Ideas on how to balance the sniper

The part of your reasoning for giving a low-tier class a nerf.

Badish Class + Nerf = Unuseable Class

The sniper is only good as a tool for some things (unless your playing this game with the heart of the CoDMaster). A sniper alone misses a lot of the field activity, and cannot reliably defeat or stop 2 of the classes, is perfectly balanced with 2 of the classes, and is good against 2 of the classes. It is where it needs to be now.

Right now, this game doesn't award wins based on size of your e-peen or by kills (i'd always win if it awarded wins for either). Both don't matter; Only escorting bots and destroying the moneyball does. The sniper has horrible tools to do that with right now. He plays as a part of a team to perform certain tasks and balance certain enemy classes. His objective-based duty is bots and zoning. He can't kill bots, or keep assassins off the bot lanes with explosive rounds, if he fires one round every 2 seconds.

FIND A WAY TO MAKE HIM DAMAGE BOTS LIKE HE CURRENTLY DOES, and then you can have your nerf. Idfc if the aim is tweeked, but snipers need to be able to kill gunners and bots, or else your going to need to nerf every gaddam thing else in this game to fix what your going to do.

Don't break the game, or else leave it alone.

Lower RoF. More damage to bots and turrets with both bullets and passive 3. Dps vs bots is the same as it is now. Juice gain per second from bots per wave is also the same. I never intended to make the sniper worse vs bots and that has been my biggest concern all along.

Seriously, the bot damage thing has been brought up so many times, but it's really not a problem at all. Bot damage is a separate parameter that can be tweaked any way you want.

Either way, I want the devs to make note of that more than anybody. As long as they take into consideration what spot the class fills currently, and doesn't unbalance the game. Gunners would get annoying real quick. Plus, i'd almost miss the sniper feeding me so many kills.

A) it's about bot killing speed not potential, the RoF is used to quickly dispatch a wave of bots abusing explosive shot. Damage per Shot is not the driving factor

B) Regarding Vleessjuu: If you genuinely believe I agree with you then I either worded it wrong or you are plain challenged.

We use the high RoF to layer the explosive shots for our bot killing potential. Altering RoF won't allow us to do that, a compensation in bot damage won't help.

Altering the radius of explosive shot to accomodate for that will open another can of worms also known as "HOW CAN HE HIT ME FROM THERE", accomodating the explosive damage for the lower RoF will have a similar effect.

I don't need to refute your RoF argument when what I said was pretty much common sense but since I like you (gotta love special people) I did it anyway.

If there was a trivial solution we would have it by now but let me state it again clearly for you Vleessjuu: I don't believe there is any problem inherent to the class, there is a problem with the people who fail against a Sniper.

Peace out

Really, what's the problem with increasing the damage of the explosion vs bots? Every skill in the game has different modifiers for differnent targets. I don't see how passive 3 couldn't have one. Yes, I know you rely on your passive 3 to clear bots. Why is that a problem to balance against lower RoF? Just increase the damage of the explosion vs bots. Really, why are you even making a fuss of it?

Now what's that supposed to mean? Is there a problem or isn't there? When you say that there is no trivial solution, you imply there is a problem. Then you proceed to say there is no problem. Clarify.

*edit*

In fact, I didn't need to refute your argument either. I refuted it quite a few times, yet you didn't even grasp what I was saying.

If there was a trivial fix to make you guys happy it would solve one thing: you'd shut the hell up. Something that would please me.

As I've been saying throughout this forum when it comes to Sniper: the problem is people, be it people who can't play against him or people who believe that there is a problem who then proceed to whine about it and other classes.

I'd do well enough with a fix and without a fix but looking at things practically and applying occam's razor we come to an easy conclusion of "no need for a fix"

Adaption is a skill, maybe people should finally start to apply it. Countless decent players have told you and other people throughout this thread and this forum that playing against a Sniper is not "OGM OVERPOWERED" yet you insist that the problem is the class, that's called delusion and we used to put people like that into a Sanatorium to fix them.

