There's a toggle in the game menu for the sniper. You can either click to have it charge, or hold to have it charged. Might want to look in there to see if your issue is fixed.Very sad to hear. If servers & irc are still there, that's good enough for now.
Also noticed the trigger gets locked on while using sniper rifle, and it hasn't been fixed in forever. The console workaround really ruins the match having to enter it randomly.
Look forward to project-z