Sniper Updates? - Probably, but read this first

Posted: 3 days ago
Hello-

I'm just going to be honest with you.

I don't like talking about the Snipers rifles and what we are going to do or not do. You see, for every reasonable person wishing to engage in a civil dialog, I get an earful from dozens or hundreds more who are unbelievable rude.

However, by far, this is the most common question people ask me about. We said (and I promised) that we would work hard to maintain a dialog with you about the game. So, despite the many ugly replies sure to follow, here I am.

First off, no matter what we do, the hardest core members Quick Scoping community will likely never be completely satisfied. The most common request I get is "...nobody complained how it was in Call of Duty 4 or World at War... make it like that." The people who say that must continue to not believe me when I tell you that we had it like "4 and World at War" a similar number of players were not very happy about it. Why do you think we changed it in the first place?

This is the update you have been asking about. Yes. We will probably make small tweaks to sniper rifles.

(1) We are evaluating the damage and hit box multipliers. Especially, if the weapon is suppressed.
(2) We are moving what many of you refer to as the "sniper rifle patch" into tunables we can adjust easier so that we can do some real-time experimentation

Anything we do is going to be carefully deliberated. Personally, I'm eager to get onto the business of "live tuning" the game, but not if it pushes the pendulum too far in a direction we don't want the game to go.

It will come. But, it will come really slowly (for many of you).

Finally, the sniper tuning conversation starts and stops with you. Act responsible. Get updates and a conversation. Some self-policing will go a long way. Act immature, get nothing.

David 'Vahn' Vonderhaar

UPDATE 1:

I've read the first 22 pages this morning. I appreciate the efforts many of you have made to keep the thread civil, which is why I am still reading. This thread is about sniper rifling tuning. Off topic posts get skipped entirely even if they are indirectly related. For example, the tuning of other weapons.

UPDATE 2:

Up to page 35. I've read every on-topic post. By far, the most constructive, mature conversation on these forums. I really appreciate that. It's why I will continue to read every single post.

We've checked in changes to increase the head, neck, helmet multipliers for all Sniper rifles. They are currently in test. These changes can not safely be hot fixed and will have to wait till the next title update. We are still evaluating the "sniper patch" sway.

UPDATE 3:

I've read up to page 64. The thread is losing some steam but I am happy with the dozens, if not hundreds, of excellent post from parties on both sides. No such thing as TL;DR here. Some of the posts are long and I've read those twice just to be sure I understand them.

I am not reading repeat posts, your posts with a large font, watching your montage videos, and I super disinterested in your attacks on me or Treyarch.

I do want to clear up a few misconceptions real fast:

- hit detection is not weapon specific and never has been. When people have issues with this it is often latency, anti-lag rewind, or client/server side prediction. In addition, people think they are hitting the upper chest, but they are hitting the arms of the player which are in front.

- hit boxes have been the same size/shape forever, although the location multipliers have changed per game and weapon

- weapon tuning is not "game mode" or "playlist" specific. It is not practical to make a "Sniper Playlist" or "Allow you to turn off the patch in Private Match."

A few people have suggested that removing the "initial sniper sway" when crouched or prone would still combat Quick Scoping, but penalize snipers less. This is a pretty interesting idea that should be evaluated, but I remain committed to the concepts in the OP first.

Update 4:

Up to page 77. Not enough posts read for a big update, but I am noticing a trend that I want to correct. I also want to continue to explain what you can expect out from me out of this thread.

One excellent poster wrote:

> Making it so that they [crosshairs] dont shrink, but stay at their full wide pattern until the scope is visible on the screen.

An interesting suggestion but typical of anyone who doesn't develop in the game engine. This is not a weapon specific tunable.

Many of your good suggestions can not be done without re-writing large part of the weapons system. What I am willing to do is tune the game with the tunables we have at our disposal. I am not willing to go to engineering with a request to flip up the basics of the weapons system in order to address the sniper complaints. Any such change would be way to risky for a post-shipped title and take new code to do it.

With the volume of traffic this thread has, I will not be able to respond to you directly. No need to take it personally. Picking up one of these updates and trying to make your own thread out of it, while lambasting the efforts of our team, is at best going to get ignored and in a worse case situation get you banned for violating the terms of service.