Should quick scopes at close range be possible?

Yeah. It's another Sniper topic. Deal with it, ok? I'm not crying nerf this or bawwwing because I lost or something. I just saw a few arguements and a video and want to see what more people think about Quckscopes. I know we already have a few balance threads here but I wanted discussion to just be related to this.

So. Quick Scope headshots. At close/grapple range. Should this be possible? You can argue that it takes skill and is thus legit, but for overall balance's sake should Snipers be able to do this? (Credit: Sumitpo on the MNC steam boards)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gFGfEWv08

Now even though he used an assassin to showcase this, it works on all classes and in a variety of circumstances.

I'm personally leaning against the quickscope since the Sniper already dominates the long range game and has some powerful close range skills. An easy solution would be to add a really small time delay when scoping like TF2 does to its sniper that make quick scope headshots impossible even if you hit the head hitbox. On top of that, no scope headshots should be impossible, preventing blind fire randomly killing another pro. This would also solve jumping headshots to get at people taking cover. However I am not entirely convinced as the Uber might have designed the sniper this way intentionally and the community may think differently.

If this topic has been discussed to death already forgive me. I'm not as active in the MNC communities as much as I want to be.

quickscoping needs to be nerfed.

put like a 1 second or .7 second delay between the scope and firing.
I know this isnt a game based on reality, but if a sniper is gonna be able to 1 hit kill someone from a safe distance across the map, he shouldnt be able to run and gun on the front lines with "quick scoping"

Cant have your cake and eat it too

A sniper with gold armour is still incredibly fragile, if a sniper is sharp enough to play aggressively and head shot all attackers quickly, as he would need to if he were up front, then he deserves those kills.

The head shot right out of a grapple seems a bit harsh but I guess that's another incentive for assassins not to front grapple if they think it wont kill the target. Most of the other classes can punish that pretty harshly already anyway.

I'm still of the opinion that MNCs sniper is far too fragile defensively to be without the offensive power quick scoping can provide him.

I don't know about you guys, but those were two awesome looking kills. :lol:

Nah, quickscoping is fine. It's no-scoping I'm against due since that's actually LUCK based.

Then someone could bring up the argument that Snipers can just hang back instead of being at the front of a push and take out Pros at a distance like the name implies. He's squishy because of that long range power. Having this ability on top of being able to do the same thing at range may require lots of skill, but then makes the sniper way too powerful by having all ranges covered on top of his abilities. It would be incredibly frustrating putting all that effort into avoiding a sniper until you get in close to catch him in his perceived weakness at close range, only to get insta-headshot killed anyway. Not to mention, who wants to even play against someone who could consistently do that? For the sake of balance, I'm leaning towards this not entirely being fair even if it takes lots of skill to pull off.

Just playing devils advocate here. Namely because I am torn on it. On one hand I would admire the skill it takes to pull it off at a reasonable rate. On the other hand immediately quit out of a game if I had to fight someone like that.

play with snug or zut and tell THEM its luck based

See this is where you and I differ then, I see them as a challenge. For a while a good portion of the steam friends I took from tf2 were snipers and there was a reason. There is no better cover from a good sniper than having a good sniper of your own! Its not just that he will die more, but that he will be constantly concerned with not getting shot by my sniper.

The problem with good players is that they are hard to beat, what I have found more in MNC than in other games is that you really do need a degree of teamwork for pretty much everything. If the snipers got no one to watch but you and he's good enough to pull of consistent close/mid range quick scopes then yeah, your in trouble.

I guess the real question is; is it too frustrating to be part of a game played for enjoyment?

Honestly, I don't run in to them often enough to say they hamper my enjoyment. But I say that as someone who loves to play against hackers. As long as its only an aimbot or a speed hack or something, they can still die. I take great satisfaction in making that happen. I can see that not being everyones cup of tea though.

I don't have much to contribute as far as this discussion goes. I guess my thoughts are that even though good snipers are the biggest pain in the *** ever, the key word is "good" and they deserve everything they get.

Now to my question. Is that out-of-grapple-headshot lined up by the game, or does that require you to line up the shot first. I'm just curious becuase I want to pick up sniper and this would be good to know.

Really?

Really?

One of my complaints about the sniper is that he's too hard to kill even if you manage to get into mid/close range with him. With gold or silver armor he has a decent amount of health. His tiny stick-figure hitbox means most weapons will only be doing about half the damage to him as they would to a gunner or tank. At close range you have to constantly worry about freeze traps, both existing and new - accidentally trip one and you're dead. Flak can force you into bad positions. The SMG is nothing to laugh at, especially if he's juiced, and he can get that juice in ~5 seconds with explosive shot against a couple bot groups. His grapple is quite powerful.

Compare all that to the TF2 sniper who has less quickscoping ability, direct AOE (rockets) to deal with, no grapple, nothing similar to traps or flak, lower rate of fire, and less safe map positions.

