Sniping from the redline does suck for infantry... but, "to shoot at individuals as opportunity offers from a concealed or distant position," one definition of a sniper. Snipers are to not be seen or heard, what would you have us do get close enough for an assault rifle or scrambler rifle to shoot us? If i was to get that close... i would carry an assault rifle or a scramble rifle. Just like the scout with RE and NK or shotgun, we're a nuisance that forces the enemy lines into disarray. Imagine how you feel when you get surprised by RE or shotgun, it p*sses you off and startles you a bit, but, you can go find the blur running around and easily shoot him without having to leave the battle area. With a sniper... not so much. I think its more of an inconvenience to players to have to counter a sniper, so snipers are not fun.

Having to stop and scan a ridge line or scour the back hills in inconvenient and time consuming and detracts from what you'd rather be doing. Unfortunately this is not grounds to constantly attempt to rid the game of snipers. You say high reward, low risk, Tanks, Turrets, Scouts, Snipers and Dropship's all pose a large risk to sniper's. Infantry pose low risk to snipers and is why we are hated by them. Although most who have fired a sniper rifle know the hit detection is low and requires a direct hit on the target.

All in all snipers don't contribute nearly as much as a scout running around hacking and laying RE and whatnot but what little they contribute may have huge repercussions throughout the battle. If your running around and randomly drop just know someone decided to kill you several seconds before you dropped and your position has already been relayed to squadmates. Love it , hate it, its a part of this game that has been nerfed to tolerance and will always **** you off when it hits you.

If I can hunt you down without the redline interfering, I hate you but I am perfectly fine with the mechanics.
If I cannot hunt you down because the redline flat-out prevents me, I hate you and the mechanics are busted.

Snipers are fine, the biggest problem I have is when the redline is abused (Snipers, Railgunners and...er, Snipers!) such that the Risk/Reward is skewed to being ___/Reward. It may not be tons of reward, but it's almost riskless. As AV users have said about HAVs, the only counter should not be the same thing: snipers should run the risk of someone expending substantial time and effort to come and hunt them down - because then an excellent sniper would keep them even more occupied.

ARs should be able to snipe to 500m and RRs should snipe to 750m, wah.

I don't hate snipers per se. I hate redline abusers, and a lot of snipers seem to fall into that category.

I've played around with sniper rifles enough to know that it's not the easiest role in the game.

There's another thing that bothers me though and that's when you end up with too many snipers on your own team (im fact I hate that more than getting killed by enemy snipers), because we on the front line are getting slaughtered due to insufficient numbers all the while you see eight little blue dots on some high ridge somewhere trying to pot shot at enemies (missing most of the time too). You just want to shout in their face and shower them with spittle to get the **** out there and make themselves useful for a change.