Battlefield and Sniping (Also other shooters)

[Suave Charlie]

In gears a good sniper can dismantle even a fairly cohesive team. A lot of that probably comes with the snipe being a pickup and regenerating health and going down and needing to be shot on the ground typically means that to kill at distance you do need to dome people rather than body shot them.
Overall my favourite snipe in terms of gameplay is the Gow3 one. Plus how many other games allow you to superman an enemy?

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I was a god among men with the sniper rifle in Bad Company 2. My friend and I could pretty much lock down the entire team at their spawn point with a couple of snipers on most maps. Sniping pilots and gunners out of choppers was a favourite past-time of mine. I was at the point of instinctively knowing how much to adjust my aim for any distance.

I also like the Longshot Gears of War. Although it takes a ridiculous amount of skill to consistently get headshots with it.

 

[angry_flashlight]

Snipers in the BF series are of mixed usefulness, mostly because of the combined arms approach to the gameplay. Having a sniper rifle is nice and all, but it doesn't do jack shit when someone rolls a tank up on you. For this reason, you need to evaluate Recons as a class in BF, not just a weapon.

Bad Company 2 Recons were one of the most powerful classes used correctly by utilizing C4 and the 'pokeballs'. However, most people just played Buskwookies and camped with x12 scopes 5 miles away hopelessly trying to get that "720MLGpr05c0p3xxx420#yoloswag-*insert dubstep*" shot. However, the best long range weapon in BC2 was the pump action shotgun slug with Magnum ammo. Combine with the Assault class for C4 and infinite ammo for Bushwookie RAEG. Snipe snipers with shotguns!

BF3 snipers are more or less useless, only providing somewhat limited team support and almost nothing that another class couldn't do already and better (the exception being the Soflam). There was almost no reason to play recon unless you needed to counter-snipe, don't care about helping your team, or are just a sadomasochist. BF4 snipers seem to be moving back towards the BC2 side of things, including the return of C4 and pokeballs, which is good.

 

[Weaver]

The worst part in battlefield is when the game devolves into like 80% of each team going snipers and just shooting at each other for XP while the remaining 20% of the players are trying to actually capture objectives.

I haven't played BF4 though.

 

[thatonedude11]

The problem with sniping in most games I've seen is that it never feels fair to get killed by a sniper. Getting hit from far away by someone that you're too far away from to kill yourself is a frustrating experience, especially in larger maps where you can't even see the sniper. Even if the sniper isn't very good, it just isn't any fun to play against them.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Sniping in CoD, Halo, Quake, TF2, Counter-Strike, and pretty much all games that use hitscan rifles is incredibly easy to do. It's not that easy to get a hang of, but when you're good, you are one of the closest things to unstoppable there is. One-shot kills at all ranges is something to fear if the sniper you're facing off is incredibly aware and has golden aim.

It's different in Battlefield because the sniper rifles aren't hitscan weapons, they fire projectiles - granted, they fire extremely fast moving projectiles, but aiming at far distances is hard. It's a lot of movement prediction, a lot of guessing the mil bars and chevrons on your scopes, a lot of scope sway compensation, and of course that freaking suppression. A sniper that can't take out an enemy in less than a second from one hundred meters away is going to die or get horribly suppressed; from around three hundred meters away, they're going to get horribly suppressed; and any further, the enemy is surely fucked but it is hard to hit a moving enemy when you are pointing your scope one mil bar in front and two mil bars above them and just barely missing them. It's hard because you have to relearn weapons.

Another problem with Battlefield is that there is no real way to practice for hitting long distance enemies other than pubbing it up as Recon. There's no level in the campaign that has you engaging enemies over one hundred meters away, and there's no form of practice mode to help you.

Also, the sniper rifles in Battlefield 4 are just freaking weird. You have no idea where a bullet lands because of vapor trails, netgraphing had shining moments of watching a bullet fly through an enemy's head while doing no damage, the only snipers given were ones with low bullet velocities, and some of the attachments that help with sniping like Straight Bolt Pull wasn't available in the beta.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

In BC2 snipers (Recons!) were atleast partly useful. The came with mortar strikes or C4, as well as hand-grenade-motion-sensors. They could destroy vehicles, detect enemies both with their scope and their motion mines, and eliminate enemy recons with their snipers doing the same.

