Is this why snipers are always nurfed to hell in games?

[Omnires]

As a stealth main in most games one of my fav weapon class is the sniper rifle. And most of the games I've played in the past 30 years always seem to get snipers wrong. And for the few that does get them right it doesn't last to long as later they get nurfed into the ground so hard as to make them almost useless. So I'm posting this to try and get the topic started on how can this make snipers good and have them stay good.

This is the video that made me want to post this.

 

[Pandagnome]

One sniper weapon i like is in kf2 when you use the lock on mode it does half the damage though.

Not a sniper but it looks and sounds nice

 

[Omnires]

I think one thing that some people forget is that in real life we do have things like semi automatic sniper rifles, not just bolt-action sniper sniper rifles. So in games placed in modern times are futuristic time frames having semi automatic and fully automatic sniper rifles would be more common place. Yes, their fire rate still slower than most semi automatics and full automatic guns, but that doesn't really matter when each shot feels like being hit by speeding fully loaded a semi-truck. Plus the way some of the newer guns are made things like recoil are kind of low even for things like 50 cals to the point where you can fire them while on the move in close ranges. As there are many people who can still hit their targets while firing from the hip. After all, bet I'm not the only person who know soldiers with old war stories about them being ambushed or being dropped in behind enemy lines. So being able to hit targets while also running is a good skill to have.

Here is an example of a real life semi automatic 50 cal sniper rifle. The Barrett M82 A1 50BMG Semi Automatic Rifle

 

[Sy]

There's also contemporary shotgun technology: Fully automatic. With drum-barrels. With rockets.

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For anyone who hasn't seen the other thread with similar concerns:
https://forums.em8er.com/threads/the-absolute-limit-of-builds.2284/

 

[Omnires]

Yes, that is one of the other advantages that both sniper rifles and shotguns share. That they can use much more types of ammo than other guns. Including mini-missiles. Yes, we do have mini-missiles that can be fired from guns in real life but at the moment they are super expensive. Although because they can be guided like normal missiles it means the mini-missiles can follow where you are aiming in case the target moves or sometime gets in the way of the shot. In other words self guiding smart bullets are real.

 

[farias]

Yes, we do have mini-missiles that can be fired from guns in real life but at the moment they are super expensive. Although because they can be guided like normal missiles it means the mini-missiles can follow where you are aiming in case the target moves or sometime gets in the way of the shot. In other words self guiding smart bullets are real.

Sometimes I have some useless knowledge that I must share with other people. And because of the video you sent, this is one of those times.

The thumbnail for the DARPA Smart Bullet video that you included, is a bullet from the 80s movie "Runaway" in which a villain had a pistol that shot those heat seeking smart bullets:

And then you may ask: "But why do you remember such a random bullet from an obscure movie released almost 40 years ago?!?!"

Because the movie is starred by Tom Selleck, and my father looked a lot like Tom Selleck, so when I was just a little kid and watched his movies I thought my father was on the screen . And that's how this movie ended up in the "Emotional Memory" part of my brain.

 

[Pandagnome]

Sometimes I have some useless knowledge that I must share with other people. And because of the video you sent, this is one of those times.

The thumbnail for the DARPA Smart Bullet video that you included, is a bullet from the 80s movie "Runnaway" in which a villain had a pistol that shot those heat seeking smart bullets:

And then you may ask: "But why do you remember such a random bullet from an obscure movie released almost 40 years ago?!?!"

Because the movie is starred by Tom Selleck, and my father looked a lot like Tom Selleck, so when I was just a little kid and watched his movies I thought my father was on the screen . And that's how this movie ended up in the "Emotional Memory" part of my brain.

Another movie to add to the collection of movie night fridays!

Imagine if there is a homing pie launcher to save hungry locals from hunger strikes or to obscure the vision of enemies.

 

[NF85]

As i see it, the only time a firearm could be created to preform whitin real life preformance, is in a pure single player game.

There are many aspects of RL firearms that are allways done wrong, but they are done so for the sake of gameplay, sadly i think many of them comes from hollywood.
I remember Magnum Force, in one of the scenes you see the bad guy attatch a supressor to a revolver..... I have never cringed as mutch as i did the first time i saw that.

