The BAR.

[Vacci]

With these stat changes, the BAR did get more a nerf than a buff, but that isn't the biggest issue here. The BAR changes have been made too late, resulting huge riot among the community. If these changes have been made sooner, the backlash wouldn't be as severe. As the era community has developed the sense of "Get the most expensive weapon in the game to win". The BAR defined era balancing of what some players like to call Pay2Win. Either Pay2Win or "Grind2Win". All what mostly mattered was that you had the most expensive weapon in the game. Drastically breaking balance between non paying player vs a paying player. If both players were skilled but had different weapons, the player with the more expensive gun would be more likely to win. That's the obvious logic of era's balancing.

In fact, BAR should have never appeared to era in the first place. For a ridiculous price with overpowered stats wasn't initially chaos for era. But it was a slow build up to where it was now. BAR won't stay rare, it will just slowly multiply. Now the BAR users have expanded greatly. The BAR, despite being one of the most expensive weapons in the game, is now one of the more common weapons in the game. Tell me the last time you went basing and never saw a BAR user.

What's worse is that there are now guns spammier and even less skillful than the BAR. I'm talking about the high spread, low freeze guns like the gm4, sawed off shotty, miniguns even for their spamminess. We've seen the backlash from the BAR, the general public just complains about it and say that so and so gun is better than the BAR now. That's how much the Pay2Win mentality has been engraved into the playerbases' minds. If players just stop using their BARs, chances are they're just going to try to grab the next expensive thing to spam instead of attempting to pick up some skill.

This problem will just continue until all guns are thoroughly balanced out. The most likely way for this to happen is to nerf the high end guns. But the backlash that will occur will just be monstrous, at least the first few times until the playerbase gets used to the fact that a reform may very well be happening. There once was a point in time when the general public cared about how OP a gun was, and had complaints. But, as stronger weapons kept getting released they just caved in and bought those guns themselves as what used to be considered "standard" like the m4, slowly fell from its throne and lost popularity against the OP guns.

It's probably wishful thinking, but I hope gun balance returns to the m4 standard. Right now, I don't even know what the standard gun of choice or where the middle point between cheap and expensive guns lies.

Side note: How can guns be balanced while still retaining variety since there are so many guns on the market now?