First of all, it's not a war sim and it is most certainly not supposed to represent war realistically. So realism isn't an issue here, and even if it was, real life snipers operate in much different ways.. The thing is, as I said, game design. What is good game design for a sniper in a game with 300m render distance, lots of people and easy access to sniper positions (drop pods, beacons, ESFs...)? You don't want inconsistency (nanoweave) but you also don't want snipers to dominate outdoor battles. As for counter snipers, well, in my experience it's just dodging and waiting for the other guy to make a mistake with a lot of missed shots due to cloak and strafing... nobody in their right mind stays still or out of cover while uncloaked... so I usually don't bother that much with enemy snipers, a much bigger problem are SMG infiltrators that you can't see while zoomed in even with the 6x scopes so you can only go pistol against an SMG. And there isn't really many other ways for infantry to die without possibility of retaliation. AV turrets (which is another thing I need needs a range cap) come to mind. I could say ESFs but you can retaliate and unless you are alone even take it down with only your small arms. Harassers and light assaults just need a bit of situational awareness. And again, this game has very little to do with real war. I also disagree that we will see more quickscoping. If anything a lot of snipers who are currently quickscoping because of nanoweave will go further out ... I don't see how incorporating more situational awareness and movement in sniping can be a bad thing. You seem to be confused on just how much 150m is... it's not MLG quickscope range and it's not SMG twitch range. It's actually quite far away, check it out for yourself. At ranges between 75 and 150 meters the BASRs will be very effective compared to most other weapons. Also, since snipers are now much closer, the time you need to spend to reach a spot is reduced drastically (if you're not using one of the methods I mentioned above) since you no longer need the extra 150m to keep you safe in case you get nanoweaved. And just one question, apart from AV turrets, do you really see the difference between a high priority target and a BR1 light assault trough your scope? It's also quite obvious that sniping in that game you mention worked differently than it works here, but I'll have to do some research on that. And again, it's not about frustration. It's about what's good game design for both sides, not just one of them. Engaging gameplay, as they said when they announced much awaited nerfs to A2Ams.
... It's not a war sim? It's a MMOFPS with RTS incorporation (If you include the core basis of team oriented gameplay.) based entirely around intercontinental warfare, how is that not a war sim? The only thing we're really missing here is a navy and artillery. The former of the two is something they have wanted to incorporate in combination to fluid transition between continents. Actually, I think we're supposed to be getting the latter too with orbital strikes. Delta Force: Land Warrior was an incredibly similar game to Planetside 2. The only real difference is that it was a much older game, there wasn't any vehicles you could actually pilot, sniping was much stronger, and it wasn't set within the future. You did, however, have huge maps with extremely similar battlefield layouts to Planetside 2 and because people could create their own maps...you had a great deal of very complex bases both above and below the ground. With that said, as I stated previously, the sniper system was much stronger. You could go prone. You could take Satchel Charges or Claymores. Scopes had an zoom feature. Scopes had a built in rangefinder. Scopes could be adjusted based upon range to adjust for bullet drop. Taking the Sniper class removed scope sway entirely. Taking the Barret 50.cal permitted you the ability to shoot from 1000m away, kill in one shot anywhere on the body, and shoot through walls. Between both games, there's no difference behind the actual mechanics behind sniping...save for the fact that DF:LW sniping is drastically superior for the reasons listed above, which would obviously be considered overpowered in today's gaming. Planetside 2's variant of sniping incorporates the same system with more limitations. Cloaking instead of Prone Scope Sway with short stabilization system. Scopes have no zoom feature. Scopes have no rangefinder. Scopes can't be adjusted to compensate for bullet drop. The strongest bolt-action rifles in the game still require a headshot to OHK and can't pierce walls. The rendering distance is limited to 300m. The system, however, still remains the same; you can attack from any direction from range to take out targets with a one hit kill. So, in my eyes, the system that Planetside 2 brought was a obvious advancement from the sniping system of old...having made it more challenging for the newer technology and generation of gamers. Anyway, I'm pretty burned out on the entire argument. In regards to Quickscoping, I suppose we'll see if my theory stands true when such comes to pass. I'm pretty confident that it'll go as I predict when it comes to that simply because of how lucrative it'll be. It won't be the snipers doing this, it'll be your run and gun oriented players who can fully exploit the twitch mechanics needed. Many of your long ranged snipers just won't be around anymore. Plenty have already quit because of Nanoweave in general, and most of the dedicated long range snipers are pretty livid over the range nurf we'll be getting. I might be sticking around if the new stealth incorporation suits knife oriented gameplay, that's the only other playing style I really enjoy... Sadism and all. /shrug
Lots of things, for example taking 6 shots to kill a target, mean that this isn't a war sim... And I assume that in that game you mention you could kill a target in 1 or 2 shots with a pistol?
