I'm just here to talk about how accuracy, deviation and handling of the weapons is still almost a mystery to me. For me, perceptually, luck is a much greater factor than skill when in a firefight.
Before you say,
Yeah, that's not helpful. I know, it happens, it happens a lot, I'm terrible at the game, whatever. Let's consider that base covered, and move on to actually constructive discussion. I've played on and off since .67. I accept the fact that some people are better at the game than I am. I want to be better, too.
I think I've watched every video and read every guide to minimizing deviation on weapons, but in game, it feels like these principles are rarely applied by anyone. Whether they are or not is irrelevant, I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about relatives. It feels that way, subjectively. I accept that subjective feelings of one player are not a useful basis for game design. Moving on.
Tonight, I played for four hours, and I had only two kills during that entire time, spread over several maps. I engaged probably two or three dozen individuals, but my shots never really landed. I'm sure some of it was a combination of bad luck and bad aim, but I don't know for sure. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong, but I'm struggling to figure out what that could be after a few months of playing. That's a problem.
My point is this: I'm not griping that I'm doing something wrong, and that the game ought to be rewritten from scratch to accommodate what I think the rifle deviation ought to be. Sometimes I have great luck with the rifles and I get five or ten kills in a round. What I'm saying is that I don't know why I'm doing well or not, and the game has no mechanism for telling me or teaching me that anywhere.
A typical engagement (where I had the chance to fire on the enemy, about 70% of the time I'm just dead instantly from a mystery location, oops, oh well) would go like this. I would see a hostile standing or coming around a corner or over a ridge between twenty and fifty meters. I would crouch and raise my weapon, wait a second for the deviation to close up, and then die because the other guy started firing, accurately, much more quickly than I did. I know it was accurate because his first shot put me into black and white, and the second shot killed me. Why was he able to shoot straighter and more quickly than I could? Trial and error only take me so far.
Again, I'm not trying to turn this into a gripefest. I die a lot, and most of the time it's my own fault. So do most new players. I want to learn to shoot better and play better, and typically, games provide feedback mechanisms to train the player to perform in a certain way. I'm counting the seconds between shots, being incredibly careful, but beyond that, I have no idea if I'm performing well or not. Other players would argue that this is the beauty of PR, that it's realistic and requires more skill. I'm not here to argue about how people don't want scrubs playing 'their game'.
The game has next to no dynamic feedback on accuracy, deviation and shot performance when firing any weapon, except for the HAT's square-bracket settling meter, anywhere in the game. Dirtpuffs are it. Now, obviously, this is Project Reality and one would argue that realistically, there isn't any way for someone to determine their accuracy other than experience. But this is a computer game. I'm here to have fun, man.
In Vanilla BF2, you die and come back so often that you can rapidly figure out how your favourite gun behaves. There's a flex-reticle and extra crosshairs when you hit. You're firing your weapon an awful bloody lot, if you're in the fight. Training occurs rapidly.
In PR, it's more like 10% of that time, if that. None of these mechanics are present in PR, and nor should they be in multiplayer, that's not realistic. However, I'm in a live engagement for too short a time and too rarely for me to gather any consistent data on weapon firing characteristics through available data. Most of the time I fire my weapon only a few times in the course of a game. We struggle to understand why we're dying and why our guns seem so useless, when to experienced players it's just a matter of "*shrug* sorry, you're just not good at this. Get better." I'd love to; help me do that.
I would pick this problem out as the single greatest barrier to entry for new players in to PR, because of how basic and fundamental it is. It's a core mechanic, the behaviour of the game's firearms. I want to know, need to know, how my weapons are performing in a live fire situation, and whether I'm even coming close to the mark. Because right now, I've been trained by the game to believe that it doesn't really matter what I do, whether I hit or not isn't really up to me. I shouldn't have that impression, a game shouldn't be training me to think that, that's insane.
Ultimately, my suggestion is this: Give me a firing range where I can see my deviation and accuracy performance for different weapons, be it with a circle or a flexible reticle or something. Better yet, put it in single-player so I can practice on targets that move and shoot back. Don't change a thing to multiplayer, it's fine the way it is.
That said, I'd really like some way for me to get better at the multiplayer facet of the game that is eluding me, and I'm sure is eluding a number of other players that are new to PR. If your counterargument is that people who can't figure this out in multiplayer be told, "this isn't the game for you", that's just kind of sad.
tl;dr Please give me a way to see and understand weapon deviation and performance somewhere within the game (not in deployment), so I can shoot better when playing deployment. There is a science and a skill to wielding weapons in PR. I would enjoy the game more with tools to help me understand and learn it more quickly, beyond youtube tutorial videos.
On the upside, I usually only hear game effects. Unfortunately, bullet sounds aren't as directional as I'd like, and the first two shots kill me routinely. I'm not worried about that, that's just awful play on my part. It's the shooting back part that's the problem. If I do get the chance, I usually miss and they don't.
And yeah, I'm using the very tip of the sight, unless I'm out beyond what I guess is 300 metres. I'm awful at judging distances, but I just use the pinpoint tip until something tells me that I'm wrong like a tracer.