It’s the perpetual question – how to improve the perfect? How to strike that balance between tactical variation, class structure and the ‘feel’ of gameplay?

It’s a difficult question, one that’s puzzled map makers and admins alike for years. Restrict this, reintroduce that, keep this, change that. An endless task of reinventing, reworking and sometimes ruining the wheel.

But have they got the balance right? Is the over reliance on medics a burden or a virtue? Would this game be more rich, more dynamic, more tactically variant where we to level out the score, and improve the lesser used classes?

Possibly.

The covert ops class is currently redundant. It’s used occasionally and ineffectively to pester defenders on delivery, mindless frenzy attack on reactor or on battery, but beyond that, we’ve allowed this rich class to stagnate for years, allowed it to degenerate into an objective only class used reluctantly to destroy command posts and the like. Why is this? Why would we not want to reintroduce one of the more exciting aspects of our predecessor?

We’ve already the means to do this – all we need is the motivation.

The covert op class, and primarily the sniper, has several levels of upgrades available to us. They go from the benign to the revolutionary. These are (thanks to Xzz & joYnt):

Military Intelligence and Scoped Weapons Level 1: Improved Use of Scoped Weapon Ammunition

Each Ammo Pack you get from a Field Ops or Ammo Cabinet includes one extra clip of ammunition for your Scoped Weapon
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Military Intelligence and Scoped Weapons Level 2: Improved use of Sabotage and Misdirection

Your expertise allows you to use your Satchel Charges and Smoke Grenades more often: your Power Bar usage will be reduced by 1/3rd.
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Military Intelligence and Scoped Weapons Level 3: Breath Control

Your mastery of the Sniper's art results in a 50% reduction in both recoil jump and weapon sway with Scoped Weapons.

Locking the Covert Ops at level three by default could transform the class. In reducing the recoil and the weapon sway, you would immediately see an improvement in the effectiveness and use of the class. Snipers would be able to fire multiple, relatively accurate shots at their target not buoyed down by the destabilising weapon sway, or the massive recoil relative to the damage of each shot.

This would not increase the damage per shot, nor the rate of fire. The skill of the sniper would remain, simply nerfed somewhat.

This would give teams an extra bow in their string. An extra option to exploit, an extra variation to the game. It would enable teams to work on developing new tactics that could perhaps utilise the improved sniper class. In turn, this would force teams to evolve their counter-strategies in order to neutralise this pest.

Two simple cvars can achieve this:

Quoteb_defaultskills “0 0 0 0 0 0 3”
b_noskillupgrades 1


The law of unintended consequences dictates that there’s a number of factors to tweaking the sniper, such as the required power bar to throw a satchel, or smoke grenade being reduced by 1/3. These are an irrelevance.

A new ClanBase season is approaching, I don’t doubt the config makers are hard at work. Is it time to once again reinvent the wheel?