Sniper Rifles, Scopes and the Metagame. A Suggestion to change Firefight dynamics.

[Luftwaffle (DayZ) 2]

I would like to propose that the Almost EVERY zoom Optic in the game be removed, except for a VERY limited and select few.

The way I see DayZ right now, It is all about a huge campfest with sniper rifles. Please discuss or point out anything I may miss, but if the majority of "Zoom" optics are taken out what are we left with?

• The Metagame shifts from sitting and waiting in rooftops/trees/bushes/hides. To a more CQB style of combat especially within cities. (opening up a more tactical feel, such as groups using cover fire and flanking. To leap frogging into or out of a hot area of town.
  

• Instill a fear of mortality in a firefight. A red dot on a military grade weapon has an undoubted advantage against a poor farmers shotgun. But not so large as to say if your the poor sod with a "winnie", you may as well cash your chips. Where as If someone has a 12x scope and is firing at me all I can do is dance the dance and hope he runs out of ammunition before he puts one through my chest. Because it is very hard to find enemy contact from a distance especially if they are prone. (as it should be, it is a Military Simulator).
  

• Firefights, Squad or even in a one vs one encounter go from a, I've seen you first (1-5) bullet exchange. (if your lucky enough to live AND have a weapon to fight back with AND find your contact.). To a more natural, realistic and more tense contact. EX: "first contact"->A:hit B:miss->A:stand and fight B: try and find a way to disengage get more range and escape this fight: Giving Covering fire to escape, Covering Fire to maneuvre a flank with a buddy, Covering fire to leapfrog yourself or a buddy/squad forward into an offensive.
  
• Player interaction is forced, if you are MADE to be within 100 yds, or closer to have a sure shot.
  

• Long Range shooting becomes a "Skill", being able to judge bullet drop or lead a target from a significant distance from a Red dot or a Iron sight makes long range engagements more about "skill" and less of a point and click adventure.
  

• If you don't like to shoot from long range, stalking and getting close enough to Kill without being noticed is another "Skill" requiring you to out think your prey and be one step ahead of them.
  

I feel that the elimination or HEAVY limitation of ZOOM scoped weapons, Would do nothing but good for the Realistic and Tense feel that DayZ has always strived for. There would still be sighted weapons to look for and acquire to have an advantge in a fight. I am proposing the elimination of the very High powered scopes. I do believe that ACOG or 1P29 are fine. It's more that the High power sniper rifle and their Prevelence in the game retract from the experience and take away from the feel of the game.

Any further ideas, Counter points, Criticisms, questions are more then welcome.

Thank you for reading

Luftwaffle

[koze 113]

I'd just like to say that removing all/most scopes in the game is a horrible idea. Thus said I've just thought of a better way to solve this issue, I even wrote a thread about it so more people can see it.

You can read it here:

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/103385-how-to-reduce-the-impact-of-sniper-rifles/

[Trizzo 632]

The Metagame shifts from sitting and waiting in rooftops/trees/bushes/hides. To a more CQB style of combat especially within cities. (opening up a more tactical feel, such as groups using cover fire and flanking. To leap frogging into or out of a hot area of town

Third person needs to be removed from the game to stop periscope sit and wait. I agree about sit and wait. If players want to lay an abmush part of the consideration needs to be concealmeant. Balancing how hidden they are as opposed to their visibility BUT transitioning to a CQB based game is a bad idea. Pitch a tent in Electro if CQB is your thing. Personally i like rolling enagements, flanking and covering fire.

Instill a fear of mortality in a firefight. A red dot on a military grade weapon has an undoubted advantage against a poor farmers shotgun. But not so large as to say if your the poor sod with a "winnie", you may as well cash your chips. Where as If someone has a 12x scope and is firing at me all I can do is dance the dance and hope he runs out of ammunition before he puts one through my chest. Because it is very hard to find enemy contact from a distance especially if they are prone. (as it should be, it is a Military Simulator).

I see a direction correlation between your comments and the reason why this thread exists. If your sniper avoidence stratergy includes dancing and getting shot you're going to have a bad time. Why not suppress obvious sniper postions (hill tops, bushes, tress, windows, count the seconds between impact and shot, listen to triangulate postion) by laying down blind cover fire from a covered postion (allowing other people to try to counter snipe). Carry smoke grenades, go prone+crawl away, run through concealed areas or behind cover OR just accept the fact that an AS50 has the area on lock down and you need to rethink your approach. Thats dynamic. Thats what makes DayZ, DayZ.

Firefights, Squad or even in a one vs one encounter go from a, I've seen you first (1-5) bullet exchange. (if your lucky enough to live AND have a weapon to fight back with AND find your contact.). To a more natural, realistic and more tense contact. EX: "first contact"->A:hit B:miss->A:stand and fight B: try and find a way to disengage get more range and escape this fight: Giving Covering fire to escape, Covering Fire to maneuvre a flank with a buddy, Covering fire to leapfrog yourself or a buddy/squad forward into an offensi

If you want a game of fire and manouver ARMA 2 is good, ARMA 3 is coming out. Nothing is currently stopping people doing these tactics in DayZ. Most people just seem to (wrongly) conserve their ammunition, choose not to suppress and only shoot at a moving target. Their fault. Doesn't need an engine/gameplay overhaul.

Player interaction is forced, if you are MADE to be within 100 yds, or closer to have a sure shot.

