Viability of Ranged Combat

Delta Force: Land Warrior anyone?

I would rather push people to play objectives instead of pixel hunt to farm certs.

you hit the nail right on the head. Would you EVER consider joining my outfit!? (Heh)

If this is how you feel then you are playing the wrong game. Go play Red Orchestra or something like it.

Actually no, a proper well run platoon would function even better with short TTK as higher damage over distance would exponentially favour the side with greater volume of coordinated firepower. Right now a lone wolf firing from a concealed spot on a group can continue firing and take considerable damage before making a run for it where he is extremely likely to survive, lower TTK means that he only gets one chance to shoot before getting properly pinned down and unable to make a mad dash to safety as he will almost certainly die.

Ask any serving soldier in what tactics are used in your average 300m firefights and he will say that manoeuvring is king, to stay still is to invite yourself to getting flanked and destroyed.

In addition, more effective range combat could make smoke grenades actually useful for moving across open ground and introduce concepts like covering fire, all things that benefit team play instead solo camping which is exactly what PS2 should be striving for.

There is such a large gap between the effectiveness of Battle Rifles and Sniper Rifles that there is a huge amount of room to change the data without making them on par with semi-auto sniper rifles. Battle Rifles are so much trash that even CQC weapons generally perform the same at range (most LMGs are much better). It's one thing to challenge oneself with garbage and make it work, quite another when it never works nearly as well as any other weapon option.

Now if Battle Rifles were the norm instead of the exception, then we'd be talking about a slightly slower paced, more tactical war game where CHARGE! typically fails in the face of a thought out defense. The reality of this game is that it is a team death match shooter and not a war game, so the name of the game is act crazy and kill.

I really wanna keep this thread going.
It's funny that CoD has the most realistic TTK/bullet mechanics even though it's instant.
I don't care who the hell you are, if you shoot at someone you should not be able to watch your bullets fly by them in a huge circle.
most realistic gun in the game is ns11 and even that is not even close

I've actually taken to playing a lot of infiltrator lately since I hate shotgun spam indoors and don't have a shotgun. Outdoors with a bolt action is way better than dealing with the recoil and cone of fire on automatics. You have to aim more carefully but two body shots isn't too hard. I imagine with the 1k cert version it'd be even easier to pick running targets plus you'd have to compensate less vertically and nano would rob you less often.

There are a lot of heavy assaults with long range weapons, and while they're less helpless in CQC I think sniper rifle is the way to go.

I'm less of an asset to my faction perhaps, but eh, I take out a lot of heavies using rocket launchers so I'll tell myself I'm being useful as an anti-anti-vehicle unit.

Incidentally, sniper rifles in PS2 have a bullet velocity of 500 to 650 meters per second. I think that falls pretty well in your preferred scenario of half a second to 300m.
In rl in half a second a bullet drops (through gravity) 1.2m while a full second is 4.9m drop. The bullet drop rates I see in game aren't particularly outlandish from what I see.

Carbines have bullet velocities of 440 to 560, LMGs 570 to 640 and ARs 550 to 650. Yes, that's lower than real life.

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As for the realism aspect, since people keep bringing it up, the CoF/bloom mechanic is a compromise/approximation for reality. The other way to hinder your aiming is to introduce sway, even while not aiming down sniper rifle sights. Out of these options, I favor the CoF bloom (but at times I wish there was a graphical representation of it while ADS just like in hipfire).

You can't simulate firing a rifle accurately when you do it with a mouse, so any calls for reducing CoF/bloom on a realism basis is kinda silly, if you ask me. You, the player, are unaffected by environmental conditions and using a weapon (the mouse) stabilised on an omnipod(? it's more than tri!). The character you control does not have this advantage.

For what it's worth, my Gauss Rifle seems to be pin-point accurate at long range when using iron sights, and laughably inaccurate when using a scope.

With iron sights, I can (slowly) kill people walking down Magrider hill, while sitting in the crown.

ive noticed this too. seems like accuracy just goes down the drain when using a scope, dunno why

I was trying to test if there's any difference to base CoF in VR, but bullet decals don't render if you shoot at long range and at close range the size (and variance in shape) of the decal make judging the possible CoF differences very hard.

For what it's worth, I couldn't detect a difference between iron sight and 4x scope accuracy, but that's with a fairly faulty testing environment. More a gut feeling really.

By spreadsheet the Gauss Rifle still has 0.03 default CoF, so it shouldn't be perfectly accurate. But 0.03 is very good (even if I don't really know what that value represents. Degrees? Deviation at x meters?).. I certainly can't remember ever missing because of that effect. Reaper DMR and Gauss SAW both have 0.0 default CoF, so I suppose one could try and make comparisons to those two.

