The problem with weapon balances (an AA12 case study)
 

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.

yo
i bought a ****in aa-12 because everyone was shittin on it being nerfed and i ****in own the haters


revenge is bitter sweet

Overpowered.... Riiiiiight...

http://i.imgur.com/OcmHIkn.png

no laser...sux

Roog you should upgrade.
Edit, wow that pic is kinda old, I haven't owned anything in a while.

I'm sure your team backing you up had nothing to do with that KS....

I remember back in the day KotH was just whoever could get the most players with a pbp shotgun to the capture room. It wasn't really fun unless you won.

It's our past, and it sucked. I'm really glad something was done to eliminate this type of gameplay. Players will always find the lamest way to achieve kills with little to no skill. It's just important that those kills are limited as best as possible.

As always, an awesome job. Didn't expect anything less.

Darn staff preventing me from being a really good PKer.

They caused me to lose it if that's what you mean...
I was dodging P4s for like 20 minutes and Cloyd got removed from the gang afterwords remember? Cyclone was also throwing frags at me.
Good times; that's when mercenary was the top gang for like 14 consecutive weeks:
http://i.imgur.com/UIkLgfw.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/9Hukcks.jpg


Douche bags :blush:

Don't listen to Rogue, he peed outside the litter box again and as punishment I put him in his timeout cage.

Shotguns in other games are typically good up close and terrible from mid-range and further. In this game, they have no such range limitation. That's the key to making them less sensitive to the context in which they're used. They need a maximum effective range.
Their bullets should drop off in damage after a certain distance.

I've never really had an issue with it being slightly over powered. I like weapons that can change the dynamic of PKing.

I honestly think the problem was; When I came back a few months ago, there was like 4-8 AA12's, no one really had them because no one wanted to pay shop price for them but they were incredibly good, a few people realised this and eventually every staff member before every gang event (BH PK, etc) would run into the little man-hole in the wall at unstick me (Staff Only room) and would "Staff Rental System" them.

I remember countless times when I was idling in unstick-me and "BH PK is now being hosted!" and all I would see was 3-4 Staff run into the wall and a second later join the event with AA12s.

I feel as if that was the reason they were ever nerfed. It wasn't because they were too good in general but because there was too many for them to be the way they were.

I'm sure this issue would of arise eventually now. (So much money being pumped into the economy through the pay-out increases) but I personally feel as if it was premature due to the Staff Team (Not all but most).

What made me realize this was when it was disabled and I was in Gang Events with my gang (TriLL) vs (The 15) we were vsing 3 Staff and 1 Non-Staff. The event was about to start and all I saw was 3 of them leave and come back with the "Photon Shotgun" you released. I think that was the moment (without needing to say anything) Savage and I both agreed that we wouldn't really take Gang Events as seriously anymore.

i thought i remembered someone talking about doing this. making shotgun bullets do less damage the more they travel.

This could be an interesting option either for all shotguns or for a new shotgun that has a lot better stats in trade-off for range.
My concern is actually scripting it. There's another weapon that's been in the works for a long time that's been halted because of a very similar issue with bullet lifetimes.

If a gun is only "balanced" because a few of them exist, then the gun is not balanced. Balancing based on rarity is silly, especially for an item that theoretically has an unlimited supply. A gun should not break the server even if every single player had it.

The AA12 didn't do so, not in my eyes or the eyes of everyone that is "good"

I agree it had balancing to do but I don't think it deserved the big kick in the balls that it received.

It was merely in my eyes that the demand for a nerf was so high because of the amount of them being used. It's like the MVP AK, when it was released and there were 3 it was a killer but the 3 people with them weren't, so it didn't matter but once more were stocked and more people got their hands on them... Wil, Corey and other semi-decent players it became a problem that needed to be fixed (Although you already told me that the clip was a mistake that you didn't even know about)

What I'm trying to say I guess is; The gun was semi-overpowered but wasn't that big of a threat because of the amount that were circling in the economy but once every staff and their dog (good old australian saying) were using them it became an issue that was inevitable to avoid.