Originally Posted by Warborn
PS1 did it perfectly by making snipers more of a support function than anything else. You could still get kills as a sniper, but your main use was suppression, taking out deployables or other important targets, and so on. If they make it anything like BF3 the game will probably be fairly terrible for infantry. The huge, open areas of Planetside would mean that unless you're fighting in a base, you'll be having headshot wars with guys too far away to effectively engage with shorter range, less accurate weapons like cyclers and so on.
So, ideally, no one-shot-kills, difficult to aim, and maybe with more of a spotting/suppression role. Maybe even make them fire shots that inflict status effects in addition to doing a moderate bit damage. So bullets that slow a target, cause some effect to a vehicle, mark a target to be visible on everyone's map, etc. Making snipers powerful would do a lot to kill the outdoor infantry combat game, so frankly I'd rather they underpower them than let them have any chance of being dominant.
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You don't necessarily have to remove 1 shot kills to balance them. Add a charge function to them like TF2's sniper, make it much longer of course. Relegates sniper rifles to sniper role and limits the amount of killing they can do within x time period without limiting the top most strength of the rifles. You can effectively make them very powerful like this but limit them from being stupidly annoying like Battlefield.
By doing this you can completely limit the sniper to a glass ceiling of strength when played perfectly. Added benefit is that they lose all awareness of their surroundings in being forced to play like this too.
In conjunction with giving lower power none charge rifles, and closer range rifles, the infiltrator can serve both long range and squad level roles depending on how people want to cert it, and the snipers in game can be limited in their annoyance level.
Though, really, both methods achieve the same thing, limiting the killing speed, I personally think a 1 hit kill hs charge system is weaker than a 2-5 hit system without charges, if you force them to wait til full charge for every shot with these rifles they're less effective because the lower damage rifles would kill much faster due to wounded opponents going down in fewer hits etc. Not to mention no scope in charge system means they can have full surroundings awareness too.
Not that I'm saying to make it exactly like TF2... Just to use the mechanic as it offers good possibilities for speccing.
Also, the downtime between shots means they "should" occupy that time looking at enemies they can't shoot doing something else, like hitting the spot button for someone else to shoot them.