Close Quarter Snipers out of control

Thank you.


In Planetside 1, infiltrators could not cloak with primaries and every class had access to snipers. Bizarrely enough, this conversation never happened for that game. I'll also point out that snipers were not 1 hit kills back then.

Honestly you aren't missing much.
You are correct, but in the situation you are describing, equal skill for a bolt action and for an LMG aren't the same thing.

Having 50% accuracy and ~85-90% HSR with a bolt action puts you in roughly the top 5% category. Against an equally skilled heavy, though, that is at best breaking even, because he can kill you multiple times in the time it takes you (~1s) to rechamber if you miss. Basically even though you assume equal skill, in order to make the Infil an auto-win you have to assume both players are aimbots. In reality there is a lot more uncertainty, and the consequences for missing are a lot higher for the Infil.

Another thing to note is that while a skilled Infiltrator is probably the single best class for a 1v1, anyone who has played this game for any amount of time knows that is not a typical scenario. More often you are engaging multiple targets. In a situation where you need to clear a room for example, a skilled Heavy can kill two or three or even more opponents in less time than it would take a skilled CQC bolter to do the same, simply due to ammo limitations and long rechamber time. This is at higher skill levels, at lower skill the advantage of the Heavy is even more significant because their skill floor is much lower.

This isn't even touching on the Heavy's added ability to engage vehicles and MAX suits.

An Infiltrator is a for single targets, the Heavy Assault is a for groups. Just because at high skill levels the Infil wins in a 1v1 doesn't mean it's overpowered, or even the best choice.

So suggesting that a CQC sniper is always within their ideal 1HK range (something I needed to calculate for you) and always knows where the Heavy is and always hits their first shot and always surprises their opponent and never encounters a Heavy using RS is A-Okay by your book, but if I suggest that the sniper isn't always in that sweet spot or perfectly accurate or that their target might happen to have RS or AS it's heresy.
You are arguing your position from a world of spherical cows.

More things I never said. Amazing.

I use the words I see fit to, I'm sorry if they make you pick up a dictionary. I could care less about the opinions of the random internet forum brigade, so if you feel my feelings have been hurt by you at any point you are sadly mistaken.

My goodness, I didn't realize that everytime someone made a thread on a forum the subject immediately became incontrovertible proof.
Speaking of..

Citation needed for this.

I'm not going to dumb down my vocabulary for the sake of your convenience. Just because you needed to go to Google to understand what I said does not mean that I had to.

You are so adept at arguing against things I never, ever said (SNIPERS ARE NEVER A 1HK, really?) that at this point I'm convinced I could start typing in Yiddish and your brain would auto-fill whatever is convenient for you and keep right on trucking.

CQC snipers are effective. I challenge you to find a quote of me saying otherwise. However, they do have limits, and they do have counterplay. These are things I have been saying in this thread for quite some time.

The most common outcome for the average CQC sniper is one or two kills before they miss the headshot and immediately die because they were 25m away from an angry Heavy Assault. In your mind, however Billy the BR10 Bolter turns into Elusive1 the moment he unlocks his SAS-R. This is where our actual disagreement lies, and where I am slowly attempting to steer the conversation back towards.

Do you froth at the mouth when you post? Insults only sting when they come from someone whose opinion is worth anything.

"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."
Your table must be close to the breaking point by now.

More wasted insults. Also, you really don't know what a strawman argument is, do you? I suggest some more Google-fu while you're apparently looking up the words I use.

Please quote where I said this:
"I'm not arguing anything, idiot"
or this:
"I'm here to argue snipers are never 1hk kills, especially against shielded heavies"

Don't worry, I'll wait.

Ah, the inevitable conclusion to the classic blunder of playing chess with a pidgeon, where he struts around claiming he won. Personally I thought you were still busy s****** on the board and knocking over pieces, but who am I to judge? You're the expert.

And it has to be a 1v1 or in the midst of a large firefight where honestly the cqc bolter isnt contributing much.