If you try to say that most of the people play Sniper who say that, you are mistaken.

Implementing a "fix" (which wouldn't really fix the bitching at all) takes time as per the current way the hostilebalance.ini indicates there are no distinct variables for the passive yet (hence new code required, read: assumption), splitting damage radius (THIS is a keyterm NOT damage) is also not intuitive and would make getting into the class harder - something people are genuinely afraid of since it requires effort. Or is effort now ok for Snipers but not for other classes?

You don't seem to understand that damage is not an issue, it's the area of effect we abuse with the explosive shot. Lowering RoF directly impairs our ability to do so.

Unless you make all bots stand in a simple line, which won't happen.

It's quite clear to me (and I don't mean to be rude) that you are neither experienced with Sniper nor competent at understanding the implications of your supposed fixes.

You want something fixed, burden of proof is yours. Be conclusive, knock my socks off with your wise balance suggestions and I will bow down.

I very much doubt that and the people I debate with about Sniper agree with me on the following:

You do not fix what is not broken.


Obado, grimbar

Just a simple question: why would it be so fundamentally different if the rof would be lower but the explosions from passive 3 would deal more damage? Either I'm completely missing your point or you're completely missing mine. I understand that you abuse aoe. Why would it be so different if the aoe is stronger, but occurs less often?

I see your Occam's razor and raise you a Hume's guillotine.

Just because the sniper can easily dispatch of bots, doesn't mean he should. And even if he is supposed to kill bots fast, I can't really see how the RoF nerf/bot damage buff would break the sniper. You can take out all the slimbots in an area with one shot. Do you really think that being able to clear another area 0,2 seconds (example of the RoF nerf, I don't know about actual numbers) slower would dramatically affect the sniper as a class?

No, it wouldn't. But it would reduce the time it takes to spam 5 bodyshots by one whole second.

I'm thinking about recording every match I play in just to show how little snipers affect the game is a whole.

Wow, I'm impressed. Occam's razor has actually nothing to do with balance discussions, while Hume's guillotine does. Occam's razor only applies to competing hypotheses that explain a phenomenon. Well played.

Game making is economical, occam's razor is the law of economy - you indicate that there is an issue that needs to be fixed, people competent at using the system indicate there isn't. Economic choice applying the principle: no change needed.

Regarding hume's guillotine. It is widely accept that the Sniper is meant to kill people, according to some it would only make sense to be able to use Headshots for that and bot slaying may not what he should do.

If that was indeed the case I raise you the question why he has explosive shot then apart from annoying simple supports - which isn't the concern of explosive shot.

The use of explosive is dead on clear to anyone who ever used it, your supposed changes won't fix that and Vleessju if I were to make you a diagram about scenarios where the damage radius matters as opposed to the actual damage you'd still be looking at it confuseface (that's an assumption)

The consensus of decent people is that Sniper is alright, the consensus of subpar people is that he isn't. We have a very vocal core of bad (no offense intended - we can't all be good) people who pool for a change which isn't warranted according to people who learned the game the proper way - that is adaption through analysis.

Considering the economical factors and the voice of the party of people we deem competent: Why above everything else should we (and UberEnt for that matter) listen to people who are clearly incapable of dealing with the situation when there are more than enough people who are capable?

I'm gonna repeat myself here once again: the problem is you, the people who are not able.

Try me.

Damn yo! I read this thread and all I come away with is a bunch of users pretty much saying this:

"No, I'm right your wrong. You can prove your point all you want but I am still right."
"I am typing a lot and reading a lot I must be right if they want to keep arguing with me."

Can this thread die and for once can we honestly talk about the GOOD stuff in the game. All over these boards is thread all about "bad" stuff. It would appear that most on these boards don't even like the game.

You brought up economics. Wouldn't it be profitable to make a game that caters to the massess instead of one that caters to elite gamers only?

