Probably (hopefully) ran out of Thales.

Well, here recently hit detection has been pretty sh!tty for the sniper rifle. I can't even begin to count the times in the past month that I've shot someone standing completely still and at most only got the shields flare. I hardly ever get a hit on a moving target that does damage anymore unless it's a heavy; they're pretty reliable targets but even they get away with no damage from time to time.

People " STOP " asking for the Thale to be placed as a prototype because we " all " know THAT would be the " only " rifle used and that's not skill . That's turning an " art " into something easy and skill less . Using a Thale is " sniping made easy " .

What else do you want us to use, the rocks on the ground. Sorry but the Thale is the only sniper rifle that can cut through the armor on classes. I will wager you 10 Million ISK, that if I gave you an NT-511 and I put on my Proto Heavy you could not kill me, no matter how hard your try. I will find cover or I will outlast your shots by pure ehp. My proto heavy has over 1700 ehp. Good luck. Its not going to happen and especially if I have a logi repping me or if I am standing or kneeling in a rep hive.

Sniper rifles have several issues with regards to the current state of the game:

First of all, sniper rifle damage doesn't scale properly across tiers. This is in fact the state of the matter with most other weapons in the game, but it isn't so obvious as with sniper rifles since the issue usually comes down to having to hold your trigger a little longer than you should if the damage scaled properly. However, since sniper rifles rely on their massive alpha damage to be effective, the problem is very obvious. You can't reasonably expect to land a second (not to even mention the third, or even fourth) shot necessary to take down someone, once your target is aware he's being sniped.

Second, sniper rifles are IMHO conceptually flawed. Tactical snipers shouldn't have better scope magnification than standard ones, not to mention charge sniper rifle. Also, tactical snipers having only three rounds in their magazines is too crippling.

My idea of how sniper rifles should behave to make them more viable, conceptually more alike their present-day counterparts, and more fun to play with is:

Standard sniper rifles: basic tier damage stays the same, but advanced does 10% more, and prototype 20% more damage than basic. All of them have a 3-round clip, and same RoF as now. Scope magnification is "medium" (approximately same as now).

Tactical sniper rifles: all damage stays the same as now (5% increase across tiers), however, advanced variant has a 4-round clip, and proto variant has a 5-round clip. Same RoF as now. Scope magnification is lower that that of standard sniper rifles.

Charge sniper rifle: damage increased by 30%, and just one, manually loaded round. Best scope magnification, comparable to that of a Thale's sniper rifle. Maybe even increased effectiveness against vehicles, to make charge sniper more alike today's anti-material sniper rifles.

Increasing damage will just add more problems to the game

AR and bulllet-spam weaponry had hit detection improved --30-40% damage increase
Devs noticed people trending to die too quickly or complaining, instead of looking to fix the root of the problem they went around and created another problem by improving armor HP. Now we have two problems regarding armor and single-shot weaponry that the devs simply turn a blind eye on.

Reducing bullet damage on the rapid-fire weapons by 3-5 damage per shot would be an excellent starting place, they could then repeal some of the armor buffs safely and snipers would then SCALE properly again!

But no... they're going to take some convoluted route that requires 8x the work to "fix" and "patch" and "respond to" over and over again.