Welcome back Aeon.

The sniper rebalance was born from the fact that as a weapon class, they remained the only weapon to have not been touched in anyway since the game launch. With the sidearm and rifles rebalancing also being done in delta (fairly successfully from the feedback we've got) it would've been somewhat remiss to not look at the snipers as well.

There was some serious map and range analysis with the snipers, something that hadn't been done in that level of detail for quite a while. Well known and successful snipers were polled an questioned as to their favourite snipe points and tactics. A large number of such points and tactics had nothing to do redlining either.

What was found is that on some of the maps the power projection of snipers from these favoured snipe points was, put simply, excessive.

Now, as you, me and virtually everyone else has pointed out, this is more to do with poor map design than anything else but any changes required to fix that will need to be part of a client patch rather than server side. Believe me, such map changes are going to be top of the list if such a chance comes.

So a reduction in sniper range was thought, a decent compromise. It forces snipers to come more into the battlefield and give non snipers a chance to counter them with something other than another Thale. To compensate for the range nerf, they were all given a fairly hefty damage increase to keep in line with the increases ehp of suits since the games launch and given a significant headshot multiplier to reward skilful play.

Were the changes perfect? Of course not, they were a product of unfortunate compromise. Were they needed? Absolutely. There isn't another class of weapon in the game that was so dominated by one particular varient of that class ie the Thale, than snipers. We need a broader range of varient use than was being seen before delta, in all weapon classes and it's my belief that simply looking at the kill feed in a match post delta, will tell you that delta has achieved that.

from my experience the changes made counter sniping harder.
you have to move closer thus are easily spotted before you can actually counter snipe.
.

I am glad the changes made its way into delta because the pre-delta complaints where getting more so on my nerves than the current and much smaller post-delta handful.

Yeah, well we're all entitled to our (wrong) opinions. If you're still considering differing views as 'complaints' then maybe it was a bad idea to re-elect you for CPM.

Honestly i dont see how the guy got re-elected in the first place.

One of the things being missed here, I think, is rendering issues at 450-600m. One of my primary concerns personally, was for instance how the Thale's excessively good zoom pre-Delta allowed snipers to easily kill players from outside their rendering distance. There was no way to identify the location of a sniper shot, even if you survived it.

Snipers sit outside the range of most other weapons. That's fine, but it also means the play to counter them can be more challenging. Because for one, you're going to have to get into that range to counter them. You cannot get in range of a weapon you cannot find. And whether a sniper is in the redline or not is largely irrelevant, in my book, when the real problem is often that there's no way to find the sniper at all.

Also, in the cases of some of the extreme 600m ranges, most sniper rifles were firing at scanned down chevrons, not actual targets they could see. I'm also not sure it's good gameplay for this to be possible or relied upon. I think bringing snipers down a bit to accommodate the nature of the game is acceptable.

I've seen a lot more snipers out and about since Delta too. And I want to highlight that the submissions CPM members received from career snipers were definitely looked at heavily, including the numbers. The base damage didn't go as high as was proposed by those, but those numbers were definitely crunched.

So now your saying its the Thales fault the range got nerfed? Seems like a crap deal to snipers. I mean after all just reduce the zoom on Thales and problem solved.

And another thing i know damn well no one from CCP or any of the CPMs talked to any of those players that constantly snipe on a regular basis because if they did they would have this information already and would have realized that a 350 m range nerf would have made sniping that much more USELESS.

A big problem with the whole 'finding the sniper' bit is that there aren't that many places for a sniper to honestly be. These aren't new maps, there's nothing being "found" anymore - if a sniper is in a location I can give a 99% guarantee that he's going to be in a spot that has been used before. In fact, a great deal of the interior sniper positions (orbital artillery outpost for instance) are now walled off with invisible barriers preventing access because... I dunno, reasons.

The Thale's just illustrates the point well. At the high end of range, 450-600m, snipers do not render on the client like they should.



Also, the two snipers I received feedback from were Appia and Symbioticforks. Obviously not everyone got everything they wanted, but I definitely see where their feedback played in. A base damage buff was something I fought for largely based on their feedback. The headshot bonus buff should've been fairly close to the document I got. And one of the other things, is that the only sniper with a range of 350m is the Tactical, as far as I'm aware. The normal sniper should still be 450m according to the spreadsheet.

Actually, that is kinda one of my peeves, I don't like the range disparity between the sniper rifles. I would've rather they all been the same, so snipers can always countersnipe the sniper aiming at them.



There's a lot of "general directions" where the sniper could be anywhere from on the ground to on a building to on a tower, to on top of the MCC from the exact same direction. I'm sorry, but the inability to actually point your gun in the direction of a sniper, and have his chevron appear, like it used to, is crippling. And the problem particularly manifests at the extreme end of range. Because no, that doesn't work anymore actually, if they're far enough away.

They nerfed the zoom on Thales? (I havent been able to play in a couple weeks due to a busted PS3) If thats the case it was a much needed change. I honestly found that it was too easy to kill targets from 600m with a thales but at closer ranges it was almost impossible to keep a shot lined up. So if they nerfed the zoom on a thales it was a much needed change indeed regardless of how many people whine about it thats something that had to happen. But as for the 350m range nerf that was a bit too much so they need to up the range on sniper rifles ASAP because 350m is too short for a weapon that was meant to be long distance.