One thing I havent pointed out so far because this is largely a hostile audience who mostly would rather rage than engage, is that when trying to cqc bolt you dont usually want to be shooting targets that are jumping and sprinting about, because this game's physics are pretty bad and projectiles are pretty slow, so there are a lot of cases where someone can literally run out of the way of your bullet. Most of the people I kill while running are BR 20 or less. Usually you want to shoot someone the second they ADS, because actually landing that first shot is 100% critical for a cqc bolter. For some heavies, a fair few in my experience, ADS and using the shield is something done basically simultaneously.

While mostly true, a cqc bolter can contribute just as much, if not more in some cases, as any other class; sometimes all it takes is to kill (or significantly assist) a player or two who are a key to the fight.

But yeah, the majority of CQC bolting kills will be players running in a relatively straight line (as they don't know they are in danger), or people already engaged in a fight/ADSing... and yeah, Heavies usually overshield while ADSing. The main problem is that they can clientside people from pretty much anywhere.

And you don't have to be very good at aiming to be able to do it - i'm pretty mediocre at sniping and even I can just obliterate people while still being very safe, even in CQC.
(Ignore Daiymo, just wanted to get the column titles without editing).

https://imgur.com/a/rZEiMJr

Death cams didnt ruin stealth. Dildars ruined stealth and many playstyles that relighed on not being constantly on radar like flanking or sneaking unseen. In every battle we are constantly spotted and very quickly farmed.

Sensor shield doesn't work so well as it only limits the detection range. I would use it 24/7 if it hid me completely.

EMP is not a valid counter , it costs nanites and the dildar does not and the dildar is easily replaced at no cost to the infiltrator.
Dildars are by far the most damaging thing to gameplay.
Before dildars people had to use scout radar vehicles which cost nanites and could be destroyed which is fair.

On the topic of stealth, the vehicle stealth nerf was not wanted or needed and seems arbitrary.

I can't have a good infantry battle without some little **** infil sniping me. Its super annoying and i switch to infil smg to hunt them down which is not what i want to do. I do not want to play infiltrator unless im OHK stalker knifing.


My suggestion, Remove infiltrator primary weapon slot. Add new NONE CLOAKING sniper class with a deployable jamming field generator to counter all the dildar spam.

Exactly. The whole point of the infiltrator class is to encourage cherry pickers, who value KDR more than contributing to a fight. Due to their invisibility and potential to land 1hk on targets far beyond the effective range of most weapons available to every other class, infiltrators are able to surprise and instagib targets before they can even react, with that kill potential only increasing in CQC fights.

What we get here is a playstyle that encourages clientside abuse, with a built in escape mechanism of 'run-n-cloak' that allows for some added survivability when misjudging certain encounters, or simply when reloading. All this adds to the fact that the class often rarely contributes to the game, since snipers have the ability to "choose" which targets they wish to engage, and build their playstyle around maintaining KDR, rather than actually contributing to their team by hacking terminals, deploying recon devices and actually covering their teammates. Sure, the sniper is still getting kills, since they have the ability to dictate their engagements and actually have the shortest ttk up to insane ranges, but the fact that the infiltrator is usually picking off the "easier" targets and often does not prioritize real threats to the team means that their team is as effective without them.


The ability infiltrators have that encourages them to avoid the fight while still rack up kills simply hinders their actual contribution to base captures/defenses. They are getting kills yes, but simply doing their own thing with no regards to actually contributing to their team. The most an infiltrator can unintentionally do to help their team is troll people, either by sitting on outdoor points with their stalker cloak, or camp terminals until people redeploy elsewhere or send search parties chasing an invisible target that will likely redeploy before they are even close to being found.



Granted, infiltrators are sometimes used by squads to shoot recon darts all over a base and hack terminals, but their actually contribution often ends there, and good luck finding a solo infiltrator that will actually do any of these things for their team.



As I mentioned countless times, Planetside 1 did not have this problem, and snipers were not 1hk kills, (with nanoweave, they weren't 1hk in the early days of Planetside 2 either), and every class had access to sniper rifles. Infiltrators could also only equip pistols and knifes when cloaked, which helped make the game more fair. No matter how people try to twist facts or deny reality, giving an invisible class 1hk weapons simply doesn't make sense, and isn't healthy for the game.


