SNIPERS: A Nightmare for Developers and Players

I recall an old quote of Tf2s balancing issues. It went something like: "Not one class was designed around an individual player having 50k hours of playtime on said class."

Another thing to consider is hitscan vs projectile. The original snipers in fortnite had massive travel times making shots far harder to hit and feel much more fun to use and fight.

I always believe this solution would work for tf2: Old school Halo had a great idea where if you recieve a threshold of damage, then you get unscoped. This would allow a lot of classes, even Heavy, to fight back, and doesn't result the sniper being useless and is forced to reposition which is SUPPOSE to be his downside, where he has to avoid being targeted.

The fix is easy: remove the reticle when not in ADS and adding a slight weight variation when shooting at the hip and force scopes to have a 8x and larger zoom forcing long-distance combat. This makes no scopes very difficult and the gun only is useful at long range. That way snipers would need to swap to secondary in close quarters.

You forgot to mention the ORIGINAL Team Fortress, which was based on Quake. The Sniper had a gradual zoom that zoomed in over a few seconds and got more powerful as it zoomed. So it got harder to aim at the same time as it got more powerful. Shooting unzoomed was about the same damage as a standard rifle.

quickscoping becoming it’s own thing just made this fight that much more complicated

As someone who spent about 200h in BF3 alone quickscoping with sniper rifles I can affirm they're often the better shotguns in close range if your aim is good enough. While we're at Battlefield I feel like it is one of the shooter series out there that managed to make among the best trade-off between playability and balancing while not sacrificing too much realism. There have been multiple of the solutions you proposed implemented to BF: - scope glare on high range scopes (>4x) - low hip fire accuracy - suppression mechanics (reduces accuracy if you're under fire, the more bullets the worse the penalty gets, meaning you cannot camp a corner successfully if someone is sending 200 MG rounds at you) - scope sway when ads - being able to steady your breath for a second or two (increases tunneling thus reduces mobility, basically a more realistic approach to what TF2 did) - a bipod attachment that removes scope sway (makes you extremely immobile and combined with scope glare makes you an easy target while you're ads) - a variable damage amount depending on distance with an optimal damage range that allows for oneshot body shots (no close range one shots) - an actual bullet travel path (in games like CS and Valorant snipers are often hitscan weapons, in BF you have to factor in the bullet dropoff and travel times over distances) And the advantage BF has over most other shooters mentioned here: - a class system limiting the availability of gadgets that snipers can use - gadgets of the sniper class are usually less offensive and more utility based (e.g. tools to spot enemies or laser designate vehicles for other classes with lock-on-missiles) - way bigger maps (encouraging the use of bigger scopes for snipers and playing less aggressively and more stealth/range oriented) - vehicles (vastly outdamage and outtank snipers in all ranges so it forces them to seek secure cover and frequently move positions) - being able to destroy buildings which removes option for camping in cover - "slug rounds" as option for shotguns which turns them into close range sniper equivalents with way higher RPM but reduced distance I think they're quite well rounded in titles like BF4, BF1 or BFV and almost never felt unfair to play against.

I am planning on making an FPS shooter, but struggled with finding a good Sniper solution thx for not only mentioning the issues, but also possible solutions for it

Many games have mechanics similar to over-penetration. Simply, you do less damage up close because they just go clean through the target. This also has the fun mechanic of walbangs dealing MORE damage at close range

The sniper also has balancing options with map design as too many clear sightlines means you have too much long range availability. However, if you let those vantage points exist with some form of path to the point that isn't visible from the point, you can somewhat balance that

Damn, I almost never react to videos, but this one is amazing. Extremely well visualised and written. Your second idea is so good, that I physically feel hype for playing a game that implements this concept.

ngl but when I get killed by a sniper in my head I'm like "nice shot bro" but when I get killed by a shotgun at a distance where the spread shouldn't even do more than 10, "Bro I could've one something dammit"

Let's not forget that in CS:GO a lot of gameplay revolves around sound cues. the sniper makes noise when you scope in, so players have the choice of walking around scoped in which leaves them open to more angles, or staying unscoped, increasing time to kill, as the snipers are still inaccurate for a few moments after ADS. In higher level CS, giving away your position is almost always a death wish

The game Project Reality has a feature known as “stability.” The way it works is that if you move around and then aim down sights, your shots will have higher deviation. In order to shoot accurately, you have stay still for a moment to stabilize your gun.

Splatoon is not exactly an FPS game but honestly it's definitely figured out how to make a fair sniper in my opinion. All they did was add a forced wind up every time you take a shot, and sprinting forces you to wind up all over again. However EVERY sniper one shots no matter what when you land a hit. This completely changes how snipers play in Splatoon, because it forces the sniper to be a lot more committal with their aim and makes more chances to bait out shots without instantly dying. And this also allows the devs to make entirely new ways to balance snipers, by making faster charging ones with less range, and slower charging ones with more range. It's a unique take on snipers that I'd like to see if it's possible to be put into a FPS game one day. One other thing to note in Splatoon is that snipers have pinpointers not just visible to you, but to everyone else in the game, which generally makes fights a lot less "hold this one angle".

One of the ways i do like when it comes to “balancing classes/weapons” is loadout points. Specifically The Last of Us’s Multiplayer system of 9-13 loudout points. Sure the burst rifle is still pretty broken in that system and some perks too, but i feel it’s a great start to take in consideration for another piece to the puzzle to balance player loadouts. This way it kinda follows your price/range bulletpoint that you ideally want to feature, although the shotgun is more expensive in TLOU than the strongest sniper rifle.

Your editing style has always been high quality, so it’s great seeing you branch out from valorant.

The quake Railgun is a pretty cool solution I think, due to how fast you can move through the arena, the you have to have a really good aim to even consider using the weapon

Hey, i think it would be interesting to bring this up again. Thats becurse, the new game Finals has some unusual game mekaniks regarding the sniper. Great video btw

I like your “reverse falloff” solution, i think more games should attempt unintuitive solutions to balancing instead of the most intuitive, because sometimes it can give really nice solutions like that, would be very interesting to see that in game.