risegold8929 wrote:Least realistic? No. Snipers almost always have spotters and thus go in a two-man team. Adding in the Spotter makes it more realistic.
The problem with this line of argument is that it's only aesthetic realism. Two people sitting together because two people sit together in real life looks realistic, but if the actual functions they carry out have nothing to do with what they do in real life, it's not realistic. Forcing snipers to work in a sniper/spotter pair
looks realistic to everyone who doesn't have to interact with the pair, but the more you actually interact with them, the less realistic it becomes:
In the pair, you know it's totally unrealistic.
Communicating with the pair, you know it's totally unrealistic.
Receiving firesupport from the pair you know it's totally unrealistic.
Countersniping against the pair you know it's totally unrealistic.
risegold8929 wrote:Least appropriate
in PR? Yes. As you mentioned, the change took away all the teamwork capable elements away from the Sniper and transferred it to the spotter (thus making the sniper less
teamwork effective, in an individual way, although it is exactly the same when you consider the sniper will now have a spotter with all his previous capabilities).
Either way, I don't care how it goes between Sniper/Spotter. At least they have someone to keep them company atm.
The _only_ effect is forcing the sniper to do nothing but shoot. Given that all the QQ over the years about lonewolf 1337 snipers, forcing the sniper to add nothing to the team apart from accurate long range fire isn't a solution to the perceived problem of snipers not integrating into the team properly. If you're grabbing a sniper kit to, you know, snipe, there's still no reason to grab a spotter and there's also no potential segue at any point in your PR career into being an interactive teamplayer with lases, contact markers or area attacks.
To put case in point, I almost never see sniper/spotter pairs in servers, because, believe it or not, players aren't stupid. The spotter doesn't actually make the sniper any better at his job, and the sniper doesn't make the spotter any better at his job. What I see are the same lone wolf snipers and marksmen I always saw, and CAS squads now being composed of officers and spotters instead of officers and snipers.
I still see
good snipers who aren't trying to roleplay their sniper as some kind of SF assassin assigned to kill the nebulous "HVTs" which don't exist in PR contributing meaningful battlespace effects to a team, like suppressing fixed targets, denying freedom of movement along movement corridors and denying key ground to the enemy, all the while sapping morale and tickets. I still see them in a wookie suit, dislocated from a team, and I still see them routinely achieving KDRs >10.
That's all fine. That's OK. That's actually much closer to what snipers do in real life (ie. realistic).
What's not OK is that the sniper had a bunch of parts of his toolkit taken off him for the spotter class. You have to view anything in a video game as a cost, a risk and a reward. The cost of a team having a sniper is 1/n where n is the number of players on the team, as well as the restricted kit itself. The player, the kit and the time can't be used for anything else while the sniper doing whatever. The risk of sniping is generally very low, but follows an undesirable curve where higher risk behaviour often correlates to disproportionately higher returns (for example, placing a sniper on a flank or behind the enemy's axis of advance allows him to fire on unsuspecting immobile enemies, which is disproportionately desirable in PR because the sniper rifle deviation code makes firing on targets which move more than once every 8 seconds (ie. nearly all targets who consider themselves in contact) impossible). The rewards of sniping are variable, but generally quite low. The kit has no way of actually killing enemies unless they make a mistake (you need to kill someone in the open, and then kill them while being revived, which relies on someone being stationary out of cover, and then relies on an incompetent medic and squad), and instead, all the rewards are "soft" rewards - denying areas, slowing movement, punishing poor teamplay and reckless movement by the enemy and so on. Almost any kit other than the sniper kit has a much higher kills:minute potential, and a far, far higher capacity to complete objectives. Basically other kits dictate play to the enemy and rely far less on enemy mistakes.
The issue, therefore, that I have with trying to force a sniper and a spotter to become umbilical brothers and don wookie suits together to use codewords with each other and pretend to be something they're not, which is basically harmless in itself, is that you
double the input investment - double the player time, double the kit overhead, double the risk, but you don't even nearly double the potential rewards. Having a spotter doesn't come close to doubling the effectiveness of a competent PR sniper in shooting; if I were to estimate, I'd say having a spotter makes a PR sniper roughly 0-3% more effective by seeing more potential targets. I also don't really think it doubles the overall effect of the sniper in the hide because I think there's an inherent friction between being in the best locations to snipe (well concealed with view onto only a few key areas, ie. generally low ground with a few fire lanes) and being in the best locations to spot (command of the ground, vantage onto many possible locations where OS might be needed, or mobile to achieve the second ie. usually high ground, or just plain attached to infantry).
In other words, the current situation
isn't realistic. It looks a bit realistic to people who don't know the division of responsibilities in a sniper pair or sniper quad in real life, and it looks realistic to people flying into Muttrah on a Huey and seeing two people lying down on a building, because it looks sort of like something they saw in a movie once and read about on wikipedia, but it's not realistic, it's not even vaguely realistic.
To clarify, the function of a spotter in real life (the "realistic" function") is the spotter carrying a book with the ballistics for every type of ammunition the sniper could possibly use, hot and cold, wet and dry, acquiring and ranging the target, and then telling the sniper what adjustments to make to his sight to hit the target to compensate for the combination of ammunition type, windage, elevation to target, absolute elevation, range, humidity, temperature, heat of the barrel and state of the ammunition. The one thing a sniper almost certainly cannot do in real life on his own is shoot accurately at very long distances. That's the one thing a sniper can do on his own in PR.
I'm not whinging that sniping is unrealistic, because I'm aware of the engine barriers to fixing sniping in PR. I do think it's doable, but I understand the enormous time investment required to fix it and the relative priority of it. If you implemented zeroing on the sniper rifles, you could add an extremely accentuated ballistics system to the sniper rifles in PR in return for a complete removal of the deviation penalties for changing point of aim. This would make solo sniping impossible while also drastically increasing the overall effectiveness of a sniper
pair operating realistically to something a little closer to the real life effectiveness of a sniper team.
I'm whinging because probably the most niche kit in the game with the fewest uses was made less useful because people whinged without understanding what they were whinging about, and ironically, the changes to the kit
encourage the behaviour that led to the whinging in the first place. The current sniper/spotter dichotomy is whack, the following statuses are listed in order of my preference:
1: Properly designed and implemented sniper/spotter system based around ballistics.
2: Sniper kit which is able to fulfill all of the functions of a sniper pair IRL with diminished effectiveness representing the capability brick as a single soldier. Spotter kit functions as JTAC/FAC/MFC with infantry.
3: Sniper kit which can only shoot on his own and spotter kit which has no incentive to be with a sniper except for roleplaying.
