There's a lot of energy right now around the topic of the effectiveness of snipers and the lack of good suppressive options. In contemplating solutions we have to keep in mind that not all the gadgets are out and it appears that some explosive weapons like tank shells have placeholder damage that will likely be increased upon launch.

With that said I think it can still be a fruitful exercise to brain storm some solutions to this problem.

By now virtually everyone has seen the meme with the scope glints so numerous they look like they're forming a constellation. So for me that begs the question of hard caps. BF is a game of territorial capture and all other 3 classes have decent claims to being at least modestly capture orientated. With that in mind, should we treat sniper rifle users as unique support class akin to how vehicles and cavalry have been treated and implement a per map hard cap in order to preserve the intended game flow? I think there's a strong case to be made that even after implementing the other solutions that will be presented below, the game would still benefit from limiting the amount of players that are not well suited for flag capture.

Sweet Spot

I don't know all the details on this so I'll keep it brief: Essentially, if the sweet spot is too generous then we may consider changing the applicable area from the body to just the upper chest or even the left side of the chest to represent the heart.

Suppression

Traditionally, suppression since BF3 has incorporated one or more of the following

• Increased weapon sway
• Reduced FOV
• Blurred screen
• Spread increase (accuracy penalty)

For more details you can see how BF4 handled it here

The main deterrent to snipers is the spread increase (accuracy penalty) that makes your bullets automatically go in directions away from the reticle. This prevents the sniper from being effective and encourages them to get away from the suppressive fire in order to remove the penalties. However, it is questionable whether it achieves the other intended effect of suppression which is to pin the enemy down given that with the lack of defensive penalties, enemies will often have little fear of popping out of cover to relocate.

One of the often pointed out gripes about this system is that it wrests control from the player and prevents them from fighting their way out of suppression if they are skilled enough. For example, if they detect a lull in the fire and perceive that as a reload and pop up to take a shot they are still saddled with the penalty making it nigh impossible to land a shot. Furthermore, if they are taking cover in the suppressed state and another enemy pops up on their flank that they have a shot lined up at they still suffer the accuracy penalty even though there is no danger of them being hit by the other person doing the suppressing.

To address the concerns made above I'm proposing a new way to approach Suppression:

*Remove all the other previously discussed effects and once the suppression meter threshold is breached you will instead receive an incoming damage modifier of say 1.25x that stacks with the headshot multiplier. As more suppression is applied the modifier would increase to a maximum of 1.5x normal damage. The thinking here is that if you want people to act in a manner consistent with being suppressed you need to instill fear and a great way to make people fearful is to make them vulnerable.

This encourages snipers to take cover but allows them an opportunity to out-skill their opponents at the risk of taking increased and, quite possibly, lethal damage. 

The devil is in the details though: Which weapons should do suppression? Should all classes/weapons be equally susceptible to it? How big do you make the suppression sphere? What is the suppression threshold and how quickly should it diminish?

Then there's the question of vehicle weapons which I think would require special care. For example, jet cannons could cause infantry suppression but not benefit from it so as to not interfere with the notion that jet cannons are supposed purposed towards anti vehicle use.

*Suppression would still prevent auto heal from starting and stop it if it is already in progress