The Case for a Sniper # Cap
Most of us dread the lone snipers camping off in the distance trying to amass a high kill count. And we experience that in Operations for both attackers and defenders - you often find your scout teammates annoying for not capping, and the enemy finds it annoying to have to deal with half a team or more of snipers which causes them to focus on counter-sniping instead of PTFO-ing. It's one thing if there are only a handful of them; but often times, I see a disproportionately large sum of them (in BF1) that kills any sort of momentum the game had, if it had any to begin with.
So why don't we limit the number of snipers a given match can have? I mean, there's a reason why we don't have entire invasion forces of snipers IRL, or even a fraction of that - they're nowhere near sufficient by themselves, and they're a relatively small group within the military. Why isn't there a navy crew class, or an artillery class, etc.? Of course, that's rhetorical; but they're just as important, if not more so, and more prevalent in number than snipers in the military. Yet, at the complete dismissal of these distinct and tangible classes, we bloat the importance of snipers and leave them as an unrestricted class.
And yes, there's the argument for a more sandbox approach, thus no restriction on the sniper count. But a win for the team that pushes effectively trumps the high KDR satisfaction of snipers who cost the team a win because there are too many scouts in the back. In other words, I wager that more people will be happier to have an intense match and a chance at winning, over playing a stalemated game trading sniper kills.
But stepping back from all of this, maybe we've been looking at the scout class the "wrong" way, especially when it comes to fostering greater team play. We could instead view them like a "limited" class, like we already do with tankers and pilots. It doesn't have to be that limited, but limiting their numbers somewhere in between them and the core classes seems appropriate (e.g. a quarter of the team count; a full server would be a cap of 8 scouts per team - that's still a lot in my book but that's a good start). By capping the scout numbers in that manner, we won't have to lower the damage done by sniper shots (I've noticed that in Closed Alpha the bullets did around 51 or so damage for a non-hs), and stay truer to a scout weapon's damage stats.
And, to ameliorate other unintended consequences that this scout # cap may have, we can lower the number of scout-based exp requirements to level up. That means that it won't take nearly as much experience to level up your scout class, and so it won't be as much of a grind as the other unrestricted classes. Not to mention, we can still have marksmen rifles for the other three classes - they're some of my favorites for the medic class in BF1 and are really effective. Of course, you'd still have custom servers that can dish out as many scouts as they want, and this would only apply to certain game modes such as for Grand Operations. [EDIT: Keeping the sandbox feel of the game for other game modes is a necessary appeal of the game.] For official servers, a sniper # cap is, to me at least, a sound solution to many players' frustrations.
Just my 2 cents. Any thoughts?
