So treyarch decided to get rid of "quickscoping" in cod black ops. This is a good thing and in my opinion it's still fun to dragscope; that's how I often play my sniper classes. I've looked at a lot of threads on this topic and seen a lot of faulty information that has been universally accepted; information that would have you believe there is still a way to quickscope in black ops. I looked into it and through lots of testing I'm convinced that there truly is no quickscoping in black ops.
The first piece of faulty information that I saw is the idea that the regular scope (the one you get with extended mag) has a zoom in between the first and second zooms of the variable zoom. This is false. The second zoom of the variable zoom scope is identical to the reg scope of the sniper rifle it's attatched to (the variable zoom's second zoom atached to the WA2000 is the same magnification as the WA2000's regular scope; slightly less zoom than the other rifles). After disproving that I looked into the legitimacy of the rumor that the second zoom of the variable zoom scope allows you to better "quickscope" in any way than the reg scope.
After two hours of testing in 'combat training' against recruit level bots I've made the following key discoveries:
1) The incident sway at every zoom of the variable zoom scope and the regular scope, along with the 'initial offset' from where your crosshairs were aiming before you zoomed in is independent of the zoom level. It will still sway over the same area whether you're zoomed in close or far (in other words it's realistic. The magnification on your scope doesn't affect how steady you can hold a heavy, high caliber rifle).
2) There is no difference in the time from when you pull the left trigger (to put your eye up to the scope) to the time when you can pull the right trigger and get a shot on your crosshairs (instead of the hipfire accuracy) between the regscope and the var zoom scope. You still have to wait a splitsecond untill the instant when the scope has fully zoomed in to have a shot go where the crosshair indicates. People have suggested that you zoom in faster, and thus can get an accurate shot off faster with the second or third zoom of the variable zoom scope. This is false. To reiterate: Both the reg scope and every level of zoom of the var scope take an identical amount of time to put a shot on target.