On a side note, Battle Rifles having 0.1 default CoF is utterly ridiculous. That's the same as all the other non-accurate weapons.

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What I also noticed was that jumping in hipfire mode vs jumping in ADS has a discrepancy on the height achievable on where your bullets land (actual jump height isn't affected as far as trying to reach higher places goes, I believe). Not really going to affect anyones gameplay, I just wonder why that is the case in the first place. And no, I'm not talking about the scope sway effect.

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edit: one possible reason for someone to think accuracy is down could be that it's easy to forget about CoF blooming while scoped, because it is no longer visually represented by the crosshairs. How fast are you guys firing?

I find that the S-Weapons are very apt at killing enemies at roughly ~80 meters with, of all things, their much lauded burst fire mode.

Something feels off about that burst fire (Namely, the horizontal recoil seems to vanish,) that makes it so the following scenario takes place: I burst 3 times at a target, I hear "FT FT FT, FT FT FT, FT FT FT" and the cert sound plays.

I can say that at least for NC this does not hold true, all the burst fire weapons have enough horizontal recoil on their burst fire modes to sometimes miss the furthest target on a VR shooting range.At double that range it will happen more often

And apart from Gauss Compact S with a three shot burst the burst fires only have two bullets..

That said, the burst fire mode enforces you to firing in bursts so CoF bloom doesn't become nearly as bad as you're prone to otherwise.. I just haven't noticed a meaningful difference between a burst fire mode and manually controlling automatic fire mode for 2-3 shot bursts.

Perhaps burst fire modes need a change to higher delay between bursts but more accurate? Seems like a nice medium range addition to game, at least for the S weapons which aren't sacrificing close range automatic fire completely. I don't know how to fluff it that a weapon could have a burstfire mode that somehow uses a different loading mechanism than its autofire, but at least for the burst-only weapons this change could do some good?

Unless NC burst mode weapons are just broken in which case they should be fixed to equal Walrus' experience

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What's up with Gauss SAW S not having a burst fire? It doesn't have the underbarrel attachments either so what good is that S variant for? Extended mag, Flash Suppressor and a 6x scope are the only things it brings to the table.. but then again the Gauss SAW S has 25 less bullets per mag by default, Flash Suppressor doesn't hide tracers and if you wanted a 6x scope you should probably be using a Battle Rifle (*gasp*) or as an infiltrator. The Gauss SAW S doesn't even inherit the 0.0 default CoF.

The S-Machinguns are just kinda.... Pawful.

I can say that for the TR T1S, something really smells fishy with the burst fire and its recoil.
(Regardless, I feel the TR S weapons got a little bit of favoritism in comparison to the other factions.)

Also, that Mosin rifle that was issued to Russian Empire's army at the end of 19th century could reliably hit a human figure at 1000m range in skilled hands. And there were no optics back then.

Because of the content that is generally associated with the words that follow. To often in this game the "lone wolf" post turn into a river of tears.

GU06 now and still no love for ranged weapons.. It's becoming clear that everything is working as intended. Grab a shotgun and enjoy or G.T.F.O.

Give it time. SOE has a huge list of improvements, and not everything can be done at once.

This is because the range on these weapons is so short. An increase on range and damage will mean people will need to place their shots more carefully. Full auto will be useless for ranged combat and TTK can be as short as 2 or 3 bullets imo. Make the LMG's actually LMG's where a good accurate burst of fire clears a corridor or stops the advance on the enemy but needs to be deployed. This makes it deadly but also immobile. Assault rifles should be good all rounders, only SMG's can have silencers, etc etc

PS2 has done a great job of making FPS combat it's most rubbish and easy with very little variety and the only reason noobs don't get owned as much as they would right now is because they're let off with guns that do naff damage allowing them to get out the way because it's not fair that they should be killed out in the open.

While this may be true, modern assault rifles can fire projectiles at speeds up to around 1,700 m/s- that is 1,700 meters per second. That means that in the time it takes the bullet to drop 4.9m it would have traveled approximately 8,330 meters. So, it's not just a little lower but a lot lower 2-5x lower. Face it, PS2 bullet velocities, drop and damage reduction at range means they handle more like airsoft guns than high performance futuristic military hardware. Of course, this is a game so realism is not some great arbiter- though personally I would like all the weapons to behave a bit more like real weapons would because all of them are very very far from this and I think it is intentionally designed this way to promote CQC and make it easier for players to run around in the open when enemies are nearby.