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 team...
Forum Discussion
@2042isNotBF Yeah, I kept pressing Q out of habit, but obviously no spotting came from it. However, I think that a sniper cap in Grand Operations and some other select game modes makes sense - just not on all game modes such as Conquest and the new Battle Royale mode, Firestorm.
And, IMHO, adding in a new Combat Role for Supports so that they can spot snipers ADSing with sniper glint will address some of your request. I intentionally chose the Support class because they've seen the lowest selection in Beta by far at just 13% vs. the 26% for the Sniper class. So, Supports need to be promoted at the expense of Snipers, which adds to the "rock, paper, scissors" balance to the classes.
@SterlingARCH3R Sadly at this point after over 100hrs between the two alphas and the beta I just see BFV reg mode being made into hardcore mode and this is just silly to me as no spotting is called hardcore. With them removing spotting from everyone but sniper it just feels unbalanced and a waste of time to play the way it sits just now. When we hit Q in the other classes all it did was show last known position and that is just silly map spam and a waste of time in my mind and can get you killed. I do not care on last known position as they have moved on and its distracting / can get you killed.
Your point is good don't get me wrong but just now I see BFV as I will not spend many hrs in as I am no fan of hardcore and play it almost never. BFV could be a great game but with all the issues with no spotting for everyone but recon they have killed what could have been a great game. The last night of the Beta I was with ten people in my TS playing BFV in two maps eight people left due to being killed by sniper as they are to far away so it does not show the red outline of going to hunt them down and kill them. At first it was funny killed by sniper over and over again with every spawn. But by the second map everyone was like ....it and quit as about 70% of the other team was playing sniper. Hard core fans may love this but for reg mode fans it makes BFV a big unbalanced fail :/
- Games like Overwatch, at the very least, give a message at the start stating "too many X types" and I think this could work well too. A lot of snipers are just thinking of themselves, and seeing a message like this could make them think "oh ok, maybe I'll play a different class". Probably won't work all the time but every little bit helps right?
Just like the arty trucks, shotties, and bombers, you can make an argument that the person bought the game and should be able to play however they want but it's amazing just how much of a [negative] difference they make.
10 snipers is a decent number to cap things at in my mind but I know finding an exact number might cause a headache. I hope there is some sort of spot feature so people can't just camp the same location for the whole map, especially now with all the tweaks to spotting and target acquisitionI think that 8 is a good number - it's 1/4 of the total number, and snipers are 1/4 of the number of classes - but it's not primarily for equal distribution's sake. You need a lot of people pushing and it's hard to push when you have 10+ snipers on the field, especially in game modes like Operations.
Also, yes I generally agree that if you bought the game, then you should be able to do whatever you want with it. However, in this case, too many snipers will negatively affect almost everyone else playing and give them less overall enjoyment.
To look at it another way, I think about it like basketball - just because someone buys a basketball, it doesn't give them the ability to change the rules for everyone else, or no one would want to play (i.e. removing the 24-second shot clock violation, which was introduced over half a century after the game was founded, and its intent was to accelerate the game and prevent one team from hogging the ball and creating a stalemated situation). Of course, in our situation, we don't even have the analogous 24-second shot clock violation rule (sniper # cap rule), so players are struggling to accelerate to the objective in-game. Well, there's the dwindling ticket count of course, but that doesn't do enough to promote PTFO; so as far as intended effect is concerned, we need a better rule in play.
TL;DR: BF needs its own 24-second shot clock violation rule (in the form of a sniper # cap) to accelerate PTFO gameplay.
