Straight pull bolt doesn't make the weapon fire faster. It doesn't improve performance. It just allows a bolt action user to tunnel vision down their scope to track a target at the cost of their peripheral vision and situational awareness. Which, by the by, is still one of the leading killers of semi-auto users that haven't learned better. You should glance at your surroundings between kills either way. But on to the point of a 'full auto' mode for semi autos... well I'm not trying to be insulting, condescending, or mean, but its just an awful concept that's acts in direct opposition to how the weapon's work. We're talking about a weapon type that relies on control, placing, and shot placement to be competitive and make up for a raw DPS disadvantage, but also actively punishes rapid firing and spray. It would basically be an attachment that forces you to make all the rookie mistakes. Semi-autos have some of, if not the worst accuracy loss per shot (CoF bloom) and recoil, and the slowest recovery rates for both of any weapon in the game. The current semi-autos reach a point where hitting a target becomes more a matter of luck that aim in just a few rounds when firing rapidly. The semi-snipers can hit it as early as the 3rd round. The semi-scouts at 3-5. On automatics, this won't even begin to recover until you let go of the trigger. Then there's the matter of recoil recovery. Pushing through recoil to land a shot before it resets is considered a high end skill, and doing so requires the user to be able to fire when they've forced the crosshairs where they need to be, not whenever the weapon is done with it's refire cycle, not only compounding and already heavy recoil to a near insane degree, but sacrificing the control you need. A full auto mod would basically just give you an extremely low DPS and incredibly inaccurate weapon. The only weapon it MIGHT work on is the battle rifles available to engi's and HAs since they're practically semi-auto assault rifles more than a sniper styles weapon, but I still wouldn't bank on it.
it's a perceived sniper buff. and we all know that all infiltrators are OP in all situations and need to be nerfed. after all the biggest threat the nc has in a biolab is not their maxes. that's just what their infiltrators WANT you to think...
I'm not so much worried about the straight pull bolt as I am about the devs. The straight pull bolt, to me, represents a lot of things the dev team is doing poorly. First off, it's a poorly contrived attachment as all "bolt-action" sniper rifles in Planetside already have a straight pull mechanic. Secondly, it's an attachment that has little to no downside and when any in-game mechanic has no downside or competitor, that's a sign that the devs have no idea how to balance a game. Thirdly, straight pull bolts have historically been designed for the "quick-scope" gameplay prevalent in COD and more recently the Battlefield franchise. It's a gameplay mechanic that relies on things like one-hit kill body shots to truly use it's maximum potential. It rewards players who are trying to pad their k/d rather than contribute to a base fight because they still won't be front line soldiers and they still will have limited impact on the battlefield. They've progressively pushed Planetside to be more noob friendly with the kill feed, main battle tanks that can be operated by one person, spawns anywhere and everywhere, and now apparently attachments that do nothing but make things easier. I get it, newer players are important to keeping the game going, but they shouldn't be prioritized over the more dedicated and hardcore gamer. Competitive players should be shaping the game's meta, but they're not. They push these quality of life updates willy nilly but they ignore/delay things that the forum denizens have clamored for for months like uniform cloak visuals, improved infantry rendering, hell even client stability (which shouldn't be a widespread issue well over a year after launch). I mean, just look at the last handful of patches. Compare how many things were added vs. how many things were balanced? Even worse, read the actual update threads and see how for every 1 bug they fix, they introduce 3 more. It's non-sense really. We still have bugs introduced in GU02. We still don't have any semblance of a meta-game. The roadmap feature they provided might as well have been a link to a video of them just twiddling their thumbs. And you know what? I'm totally comfortable giving them crap about their mediocre performance because when all is said and done, they'll never read this. We'd have better luck getting through to the devs by throwing paper airplanes with messages on them at their corporate office. Time and again they gloss over any sort of criticism on their facebook page in lieu of supporting a fanboy who posts a comment saying "I LIEK SPLOSHUNZ AND LASER BECUZ PANERTSIDE." They'll signal boost the crap out of that. But if someone asks them why they can't fix something, crickets.
