Tom Berenger has a lot to answer for

[leehwgoc@gmail.com 7]

The problem is that sniper rifles are too common to find.

Make them rarer loot spawns. As rare as NVGs. Bingo, problem solved, without removing the aspect from the game.

Practically speaking, it would also make the DayZ world more realistic in effect... there just aren't many people who can use sniper rifles with any reliability, takes a great deal of training and practice. Soldiers good enough to qualify as designated marksmen are themselves uncommon among their peers, and rarer still among a group of mere civilians trying to scavenge weapons and stay alive in the post-apocalypse.

Edited July 27, 2012 by cogwheel

[dirkdeadeye 8]

FPS games need sniper rifles. People don't want to engage in man on man gun fights. They want to be miles away.

I doubt they're going anywhere..because there would be a tsunami of butthurt.

I don't like them personally. But, it's a balance of having people interested.. versus gameplay.

[Chandler (DayZ) 14]

In other words :

Invisible sniper, YOU KILLED KENNY!!! YOU BASTARD!!!

I was SO there with ya on that one. Had the image in my head and everything. Damn it, I need to find a buddy willing to create a "Kenny" profile and always be on point duty.

[Huey (DayZ) 87]

Tom disagrees, snipers are here to stay.

Problem?

Edited July 27, 2012 by MilkyWay

[ParaB 114]

IMO sniper rifles are FAR too common in DayZ. In my group basically everyone runs around with one in the backpack,and there are always a couple stashed in tents.

Especially the 0.50cal rifles should be rare as hell. And not something you find at basically any heli wreck.

I'd go even further and drastically reduce the spawn rates of basically ALL military weapons. Especially on deer stands. It's ridiculous how easy it is to obtain fully automatic weapons in the game.

[ZedsDeadBaby 2287]

Essentially we never saw who hit us. You could say he's playing the game well, but I don't feel it's really PvP with guys being able to take people out from great distances, relatively safe from small arms, machine gun & assault rifle fire.

Everyone acts like PvP just begins and ends when the shots are fired.

PvP is more than that.

Not being seen is part of PvP.

Sniper rifles play a critical role in the game. I shouldn't have to expose myself to your assault rifle fire in order to cover my friends while they loot a crashed helicopter in the middle of an open field. That undermines a huge part of the game's tactics and tactical combat is part of what DayZ does best.

Would combat involve more shooting without sniper rifles? Yes, probably. But, why is that automatically a good thing? This "everyone gets a chance to shoot" mentality is just goofy.

I absolutely have no support or sympathy for anyone who wants to see them "gone" simply because they died without seeing their murderer's face.

[ratfever 27]

Snipers were made to kill at a distance... And now you complain about people killing at a distance? A sniper is supposed to be a ghost, unseen. His disadvantages? The gun is heard for miles around. Sniping from a great enough distance takes some skill. If a sniper fires on you, be sure to zig zag, and confuse him, it makes sniping 10x harder and more frustrating. Perhaps have a friend provide overwatch via sniper for you guys? Allowing him the ability to counter-snipe.

[zutha 3]

How about people stop trying to dictate how others should play...

[zutha 3]

I love the mentality:

Bandits = scripters = kiddies....

I prefer Rocket's description: Bandits = players who are playing and not whining on the forums.

[xwhitemousex 67]

I have said this numerous times in various posts.

The military grade weapons need to be reduced and the ammo made alot more rare.

Why is there DMR's and G17's in random civilian deerstands used for hunting?

Why is there M16's and AK's in a civilian fire station?

Most apocalypse/zombe survival movies or series you see the survivors have mostly:

1. No weapons, or using melee items such as hatchets, baseball bats, improvised weapons such as clubs, tablelegs and whatmore.

2. Most commonly they have handguns, such as revolvers and pistols.

3. Sometimes they have heavier guns such as pump action shotguns, double barrels or semiauto shotguns.

4. Very rarely you see maybe one of them has a scoped hunting rifle.

And... with the guns you see the people in the movies/series carry around, they almost always start running out of ammunition... or try to conserve their shots because they have so few or just want to avoid detection (because zombies are a real threat).

The lack of heavy firepower and the low availability of ammunition is a key point why those movies and series are exciting. They are low on ammo or even lost their guns... what to do next? Try to recover guns? Make a run for it? Or they sometimes end up in a very problematic situation where they have to start shooting alot, which eventually leads to them being forced to run anyways because they attract too much attention.