Oddly enough, the Planetside 2 player count has decreased quite a bit after every tweak to nanoweave. Maybe people don't play fps game just to instagib ppl who are standing still, or sit around cloaked in some corner doing nothing until the continent locks. Ofc, that's just the observation of a guy who's been playing the game since launch, has tried every class, mains engineer and light assault, and only uses the lightning now since the CAI patch; do with my opinion as you please.

People dont have a better chance of surviving being picked off by an infiltrator against their SMGs, or the new OP knives, or stealth flash Elliot Roger impersonations, all of which were imo questionable additions to ps2. Any of the ways Infiltrator has to kill are entirely about their execution and timing rather than your ability to defend yourself. You just disagree with the entire design philosophy of a stealth class, to which I have to say... get ****** and crymore I guess. The designers of this game love making ways for you to die that you can objectively do nothing about, they literally just added yet another one, war is hell. I dont particularly like or dislike that aspect of their design, and at that point its not for me to defend or comment on, get over it or leave imo.

That would mean that there is/was never a reason to nerf anything.

Considering that there have been many, many nerfs to playstyles and weapons/platforms that were too good at killing you (where there is pretty much nothing you can do about it), I don't think that's a really good point.

Infiltrators are really poor at direct engagements without their bolt actions, and smgs moreso if they're not in a particular effective range. You unequivocally can react to them in a way you cannot react to being bolted down literally as they uncloak.

Melee requires that they're not only able to get next to you but did so without anyone seeing their spectacularly visible shimmer whilst sprinting.

Depends what you think my point is.
It seems to be generally conceded even in this hatefest that infiltrators, cqc or otherwise, dont actually contribute much to their faction. Why call for a nerf then? It seems pretty obvious to me that the reason is more philosophical and emotional than rational, people just dont like being killed without a "fair fight" (whatever thats supposed to mean in this game). Thats all that infiltrators do though, thats their whole class. Its not just cqc bolters, its not even mostly cqc bolters, thats just today's pet peeve apparently.

I dont like cqc bolters either. I dont like smg infiltrators, I dont like stealth flashes, I dont like weebs with their anime knives. Im not stupid enough to see much of a difference either. Most infantry combat in the game is close range, and every single decision made about infiltrators since the game was released has been about them killing you by surprise. If you disagree with that, if you want infiltrators to have a different design philosophy, send in your job application to whichever company is nominally running the game this week, because you'll have to rebuild a significant portion of the game from the ground up.

Alternatively, just delete the whole class and give the two useful things they (sometimes) do, recon and hacking, to engineer, because apparently engineer is the dumping ground class for all utility in the game. Dont bother reassigning sniper rifles, lightnings and MBTs are the game's real snipers. The game would literally continue without a hitch.

I mean, 'stray shots' from a lib had it nerfed for a while (no matter which way anyone leans on that), and it was hardly game-breaking in terms of fights.

But you are mostly right, and that is why I really don't want to get into large discussions about infil balance, because they are a class designed entirely to be not fun to fight against and also because it is 99.9% not going to change anything.

But if I had to do two smallish things, I would just disable all recon (bolts, dildar, and vehicle radar), and simply switch sniper weapons to another class (reason engineer is chosen as a dumping ground is because it has no real mechanics that makes balancing it hard).

Tons of weapons and playstyles have been nerfed into the ground, yet suddenly when we ask to tweak yours it's "deal with it or leave".


Lmao, people have left you ignorant fool, that's precisely the problem. Planetside 2 isn't a game that has enough playerbase to tell it's players 'accept these playstyles as the only ones allowed to kill things without getting nerfed or change games'.

Have you not been playing the game??? Are you really certain that pop is not an issue for this game and we can simply brush away players like that? Before they nerfed everything except infiltrators and air, the game actually had players. The surge of escalation is temporary, so we'll ignore that until we actually get a stable amount of players again, but maybe look back to the days the game actually had a relatively high amount of players on a frequent basis, and try to take from what actually worked back then. Instead of trying to drag the game down as far into the dirt as possible brushing off criticism with 'lEaVe iF yOu DoN't lIke It'.


