On top-tier gun imbalance:

[Shingeki]

Sorry to break it to you guys, but the top-tier guns of iEra (PBP, Shipka, BAR among others) can't be nerfed without a lot of the community being pissed off, and the same stays true at its current state that those who can't afford it would be pissed off, and you guys already are and have been for a while. There's no way to fix the current balance situation without hard resetting the server's weapons, and this is due to our current pricing and the incentivization and necessity of USDing for currency. The fact isn't that the developers can't balance all the weapons to the point where each one has its merits and are relatively and statistically comparable. That's easy. However, the problem lies with the greedy pricing put forth by the developers and "economists" (though I doubt Era has dedicated specialists for these things).

Look at it this way. The gun administrators on the dev team at the time of their conception decided to price guns like the Shipka, PBP, and BAR at astronomically high prices compared to other guns at the time, to the point where they were more than seven times the price of an average, realistically attainable gun. Now, with outrageous prices such as these, it would only be logical to overpower these guns beyond what's expected of the other, 'mid-tier' guns. From this point onward, gun/pricing balance became fundamentally broken to he point where its irreparable without a hard reset. If you bring the guns to be statistically in line with the other mid-tier guns such as the M4, then you've got a bunch of angry BAR owners who demand refunds, and staff have already stated furiously that they will not do gun refunds, and it's understandable why, but that's a completely different story. On the other hand, if you leave the weapons as is, you've got everyone else angry that they're getting stomped by these overpowered guns. You've got one option left, and it's probably the only option besides a hard reset, but I'm sure staff won't even take it into consideration given the current economic circumstances. With the current pricing schemes and scaling balance with little diminishing return, we have a fundamentally flawed balancing scenario that cannot be fixed without a hard reset.

Well done, iEra. I haven't seen a game economy so broken since Graal Kingdoms PC to the point where staff intervention won't mean a thing in the big picture. I'm thoroughly impressed.

And yes, all you elitists out there are telling the people that don't have access to a credit card (their parents' or otherwise) to "get good", but skill is hardly a factor in an uneven playing environment. There's also the "work for the money" argument out there, and while it should only be fair that those who work longer get more out of it, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's a ridiculous amount of grinding that's unhealthy for the community to incentivize, just to get on an even playing field with those who paid. No matter how many times you try to deny it or hate to admit it, iEra is a pay-to-win game at its core, and a broken one at that.

Learn from this in your future pricing decisions, iEra staff.