"DICE has revealed some new information regarding sniper rifles and how they will be tweaked, weapon damage, and HD textures!
When it comes to balancing, sniper rifles have always been a controversial issue in FPS multiplayer. According to many FPS forums, they’re either under-powered, over-powered, useless at close range, or too effective at “quick-scoping.” Many Battlefield fans have already shown concern towards DICE’s decision to make bolt-action rifles only a one-shot kill when striking to the head. This would seemingly give too much power to the semi-auto sniper rifles (which only needed two body shots to kill an enemy, as with the bolt-actions) that tended to dominate during the Beta. However, Alan Kertz recently clarified that the semi-autos are, indeed, being tweaked. When one fan for Kertz’s thoughts on their ability to take down enemies in two shots being over-powered, he responded, “the two shot kill range was a bit too long. They can still 2 shot up close to be competitive.” So, it seems that while they will still be able to two-shot an enemy in the final build, the distance at which that can do this will be shortened."
Yeah, Fudge them... they have no concept of balancing their LMGs, MGs, and SMGs. They have basically made long range sniping worthless while allowing every other non sniper rifle in the game to have more effective stopping power. They also havent learned their lesson of how stupid it is to have a sniper round suffer from bullet drop, even at medium distances while allowing other non sniper rifles to have none ad medium to long range.