Dude are you 4 years old? It's not about you, it's about the majority of the player's needs. Considering the majority of players left due to the garbage they had to endure, yet still come to check out the game and undergo further disappointment after each "significant" update, it should be time that people opened their eyes and started catering to the needs of the greater community, in order for the game to grow again, instead of favoring a few clowns who have let the game hemorrhage players for years.

Exactly what I am trying to express.


The reason the engineer is the go to class for dumping the recon tools and hacking is because it currently isn't as much of a valuable support role than a medic. Repairing doesn't give as much xp as healing or reviving, and it's something the engineer actually has to main longer than the medic tool, making him a vulnerable target.

Also ammo printer and heat mechanics means the engineer ammo packs aren't always needed, and aren't as stable xp sources as the medic.


It makes them less useful than the medic, with worse guns without ASP.


Adding a few utilities could help it have a better role in fights.

I love my Eidolon and VE-LR Obilisk as secondaries on my Medic and almost get more kills on them than my Assault riful in point holds and attacks with no-cloak (and Im still trying for Carapace so not that).

also as a side note Eidolon has a Grenade launcher so if using the Eclipse with grenade launcher for example gives much more boom to the C4 on a medic class, or one gun explosive one gun smoke with NVir is great utility lol just make sure you have a good Engi nearby to be able to spam nades

I do not understand why the class as a whole needs to be deleted because of a very specific aspect of the class being annoying. It gets extra silly when every primary weapon has to be removed because you have an issue with BASRs. If anyone of you want to claim scout rifles are OP or cause people to leave then you need to slap some sense into yourselves. The full auto and semi auto scouts are mid range weapons which require skill (double tapping domes with a semi-autos is great but in practical term people do not stand still like they do when you test them out in VR). I particularly like this because they mean I'm actively engaged in combat and to this day I have never ever gotten a ragetell when using one. The reason probably being 1) they can see me 2) they could react 3) if you do a successful double-tap it is on the same level as doing an accurate burst with just about any full auto weapon.

Just give the engineer jamming tools, both grenades and a device (replacing the turret for example). This would require either the infiltrator moving in to disable it or having to rely on teammates to disable the jammer. In other words, people of different classes would have to work together to maintain or take away an advantage.

Like I said in the other thread, I am open to tweaking the class but not to suggestions so insane they outright nerf the entire class into the ground... I would love to see more full auto scout variants, for instance.

TRspy, there are a lot of reasons that the game has lost players. I dont know if you're trying to make it sound as if you think that its entirely because of cqc sniping, but thats how you sound.
The sky isnt falling, and the fact that most of what you have to say is very subjective isnt disguised by how forcefully you say it.

I was also just pointing out that you and the devs very very obviously have a fundamental disagreement about the flavor you want the game to have.

Its ok, im the same way. I think the game has too many vehicles too much of the time. I'm sure there are other nitpicks I have but I fundamentally disagree with the devs that there should be frequently more lightnings on the map than infantry. I dont like "Vehicleside".
Sometimes that means I've left. Im capable of deciding to wait years to see if a company will come around to my point of view.
Currently I'm dealing with it. I'm finding it more bearable than the last time I played the game, though imo thats partially because there are more new players right now and they dont understand the meta.
So I dont give that advice lightly, I take it myself. I understand your desire to inform the devs of what you see as a flaw in their game, but there's a difference between suggesting a tweak and suggesting that the devs need to fundamentally overhaul their game and reverse years of decisions in which they've proven that they fundamentally and philosophically dont agree with you. If you feel as strongly about it as you seem to I suggest for your own sanity that you take a break. It wasnt a dismissal.

The Infiltrator as a class isn't a bad idea and it isn't even horribly implemented; you're correct in saying that the Infiltrator is all about taking "cheap shots" to "auto win" fights from stealth. That concept isn't intrinsically wrong provided it has some faults, counterplay, that others can exploit to protect themselves.

Well, the Infiltrator has that. The Infiltrator's formula is that it compromises combat efficacy (higher TTK from a weaker weapons suite, lower survivability) for stealth (to eliminate the need; won't ever take a fair fight). This trade-off is ruined when they equip a bolt action, which gives them a literal instant TTK and eliminating all trade-offs for the class.

