— Why has the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles been changed?
To get closer to their practical realistic rate of fire.
The practical target rate of fire for such rifle ammunition is about 50 rounds per minute (which is very low in the game’ tempo and in terms of easy aiming). Mechanical rate of fire is really high, but in reality it is limited by the frequency of pulling the trigger under the conditions of recoil impulses (which push you to grab the gun tighter), some effort on the trigger when cocking the gun and just physical exhaustion.
Maximum trigger pull frequency without force, recoil, and accumulated exhaustion (i.e., estimating the upper limit under the most favorable conditions, far from combat) gives a rate of fire of about 300 shots per min. The current values of 200 shots per min for a semi-automatic rifle cartridge are chosen so as not to affect the effectiveness in hitting targets at distances greater than 40 meters and to slightly limit the rate of fire when aiming at distances of about 20 meters.
— Why didn’t this change affect the automatic rifles?
The automatic mode removes the above-mentioned restriction on the frequency of pulling the trigger. For weapons that have this mode, we set it as default. If it’s not the same somewhere, it’s a bug.
— Semi-automatic rifles are now “useless” for assaulting rooms.
We want each class of weapon to have its own niche of use.
The most mobile and strongest class of weapons for such situations, for obvious reasons, was chosen the submachine gun. The semi-automatic rifle was considered as an extension of the rifle’s area of application, but any universality is at the price of weakened performance, so semi-automatic rifles have a shorter “one-shooting” distance compared to bolt-action sniper rifle, and a lower ammunition and rate of fire compared to submachine guns.
— This change drastically affected the performance of the VSTG 1-5 and M1 Carbine, which previously were known to be rather limited in their effectiveness.
A key feature of these semi-automatic carbines is the need to hit the enemy at least twice to kill him.
This factor was taken into account and, therefore, the rate of fire for this weapon was set higher than that of semi-automatic rifle cartridges of 250 shots per minute. We can observe a similar rate of fire of about 4 shots per second in modern assault rifles with relatively low recoil impulse. But perhaps in practice, this tempo is still not enough to keep the weapon competitive at medium ranges. In this case we will increase its rate of fire to 300 shots per minute.
In general, we continue to work systematically on the weapons in Enlisted and will release other mechanics changes in an effort to make Enlisted even more interesting.