If I had to try and isolate the time/reason that gun balance got out of hand, it'd be around the same time that movement speed was increased.
Movement speed used to be considerably slower, to the point where you couldn't really run in front of a bullet for very long before it caught up to you.
Then Jenn made the gym, and added speed levels, and you had players who could move and dodge much more easily than others.
People like Meph, Diaz, FalkonJenova, etc could literally run circles around people and almost never get hit, and they melee'd people to death while doing it!
So while there were "fast players" and "slow players" the trend was that freeze on guns was decreased and the firing rate was increased.
At some point speed levels were removed, but people were already acclimated to the higher speed so the default speed was set higher (I think it was increased to Lv3 speed level by default?).
Once everybody became a "fast player" this had a twofold effect because the default walking speed increase kind of dulled the effects of freeze on its own, and having players moving in between shots that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to move in between let them basically emulate a faster firing rate (walling), and now they all had guns with less freeze and faster firing rates than before as well.
There were always lame guns (sg5552?), but the majority of the rest of the guns were balanced around 0.2 or 0.15 freeze and timeout, whereas now anything except 0.05 seems to be unacceptable.
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones... |