In DayZ the excitement is found in the very start, just after you respawned or when you started the game. Why? Because you have no gun, or very little ammunition. You have to be careful because you don't want to spend your few rounds or because you have no way to defend yourself. That is part of what makes the game exciting and fun to play.

Once you get enough food and weapons/ammo in DayZ the game immediately becomes boring... and you end up running around hunting players because you got plenty of ammo to spend... or you go chasing helicopter crashes to upgrade your weapons.

As far as I am concerned they could remove every military sniper rifle from the game and leave only the CZ550 which would be very rare to find, and ammo hard to come by. The common guns in the game should be handguns and shotguns, or unscoped rifles like the Enfield. The few military grade weapons that should be in the game would be automatics like AK's and M16 or M4's... definitely not M249's, AS50's or L85's with thermal scopes.

Only reason all those military guns are in the game is because it's based on ArmA which is a straight-up military simulator and they haven't done a proper itemization in the game while it's in alpha, which is obvious considering we have thermalscope L85's in the game but no AS50 TWS.

With less snipers it would also mean alot more situations within cities or towns where people run into eachother around streetcorners or inside a supermarket... which leads to alot more interesting and "on the fly" decisions needing to be made than having bullets whizz past your ears from 1000 meters away. If this game is supposed to be an experiment in human behaviour like Rocket says then you need to put people in tense situations... being fired at by a sniper is not a tense situation. You either die, or you run between buildings to get out of sight and just stay put.

Tom Berenger can go back to vanilla ArmA 2 where military type sniping and weapons belong... and stay out of a survival game where a bunch of civilians are thrown in together.

Isn't the goal of the game survival, or did I misread something and the goal of the game was "Sniper Ghost Warrior: Realism Edition" ?

[Humbabwe 16]

It seems to me that its a problem that has been going on for centuries, beginning probably with archers. That is the point of snipers. People, in war, when capturing snipers, used to torture the shit out of them, and probably still do. In my opinion, what needs to be done is sniper rifles need to be more pinpointable (the sound I mean), nothing else. I don't know, I don't really think sniper rifles should be nerfed or anything... but I do feel your pain.

Here's a story to possibly make you feel better. I, a friend who just started last night, and a friend who started a week ago, decided to teach the newest friend how to loot. :D :D. Anyway, we set it up so that the week in friend was sniping from afar, watching our backs while we hit up the east of Mogilevka. We're in the red brick house (the last of our loot spots before we bounce) and he says "Oh shit, is that you outside?", and Im like "Negative". So he takes two shots... misses. Me and V, I'll call her, hit the floor in the brick building and I freak out thinking she is him, shoot at her, miss, but give away our position. (He had been running to our building to get away from the sniper fire. Now three zombies are agroed on my sniper, and we're stuck in the red house. Long story short, we make it most of the way out of trouble, only to run into another dude who must have heard the sniper fire and come in from the south east. I get shot and killed, V then goes down next, and finally my friend watches as these two dudes fight each other, the winner of which finds my sniper and kills him. Bottom line, we suck... but snipers dont always win :D:D

[Bottlerocket 205]

Why is there DMR's and G17's in random civilian deerstands used for hunting?

Why is there M16's and AK's in a civilian fire station?

Totally agree with your post, and think it would make the game much more like an apocalyptic scenario if everyone wasn't running around with more hardware than the entire cast of GI Joe.

But to answer your questions - I like to think that as the zombie plague swept over the land these places were taken over by the military in a vain attempt to stop the hordes. That's why you get military zombies there.

You have to remember that DayZ is set after the end of the world. Just look at all the wreckage around - all those battles against the undead that were ultimitely futlie. The barricades in even isolated towns. The crashed Humvees, the wrecked helicopters.... It gives me the shivers, I tell you.

Deerstands were commandeered because they were out in the country and could be useful to control the flow of refugees trying to creep away from infection hotspots like the cities.

Fire stations became control centres in those cities.

But nothing worked.

The dead rose.

The slaughter began.

[dallas 5195]

In PvP speed and solid cover is everything.

Become unpredictable, plan your route to pass as many obstacles as possible, keep on the move and keep cover close. If you're moving, you increase the chance of the first shot missing you. If you're constantly moving in and out of sight, cutting corners and only stopping for short moments, you might force the sniper to rush his shot or wait for an easier target.

