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 TLR 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] don’t 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.

Update 5:

Up to page 98. I may not read anything after my last post on that page. Reserve the right to skim through in search of new ideas and time permitting.

I've been playing in disguise on both 360 and PS3 a lot the last few days. I've certainly run into snipers and they have certainly turned me into dust. Especially on the larger maps like Array. I watched the kill cam every time and even went back and watched the entire match when I died to a sniper more than 3x in a game. All of those deaths were more than fair with our current tuning.

I've gotten a few new ideas from this thread and I certainly understand the PoV of the "Quick Scoping" community even if I don't agree with it. I've always said that I would make changes to the game I don't agree with, as long as they make sense to me.

First off, using the "make it like COD 4" argument doesn't have any weight. This game doesn't have COD4 weapons, perks, attachments, systems, mechanics, unlocks or anything else. In a world of Lightweight and Marathon (not just Extreme Conditioning) and a world without Stopping Power or Juggernaut "making it like COD4" is not a argument, it's a request. Request denied. We can't "make it like COD4." If you want to play COD4, go play it. It's a great game and we own much of our success to the foundation that game put down.

I started this thread being as honest as possible and I am going to end the thread (for now) the same way.

Nothing here has convinced us to completely remove the "sniper patch" or "make it like COD4." I do feel that snipers are disadvantaged. I have trouble sniping myself, but then again I was never much of a sniper in the first place.

Sure. We stopped Quick Scoping for the most part. We mostly invalidated a sniper winning a battle with a Shotgun or SMG at close range. This was the goal. However, this has come at a pretty large cost to sniping in general. These two things can not be easily separated, since quick scoping is a form of sniping.

Despite the many ideas in this thread their is no "magic solution" to making sniping feel awesome while keeping Quick Scoping to a minimum.

We are going to increase the head / neck / helmet multiplier. After that, we will start to "nerf" the sniper patch. Slowly.

Please don't harass me when. The answer is ASAP. We have a lot of things we are working on. Game tuning is only one of those things. It just happens to be the thing that they pay me to do as the design director.

David 'Vahn' Vonderhaar

There was one sentence where i laughed:We can't "make it like COD4."
YOU guys,YOU were the one who copied the whole f*cking CoD4 and made it in an another envintoriment,ALSO you were guys the one who ALSO copied the whole MW2,so if i were you,i'd rather kill myself than saying a thing like this.F*cking copycats.Never gotta buy another Treyarch game...

Fanyboy much? You expect Treyarch to make a game like CoD4 just so you can snipe? Time to learn there are other people in the world but you buddy. Why don't you keep reading and tell me what he says WHY they can't make it like CoD4.

Nah dude,i'm not a fanboy,they do copied CoD4 and MW2,i know there are other people but i don't think you ever played a CoD4 promod war.The sniper is an important part of the team.That's why i want it.I even enjoy sniping in BC2 better,where snipers ain't even a oneshot kill...snipers are underpowered in this game.

They really aren't underpowered. You're just not using them right. Treyarch really does not need to make sniping any easier.