LDG-Gaming

Ultimately, all I'm doing is looking at aspects of the game and weapons that don't work as they are and changing them. I couldn't have given a long-term plan for the HMC, for example, because as far as I knew it was working well until recently. I'm not sure how I can communicate things in advance when I generally work immediately from a thought or discussion in BW Skype.

I can imagine that constant changing leads to some stress at times, but it's done with the intent of improving the game. It's not much fun to play the game as a developer sometimes, because I have to be constantly monitoring my own performance, and that of others, in order to gauge what needs doing. While other players may take pride in a good result with a certain weapon, I find myself eternally questioning whether it's my own skill or a failure of balance which has resulted in a particular performance. There's always something to bother myself with whenever I play.

Ok, I have a suggestion: Make a list of weapons which are perfectly fine in your opinion first and will not be changed under any circumstances. And keep filling that list of course. This will help both you and players, because:
1) players will see what exactly is going on and that there's a possibility that someday the changes will be over.
2) you will get a good starting point, something which you can use to compare the rest of the loadout, because if you don't have a measuring standard for your changes it will obviously turn to an endless tweaking when you tweak one weapon compared to another and suddenly 3rd weapon becomes a bit more powerful and then you have to tweak 4th weapon etc.

Hah. There's a reason politicians would rather die than make a solid commitment like that, and the reason is simple: I can't predict whether a weapon will be fine forever. Changes in the metagame are inevitable when weapons are being changed and may necessitate buffs to older weapons. The only reference point in this mod is for damage and it's set by the DPS output of the SAR-12.

But you're not a politician, right? Because you are basically saying that you are not able to achieve any balance at all.
If that's true, the whole balancing story is pointless here and you can just stick to adding new stuff instead of changing old.

I am saying that I cannot verify that any individual weapon will never need changing in response to a metagame need. To lock one weapon which may in the future under or overperform to a particular configuration for all eternity would be a foolish move on my part.

I do not believe in perfect balance, but I do believe in progress on both the gameplay and balance fronts. That may necessitate reworks across all weapons.

You're the one in control of any change here. What is the metagame need you're talking about here? New weapons? This is you who is making them.
I'm not trying to win this conversation but I just suggest you think about it a bit. This is a compromise which every game developer has to make at some point, unless you're going to add a huge banner on the front page stating something like "this server is dedicated to experimenting with stuff and our game will never be finished".

Balance is not easy.

Take generic cannon of magnificence +2

How do you balance it so it performs well enough for the weaker players to consider even looking at it, yet keep it in line so gizmo, azarael or vanico don't take it and own the server up.

What about taking a core weapon from each weapon category and setting that as an arbitrarily determined standard for the weapon category.

Standard weapons should ideally make up for a solid weapon set if you were to play a game of DM pickups using only those weapons. They should probably be better rounded than the rest with the majority of the other ones being somewhat more specialized.

Other weapons should then be balanced around the standard weapon of its respective category, and a change to the core should affect the rest.

Naturally you got things like the Bloodhound so far removed from the rest, but a lot of weapons are pretty similar in core function.

This is probably going to be more complicated but yeah basically this is what I suggest. Make a measuring standard and start fixing the rest and adding them to the list.
Not just fixing random bugs by chance but start testing a single weapon until it's done and then move to the next one.

It's a false way of looking at the situation because weapons don't exist in a vacuum. Changes made to one weapon can influence the value of another weapon by changing the metagame, and it's not necessarily new weapons; general reworks to a class of weapon (for example, aim displacement on melee weapons now) can influence the value of other weapons, and necessitate that their balance be changed. If I were to be faced with a situation where I had said that one particular weapon could not ever be changed again, and it then became OP or UP... I would simply break the promise rather than leave the weapon broken. Hence... I find it better not to make a promise that makes absolutely no sense from my own perspective, especially considering that the changes that I have made seldom radically change the function or intended usage of the weapon such that a player accustomed to that weapon would no longer be competent with it.

Sleeper weapons also exist which may seem innocuous but later turn into serious problems once players discover an overlooked and broken feature. The E-23 ViPeR and the HMC are both examples of former such sleeper weapons.