You might have been able to with a headshot, I can't remember all that well since I was a dedicated long ranged sniper; the TTK was pretty quick though. I sniped from about 700m clear to 1000m, so I didn't use my pistol very often. Grenades and the knife were my CQC weapons while trying to get to my sniper locations...unless I was using the PSG1. That was more of a rarity though, I preferred my knife for anything close quarters. The knife was a OHK. As for six shots to kill, with advancements in technology, that could be quite accurate in the not so distant future. We've found that weaving spider silk into a human skin graft will stop a bullet at half the normal velocity. While that doesn't sound like much, this was discovered simply due to utter curiosity when researchers were looking to use spider silk as a more adequate means of attaching skin grafts to the surface of a wound, the result was a mush stronger layer of skin than we have now. We've been trying to properly work with spider silk for quite some time, hence the hybridized goats that produce silk in their milk... In time, body armor might be derived from this substance hybridized with something else...and provide a form of protection far superior to any form of Kevlar we currently have. Be that as it may, when I say war sim, I'm simply speaking in terms of the overall concept of war...which Planetside 2 fits. It's a war sim set in the future. You have infantry... You have ground vehicles... You have air vehicles... You have territory to conquer and are battling it out between several continents upon an alien world in order to effectively establish your faction's ideology as supreme. It's a war, an endless war.
Depends on how you define war sim then... But if you could, with advancements in tech, make human skin stop bullets, why couldn't the seeming pointless helmets everyone wears stop a sniper bullet after a certain range?
Well, with the way things typically go...the technological advancements in killing tend to exceed our methods of defense against them. Were we ever to reach a point where this technology could effectively stop bullets, the composition of these projectiles would have probably exceeded this defense and thus render it obsolete. Granted, in the short term, having our soldiers grafted with a spider silk infused skin cells may actually amplify the effects of body armor by giving them a second, lesser, layer of protection under. Still...the technology to kill typically exceeds defense. In the distant future, however, none of this will even matter... Michio Kaku predicts that we'll ultimately progress towards an existence very similar to Planetside 2, where the human body is composed of nano-machines and can reconfigure itself as it sees fit. You want a body that's not human? That should, theoretically, be perfectly possible in the distant future even though it's not within Planetside 2. Hell, Harvard has effectively reversed the aging process of mice just recently...so anti-aging is possible within our lifetime, and thus...even immortality. So you, I, and everyone here might live long enough to see the age where humans are divided between machine or biological forms. I'm going on a rant though...all very cool stuff though! Basically, Defensive technology never surpasses killing technology. Nuclear weapons, Biological weapons, we progress far quicker in ways to kill than we do means of protection...and that's because the technology just seems to advance that way. It's far easier to develop a means to kill than it is to protect, and when you do come towards the latter...it's often very expensive to make. This is why the 50.cal Barret sniper rifle is one of the most feared weapons amongst Infantry. Your buddy can be right alongside you one second...and then blown into a plume of entrails and crimson fluids the next. There isn't any type of body armor, that I'm aware of, which can defend against this weapon. If you're shot by it...you're dead before you ever realize the threat was there. Same could be said about many weapons though, naturally. Just saying, the technology to kill exceeds that of defense.
stopping a bullet with absolutely ridiculous kinetic energy with a helmet wouldn't do **** because conservation of momentum, energy and what not. If not pierced skull then broken neck and pudding instead of brain. People don't like accelerations exceeding 10g and the brain would get much more than that. BTW droppods are ridiculous without any deceleration before landing, going from few hundred kph to 0 in 0.001s is lethal mmkey? If it wasn't, fall damage wouldn't be a thing. Either way if in 21st century we are using rifles that can shoot through walls to kill people, i'd assume auraxian military engineers would put enough overhead in their dedicated sniper rifles too, accounting for all the available defensive tech, energy shields and what not.
