With burst firing mod, you can actually hit every target with every weapon from any distance within your sightrange (Or that's just me : P ) ... normally it would suck, but empires infantry are moving way too fast so pinpoint accuracy is just fit against these circumstances. (Especially if having a weapon capable to bring up ironsights) I think the real problem with infantry weapons is the strange "balance" (?) beetween the factions. BE RPG blocks more your view, while NF RPG let's you see more wide area. BE AR has 40 bullets better falloff characteristic, while NF AR has only 30 bullets, worse falloff characteristic and the only advantage it contains is +1 dmg, and a bit greater zoom. (I used both weapon so the greater zoom is not much a difference, definietly when shooting on a marked target.) BE CAR and 50.cal Heavy rifle is the ideal example of balance, in my opinion they are fine. Same with the pistols, and other stuff.
It's about 80% of balance. DPS = gun kills you faster or slower. All guns should kill you at similar speeds, all guns should have at least one useful role, and all guns should be fun to use. Not really much else to it given that all of the guns apart from the rifles were pretty easy to use without aiming too precisely, and their high power close up means that with any gun your ability to outflank your enemy will mean more than the raw power of the gun. So I think DPS is more or less the only thing I need to balance.
Like I said, it's fairly simple, you point the gun at the enemy and hold the trigger. Because it uses largely static accuracy and most of the guns are kinda inaccurate, you don't have to aim it at tiny pixels, you can't aim for headshots at long range with most of the guns, and the one gun you can do that with is probably much easier to just shoot the body several times with. There's no tapping of the fire button to make an SMG into a BB sniper, you instead unload lots of bullets at the enemy and some of them will hit and do damage, it does basically the same thing but is far more sensible given that it's an SMG and therefore a spray weapon. The main strategy for them is to be behind the enemy when you use them, which you can do equally well with all the guns except the rifle which is basically a support weapon, you can sit back and whittle people down with it or kill people who are exposed, you can also do the same with the HMG but only from prone and not quite as well, usually the HMG functions like SMG2. If you remove all the stupid exploity behaviour that the empires guns currently have, it's quite easy to balance them, and you also get guns that are satisfying to use, it's far more fun to hose people with bullets and focus on flanking them and deadly close up fighting than sitting and plinking away at the enemy with your SMG.
Believe it or not, chris, you're not the best aim at this game, and you don't have the best understanding of infantry combat. Some people get fairly regular headshots, even in the current environment. I was getting about 25% headshots back when g4tc was recording stats, and I know there were a few getting higher headshot rates. My data set was large enough at the time to eliminate any outliers, as I had been playing quite a lot at that time. my headshot rate (as well as others) was statistically much higher than the average, somewhere around twice as much, so consciously aiming for them was definitely possible and definitely increased performance. Did my aiming for headshots actually hurt my score? I don't know, maybe. The data can't really tell that. But my score was high enough to show that someone who DOES consciously aim for headshots CAN statistically do very well against others. In fact, most people who were higher on the scoreboard were at least somewhat over the average in headshots. However, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that my headshot rate has dropped since the inception of 2.25, this is one reason why I'm not a fan of these new weapons. A lot of them have much shittier accuracy on the first shot. Your rationale about SMG's is not founded on any realistic perception. Some SMGs in real life are engineered exceptionally well and easily exceed the average assault rifle in accuracy, even when fired in bursts. Almost all guns in real life will shoot exactly where you point them, even at ranges of 100 or more yards, and it comes down to the skill of the user to determine how accurate they are with that weapon, not the weapon itself. Kind of like how empires should be.
I don't bother with headshots, except maybe with SMGs at melee range Most infantry targets are 3 pixels in size (god damn resolution doesnt go higher than 1380x760)
You misunderstand, you can't get headshots with the gun balance I suggested/did because you can't aim that precisely. As in the guns do not allow for precise aiming because they are inaccurate, it has nothing to do with how amazing you think you are at the game. Also fuck realism.
I didn't misunderstand. You posit that the weapons are too inaccurate to get headshots. I posit that you're too shitty to get headshots. Fuck realism? Sure, but if we don't at least found it on realism what are we founding it on? The fact that the objects we use to kill other people strongly resemble guns in real life is a strong suggestion that we should also make them resemble real-life guns in performance, even if they aren't identical.
No, I posit that the weapons I designed and balanced but didn't release are too inaccurate to get headshots. Which they are. Unless perhaps you have been spying on me and somehow were there when I wrote the scripts and tested them and therefore know better than I do what they are like? Or more probable you jumped in halfway through and didn't read the entire conversation and therefore don't have the first idea what you're responding to.
No, I'm saying that weapons designed for YOU to be unable to get headshots means that people who are more accurate than you are going to be able to get headshots. Derp.
Static cone means it always has a set accuracy that isnt perfect IE every shot is random IE your aim doesnt matter past a certain threshold.
Shit, I get headshots with the mowtar all the time. I dunno if it has a damage boost or HS icon but I know I'm smacking those fools in the face. And with the rifles, specially the BE CAR and NF AR. This is also kinda my concern with 1 shot head shot kills for the sniper rifle. I know people will dominate with it.. Well lets face it, empires maps would be a snipers dream. But I think along with balancing weapons, we need to change the names of the guns so people stop saying shit like, This is a nade launcher/this isn't a carbine! blah blah.. But ya gotta name one of the mowtars the DUB-33.
No you don't, there is no skill involved in hitting people precisely with highly randomised shots, it is a logical impossibility.