Now that we've had the time to play with the new guns a little, there is one question that nags my mind: What purpose do anti-material rifles serve in an infantry-based game like insurgency?
.50 BMG isn't really used against human targets in real life, given that you can take out such targets more than adequately with smaller calibers, hence the designation of being anti-material rifles, not anti-personnel.
As for use in Sandstorm; they're fun and loud as hell, but I don't see them offering any advantage over an M14 EBR or SVD in terms of lethality, as well as effectiveness of hitting targets through a single layer of wall, add to that the massive recoil, and there isn't really much reason to use the .50 BMG caliber rifles for anti-personnel purposes. Unless you intend to shoot your enemies through two or three layers of cover, at which point you'd presumably need wallhacks to even know their position behind those three layers of cover.
What do you think the role/purpose of the .50 caliber rifles is, what's the best way to use them, and what upgrades for these rifles would you like to see?
Personally, I think an explosive/incendiary-tipped bullet upgrade would be cool, and would increase the viability in use against infantry as you could deal fire or explosive splash damage.
Needless to say, that would probably run afoul of the Geneva convention, and isn't how this sort of ammo is generally used in real life scenarios, but this is a video-game after all and given the amount of killings by fire that happened in-game we already know there's no Geneva convention in the insurgency universe.