The BAR.

[Meph]

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.

As you know, I agree with you full-heartedly on this.

I’m sure you remember my posts on the forums back then talking about how much I’d love to nerf the BAR, but wouldn’t do it because I felt it would screw over the BAR owners. I truly think that nobody wanted the BAR nerfed more than me. Its presence on the server goes against everything the title ‘Gun Admin’ stands for.

Gun choices are supposed to be out of player preference. Meaning, the player chooses a gun that works for them. The BAR created a situation where this decision was made out of necessity in order to compete. Even the BAR owners at first didn’t want to use it, and I’m sure they would have rather spent the money elsewhere. But in order to compete, they felt that they had to make that purchase.

Regardless of how skilled somebody is, the BAR provides an advantage that should have never been provided. I honestly don’t know what the hell the person was thinking when they set the stats. We all tend to think it was “money”. However, if this was really the motive, they should have had the foresight to see that, not only were they ruining gameplay, but they were shooting themselves in the foot. They made the BAR one of the last purchases that a player will ever make.

After all, why would anybody need to purchase another gun once they have the BAR? If it were released with balanced stats that only gave it a slight advantage, players would be constantly trying to find a gun that works better for them. Every gun release, they’d be thinking: “This could be the one”, and keep on purchasing new guns to find their glass slipper. But instead, they’ve taken the guesswork out of the equation. Players know that when they purchase the BAR, they’re making an investment that will give them a better chance of victory than any can possibly offer.

As much as I hated it, those players already made their purchase. I couldn’t find an ethical way to nerf it without widespread approval from the server. (http://puu.sh/a7XkL/646fa59379.png)
It would be like me coming in to work my shift at McDonalds, clocking in, and then walking around the dining room removing 1 patty from everybody’s Big Mac and saying, “Sorry, the guys that work morning crew didn’t know what they were doing.”

What's worse is that there are now guns spammier and even less skillful than the BAR.

Bingo.

While I couldn’t do anything with the BAR, I remember I could sleep at night knowing that it was just one gun. For the most part, the rest of the guns were level enough that I could work with, and still maintain some level of skill-based play because I would have control of every gun that would come up in the future. As long as I maintained a check-and-balance with every gun that comes after it, the server would keep its skill-based standards in play.

Of course, I took leave in February of 2013 to help my wife finish her pregnancy, and in recovery. I came back seven months later to find that not everybody has my standards. I came back to find that, instead of trying to maintain the standards that enforced skill-based play, they lowered them to try to compete with the BAR. I came back to find that it was no longer just one gun.

I feel somewhat responsible, because I think I should have given some guidance before leaving. Like I mentioned in some of my other posts, I think the title “Gun Admin” was undefined, and they just ran with what their interpretation of it was.

When I see somebody in the position “Guns Admin”, I expect them to do what I did, and put the guns through appropriate testing phases before their release. I expect them to think about the gun they’re going to release—what tier it is, what type of gun it is, and how much it will cost. Then compare it to the other guns on the server that share the same tier, type, and price range; using them as a benchmark.

Then tweak that gun to produce something unique, while not overpowering or under powering the guns within that benchmark—and this takes time. I remember I’d put in anywhere from five to nine hours on every gun to produce something unique while ensuring that it remained within the bounds of the guns from the same cloth.

Again- I stayed true to the definition of ‘Guns Admin’; I don’t think the position was clearly defined when they threw in a replacement. So I understand why this has happened.

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

First, you’d have to find a reasonable starting point. To find a starting point, one would have to first question their own motives: “What do I want to accomplish?”

I
If their goal is to lead the server down the narrow path of pay2win and keep inching further away from skill-based play, they’ve already got their starting point right now. They just have to continue producing guns with the low standards they’ve already got, and continue lowering the standards with every new wave of guns, and making older guns obsolete.

This makes players’ older purchases worthless, and paints a picture that their current purchase will eventually be worthless, because they’ll expect the standards to be lowered again with the next wave of guns.
Once they hit that point of releasing the next wave of guns, they can do one of two things:

• Meet that expectation and ruin gameplay some more.
• Fail to meet that expectation and lose sales, and waste the resources invested in making those new guns.

This vicious cycle will repeat itself until we find this whole conversation a moot point, because our guns will be so far removed from skill-based play that people won’t remember what skill-based play is.

II
If their goal is to bring the server back to skill-based play and balance the guns with this standard in mind, they’re going to have to modify the guns globally and create a new starting point. The one we have now has very little variety to spark the interest of anybody that wants skill-based play.

Fortunately, this won’t ruin anybody’s purchase- if every gun is nerfed equally, they all have the same respective stats to one-another. The real problem with guns right now isn’t that they’re powerful, it’s that people can achieve victory using cheap tactics such as spamming. Low freeze on these guns is what makes spamming effective, since their movement isn’t impeded and they have no repercussions for doing it. This said, I would start with freeze.

If you added 0.04 freeze to every gun on the server, spamming on the server would decrease tremendously. While they would still be able to do it, it wouldn’t be as effective of a technique, since they would be more vulnerable while they were holding their fire button down. To put it in perspective:

• BAR would go from 0.20 to 0.24 freeze, putting it at about the current freeze of an AK47(0.25). So just envision an AK47 dealing 10 damage.
• Shipka would go from 0.21 to 0.25, which is exactly the current freeze of an ACR(0.25).
• Souizen would go from 0.12 to 0.16—which is the current freeze of a MetalStorm(0.16).
• Vulcan Minigun would go from 0.10 to 0.14, which is about the current freeze of a Ghost M4(0.145).
• Respectively, the guns mentioned here would be: AK47(0.29), ACR(0.29), MetalStorm(0.20), GhostM4(0.185)

Spamming would still be possible, but not as effective as it currently is. People would be forced to apply more technique than simply holding their buttons down. And, while it would still be possible with guns such as the Souizen and Vulcan Minigun, they’d be much slower than they currently are, and they’re already met with counter stats that would be more prominently evident (Souizen’s long reload, or Minigun’s low damage).

Once this issue is addressed, and everybody’s not focusing on spamming, they’ll begin focusing on the other stats that make a gun unique, and relieve the Gun Admins from the pressure of having to compromise freeze so that people would make the purchase. The players would be more appreciative of these, and instead, make their purchases based on things such as clip size, reload freeze, spread, and rate of fire. Hell—even the graphic would play a large role in stats—the bullet being positioned at the barrel enables longer guns to shoot over walls, and shorter guns to wreak havoc close-range, and emphasize spread more.

Our society needs to identify what it wants, and put faith in somebody to see through that it happens.
You can't dance around the elephant in the room forever.