It's all cool stuff, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that a weapons similar to the Gauss SAW would have the exact same effect in the real world. Yet it takes three bullets at extremely close ranges to the head to kill a guy... Obviously something strange is at work here. See above, but in theory you don't really have to stop the bullet with your head... just deflect it a bit to miss anything crucial, the rest can be fixed by a medic =P Nobody's expecting anybody to tank 10k joules with their bones. As for droppods I'm pretty sure jumping down at that same speed from a galaxy on a cloud of light is more ridiculous =P
That's because the development team likes to use the terminology for a technology that they haven't actually incorporated into the game... You should go through my post history, I just recently posted about actually giving the NC true-ish Gauss weaponry and adding a lot more faction flavor to the three factions weapons. Either way, sniper rifles capable of killing infantry from range aren't going anywhere any century soon...they're just getting better at doing their job. It's essentially the entire point behind the sniper rifle. There are always ways to reduce kinetic energy, such as Non-Newtonian fluids...they're even making armor based around incorporating liquid Non-Newtonian elements that will help with this. Those armors won't prevent sniper rifles though, and even when we develop shield technology...they're going to come out with bullets that can penetrate those shields well in advance. That's just how it works, killing technology always exceeds defensive. Granted, we could claim that this resurrection nanite technology is a defensive variant that actually nullifies all killing tech. It also, however, makes the very fundementals of what it is to be human null and void. Can you imagine life on Auraxis? Everyone's emotions are going to be extremely diluted, because death and murder is a triviality. What stops you, morally, from blowing a friends head off for cheating in a game of cards when they'll just be resurrected in about 18 seconds to come and tell you that your a ****** hat? Humanity upon Auraxis, mentally, wouldn't reflect anything that we know...because they wouldn't hesitate to kill and torture for downright trivial reasons. That's what immortality, in that true absolute sense, would bring to humanity as we know it now.
yeah, nanites... http://herohog.com/images/guns/ammo/all_ammo_comparison.jpg compare 56 to some standard bullethose ammo in the middle That raises the question - why wouldn't the same tech be used in let's say tanks? Because last time i checked the eat dumb rockets and tank shells like there is no tomorrow Besides everything fits within the 'enough overhead and accounting for available tech'. Sniper rifle that sorta works is not worth having in the arsenal. If something is not efficient it goes the way of the dodo when it comes to military. For some reason we don't use battleships anymore and carriers are on their way out. Defense stays behind the offensive tech and when something becomes brutally cost ineffective it's dropped. Ever heard of war game excercise called Millenium Challenge 2002? Dude playing Iran defeated glorious fleet of high tech **** by overwhelming it with dumb rockets, motorboats and cessnas delivering torpedoes and communication was done via messengers using bikes to circumvent jamming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 That's how much harder it is to defend. Who cares your 200million automated defense system has 99% efficiency when sending 100 rockets 20k a piece defeats it for 2M?
Using IRL facts for argue about gameplay mechanics is silly, is just a game. We know why Phoenix rockets don't one shot infantry and isn't because of futuristic bodyarmor.
Yes, the actual reason is that the proper counters to Phoenix users, ie snipers, are inherently incapable of performing their role, ie killing infantry, in the current state of the game.
Hell no. It was nerfed in less than 1 week or so. If phoenix was still instagibbing people in 300m radius, NC snipers would be long extinct. NW nonsense was already rearing its ugly head, BASRs requiring LoS and flanking, suffering from scope sway and ****... and here you get a remote controlled sniper rocket launcher that can hit people ducked behind cover up to render distance. I remember raging a bit when it was released and first montages were posted on youtube. All forms of life were literally obliterated within 300m radius (running, hiding behind rocks and hills - didn't matter), making sniping obsolete. At least VS and TR infiltrators got some kills on phoenix spammers.
...and by the time you do, the enemy can often move to a location that's completely obscured or entirely different. Always a fun time when that happens.
Completely changing NC weaponry isn't something I'd agree with, I mean everybody made their choice of faction, changing the concept would probably lead to a lot of people leaving (I know that if I was NC and the SAW was changed to half ammo and half fire rate but double damage I wouldn't be happy) Well I could argue that by the same logic sniper rifles would eventually go the way of the sword or the crossbow. Thing is, sniper rifles in planetside don't really seem to have advanced all that far from what we have today... unless they're using some super dense material in the bullets, but I doubt that you could fire such a weapon from your shoulder... Since railguns don't need cartridges and NC LMG magazines don't seem to be any smaller than TR LMG ones, why wouldn't the Gauss SAW fire bullets of comparable size to the bullets a TR sniper rifle fires? But yes, nanites. And if I could produce a personal shield that can stop several bullets before breaking that is cheap to produce, which we have here, it really doesn't fit in the concept of offense always being better, does it?
