This post is mostly so I can have a pre-formed response to people PMing me to complain about X nerf/buff (particularly AA12). It will consist of a brief re-cap of my design principles followed by a historical case study (AA12) in which these principles are applied. I'll save everyone hard numbers. If you hate reading, a TL;DR is included.
I'm a philosophy student, so, like any good philosopher, I tried to set out a few concrete criteria or principles to select gun changes.
1. Make the game fun for as many people as possible, with a slight preference to under-privileged players-- this seems obvious, but it isn't. It actually comes from another game (LoL), where creators want to give people fun abilities without sacrificing the fun of other players.
2. Balance to such that the relative abilities of a gun to match its shop price. Do not balance based on supply/demand (street price)-- people want weird things. When the Mp7 was released, it was, like, terrible. Worse than a Navy. It still went for ~1M at auction. I buffed it up to slightly worse than a Navy, and yet people still are willing to pay ~1M for it... why? Who knows?
3. Be open about all changes. Announce them in advance. Give reasons-- self-explanatory
4. Use both numbers and intuition to balance things-- this proved especially important with guns with .2 rate of fire. Though on paper this is better than a Navy, at times, a high rate of fire is actually harmful
CASE STUDY
So, when I first started as Gun Admin, I had an AA12. It was 25 damage, automatic, super fast, with a clip reload. I remember getting 50 killstreaks in BHPK by literally standing still in a hallway. This isn't a brag about how amazing I am or anything; the gun was ridiculous in certain situations which included gang events and BHPK. The key to winning gang events was to stack AA12s. (5-6 years ago, the key was to stack PBPs.) However, if you put the AA12 in a regular base (BH base), it was fine, but not ridiculous. The context of the gun changes how good it was (important point).
(good example of principle 1): It's fun to kill someone with an Mp5 Navy in a close battle in the middle of a gang base. It's arguably not all that upsetting to get beaten by said player with the Mp5. However, it's not fun to sit in a corner and hold D with an AA12, and it is even less fun to be killed by a wall of bullets you can't really avoid.
Still, I nerfed it pretty hard and buffed other shotguns to make them slightly more competitive. I think most people were happy with the changes.
I did some stupid minor buffs to the AA12 ~1 month ago to appease a bunch of complaints. This was admittedly a mistake, but the buffs were not to the parts of the gun that were problematic (they were buffs to the freeze and slight to the clip).
Fast forward to now: with the new GMAP and bases, a lot of things were thrown into whack. There are no more bases like old BH base. All bases are huge with long hallways. The context changed completely, but I want to emphasize that I was never really for completely disabling any gun in gang bases. Guns needed to be re-balanced to match the situation.
In other words, shotguns have a very very tenuous spot in the new PK scene and thus prove very difficult to balance. If we want to keep large bases, we won't also be able to keep guns that allow a single person block out large areas of a PK-zone.
We can argue about specific numbers, whether PBP is too good for its price, etc. etc. etc. but the point is that the current PK situation dictates that shotguns as a whole will not be as good (stat-wise) as they once were. I think if any of you actually use a shotgun in a new gang base still, you'll have a fair degree of success.
TL;DR:
AA12s were only OP before about half of the time (BHPK, some gang events), but were relatively balanced in normal gang bases (BH base). Now with new bases (large, open space), shotguns as a whole have become very powerful and needed to be toned down. |