In BF3, people just sit way back being the useless lumps of human waste they are, taking up a spot on the team. I mean, they're not even meat-shields.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh. 'Snipers' can be useful if they play intelligently instead of just finding a place to camp. Doubly so if they bring the laser des.

Although, your average 'sniper' in BF3 is stone-cold-stupid so finding one that plays intelligently is like finding a unicorn.

 

[RJ 17]

Really I'd say it depends mostly on what map is being played. There are maps clearly designed with sniping in mind and there are others that strongly discourage sniping. It also depends on where the sniper depends to perch which kinda-sort depends on how good the sniper is at picking out said perch.

Personally I can't snipe in CoD. Seems like every place I pick that LOOKS like it'd be a good place either isn't because I get shot immediately or it isn't because no one every comes into my line of sight at all and come to find out the battle's going on on the opposite side of the map. Unless you're using a "cheap tactic" (such as quick-scoping), then I'd say that good snipers are hard to come by. They're the ones that know all the good spots to snipe from on every map. Generally they don't get as many kills as someone who would have comparatively equal skills with, say, an assault rifle or an SMG just because those players are literally running into the enemy more often. But back when I actually played CoD I remember one of my buddies being VERY good at sniping and could do it and get 3rd place for the team (or better) on a consistent basis.

Is it becoming futile to be a sniper? I wouldn't say so. Could just be that people who are really good at sniping are becoming an endangered species, for lack of a better term.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I often play a sniper class in games but I rarely use them to actually snipe. In Battlefield, I generally just used a red dot optic on a semi-automatic sniper rifle and used it as a battle rifle. In planetside, I have a grand total of five kills with a proper sniper rifle but three or four hundred between the two scout rifles and another few hundred with a semi-automatic sniper rifle that has never had more than a 2x sight on it.

In general, I do this because it gives tremendous flexibility. While obviously at some disadvantage at point blank or extreme range, the sniper classes tend to have access to gear that gives you exceptional situational awareness in close to mid range combat. In Planetside, I use the semi-auto sniper rifle with a red dot when I go into a base ahead of an assault and use the combination of cloak and motion sensor to frustrate defenders while I hack turrets and plant mines at key locations. In battlefield, I use the motion sensor as part of a larger effort at close combat. Hell, one of my most effective setups was a sniper with a slug throwing Saiga shotgun!

Personally, sniping is a fools errand for most. One has to be exceptionally skilled and presented with the right circumstances to be truly useful in the role. Sure those planetside snipers might rack up a lot of kills but inevitably it's some light or heavy assault that actually does something important like destroy a generator or capture a point.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Do you think that sniping in modern online shooting games is becoming ineffective?
Maybe sniping needs to under-go a transformation to remain competitive with the assault rifles and sub machine guns.
What do you think?

With the map size and design of most shooters, you have to make sniper rifles somewhat able to run and gun with. Of course, automatics should have an advantage up close. I like the way sniper rifles, for the most part, work in Ghost Recon Future Soldier as they excel at mid-range actually.

The problem in BF is that the people playing Recon/Scout/Sniper are generally complete morons. There's no real way to sugar coat it, 99% percent of the snipers in all BF games play like they couldn't pass grade school.

100% this. Probably 90% of players don't even understand how to play a shooter and sniping is the hardest class to play as you have to have great aiming skill with the ability to perfectly position yourself on the map, very few people have both. Most people just play sniper and sit back in their spawn and camp while causing their team to get spawn camped, they people complain about getting spawn camp when they are the cause of getting themselves spawn camped. You have to know how to play the objective and map.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

I think as shooters have gotten more realistic and better designed, snipers have become less and less effective. Snipers may reign in some deathmatch games, but they can't effectively hold or take an objective. And in games that limit the number of sniper roles you can have, they can't be spammed either. Although strangely, in a game like Red Orchestra 2 where you have a fair majority of semi-automatic weapons on the field, sniper rifles are... surprisingly situational. (I myself preferring to snipe with a standard iron sights bolt action rifle in the game)

And I also suspect that the "overpowered sniper" meme is very much a myth in gaming, perpetuated by the early-mid fps culture, from games such as Counterstrike and Halo. And part of it's natural that people just hate being sniped. It's unexpected, and sometimes a person might feel cheated, no matter how irrational that might sound. Throughout history archers were loathed by warrior cultures for perhaps a similar kind of reason.