I thought it was odd that the m24 was taking more than a few hits to kill so I looked up how damage worked. The chance to kill on any bullet mechanic is interesting enough but I was really confused when I saw that the m24 should be killing on any hit. Why is it that I am sometimes hitting 2-4 times before killing with this weapon? This is happening more often than me getting one shot kills and the bots I'm hitting are not wearing vests.

edit: Tested with SVD and the PSG as well. One shot kills happen on occasion but it frequently takes more than 3. Now that I'm pay more attention to my hits I noticed I'm also occasionally getting kills when my bullets wiz by enemies.

You're playing online, right? Online isn't 100% true to what you see because of lag and how your character and bullets behave predicted to hide that lag.

Is there any chance of getting lag compensation like a lot of first person shooters have? In DM, this game has a larger ping advantage than any game I've ever played, excluding the original doom and quake before the quakeworld release.

Not really I suppose. It would require plenty of studying on the subject and experimenting to get that tech on to the next level. Best you can do is choose your server so that you're in the ~50ms region.

Usually, the sniper rifles have a good .9 out of 1 chance to kill for each bullet, or 90% chance. Usually, it may take up to two shots to kill a target. Of course, you could get a very rare possibility of both of your 2 first shots not killing the target, or both hitting the 10% that the bullet won't kill. In that case, you will almost always, and I say almost, kill the target in the third successful hit. The SVD On the other hand is semi auto, so it's balanced by having a .8 kill probability. So, yeah, your more in likely to get strange 'hit markers' instead of kills.

This is why its so hard to kill moving targets.

I suggest you to predict the lag and aim in front of your target. I got a lot of kills this way (it looks like a bullet is missing but the opponent dies).
Good old cs 1.6 mechanic.