BRSloth's Journal: On FPS Snipping the Ruination Of Gameplay

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93600&cid=8035613

In real life. Snipers are a bitch. It takes very real work to take out a sniper in a battlefield, especially a good one.

If I recall correctly, Army counter-sniper doctrine begins with "first, call in an artillery strike..." That should tell you just how serious the armed forces take snipers: the preferred method of dealing with one involves saturating city block-sized areas, one after another, with artillery barrages until there's nothing living larger than an amoeba.

In real life, snipers suck. Unless they're on your side, in which case they're so "cool" they have their own nickname: Murder, Incorporated.

There are only a few well-known snipers (or, as they're called in the Marines, scout-snipers) in the last century. Vasily Zaitsev and Carlos Hathcock are probably the two best-known, Zaitsev working in the Siege of Stalingrad and Hathcock working during the Vietnam War. Zaitsev's exploits are legendary: read the book Enemy at the Gates (avoid the movie, if you want to know the real story) and you'll shudder.

Hathcock's exploits are just as well-known. During the Vietnam War, he and his spotter once eliminated an NVA weapons platoon--around fifty men--in eight hours. It was Hathcock's scout-sniper unit which first received the appellation Murder, Incorporated. To this day, the Marine Corps nickname for their scout-sniper teams is "Murder, Inc.".

Many regular soldiers and Marines hold scout-snipers in contempt. Why? Because regular soldiers and Marines are scared shitless of snipers. They are the total antithesis of warfare. Soldiers understand killing in the heat of battle, when the adrenaline's pumping and you know you're in danger and your buddy just got severed in half by an RPG-7. They don't like it any--and no sane person should!--but they understand it. To a regular trooper, a scout-sniper isn't war: a scout-sniper is the Angel of Death following you wherever you go, and ending your life at a totally random moment, without warning, without escape, without mercy.

A scout-sniper who's working for you may be the Angel of Death walking the field on your side, but he's still the Angel of Death, and troops tend not to like that one bit.