And while russians did experiment with supressors on light machine guns as early as ww2, it is still wrong imo to have a supressor on a a firearm that is ment for high volume of fire and pinning the enemy in place.

The leathal range of a shotgun in RL is on avrage still over 100m, but its not a dependable or accurate range. Still, having shotguns in fps games be able to preform like they can do in RL would mean that any other weapon types would be pointless to use. That is why they behave like shooting blanks at 5m or more.

From a multiplayer arcade standpoint, anything that is not a pistol or an assult rifle is never going to be possible to have behave like RL intended, while at the same time be considered balanced and fair.
Players simply do not want to get one shotted.

 

[Omnires]

Another movie to add to the collection of movie night fridays!

Imagine if there is a homing pie launcher to save hungry locals from hunger strikes or to obscure the vision of enemies.

Knowing what I know about real life weapons and history it would not surprise me if I ran across designs for one somewhere or even seen a working one inside of a museum on display.

Like how a good number of people think things like gunblades was made up by RPGs and anime, when in fact they was real life weapons they you can find in museums. There was some knights who even had extra gun built into their shields.

Like how some armies was trying to make a kind of love bomb using psychedelic drugs. The idea was to drop shells into an area that would release these psychedelics into the air make the enemy troops to relaxed, confused, and/or just unwilling to fight. After all, can you really call it a war if no one is willing to fight?

But also there are a lot of ammo types that exist in real life that you never see in things like games that could be fun to play with going by the game. For example the taser shotgun rounds.

 

[emikochan]

If you're looking for realism you'd be wiped out by artillery 90% of the time without even seeing the enemy

It keeps getting nerfed because it's not fun overall. Personally I like how Dune does projectiles. Much more variety available when there is a defence.

 

[Omnires]

If you're looking for realism you'd be wiped out by artillery 90% of the time without even seeing the enemy

It keeps getting nerfed because it's not fun overall. Personally I like how Dune does projectiles. Much more variety available when there is a defence.

I'm not going to true realism here otherwise energy based weapons kill everything faster than it takes the brain to react to what is happening. And I'm not just talking about things like lasers and radiation, but also things like soundwaves. Yes, soundwaves alone can kill you and even effect both your mind and body in other ways most people never think about. Plus in real life nations like the USA and Germany did and still do testing with sound bases weapons both as way to control the actions of people without hurting or if turned up to higher setting can be used to kill them slowly or quickly by turning their own bodies against them. Also one of the key important things to remember about sound based weapons is you don't need to be able to hear the sound for it effect you. Even with you was born 100% deaf the ability of sound based weapons to make you feel sick and/or kill you doesn't change.

My goal here is trying to make it so they still feel power like they should and not be nerfed to hell like I see in so many other games where snipers are more or less useless.

 

[farias]

I'm not going to true realism here

Yes, the wepons can't be so realistic because the devs must balance them. Otherwise players will have no choice but to use whatever is meta.
And in that regard I don't see a problem, because I usually like to play with different classes of weapons, and if the weapons are well balanced, there won't be too many disadvantages for the player to experiment with other classes.

 

[Omnires]

Yes, the wepons can't be so realistic because the devs must balance them. Otherwise players will have no choice but to use whatever is meta.
And in that regard I don't see a problem, because I usually like to play with different classes of weapons, and if the weapons are well balanced, there won't be too many disadvantages for the player to experiment with other classes.

That kind of reminds me of a chat I had in FireFall one day where there was some people in chat complaining that in PvP Recon players was actually playing like snipers. Buy using stealth and range to their advantage when taking over a base or watch tower. As if they never heard of or seen a sniper before. Even going as far as to say it was unfair for people to play the class as designed simply because they was type liked to run into areas guns-a-blazed and fight with enemies head on face to face. You know the opposed of a long range stealth class.

