Profile of Tommy

Big update coming soon ahead of the tourney announcement folks, get excited for:
More viable wher T4
Better LMG42's
A new and improved Officer
Better vanilla Rangers
More sniper tweaks (and some things reverted)
Cheaper Airborne
Reworked assault nades
Inspired assault on support weapons

Get excited and spread the word!

That was beautiful.

I want to move the sniper discussion here because it's dominating the main thread at the moment which I'd like to keep reasonably clear so people can see when new releases come out and so on.

The sniper issue is contentious and I'm not a 100% supporter of the current fix (which is always hitting countersnipes except on retreat) nor am I a big proponent of the system the way it is now (50% chance of hitting an enemy sniper).

The facts as they stand:

- Right now, the sniper versus sniper battle can be decided by a coin flip.
- A countersnipe is worth a minimum of 340mp, which is the largest single amount than any one RNG factor is worth. The only single RNG factor worth more than this was the 5% bug, which was fixed.
- There are not enough countersnipe opportunities in any given game of a typical duration for the 50% odds to balance out. Whereas every other RNG factor (for example, whether a garand rifle lands a critical hit on an individual enemy unit) will be calculated hundreds if not thousands of times across the span of a game, countersnipes only happen a few times.
- Therefore 50% countersnipes can feasible mean missing every countersnipe opportunity in the game, while your opponent lands every one of his. This is far from ideal.

Proposed fixes:



Pros: No more missing countersnipes. If a player sets up a CS attempt he will always hit, therefore there is no chance of the game dicking him by having him miss every attempt while his opponent hits - this can easily decide games.
Cons: Removes the micro aspect of moving after firing in favour of placing more emphasis on using the map and shotblockers. However this is dependent on the map actually having said shotblockers. Snipers can retreat and be completely safe from countersniping, making combined jeep/bike decloak + sniper pushes less useful.



Pros: Micro aspect of moving after firing remains in the game. Players remain in control of the countersnipe attempt; they accept the risk of trying to CS a sniper in cover with full knowledge that it may not hit (and conversely the player being sniped accepts the inherent risk of firing from a position of no cover).
Cons: Would affect all units, not just enemy snipers. Therefore however you fiddled the numbers, regular infantry in cover would gain some protection from snipers (not necessarily a bad thing, but would depend on the numbers used).



Pros: Discourages 'Rambo' sniper usage (running up to cloaked snipers with your own cloaked sniper to fire at point blank), encourages micro of snipers to stay at max range, player remains in control of the risk factor of a CS, micro of moving after firing remains.
Cons: Might seem arbitrary.



Pros: Snipers become easier to kill by other means than countersnipers. Sniper micro becomes more significant.
Cons: Potential large meta changes, unpredictable, countersnipe attempts retains a chance of missing.

This is, after all, a mod, not a patch (for now, anyway), so there's no real time constraints here- we're free to experiment. Leave thoughts and suggestions below, and please divert discussion from the main thread, thanks.

Was fun reading the old balance thread

Tommy, this is not the first time this has been done. We put 100% CS way back then and even had a tournament held with it. It was dominated by recon + snipers. In the end most people decided they didnt like the 100% despite it sounding good in theory.

In the end we ran out of time and just put it back to where it was but it wasnt where we would have liked to leave it.

As I see it there are a few options.

1) If we went 100% CS, we'd have to nerf recon reveal of snipers. Remove it vs snipers or just 1/2 the time that it reveals the sniper so its nearly impossible to countersnipe that way.

2) Go to the 50/75/100 scale as I suggested years ago in that thread. 50% chance on retreat, 75% chance vs moving sniper, 100% chance vs non moving sniper. Simple and elegant imo.

I'm not sure though; was the tournament dominated by recon because people _assumed_ that recon became significantly more powerful and therefore everyone spammed it, or because it was actually the best choice? I would be interested to see whether given more time it might cause a meta shift- for example, if everyone and their mother is going airborne, then Wher players might start putting down more med bunkers and going defensive, or building lots of pumas to counter AB, etc etc. I think the same effect would have been seen if, say, everyone decided that strafe was amazing. If everyone was strafe spamming in every single game, it wouldn't take long for people to say it was broken either.

So although I don't flat out refute that recon can become more powerful with 100%CS, I'm not totally sold on the idea that for this reason, US players would start going AB 99% of the time. We need a bigger sample size, and a longer test period, and as this is a mod and not a patch (so no time constraints), it seems to perfect time to do such a test.

As for your alternative options, #1 could be viable but then people might equally not bother with AB at all- at the very least, there would probably have to be some other buff to the doctrine (like to AB themselves) to keep it viable.

The second option isn't a good solution imo. It actually makes it more random because now you can still miss your CS attempt, even though the odds suggested that you probably shouldn't. At least with a 50/50 it's just a straight up coin flip. It doesn't really solve anything.