NO, no and no! A .22 bullet will easily reach this distance and do it accurately. Firefights can be CQB or 600m+ it's diverse. A bullet travels as far as it is pushed, 100yrds for every round is arbitery and unrealistic. Firefights can happen from pointblank to 600+ meters. Just look at the debate on the effectivness of standard issue (Western) rifles in Afghanistan in terms of range, it's not far enough!

Long Range shooting becomes a "Skill", being able to judge bullet drop or lead a target from a significant distance from a Red dot or a Iron sight makes long range engagements more about "skill" and less of a point and click adventure.

Bullets are not as erratic as i think you think they are. Between 100-200 meters most 'militrary rounds' from a generic rifle will not drop in a signifcant way that you would miss a shot aimed at centre mass. Example. I sight in my rifle for 100 meters. Between 50-200 meters the drop will off center probally by a couple of inchs, not a complete miss. Still going to hit the target.

I do agree long range shooting needs far more tweaking. Increasing the amount of potential dials by 25m Quaters, instead of intervals of 100m, AS50 removed because it is far to easy to use with no long range experience, third person gone so long range shooters do away with the imbalaced prone+spotting combo.

Edited October 30, 2012 by Trizzo

[indominator 95]

complaining about pvp, its fine we just need to learn to deal better with it and be more careful, just high end snipers are way too common.

The game mechanics will not be changed for one person, i am sorry but you have to addapt, like most players. Its hard, but you should addapt and if you always get shot in cherno go to other places, cherno and elektro are not the only cities.

[Luftwaffle (DayZ) 2]

I just believe that it does not make sense in a realistic way, or even a fun engaging gameplay standpoint that everyone in the entire apocalypse is a crackshot from 800yds out and packing a High end military grade Sniper system, like the game is now. That is just my opinion but, It has really stagnated the gameplay and made DayZ into a point and click adventure with zombies and people in the distance.

Third person needs to be removed from the game to stop periscope sit and wait.

This is another discussion for another Time but I whole heartedly agree with this. Sure it's cool seeing your gun or character move around the world,etc, but the seeing around corners or over walls without showing yourself is completely broken and ruins the gunplay.

Edited October 30, 2012 by Luftwaffle

[wolfstriked 143]

I agree about it being sniperville.I watch videos from Sacriel and while I love to watch them I hope to never run into him and his crew.They are on full blown "spot and kill anything that moves" mode from high distances.That plus they are on comms and practice this way of playing day in and day out and I will get killed instantly as I search for supplies.But I am a good player up close so while I do not like using sniper rifles I find I may have to out of necessity.

But a way to fix this without removing the sniper weapons is easy IMO.

Get rid of anti-material rifles and to counter the anti-material aspect of them add in RPG's.This is huge as it gives players a fighting chance to survive against snipers.

Get rid of range finders....silly addition to game making sniping easy....remove it for easy way to increase player skill being part of sniping.

The lack of one shot kills unless a headshot is greatly needed.

[Topol (DayZ) 8]

Third person needs to be removed from the game to stop periscope sit and wait. I agree about sit and wait. If players want to lay an abmush part of the consideration needs to be concealmeant. Balancing how hidden they are as opposed to their visibility BUT transitioning to a CQB based game is a bad idea. Pitch a tent in Electro if CQB is your thing. Personally i like rolling enagements, flanking and covering fire.

I think the goal of making snipers more rare isn't to make DayZ a CQB based game, it's to make CQB possible in Dayz. Currently, any high pop server is going to have so many people with anti-materiel rifles that if you stand still anywhere that isn't in the middle of nowhere you die instantly. This is the primary reason for why I don't play DayZ anymore, it's boring unless you enjoy sitting on the hill over electro for 12 hours at a time.

I see a direction correlation between your comments and the reason why this thread exists. If your sniper avoidence stratergy includes dancing and getting shot you're going to have a bad time. Why not suppress obvious sniper postions (hill tops, bushes, tress, windows, count the seconds between impact and shot, listen to triangulate postion) by laying down blind cover fire from a covered postion (allowing other people to try to counter snipe). Carry smoke grenades, go prone+crawl away, run through concealed areas or behind cover OR

Kind of difficult to do any of that when the first shot kills you every single time.

just accept the fact that an AS50 has the area on lock down and you need to rethink your approach. Thats dynamic. Thats what makes DayZ, DayZ.

I don't think there's much of a market for a game where the gameplay is to just sit in the woods all the time, doing nothing.

Edited October 31, 2012 by Topol

[Icharus (DayZ) 13]

Remove all snipers apart from the SVD and CZ.

Ok, maybe not that far but look at the SVD for example, although being a top class, stealthy looking sniper, no one uses it but me and 1 other in my entire clan. Why? Well, here is the answer I mainly get "Omg why use the SVD it has sucky sights, AS50 is so much better" Same for the DMR. Personally I love using the M14 Sniper varient and it's my second sniper after the SVD as they take an inch of skill to use past "Page up, page up, page up, left mouse, kill confirmed" If we removed Zeroing from snipers, you'll see how quickly people will stop using them, or at least how much they will start missing.

[Zeppa 562]

But removing zeroing woudnt be "realistic", it should be made slower and no visual text about zeroing, you have to count the clicks and zero your gun "manually". Without rangefinder "manual" zeroing woudnt be very accurate.

Edited November 1, 2012 by Zeppa