I want to emphasize the fact that NOBODY IS COMPLAINING about SMG infiltrator or Stalker infiltrator from a balance perspective. Annoying? Perhaps to some, but that isn't a reason to nerf something. The bolt actions eliminating all trade-offs, however, are.

While this is actually not a bad idea to deal with radar, imo things like this just further dumb down the game - place and forget/passive mechanics. The mini-map is an incredibly strong tool as is, tracking people for simply moving is quite possibly one of the dumbest mechanics in the game in it's current state.

I want to emphasize that people do, and will, complain about whatever tools infiltrators use to kill them, because of how infiltrators are designed. This is one of the few valid cases for the slippery slope argument, and when that's recognized one has to reexamine ones assumptions.

Pretending that cqc bolters dont miss half their shots, and frequently then die, is sheer intellectual dishonesty. Pretending that there is any more counterplay to being SMG'd or knifed from behind is again; intellectual dishonesty.


https://ps2.fisu.pw/player/?name=deadeyeoo&show=weapons

Look at this guy, I've linked his account for convenience. He has a .624 Kpm, with a KNIFE. That **** is always equipped and ticking minutes to lower the average. I have like a .007 Kpm with my knife because heck, its been equipped for my entire playtime on every character.
Arguably this guy has a much bigger impact on fights as well, because he actually gets into the backline and kills medics, which Elusive1 does not do.
SMG and knife infils are also easier to play, and more common. There's no counterplay. Anyone who the heck would bring up that argument has not played infil. You go....... around. Yes you can see someone sprinting straight at you in stealth, though as this DeadeyeOo guy shows even that has a certain viability.

Infiltrators also can equip the new battle rifles. The game is called Clientside for a reason. A stealthed infiltrator can double tap with a BR before the first shot lands, and there's just as little you can do about it as a cqc bolter. The difference is that the BR has twice the mag size, 3x the fire rate, and a greater effective range. Almost forgot the stealth flash, which can run over 20 people at a sundy before they can move their character, that has a lot of individual counterplay.

You, personally, may not be complaining about anything but cqc bolters, but as far as I can tell thats from nothing but ignorance. You can make the argument that you're making about cqc bolters, but the problem is that that particular argument doesnt stop there.

Honestly, the problem you people have with this particular weapon would be a lot more valid if it were possible to nerf the weapon and keep its actual role. Its really not.
When people, for much the same reason, had problems with NC ScatMaxes yes those were nerfed, but 1-shot potential was intentionally maintained. Thats the design philosophy of the devs you're dealing with here.
How are you going to nerf cqc bolters, keep their one-shot potential because that is their role, and actually fix the issue you guys have?..... You cant. These weapons are already objectively terrible in every way but the 1 thing being complained about. Thats why the suggestions being floated are literally things like remove the weapon, remove ability, remove the class. Thats pretty extreme.

Well that's just riddled with fallacious reasoning. There's no slippery slope about saying a class that can usually get the first shot shouldn't kill in one shot. You're effectively saying we're obliged to take an all-or-nothing approach and it's just not a tenable position. You cannot force us to pick either a stealth class is fine and therefore can have anything or a stealth class shouldn't exist.

People complaining that Infiltrator is annoying is different from saying it's overpowered. The likelihood you get killed uncloaking and killing with the reduced TTK that an SMG has is much higher than uncloaking and clicking once. You can't be that far away with an SMG or they can just turn-and-burn, and you're more vulnerable to being spotted or detected via motion detection because you don't have the fall-back plan of "lol I just click your head to win the DM anyways."

Finally, there's a reason battle rifles and scout rifles aren't used by infiltrators very frequently, and it isn't solely that bolt actions render them superfluous. Every class save for LA and MAX has access to them and no one wants them.

Intellectual dishonesty is presenting black-and-white options and taking aim at a strawman when the issue is more nuanced than that. Infiltrator is fine, bolt actions within the infiltrator class is not.

EDIT: Full disclosure, I actually am quite partial to the Infiltrator class myself, I just recognize that bolt actions plainly shouldn't belong to this class.