I think they said in one of the interviews (or somewhere) that the VS would have some sort of energy weapon sniper rifle that did not have bullet drop, but it would do decreasing damage over range or something along those lines. This seemed to indicate that the normal ballistic sniper rifles would be more powerful at range but harder to aim properly.
I personally can't stand all of the sniper hate in modern FPS games; it led to the stupidly absurd scope glint in BF3 that made snipers completely useless at what snipers are actually supposed to do in real life. The sniper class should be very hard to use to keep away "1337 qu1cksc0p3" 12 year old children, but not be completely nerfed into oblivion like in BF3. I would like the sniper class to be able to remain concealed (which is impossible in BF3 because of the ridiculous scope glint, automatic minimap spotting when you fire your weapon, and stupid 3D spotting) and still do a bit of damage; in real combat snipers are used more as psychological warfare than anything else (as well as assassinating officers); if you make snipers unable to properly conceal themselves so they can be spotted too easily or make them too weak then they won't instill any fear in the enemy and just be a slight annoyance.
The devs have pretty much already established in their interviews that infiltrators are going to suck at close range if they choose to equip sniper rifles, so I think they should be pretty powerful at long range, i.e. 1 hit kill headshots against lighter units. However I think there should be bullet travel time and bullet drop.
And to be clear sniping in BF3 is not really that easy; just because a ton of low skill players attempt to use the sniper class does not mean it is easy to use. Most of the snipers I see in BF3 are astoundingly bad and can't land headshots on stationary targets, let alone moving ones at a distance. The fact that all snipers are basically autospotted by the scope glare makes them pretty useless on the whole and not much of a threat, especially since you can usually kill them at sniper range with an assault rifle.
Basically I look at snipers in FPS games as a high risk, high reward class; they should have powerful weapons but landing headshots should be hard. I don't think making them "harder to play" by making it take multiple headshots to kill is the right way to go; I think instead it should be harder to land those headshots. Otherwise snipers end up being at a disadvantage overall, since shooting someone in the head twice with a "long reload pause" inbetween will likely take longer to kill an enemy than just shooting them with some sort of assault rifle at the same distance.
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