I believe that the majority of NC would actually enjoy an overhaul of their weapons, but I've yet to make the thread regarding the changes I speak of to properly gauge results. However, they have been upset with their faction mechanics from the start, and the majority seem far more interested in the Gauss aspects eluded to in the lore over their current fabrications. It would be an exceptionally significant change, but one that I feel would be better for the game as a whole and be far more likely to lure further attention when it takes off. Right now, people complain about a lack of faction flavor all the time...this game would have been much better were those aspects emphasized, and they could have been since this is a RTS at the macro scale. That aside, You can fire the Barret 50.cal from a standing position, and technology is only making deadlier more light weight weapons as time progresses. As the technology gets more advanced, the ability to kill grows easier and more convenient over cumbersome and heavy. Hell, we're still toying around with sound based technology for weaponized purposes...which will be capable of inducing madness, sickness, and death if it's ever perfected. Planetside 2 does have a tendency of proclaiming advanced technology...and yet, actually downgrading some technology. Still, in a war oriented situation...a sniper rifle is never going to go the way of the bow and crossbow. Were this the future, these weapons would probably be far more advanced with their scope options and penetration capabilities. If there's Infantry, there's always a reason to kill infantry from range with a single shot. A railgun still requires reloading, and if you weaponized it to a small handheld device...it would have cartridges to ensure that you weren't reloading a single projectile yourself after every round...that just makes sense, unless I misunderstood you? Actually, we have cheap ammunition too...so it kind of does. Furthermore, we have sniper rifles capable of completely bypassing these low grade shields with a single shot to the head... That does fit the methodology of offense always exceeding defense. There's countless methods that can kill in a single hit...meaning that offensive capabilities have exceeded defensive. The only aspect to Planetside 2 that goes against this is the resurrection technology, which is defensive on a massive scale and completely nullifies death entirely.
Actually as I understand it a lot of NC would prefer to have more CQC based options, since they claim that their weapons have too steep a learning curve... but I dunno. You can fire that rifle from standing, but what I mean is that if you're going to make more powerful rifles eventually you will no longer be able to hold it like that. Depending on the strength of a PS2 infantryman's shield. Right now it pretty much completely stops a sniper bullet (we know that by the fact that a sniper will just barely damage the target if it's a bodyshot after a certain range) so I guess it's pretty powerful. Apparently the shield + some helmet reinforcements will even save a man, but leave him heavily wounded. If we're talking PS2 tech, that's where it's at currently. I've also seen pictures of people being protected by bulletproof vests from long range snipers, but I don't know which ones. I meant the bullet casings with the gunpowder. What about invincible shields? Or MAXes taking AP rounds to the face like champs? Or 150mm HE shells only being able to kill a person within 0.5m of where it landed? These are examples of defensive tech overtaking offensive.
Odd, I see the exact opposite more often than not. An increase in damage doesn't automatically equate to a more cumbersome weapon...this has simply been the nature of weapons due to our inadequate technology in reality. As we've progressed, materials are becoming far more far more light weight yet increasingly durable. For example, Graphene is extremely lightweight and one of the strongest materials known to man. It's often said that an elephant standing atop a pencil couldn't puncture Graphene. Not anything 50.cal...there's nothing aside from vehicle armor capable of protecting people from these rifles. Even if you were to have body armor capable of ensuring that the bullet didn't penetrate, the impact alone would kill you and turn your internal organs into jelly. When they took you out of the armor...you'd most likely be a sack of soup. These weapons literally blow people in half... With that said, they're looking into Graphene body armor...but not even that would save you from the impact of these rounds, might stop the bullet though. Ohhhhhh, I understand you now. I can't answer that, I don't know THAT much about the technology. Truth be told, in Planetside 2, the bolt-action sniper rifles SHOULD be using Gauss and Railgun technology themselves...it makes logical sense that they would be, with the exception of maybe the VS. The invincible shield doesn't last indefinitely. The MAX can take a limited amount of AP rounds to the face, but I think of them as more like a vehicle. Even the sniper rifles can deal damage to them, just not as much... The MAX armor is superior to the personal shielding we all have. These really aren't examples of killing technology being defeated by defensive technology...you're just using weapons that aren't actually geared towards the intended target. It's essentially like saying why can't a bolt-action rifle destroy a tank. All of these defensive technologies have something in the game that's capable of taking it out...so they haven't exceeded the technology to kill anymore than modern technology has. Otherwise, something in the game would be OP because you wouldn't have anything strong enough to destroy it.