It doesn't take alot to miss a long distance shot and if you keep cover close, you can do your best to deny the sniper a chance to correct and hit. If a shot misses you, you have a very short time to react. As sound travels slower than bullets, when you hear the bang, the shooter has already had a half second to reload, recover his aim and adjust the shot. When you hear the first shot it's time to up and run, keep runnig till you reach cover and use whatever follow up shot that misses you, to figure out which side of the cover you want to hide behind. Trust your flight instinct and just go!

If you have to alert the whole towns zombies, do that, but keep running until you have solid cover between you and the shooter. When you're behind cover you can decide if you want to deal with the zombies and then the sniper or keep running. If you decide to run, stay unpredictable and chose the path with the most bushes, corners and obstacles. If you want to take the sniper out, you have to find a way to locate his position, without presenting a static target.

Edited July 27, 2012 by Dallas

[osirish 165]

I think the whole ... "make ammo scarcer", "remove sniper rifles", "lower drop rates" .... are all discussions that are a waste of time.

The truth is ... this is an alpha with some major bugs in the game engine.

"Make ammo scarcer" is a useless argument as long as ammo can be duped and replicated ... maybe the drop rate is perfect as it is, but due to glitches, it is more common.

"Remove sniper rifles or lower drop rates", again, maybe they are fine as is, we won't know until the tent dupe glitch is solved. I've seen numerous weapons left in tents and removed, magically reappear with a server reset, even if the tents were saved.

If everyone was out looking for crash sites and constantly checking the barracks, there would be fewer sniper rifles around. As long as the glitches remain, both accidental and intentional, and hackers are spawning weapons crates, we'll never know whether or not the balance is fine, and the constant threads making these suggestions will continue.

[xwhitemousex 67]

If the military was overrun, as you say... wouldn't they have used up the majority of their ammunition in their failed attempt to stagger the zombie hordes?

Or to put it bluntly, wouldn't the amount of ammunition be severely reduced and/or near impossible to find?

Sure, loads of guns dropped by overrun and dead soldiers... but no ammo cause they spent it all.

Furthermore we don't really know what happened. So if we are going to speculate on that, we might as well say the military successfully withdrew the largest part of the population and their own personnel and vehicles, and what we see as we arrive on the scene in the aftermath is simply those that didn't make it. Hence, the military would have shipped out the majority of their supplies (including ammo stores).

Either way... there is a massive overload of sniping in the game in it's current state... which draws the game away from the survival encounters you might have had within the cities or outlaying villages.

There is little suspense or excitement when everyone carries around enough ammunition to blow away the entire zombie population in a city if they want to. The last time I checked my tent I had 20 DMR magasines in there. And I know for certain others have alot more, and higher end, ammunition such as M249 boxes, AS50 ammo, Dragunov ammo and whatmore... and plenty of it as well (in fact so much I couldn't carry it all and had to ride a bicycle over the tents to destroy the contents).

Anyways... this game is about spending roughly 1 or 2 hours to get yourself something scoped... then go camp a city to inflate your murder count.

If the scoped rifles were removed, or at the very least made much, much rarer to come across... there would be alot more action going in within the cities as people would have to get in closer to find other players due to the lack of long range sighting on their weapons.

Right now it's a sniper simulator because;

1. Scoped weapons are so easy to find.

2. Everyone likes taking shots at players without them being able to shoot back

3. By laying 1000 meters away you minimize the risk of being killed, and by extension the risk of losing your scoped weapons.

The risk vs reward in the game is completely gone once you got scoped weapons.

People with shotguns and handguns are putting themselves at a very real risk of being shot as they have to get within the 100m engagement radius... while anyone with a scope can lay in cover and have a field day without being spotted.

Put some risk into sniping or remove/reduce the availability of snipers in the game.

[Gogster (DayZ) 626]

I think the whole ... "make ammo scarcer", "remove sniper rifles", "lower drop rates" .... are all discussions that are a waste of time.

The truth is ... this is an alpha with some major bugs in the game engine.

"Make ammo scarcer" is a useless argument as long as ammo can be duped and replicated ... maybe the drop rate is perfect as it is, but due to glitches, it is more common.

"Remove sniper rifles or lower drop rates", again, maybe they are fine as is, we won't know until the tent dupe glitch is solved. I've seen numerous weapons left in tents and removed, magically reappear with a server reset, even if the tents were saved.

If everyone was out looking for crash sites and constantly checking the barracks, there would be fewer sniper rifles around. As long as the glitches remain, both accidental and intentional, and hackers are spawning weapons crates, we'll never know whether or not the balance is fine, and the constant threads making these suggestions will continue.

