How most feel about headshots

Why would getting headshots be less rewarding for skilled players? A 'skilled' player should be able to come out on top of engagements even if there were no HS multiplier and surely winning such an engagement would feel like more of an achievement without a HS multiplier crutch to help them?

Getting headshots is not less rewarding for skilled players. REDUCING the damage multiplier is. It means that the output for better precision is less, there is no incentive to aim for the smaller target (head) compared to the larger target (center of body).
Less variance in damage potential means that there is a shorter skill gap overall. I am very strongly against this. It makes it so that skilled players have less potential to cause a significant impact, meaning battles will be decided even more by sheer numbers rather than individual player agency or organization.

Landing headshots requires a significant amount more aim skill than landing bodyshots. Headshot multiplier is not a crutch. A crutch is something that allows less skilled players to play on more even footing with higher skilled players, shortening the skill gap.
This exists in game. The unstable ammo attachment for the VS gives you a larger bullet hitbox, making it easier to hit, in exchange for less headshot multiplier. It is undoubtedly a crutch attachment for players who cannot land headshots reliably. It lowers the skill floor (makes it easier to start having an impact) while lowering the skill ceiling (less potential for skilled players).

Taking your word for it, that has to be a hack because it just technically doesn't seem plausible.

Now ive been at the game a few weeks now and Ive started to see some things I thought were cheating aren't; "how did he know I was there? Well he has the base memorized and deductive reasoning. Why do I keep dying in gunfights? Well I suck at peeking and positioning. Was that guy hacking or was that just a lucky shot? Well I can use Tab to see if he has twice as many kills as the next plater in this zone"

300m... there's an implant that lets you see what the actual in-game distance is to your cursor. If I go into VR and take a sniper rifle with 12x scope and check what 300m is, it's just a tiny dot on my screen. It won't even render the other player with a 1x scope. So I don't know if that was actually 300m or hyperbole.

But yes cheating, or "what feels like cheating" discourages players and that's a serious problem in this game.

But that doesn't matter as long as there is fun gameplay. The range of a real assault rifle is what like 400m? Of course it's massively condensed in the game but if it makes for a fun FPS that's what the real goal is.

That makes a ton of sense to me! Now Ive not been playing for years so I don't know how this will rebalance the game.

The more I play, they less I "see" cheaters.

In the chaos of a big zerg where should I stand and point my gun? Ive learned to move less and wait more, or at least to move in such a way as to have better angles that minimize people shooting at me and maximize shooting at them.

Maybe the game needs to penalize the run-and-gun strategy more. If your team needs to cross an open field to get to an opposing hill, things like covering fire might be a thing. You could actually tell players: you stand here and shoot at the people coming from X while we run to Y.

Players that can run and shoot and clear whole rooms of players, and then run outside and shoot the players coming up a hill, and then run towards the sundy and jump on it with C4...

Penalize the one man army thing. Bring positioning (and therefore tactics and teamwork) more to the forefront

It's not true though. A noob doesn't position himself well and often puts himself in a position to be shot all over his character model instead of just a corner.

Problem isn't the base headshot modifier, it's that since most people run Nanoweave it's actually higher than the advertised x2 when compared to bodyshots.

I'm not very skilled in aiming, most of my kills I believe come from body shots, and since I've spent most of my play time as medic and engineer I've died a lot from headshots, still don't see why they should be nerfed.



In almost all games I've played damage is huge when you aim for the head and that's the way I think it should be.

I think we can afford to reduce the headshot multiplier by a bit, but in exchange we should remove both nanoweave and flak armor. If that means we need to rebalance infantry weapons and explosives a bit, so be it. I think rewarding good aim is great and all, but we really need to deal with the fact that Nanoweave in its current state is essentially just a placebo when playing against people who can consistently headshot. Beyond that, Flak armor is pretty much the one other suit that ever used in a meaningful capacity.

Frankly bad characteristics of the weapon lead to the fact that it is simply unpleasant to shoot from it.
And at the same time, make it useless to fight at least some long distances for everyone except snipers.
I have repeatedly found myself in a situation where the enemy is in line of sight, the distance is visually estimated at about 30-50 meters, that is, intuitively it seems very close, you aim exactly where you need to but.... not a single hit, even in the body. This is annoying, especially when you realize that other games don't have it.
I think everyone here is aware that in order to kill the enemy, you often have to run up to him with a carbine almost close, or at very short distances of 10-15 meters. Often the fighting is close. If you do it differently and open fire from a long distance - you will not be able to kill anyone, even if you accidentally hit the 1-2 hits will only damage the shield, which will quickly recover.
Is this a war with the use of future technologies? Maybe it was worth giving the players 17th-century muskets, and not pretending that they have modern weapons in their hands? Although the musket also causes much more damage, so it would be more correct to replace lead bullets with corks.

This is the feeling that the game gives in the field of infantry fighting. This is hardly a positive experience.

At 30m-50m is not very close. 30m I have seen mentioned as a distance beyond which you do not go for headshots because are hard to achieve unless the target is stationary. 50m begins to be far for the average LMG.

