AMA

Hello, I would like to voice some concerns with the current state of weapon balance at the moment. I ask that you try to read this thoroughly as it is admittingly a giant wall of text, as I have taken a lot of time to formulate this opinion, doing things such as writing the most popular weapon build guide for your game as well as digging through the games decompiled lua files for additional information. I also use the Long Guide as a source of information, which thoroughly data-mines your game for hidden information. Finally, I created a mod which presents much of these stats hidden or misleadingly given to the player in a better, more readable manner.

I am not certain you are aware, but in the long run the two most important stats of a weapon are ammo count (due to it usually directly influencing ammo pickup) and damage. This is because those two stats alone dictate how efficient your weapon will be, how much ammo you pickup from the ground and how many cops you can kill before you must refill your ammo from the ammo bag. Accuracy is also fairly important, with Stability, Concealment, and Threat all being fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things for most weapons, unless you are a Fugitive where Concealment becomes important as a penalty to two high tier skills.

The problem is that due to your model, damage is NOT a continuum. That is, 42.5 damage is not always better than 40 damage and often has no advantage at all. Damage is broken into discretes steps dictated by the shots to kill common units. The most obvious example of this is the fact that, in Overkill, once you hit 40 damage you have absolutely no reason to exceed it unless you can hit 80. This is because 40 damage is enough to one shot the Green Cops and can also two shot the Tan Cops with the Headshot Bonus that everyone gets. This means all those 80-90 ammo weapons that can hit 50 damage have no real purpose in the grand scheme of things, even in Death Wish, due to their very poor ammo economy.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that the CAR-4 and AK have become the far and away best choices in virtually all situations due to their 18 accuracy and 25 stability (both the highest possible) while maintaining 40 damage, a magazine size of 60, and an ammo count of 150. The only ARs that even come close to being as useful as the CAR-4 and AK are the Commando 553 and Clarion; both of these are 150 ammo count weapons that can hit 40 damage, though they are restricted to a mere 30 round magazine. I feel as though you do not weigh the importance of shots to kill vs ammo count as much as you should (if at all) causing a lot of balance problems.

Another problem is how you represent Accuracy and Stability. Accuracy seems to be quadratic in its representation, with 18 accuracy being twice as accurate as 16 accuracy and four times as accurate as 12 accuracy, but this is hinted nowhere. Stability suffers from an even more bizarre problem in that the table you use has 20 stability twice. This causes some mods on base 20 Stability weapons to claim they don't alter stability, and also means that you have to increase/decrease the stability index twice to get over the 20 Stability hump. Stability also works the opposite of accuracy, in that returns are diminishing and not increasing. This is also hinted at nowhere.

The stance multipliers on various weaponry are hidden, which is odd considering how much it influences the weapon's spread. The fact that the LEO Pistol only has a 5% spread penalty while hip-firing makes it far and away the best overall pistol, but at a glance it almost seems that the Chimano Custom is better, despite that pistol having over twice as much spread while hip-firing. The new Minigun you put out has an EIGHT TIMES PENALTY to its ADS spread, making it insanely inaccurate regardless of your accuracy stat. I ask that you do not hide this stat anymore.

The last thing I want to address is accuracy/stability skills. In both cases these alter the stance multiplier and recoil additively, yet the way they are shown in game makes it appear that they multiplicatively boost Accuracy and Stability. This causes impossibilities like Accuracy exceeding 20 and Stability exceeding 30, both which would be impossible even if base + mod stats weren't hard-capped as it would represent a spread and recoil of 0.

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