Exactly. While I agree that they should model full auto fire a lot better, in particular muzzle climb, the sniping stuff is absurdly easy. And it sucks to have some dickhead running around quick-scoping, or sniping from across the map that you can’t see…
Look at it this way; the military trains thousands of middling intelligence and skill civilian teenagers and young adults to be fully-fledged infantrymen every year in about 5 months.
Snipers on the other hand, require your average soldier to already be a rated infantryman, meet certain test scores, and have achieved a certain rank. And on top of that, they have to be rated “Expert” in marksmanship, meet certain physical fitness requirements, meet certain vision requirements, qualify for a certain security clearance, pass a psychological examination, and finally pass Sniper School. Snipers are RARE. There aren’t snipers assigned to every company or anything idiotic like that- I suspect that your average Battlefield or Call of Duty player might see a sniper every 10th match or so at most if they were as uncommon as they actually are.
Seems kind of shitty to me to abstract all that away and let any and all garden variety players be ‘snipers’ just because they choose that rifle in the fit-out screen.
I’d say let them choose the rifle, but make it realistically difficult- in other words, you’re just some grunt who happens to be wielding a sniper rifle, and about as bad as your average grunt would be with it at 400 yards.
Which kind of leads me into my second thought; rather than let you choose a set of several classes out of the gate, a-la the *Battlefield * games (it’s been a while since I played the CoD ones, so I don’t remember how they worked), start everyone as that qualified infantryman I mentioned above. You know how to operate all the weapons and have a basic level of skill. Then, as you play, your skills would get better as you use them, and you’d accumulate XP, and be able to spend your XP when you gain each level. Enhanced gear would be essentially randomly found, but you’d have a wide variety of balanced ‘standard’ weaponry, etc… that you can take at any time. Accoutrements like ACOG scopes, extended magazines, cosmetic improvements, etc… would be purchasable with XP, but would basically be at the expense of skills if that’s the way you want to roll.
So you’d start out as the usual basic player, and if you were to throw a lot of grenades, your grenade skill would improve. If you fired a lot with your pistol, that would improve. Larger weapons would probably have a handful of skills that would be applicable- aim, control, recovery, etc… and different weapons would enhance different ones in different ways. So if you were firing something like a M14, that would tend to improve aim more than recovery or control, while firing a M240 would enhance control and recovery more than aim. Sniper rifles would enhance aim and control almost exclusively. Your average assault rifle would enhance all about equally. And so on - even with non-weapon skills like first aid, demolitions, rocket launchers, etc… . Basically you’d be able to get good at how you actually play, but wouldn’t necessarily be good at other roles.
Even at that, sniping wouldn’t be ‘easy’, just not quite impossible.
So if you wanted to be the second coming of Vasili Zaitsev, you’d have to pick that sniper rifle, but you’d also have to have built up your aim and control skills, as well as picked up some sniper-specific perks like “hold breath”, “camouflage”, “stealth”, or something like that, AND be actually good enough yourself to do it well (you’d have to have practiced yourself as the player).
So there would still be assholes who would be sniping from across the map, but chances are, most people wouldn’t bother with the level of dedication required to be a good sniper, and you’d know that your good sniper across the map paid his dues by having been a bad shot and easy to spot for a good while as he built up his skills.