers injure players and make them lose health overtime unless they get healing at which point the health stops deteriorating but it doesn’t regenerate for another 7 seconds. Also the damaged player is marked for the teammates to finish off until fully healed.

(D'@athi) #18

So when we are done with snipers, were will we be going next?
To Auras not healing, Skybros not dropping ammo or Fletchers not repairing? Or even to every other shitplayer(=class) hiding to not taking bullets, not defending the engineer, not trying to plant dyn, not defending the dyn, not shooting or throwing grenades at generators or the ev, and especially not shooting the last points of gens or the ev?
It’ll be my pleasure comming back here. Until then, I’ll stick to switching to my beloved Vasilli and give shit about mates not playing the fucking objective the first minutes, and after the map is lost, me having 25+/10, tons of spot-xp and still hearing it was my fault.
K, thx, bye.

(Press E) #19

That’s still the same problem though. Regardless of whether or not they take skill doesn’t really matter, high damage snipers just don’t fit in with DB’s playstyle. Increasing the skill still means noobs will be useless as a sniper, and skilled players will be gamebreakingly annoying as one

(LifeupOmega) #20

What could SD realistically do to help mitigate backlash if they removed snipers

Honestly, you could keep the mercs, with spotting, but give them other weaponry - ARs, SMGs, etc. and they’d be nowhere near as annoying, but would still have a solid place due to how powerful spotting is. I’d love to play Aimee with an SMG for example.

The rifles themselves are the whole issue, they have the power of high cooldown abilities with none of the cooldown.

So when we are done with snipers, were will we be going next?

And this is an example of someone who’s too dumb to get the point of this post, and would rather live with imbalanced mechanics because it makes them feel good, instead of realising that there are issues with the game that should be addressed.