I believe this was mentioned a billion time each week by other players, but i didn't see any progress in that area.
Currently and since the beginning area, you could see troll characters that were able to instant kill other player with just knives.
Those sneak-melee are the only one that regularly instant-kill others, and they don't even have to use ammo/costly weapons. I won't remind what everyone has said that the sneak should be nerfed/removed.
I would bring some additions to the mix that could make things more fair.
- Instant-kill counter measures. There is no reasons only one character (the cheapest) should be allowed to instant kill. On the other hand, one of the most intestersting aspect of AOP is that there is almost no instant kill. Contrary to Fonline and other crappy servers, here fights lenght longers and it should stay that way. You are now able to adapt, use tactics instead of just shoot first. This fit well with the AOP big map. You don't want to go through 5-6 maps to comeback on the battlefield. You should have chances to fight back. It would be fair to be unable to make more than 80% of the player maximum health (after all other calculation) on a single attack). Even if you hurt him, you should need at least two attack to kill him.
- Melee weapons should deteriorate much faster. Contrary to other weapons, you need to make the weapon in contact with the organic matter in order to make it usefull. It shouldn't take too much attack before the weapon show sign of being weakened, not sharp enough, or maybe heavy, adding more chance of failures & critical faillures. It wouldn't break, but might hurt the owner or be dropped.
- Sneak should use a more layered system of enemies awareness. Let's say you used sneak to kill a guy. You have to wait two minutes before sneaking again, as enemies are in alert mode, then you will have a 50% malus in sneaking for three minutes, as enemies are in aware mode. Then, after five minutes, you would have no more sneaking malus. If there isn't any player of opposing faction, or red (hostiles) critters, in the current map, you would be able to skip alert/aware mode and re-sneak immediately.
That way, those chars would still be powerfull, but with enought flaws to balance it a bit.
Otherwise, let's just all create melee sneak and play easy mode...