Hitscan games behave differently but PS2 has bullet drop, recoil, CoF and Bloom. Are you familiar with those terms and what they imply?

Not saying you should like it or not, I am merely pointing out you have to understand how the game works and then decide whether it is for you or not.

I mean, for a new player, shooting in this game looks very uncomfortable. That's why the infiltrator class is popular among beginners, its rifle is the only weapon in the game that looks like a weapon, you feel that the shots are not useless. There are also shotguns, but they are harder to play with.
This does not affect the game balance, since all players have more or less the same weapons. It doesn't matter if the damage is high or low, if the initial conditions are equal, the players will adapt to them. But the feelings of the process will be different and the prevailing tactics will also change.

The decision to turn LMG into airsoft would not cause problems if it were an Overwatch-style game with cartoon characters. But visually, the game tries to seem realistic, despite the fantastic world and this causes a contradiction between the expectation of a new player and how the game process actually goes.
This game is basically like to cheat expectations, almost none of the weapons is not working as it should work. The rapid-fire machine gun here is a weapon against tanks. Anti-tank gun-a weapon against aircraft and infantry (preferably shoot in the head). Mounted grenade launchers (bulldog for example) are very close range weapons. A huge stationary gun is weaker than hand weapons (especially air defense).
In the game, even the internal logic is completely broken, only with the help of empirical experience you can determine how a particular item works.

Headshot meta, by far, is the worst part about this game. I have a little over 1k+ hours and I still hate it and feel it is the primary reason new players either quit early or try then quit later.

You have 20% accuracy while aiming for the body. The problem isn't the 'headshot meta', at least in your case, it's simply that you miss 4/5 bullets.

I hope you are aware that - if the stats you used for that are overall ones - that includes possibly abysmal performance in the early hours, then slow improvement to wherever a given player is at this point in time? My personal stats these days are decent, but overall still pretty bad because in the beginning I s*cked really really hard and it took quite a while to get acceptably good at the game, so I know what I'm talking about here. Overall stats say jack about current performance.
If you only took recent stats, then very good, ignore the previous part. Still, one can dislike a part of the game even without experiencing it to the fullest from the delivering end.

http://stats.binarycoder.info/playerinfo.php?playerName=CrimsonSerpent&sampleSize=1000

Unless they significantly improved on an alt in the last two weeks...

People still only run nanoweave anyway except for us weirdos that like flak armor, grenade bandolier, adrenaline pump, and mine carrier.

I'd rather see the nanoweave integrated into classes instead. Or just made a default armor of medic and heavy assault. Open up suit slots for some actual customization choices instead of just being a 'meta slot'.

Why would there be no incentive if the HS multiplier was reduced?

Headshots would still convey an advantage and so would still be worth landing relative to body shots. The game also rewards headshots with additional XP bonuses.

HS multiplier focusses the game too much on getting kills rather than pushing objectives. Kills actually mean very little in an objective based game where a character is revived within a few seconds. The only thing kills do is massage the ego of the person getting them.

People endlessly farming kills rather than playing the objective is one of the poor things about this game - and HS multiplier IMO contributes hugely to this.

It's a crutch because it allows a player who has "skill" in a single very focussed area to dominate, whilst massively disadvantaging people who have skills in other areas but who are perhaps not quite as good at hitting a tiny target. There is more to this game than simply being able to hit small targets.

Mixed my statement with the previous argument. NO headshot multiplier would give zero incentive. Reduced headshot multiplier gradually discourages attempting headshots.

Strongly Disagree. Headshots are not responsible for influencing player mentality towards kills per minute or Kill death ratio. Incentive rewards for kills and performance do. Currently the main way to upgrade, acquire weapons and generally progress in this game is via Certs. The fastest way to gain certs is by maximizing your kill rate. If you want to change how people play you need to change incentives. Give more exp or cert gain to objective play, winning alerts or non-kill based performance metrics

Being able to eliminate large numbers of players quickly is necessary to allow either a single or small number of players to outplay a large number of players. There is already a massive problem with population stacking, where one faction can win a base through sheer numbers. By reducing or eliminating headshot multipliers, you are increasing the average and maximum potential time to kill. This means that an individual player has significantly less impact on the flow and outcome of a battle, thus shifting the game towards sheer numbers and equipment over actual tactical or skilled play.

As far as farming goes, HE tank shells, A2G Nosguns, rocketpods and C4 contribute much more to farming than headshots.

A crutch is something that allows less skilled players to compensate, lowering the skill floor. Again, refer to the example of unstable ammunition.

What you are describing is not a crutch, it is called specialization or mastery. If someone is very skilled at getting headshots and is using a headshot focused weapon, like the Daimyo they are making the most use out of the tools they are given, and reaching close to the skill ceiling.

Yes there is more to the game, such as positioning, strategy, leadership, tactics, but so is mechanics. Trying to remove or reduce the influence of one will badly influence the game.

Just removing NWA should do the trick. Adding the 'option' to make your character more resistant to bullets was never a good design decision for any shooter. I feel like Bandolier/Adrenaline Pump/Flak presents enough of a variety on it's own that you might be fine to leave it at just those options and see what happens.