Why the Sniper doesn't work in MNC (PC)

that's if you can get close enough to him =[

This problem doesn't occure nearly as often as you'd think if the sniper is any good.

I'll send Moose a message :lol:. But yeah, that was my point a few posts back. Sure, there are a few ways to harass sniper and possibly kill him without exposing yourself but it's not really worth it. Even if you do kill him, he'll respawn and go right back to his spot after 8 seconds. You may as well just do what you can to stay out of his line of sight and push into the enemy base without messing with the sniper. If you're crafty, you can bypass or overwhelm him with numbers to win the game.

I play all classes, I just play sniper the most.

Rewarding one player for his skill shouldn't mean that everyone else has to eat ****

Exactly.

Meh, until I see people that complain about sniper record themselves and post it on youtube and show me it's OP it's all rable to me.

OP for me = anyone of any skill level can dominate and be good with it.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Brink didn't reward players for skill and look how great of a game that was.

It's not about OP and if you should reward skill. It comes down to: It's not fun and it drives players away. That's a much stronger argument than any balancing issue.

Having a perfectly balanced game doesn't matter when nobody is left playing it. If nothing is done there will soon be no faces left to click on...

Uber Entertainment: Can we get some insight as to whether or not you are listening to all this buzz about Sniper?

This has been going on since before patch #8 but #8 and #9 were completely unrelated.
By now, Sniper annoyance (often mistaken as over-poweredness) is what I see as the single largest issue among the community.

So many threads just to whine about how annoying it is. So many threads suggesting how to fix it.
No reply from Uber Entertainment at all.

I (and by that I mean everyone) would just like to know if there are any plans from Uber Entertainment to address these issues, or if we are completely wasting our typing strength every time we post about it.


L. Spiro

To me is TF2 a perfectly balanced game. They somehow managed it to make every class fun to play and you always have a feeling that your class stands fair chances on the battlefield.

MNC was fun in the beginning and as long as the motivation for custom class unlocks was there, but now it doesn't feel any satisfying to me anymore, no matter what class I play.
Don't get me wrong, I really love the concept of the game, but when I am done with a few rounds of playing I usually feel more disappointed and mad than entertained - even if I win.

Maybe because to my understandings each class in MNC has some own annoying tactic. And while many exploit those tactics (and the map exploits) because it's the best way to win, it kinda ruins the gameplay a bit in my opinion.
The Assault can spam his grenades and bombs while flying around (especially when staying on the signs around the center in Funland, where he can be barely hit by anything except the railgun or a sniper rifle), the assassin keeps harassing on your back so that you always need to be aware (especially if there are three sins on the enemy team), the Sniper was discussed enough here already, the Support can dominate a whole map (particularly by using the center platform in Funland) with his fire base if there is no aware Support in the other team with an airstrike available and a Gunner, especially juiced, is also a pain in the bottom when he's camping your spawn and let mortars rain on your turrets and defending players as soon as they appear.
Solely the Tank feels at least a bit fair because he relies on close combat and can be stopped by most of the other classes if done right.

I played UT2004 for nearly 3,000 hours and I'm here to tell you that the comparison is not valid. The reason the "no sway" of the Lightning Gun was balanced in UT2004 is because:

1) UT2004's head hitbox is incredibly small.

2) UT2004 has probably THE most advanced movement system of any shooter released to date. Lining up consistent headshots against skilled players (who have amazing movement) is pretty much impossible, which is why any sane person will opt to go for body shots and get the 70 damage, rather than risk the miss and do nothing. In MNC: the only class that's even remotely challenging to headshot is the Assault.. and he's still far easier to hit than a good UT2004 player.

3) OHKO headshots are easily counterable in UT2004, unless you've just spawned. An LG headshot in UT2004 does 140 damage, which can be negated by the common pickups around the map (health vials, armor, kegs.) Timing pickups is as big a part of the game as having good movement and aim. MNC has no such mechanic.

There's also the matter of fire rate.. the LG has a really low rate of fire compared to an endorsed Sniper in MNC.

So yeah, I wouldn't say that the "no sway" sniping of games like UT2004 is on par with MNC at all. The Sniper Rifle in MNC is ridiculously powerful by comparison, and should have been adjusted *long* ago, in my opinion. Sniping in this game is still balanced for a sluggish controller, not the speed and precision of a mouse.

You aware that Funland is not a map, aye?

I just want to say that this post makes me want to load up U2k4.

I've been playing FPS games for a long time now, and I've never seen a sniper rifle as powerful as MNC's.

Strengths:
- Infinite ammo
- Very fast fire rate
- Not bolt-action
- 1-hit kill headshots in most cases
- No downsides to quickscoping
- Piercing Multi-Explosive shots

Weaknesses:
- Somewhat low bodyshot damage
- Only one zoom level


When I say low bodyshot damage, I'm only talking in relation to rifles in games like Action Quake or Counterstrike where a shot to the chest can kill someone. But in those games, almost every weapon can kill at long range. Those rifles have much slower firing rates and other weaknesses too.

Having only one zoom level is offset by the fact that you can quickscope perfectly, essentially giving it two zoom levels to work with.


Combine all that with the best close-range defenses a sniper has ever had and maps that were designed without a PC sniper in mind..

Arson1st made this suggestion on the MNC Steam forums. I think this is the best suggestion for an actual rebalance of the sniper rifle itself. I approve.

1 shot every 3 seconds is an eternity. Make it like in GA.

Uncle Tully's Funland is the full name of the map though...

There a lot of problems with this.

One shot for every 3 seconds at Gold rate of fire is REALLY REALLY slow. By keeping the gun "semi-auto" (1 round per 3 seconds isn't very semi-auto to me) you exacerbate the issue because the player doesn't know when the next bullet is cycled.

You screw over the sniper's ability to handle bots or if you increase the damage to bots to compensate you screw over everyone else's ability to protect their bots. It's crud either way.

Assassin's get screwed over big time and sniper duels are completely reduced to who saw who first plus lag. Unless of course you go gold armor and that makes the trap choice problem in MNC worse.

Headshots are tracked and there are tags associated with it. Probably too much of a pain to remove it utterly but a smaller headshot bonus that wouldn't kill anything but unarmored lights would be the best way of handling OHK.

Make it like TF2 Sniper.

Fixed.

Except that the map design in TF2 plays a big part in keeping the sniper under control