I keep seeing these threads pop up from people saying how ridiculous Viper's buffs are when in reality it's just that NA doesn't know how to respect smokes. They've been so conditioned to just running blindly through them, now that we have an agent that demands that respect, instead of adapting the playerbase will just deem it as OP because they can't use their old tactics of Stewie2k-ing through everything.

I don't think people realize that Viper's smokes aren't infinite. She needs to activate and deactivate her utility all the time so it's up to you whether or not to take that decay punishment.

I've played so many games today where teams will just blindly push through my utility and then wonder why they keep losing rounds instead of them just waiting for me to run out of fuel and hard pushing after I run out of snakebite to stall in-between smoke re-activation.

I feel it too from the other side. When I play Viper I feel EXTREMELY vulnerable when my fuel gauge runs out but NOBODY PUSHES ME when I'm out of fuel and I've used up my snakebites on defense. Also it's not like I can pick my wall back up and rotate if they leave because I've already placed it. There's such a weird lack of patience in this region where teams will always just bottleneck if they can't steamroll through initially with their W-key that when that gets stifled its like their brains malfunction.

The same thing happened with the Operator. The point of the Operator was that it was supposed to punish dry peekers. Theoretically, an operator should ALWAYS win versus someone who peeks without utility and the playerbase just didn't know what to do. So what happened? Instead of playing more smokes and supplementing with the one agent that was a good counter to break the line of site of the operator (ironically that agent being Viper), we had a nerf to that gun instead of a player base adapting and using more utility.

People on this subreddit act like Viper's utility is literally infinite and they're FORCED to run through the 50 decay punishment. It's literally not like that at all. You can wait for her fuel gauge to run dry, her snakebites to be used up and she's completely vulnerable to be steamrolled by your team

Or just pick Sova. Seriously.

(Edit 1: idk if anyone knew this but if you picked Sova and used his recon dart, it even a single pulse would be enough to spam her through her utility or in her ult)

(Edit 2: Did I mention Sova exists? He acts like a pretty good counter to viper. Even then you should be running a Sova on your team regardless because he's so impactful in matches except when he's on Split)