FargoDog said:
Sniping in Black Ops is beyond broken. It's fine nerfing quick-scoping, as it was a complete pain in the ass, but they've just taken it too far. You can't use the things.
While I will shed a few molecules of moisture that I will claim to be a tear on your behalf (really, I am sorry people can no longer play the game they want to play but I am overjoyed that it resolves (in a destructive way but resolves nonetheless) the problem of my least favorite type of teammate in the average team based FPS), I would point out that the problem here is largely due to the simple fact that there is no scenario in any Call of Duty game that would even come close to giving a sniper the sort of engagement envelope in which the crippling flaws of their weapon (that it is bolt action and difficult to aim quickly in close quarters with respect to a well designed iron sight or alternate sighting apparatus) are more than compensated for by the inherent advantages (that is a very high degree of mechanical accuracy (that is, the maximum potential accuracy of the weapon. In this case, generally a sniper rifle is expected to achieve sub 1/2 MOA, which equates to less than 1/2 inch deviation from the target at 100 yards)).
The problem with sniping in general in games is that reality kind of sucks. In real life, you don't just shrug off a 7.62 mm round to the torso without body armor. A round through the leg or abdomen can easily lead your death and will, at the very least, reduce your potential combat efficiency dramatically. The very fragile nature of the human body is what makes sniping possible. It doesn't take a dozen bullets to take a man out of a fight, one that is properly placed is sufficient.
But, people don't like when they get killed without the chance to retaliate, and as such most sniper rifles in video games achieve an instant kill if you hit the person in the head. Because sniper rifles are often semi-automatic games feel the need to offer further levels of refinement where a rifle that fires the same round at a similar velocity will do less damage than another simply because one fires at a fraction the rate of the other. The problem, in short is one of balance. Or, more specifically, the problem is one of defining the role.
Games where sniping "works" (that is, a game where sniping is seen as a useful role by most players rather than glorified camping and griefing) is largely due to the fact that the sniper has place in the game. For example, people rarely complain about snipers in team fortress as they have a legitimate job to do. They provide a first line of defense for a base. They offer a counter for the slowest and hardest to kill class. They also help ensure that defensive emplacements can only be placed in resonably defensible locations (which was certainly more important in the original team fortress when the Sentry Gun weilded the firepower of a pair of heavy weapon guys and boasted a rocket launcher nearly twice as powerful as the soldiers (and the rockets traveled faster to boot - fast enough that dodging a rocket was all but impossible in the close confines of most TF maps). As another example, look at the sniper in Battlefield Bad Company 2. They can be used to remove effective static defenders. They can be used to counter enemy armor. More importantly, they are given the range they need to do all of this with relative impunity. In both these examples, the sniper has a defined and unique purpose on the battlefield.
But in CoD, you don't have any of this. The ranges are all shockingly short (at best, you might have the opportunity to shoot at a target 200m away - the actual ideal sniper engagement range is 700 - 900m). Additionally, death comes swiftly regardless of the weapon in your hands. Even the most pathetic can easily kill another player in a few shots. The sniper rifle is certainly more powerful than other weapons on a shot per shot basis, but examine the role the sniper plays. Simply put, they serve to inflict casualties on the other team. This is precisely the same role everyone else in the game has. In modes with an objective beyond a body count, the sniper suddenly demonstrates a glaring flaw in that they are going to be a worse choice in most any circumstance. The quickscoping tactic, something that any gun technically can accomplish, serves an even more critical function for the sniper because they are likely only going to get one shot in any close range engagement. Unfortunately, because sniper rifles have to have very high stopping power to make them useful in the obvious and intended role, this means that, at the ranges you encounter in a normal gun fight, the sniper rifle tends to offer an inordinate advantage in lethality. Yes, that advantage disappears if there is more than one target, but truth be told, winning a 2v2 in CoD is as much a matter of luck as anything else. As such, the sniper concept itself has no application to CoD. You are not given the range to make it useful. You do not exist do do anything more effectively than any other member of the team. Indeed in most respects, the sniper is the least useful member of a team unless the goal is simply to amass corpses.
The sniper concept exists in CoD because it is expected that it should be there by the people who play. But the problem is that the reality of the game concept does not allow for it to exist in a fashion that makes it both fair and useful. To fix the problem properly, you would have to fundamentally change the game experience. Since that solution is unlikely to appeal to the parent company who sees the CoD as a giant bag of free money a year, that means you're going to have to accept that the sniper role will vacillate between between broken (and useless) or broken (and unfair) because the happy medium can only be achieved by reworking the way the game plays at a fairly fundamental level.