The sniper is fine in a competitive enviroment, where players are constantly aware of what's happening in every direction, know exactly how to move to make themselves hard to hit, and work as a team. But in pub enviroment, people don't know what's going on. The vast majority of gamers are clueless. The real problem is that the sniper class is way too good at taking advantage of that fact. Every other class still has to be reasonably close to gib a player that's not paying attention, but a sniper can do that from a safe distance. Punishing a player for not paying attention makes sense, but the sniper is way too good at it. It takes virtually no effort, and with the big, slow targets in this game, even players with bad aim can do it.

If everyone suddenly got good, sniper would be balanced. But you can't really fix people. The game excists for it's players, so it's only logical to make it suit the majority of players, instead of expecting people to adapt to the game.

@DeadStretch : If I didn't like this game, I wouldn't bother trying to get the small things I don't like about it fixed. The community needs to speak and show the developers what they think about the game and what could be improved. I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining, I'm complaining because I believe that eventually the developers will make changes. I don't even want them to change the game in a long time though - they have to follow the feedback for a while. But if the sniper threads keep popping up after three months, maybe that means something?

I still won't change my mind that everything is balanced and all we need is competent people. However, other players feel that the game needs balancing for pubs. This argument could go on forever.

Meanwhile, I'm going back to Global Agenda. This game bores me of it's horrendous assassins and gunners.

Lucky US git, I'd play GA too if it wasn't for the fact that EU servers are dead. It's not really nice having to lead hitscan weapons by two character lenghts, let alone trying to snipe with the projectile-based sniper D:

You can't expect certain changes when more then half of the players don't know what they are doing yet. This same cycle has went around on the XBox. I have a big clue on how it's going to end. They, might, make the balance change but guess what without knowing it will indirectly buff another aspect of the game. Those who whined about the first change are happy, well because they got what they wanted. The rest are pissed because they changed something that changed something else that didn't need to be changed but Uber feels it had to be done in order to balance it.

Basically, the way this game is changing one thing will case them to change another thing, and another thing and another thing just to balance it out. You see what I'm getting out. If you want I can break down the whole cycle the XBox changes went.

I'll just say there was a certain class A LOT of people cried about. Now it's not to say Uber changed it solely on that but you can tell it did have heavy influence. What happen? The noobs fell in love with the changes made to the class while the vets, the onse who knew their ins and out, get pissed and left the game or play a different class or barely even play. You know what Uber did? They rebalanced it back.

[Edit]
You know what Uber learned from this? Ultimately they will make balance changes based on how THEY fell they want THEIR game to play out. Sure they will take some advice and suggestions from third parties but it all comes down to UBER MAKING THE GAME THEY WANT.

As for Sniper's even the best Snipers get careless, intimidated and/or distracted...and I forgot the point I was going to make here...oh well here's thanks for having a loud house where people always yell.

DeadStretch, we agree on the fact that fast changes are a bad thing. I'm not asking for a quick fix here. I'm hoping that Uber will look at things for several months. But that's no reason not to voice my concern now. The fact that people complain about a class a lot helps the developers focus their attention on it. They can make the final call on wheter it should be nerfed or not. I'm just giving them something to look into. If players never voiced their opinion, it would be really hard to make balance changes. And if players waited for 6 months before voicing their opinions, the changes would take too long.

Now that we're already talking about balance, Uber has plenty of time to think things through and observe before having to make hasty decissions. Nobody expects them to fix anything now. But atleast they know that there may be something wrong with the sniper.

Voicing your opinions are one thing. Bickering back and forth for 30+ pages does not help the case, imo. I notice people feel the need to defend themselves when someone else has a differing opinion. They aren't attacking you they are just trying to have you see it from another perspective. In the case of opinions nobody is right but always when debating over the internet there are those who take it personal which then it spirals into a whole new direction of discussion.
*Note that wasn't towards any one person just a general statement*

I am pretty sure Uber has made all the nerfs to the Sniper as they intend to. Lets see XBox's default clip size is 8, PC 4. Freeze trap freeze duration XBox something like 5-8 seconds, PC about 3. Ehh there are probably more but I forget.

DEADSTRETCH!!!

I so ******* nominate you for president! You are a prime example for forum behavior!