Jonne tested sniper nerfing yesterday, it appears that setting the sniper skill level to 0 doesn't affect its efficiency in any shape or form. Chainsaw is a melee weapon, so trying to edit something here is pointless. Therefore, it's a choice of whether to leave everything as is and continue turning off newbies or try the 'equality' route (removing sniper and chainsaw altogether would prove catastrophic, I'm afraid).
Shit, that's too bad. It would have made things easier. Glad we finally know, though. Is this the same for all the other weapons? The skill is supposed to affect movement speed during use as well.
Isn't it possible to change the amount of damage a weapon does? What about correlating sniper damage to the distance? Or adding some kind of randomness, adding a delay between shots, limiting ammo, etc.? It's not like there's one way to nerf it.
Let everything like as it is pls. If you removed the saw and sniper then you have fucked all the vips and all of them will feel like they have wasted their money. And if you give everyone saw and sniper then players who used to donate to get these weapons will no longer donate since it was the main reason of making them donate, also vips will feel that they got no specific weapons for them which is bullshit, skins are not enough.
So either removing them from everyone or giving them to everyone will just lead that two things will happen.
1- Vips will get annoyed and feel like they wasted their money.
2- there will be no more donations for the server, since you have given everyone vip weapons, players won't donate for skin lol.
You get fast skins, nitro/hydraulics, force-reclassing (which is now limited, so we've already set a precedent for scaling back VIP features), and plenty of other little goodies. It's not like you'd be bereft of VIP features. Honestly, I'm okay with the saw remaining if the sniper goes-- the saw is OP like the combat shotgun is; it's useless at a distance.
I think if we'd had a server owner at the time lagcomp happened who actually cared about balancing when it affected people who were not himself, this would have never been an issue. The sniper was never so ridiculously powerful before, but since he benefited, he didn't fix it.