Of course. There are a couple of related issues here, though, that annoy me.cannonfodder wrote:It's natural that some weapons are going to surpass others.
The first issue is when an entire class of weapons for one faction is better (or worse, too) than for another faction, as with NC SMGs, VS LMGs, and VS assault rifles. It is rarely the case that a single weapon is better than any other, as the devs are pretty good and fixing stuff like that, but they can't seem to fix weapons in groups. If SMG balance right now was something like NC > VS > TR > TR > VS > NC, that would be fine, but as it currently stands both NC SMGs are better than any SMG usable by any other faction. The VS LMGs are overperforming not individually but as a group, and the statistics for that are easy to show; as of the last time I checked more than 50% more VS players have their Auraxium LMG (from getting the Auraxium medal on all four of their normal ones) than either NC or TR players do. On the other hand, the VS assault rifles are underperforming by a similar margin; at least a couple of them ought to be buffed.
The second issue is when one faction has basic capabilities that other factions don't. My big issue with the VS right now is that the Lasher, despite being fairly inaccurate, seems to be the best HA weapon in the game at very long range. Two or three guys with Lashers can effectively suppress an entire squad of TR from far enough away that we can't do anything about it. The NC Gauss SAW can hit stuff out to a similar range, but its lack of explosive shots means it isn't nearly as good as the LULZ SPAM TEH TRIGGEHS approach the VS seem to have embraced. Both the VS and the NC get weapon mechanics that no other faction has access to, namely infinite-ammo infantry weapons, charge weapons, and AOE infantry primaries for the VS and wire- and camera-guided rockets for the NC. How useful those things are can be (and has been) debated, of course, and VS generally don't like their charge-up guns, but TR doesn't get any similarly unique mechanic. All our 'empire-specific' weapons work the same way as VS/NC guns—maybe better or worse, but always the same basic idea.
I think the NC is a bigger problem than the VS in terms of generally getting better stuff, though. In terms of pure variety, the NC have the best arsenal by a long shot. For LMGs, for example, IIRC the NC get one 200-damage, one 167-damage, and 2 143-damage guns, while the VS get one 167 and 3 143s and every single TR LMG is in the 143-damage tier. TR is theoretically the small bullets/high ROF faction while NC is the large bullets/low ROF faction, which is all fine and good, but the way it was actually set up is that NC is the large bullets/low ROF faction and the small bullets/high ROF faction too. Until a couple of months ago NC had the highest ROF infantry weapon in the game and the highest per-bullet damage infantry weapon in the game. There's no sane reason for that.