Imo(major bias since I main sniper) quick scopes should be possible, only real difference between quick scope and no-scope is damage/accuracy/ and guarantee of headshot(which you should be aiming for regardless)
And why shouldn't it be possible? It's no different than aiming a sniper to someones head close range irl. If anything it reflects real-life, scoping vs hip-firing.

And lawl thanks for the video, now I'll practice and make Dragon hate me even more as a Sniper :3

I create my own luck <3 I only no-scope when its overtime and super close range cuz the reticule size is smaller. Otherwise its quickscopes all day. Rogueblades knows, I qs'ed him a couple times yesterday.

If you look closely, he lines up his shots before the grapple, you pretty much have to because of the imminent counter-grapple/lunge that may follow afterwards. You have to beat them to the punch.

Look at it from both perspectives though.. Sure it's easy to say that the sniper deserves his kill, but did the victim deserve to die?


Whenever you die, you can evaluate the scenario and figure out what you did wrong to allow the other guy to kill you. Maybe you got greedy, didn't pay attention to where the enemies were, didn't aim or time something well enough, didn't stay mobile enough...

But against a sniper, the only mistake you have to make for him to kill you is to enter his line of sight, at any distance, for an instant. You can do things to make it harder for him, but the bottom line is that your reason for dying comes down to the simple fact that you left the safety of your base.

It wouldn't really be a problem if the maps didn't offer such commanding lines of sight for snipers to abuse.

Yes, abuse. I can't think of a better term for it when there are 2 maps that a sniper can reach out and snipe someone on either lane, 2 maps where the lanes converge so it doesn't matter, sniper covers both, and a last, single map where a sniper can't shut down all lane activity from a single position.


And if you ever bothered to listen to dev commentary in TF2, one of the points they touch upon is having alternate routes that allow you to go AROUND a sniper. MNC maps don't have this unless they're LazeRazor. (Oboxiously so in the case of AmmoMule, where you can get sniped on your own spawn ring)

This. Super important as a sniper, whilst scoped, if I see a name on the corner of my screen, I immediately stop what I'm doing and scan the side to see if someone is trying to flank me. Same goes for hearing assassin cloak, as soon as I pick up on it, immediately start jumping and scanning surroundings. Reaction times are key to being a good sniper + good situational awareness. If anything the good snipers are helping you improve, in both positioning and striking, so think of it as a positive thing/a learning experience.

@Zarakon: Honestly, yeah. I've rarely struggled to kill snipers in either game and that's how it should be, but in this one always feels a little too fragile when I am murdering him. And that is coming from a career demoman (everything was pretty fragile to him!). Maybe its because not all snipers are wearing gold armour all the time, I dunno. I don't think he's much too weak, but I do think he could stand to have a bit more survivability.

I would like to say about quick scoping that most of the people talking about it seem to think that just because its in the game any good sniper is going to instantly kill them whenever they see them. That just not true. Its got super high potential but only actual aimbots are ever actually that good. Some people are almost unbeatable, but they are never perfect.

Basically my feeling is that whilst quick scoping is very valuable to good snipers, it really just allows them to play the game in a more enjoyable active way. I have seen a lot of moaning about snipers sitting on their spawn ring, well if you take out their ability to quickly murder a single closer range target, where else are they going to spend their time? The good ones will still sit back and kill you repeatedly, it just wont be as much fun for them to play the class. I'd say that is not a good solution.

But then how do you combat it this? What do you learn? The problem I see is that it's neigh impossible to counter a good sniper outside of a better sniper. In order for anything to get done you have to stick your head out sometime. Even if you focus on the Sniper to see where you can break line of sight, most of your attention has to go to him at the cost of everything going on around you. Then, even if you get in close where you're combat effective, he can still instant kill with a quickscope on top of his CQC skill arsenal. Even if he isn't aimbot material (they never will be), he has the potential to be super powerful at all ranges.

(again devils advocate here)

But one could argue that would be to the detriment of everyone else.

In fairness the way snipers function in general does that, I just don't put that solely down to specifically quick scoping. And the guys making brink are reducing sniping down to basically non-existence with that logic in mind to see just how much it helps. Though I worry people will enjoy it and decide all snipers are always bad for everything, because people do that .

Adding a delay is not just going to destroy close-range quickscopes but quickscopes in general or you'd have to start checking if people are near and that could lead to some interesting challenges which I won't point out further due to it being obvious.

So let me say this: Yes they should be possible, no they should not be changed.

Aim is a crucial skill, you don't penalise people for having skill - you penalise them for lacking skill.

Yeah, the maps definitely add to the problem. They added some extra walls (early 360 patch) to make it a little better, but still almost every map has spots where snipers can see huge portions of the map, including all routes that could be used to approach him.

Most TF2 maps are well designed so that the most offensively powerful sniper positions are also very vulnerable to flanking and/or AOE spam.

The problem is, against a good sniper you get penalized REGARDLESS of your skill. The sniper's single skill of aiming trumps everything else