I disagree with you. I think whilst a game is in alpha is the perfect time to point out improvements.

Edited July 27, 2012 by Gogster

[scoobysnacks 32]

The problem is exacerbated by te infinite ammo. If that were fixed i doubt it would be as prevalent as it currently is.

I think you are absolutely right, ammo should be limited with these very powerful, highly scoped weapons.

Also it is a massive burden to carry one of these babies around they should either be 15-20 slots in your pack or unable to place in a backpack at all.

[Gogster (DayZ) 626]

I think you are absolutely right, ammo should be limited with these very powerful, highly scoped weapons.

Also it is a massive burden to carry one of these babies around they should either be 15-20 slots in your pack or unable to place in a backpack at all.

The problem with this suggestion against removal or 0.001% chance of drop is that snipers don't need anything else, a bit of food, a bit of drink and they're happy to camp for hours/days.

[osirish 165]

I disagree with you. I think whilst a game is in alpha is the perfect time to point out improvements.

Again, if you read my point, as the game is in alpha, it is pointless to say "reduce ammo" when it can be replicated. It is pointless to say, "remove or reduce snipers" when they can be replicated. "Pointing out improvements" for a problem that is bug related, and not drop related, is not productive as the mod is in alpha!

Fix the replication problems and then feel free to discuss the drop rates.

Edited July 27, 2012 by osirish

[Gogster (DayZ) 626]

Again, if you read my point, as the game is in alpha, it is pointless to say "reduce ammo" when it can be replicated. It is pointless to say, "remove or reduce snipers" when they can be replicated. "Pointing out improvements" for a problem that is bug related, and not drop related, is not productive as the mod is in alpha!

Fix the replication problems and then feel free to discuss the drop rates.

No mate, again I disagree.

This is the perfect time - reducing ammo is one method, personally I would see them go or reduced greatly - the latter would require the duplication to be sorted I agree.

[tarquinbb 28]

the reason sniper's are OP is because it's far easier to see movement/people in a game world compared to the real world. limited resources, limited cover, limited draw distances for cover, limited draw distances for high res textures... it all means that a player at long range is basically a dark blob moving accross a non-so-dark texture.

ergo a lot of games have to 'balance' nerf the sniper rifle to compensate for this.

it almost makes me want something implemented which shows your killer's location after you die (like team fortress 2 kill cam). but not exact coordinates or orientation, so you have to work that out for yourself. because in real life if one of your squad mates dies to a sniper then you'd have a pretty good idea where it came from because you would be hidden from 99% of vantage points.

this would effectively punish camping, which is an easy and boring way to play. camping should offer benefits, but never to the extent in dayz where camping forever is the safest and most successful thing to do. basically - if you were playing dayz for a cash prize - EVERYYOOOOOOONE would find a camping spot and remain stationary for the entire game.

Edited July 27, 2012 by tarquinbb

[Jex =TE= (DayZ) 218]

It doesn't take much skill to shoot a stationary object from 300m and as for "snipers" - when they add in every factor that effects a bullet over ranges then that will be what sorts out those who know how to shoot and those that just have to guess the range.

[benjaminvnelson@gmail.com 7]

I don't pay as a bandit and have never killed another player, but I don't mind the snipers. It adds to the tension. I can be almost anywhere on the map and still feel like I could be shot at. Knowing this makes me spend a long time scouting areas with my binocs before proceeding. It's pretty exiting. Even more so when a bullet whizzes near to you and you have to try and figure out where you are getting shot from to hide. If I knew that I wasn't going to get shot at from a long distance I wouldn't be half as worried. A map of this size needs sniper rifles imo.

[Gogster (DayZ) 626]

Gonna put this to a poll to, if you would kind gentlemen.

Thanks. :thumbsup:

[Tigger (DayZ) 24]

Again the same thing. Sniper rifles ARE rare. In 3 weeks I found 1 CZ550, 1 DMR and 1 M24. (compared to 25 AKMs, M16s M4s, etc, etc).

Why everyone has one is item duping. Take it out of your tent, next restart it's back there. Get killed? Run to your tent, take your sniper rifle and ghillie suit, go back sniping. If you had to search a week to get a good rifle, you wouldn't run to the hill N of Elektrozavodsk to snipe noobs. Because once a day a fresh spawn comes by and chops you up with an axe and you have to spend another week farming weapons.

Once this gets fixed and weapons properly despawn, it'll be back to how it should be.