Then also complained about how Nighthawks could kill every other class in 1 hit, even the Mammoth with full health. Saying that is was unbalanced to have tank players running around fearing another class. And we had to explain that was because Nighthawks are the anti-tank class using anti-materiel rifles designed to put holes into things like tanks and armored ships along with things like armor piercing rounds. The game was balanced because Mammoth had the most armor and health along with the second fastest fire rate and lowest damage per round (death by a thousands cuts type of class), while Nighthawk had the lest amount of armor and health in the game with the slowest fire rate in the game and most damage per round. If they would not balanced than there would be no reason to play any other class in PvP because Mammoths was near immortal when they had their shields up. But because the snipers shots pass through shields and armor while also still being able to kill a Mammoth in one hit from a head shot or with 2 center mass body shots it kept them on their toes.

I'm not sure if Em-8er is going to have PvP or not. But it is always good to balance out one class with it's anti-class. Like the tanks and the tank hunters.

 

[farias]

while Nighthawk had the lest amount of armor and health in the game with the slowest fire rate in the game and most damage per round

Just now I remembered the PS3 game Dust-514, which didn't have that kind of restriction.
A sniper player could choose to wear heavy armor sacrificing only movement speed. I can say from experience that that type of build was pretty tough to deal with. We know how to deal with snipers and we know how to deal with heavies, but something like a "heavy sniper" is a different thing no one expects to face.

Edit: I found a video (1:20 to 1:55):

 

[Omnires]

In games where I can make my own loadouts or even my own class. One of the things I like to do is build a heavy hitter melee fighter who can kill in 1 or 2 melee hits (like an assassin and/or berserker) and keeping the melee weapon like a sword or dagger as the secondary weapon while the primary weapon is a sniper rifle. This is because I personally do best with classes and characters with fighting styles similar to my own. Which is a max of things like brawler (a boxing style that focus on having very strong punches, going for 1 hit knock outs with things like the haymaker punch), MMA wrestling, CQC, and sharp shooting. Yea, I know it might sound a bit odd to a lot of people. But I grow up in a military family inside of a military town where a lot of us learned how to fight at about the same time we learned how to walk. Just do the nature of how a lot of us would play with and interact with our family and friends. Not counting playing games like war in school because a good number of teachers (mostly P.E. teachers) was military so would hide military training inside of the games they made us play. Because of that when in games if I'm sniping I'm meleeing while switching back and forth between the two on the fly. So even if another was to somehow close the gap on me unless they stays at mid-range all the time odds are I would win at close range with the melee or a long range with the sniper rifle.

I even did the same thing in FireFall even before they added the S.I.N. Blade and melee into the game. Because I was one of those people who would run around killing things with the Scan Hammer before they nurfed the damage it did. And even then that didn't stop me because I found it fun to kill elite Chosen and boss type enemies using only the Scan Hammer while using Stealth, Decoy, and Smoke Screen.

 

[farias]

And even then that didn't stop me because I found it fun to kill elite Chosen and boss type enemies using only the Scan Hammer while using Stealth, Decoy, and Smoke Screen.

 

[Omnires]

I know some of us has talked about this before. The given that is a futuristic sci-fi game the idea of transforming weapons or multitool-like weapons has come up from time to time. And one of my favorite weapon types in game are gunblades because they are mix of melee weapon and range weapon. Truth be told my fav weapon in sci-fi game of all time are nanobots that live inside of my body and/or inside of my cloths that is linked to my mind so can take on any shape that I need them to be at the moment. But sense I feel like given the lore of Em-8er that things like nanobots would be viewed as illegal technology I would not get into them. Although some of my fav games of all time do use nanobots as part of the mai plot both in terms of the characters and the world itself (Looking at games like Wild Arms and Deus Ex). Personally I would live the idea of multitool-like weapons in this game, mostly because I grew up with the mindset of "anything can be weapon when put into the right hands.". It is part of the reason why even now when I do sparing with mock weapons, If I'm given a shield I don't use it block but rather to attack by smash it into things. And if you look at all old combat training guilds this also a tactic that number of people used in the past, including gladiators and knights. Who used their shields to hit people with just as much as they would use them block attacks.

And given how this thread is about snipers one of the best examples that comes to mind in terms of a sniper rifle melee weapon combo is Crescent Rose from RWBY. It is a sniper rifle that can turn into a scythe. For the people who never seen RWBY here are some examples.

I even see gunblades pop up in few MMOs like Phantasy Star Online 2.
Luster class from PSO2

Slayer class coming use to PSO2:NGS