Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-26141477-20200213021739/@comment-38528045-20200213055923

This weapon outclasses every other shotgun in the game. The only shotguns that can match it in any stat are the Shotty 12, which has higher single shot damage in exchange for an accuracy of 18, and the DB shotgun with double fire, which has higher single shot damage in exchange for reloading after every shot. In nearly every other stat, this weapon is a straight upgrade from all of the alternatives. It's not even a slight upgrade. It has a base capacity of 40 shots. It's automatic with insane DPS, and uses a magazine. It even gives you explosives.

The unfortunate thing is that something like this has already been added. The P90 is more or less a straight upgrade from every other automatic in the game. Even the SCAR-H is significantly worse, having only 70% of the DPS for pretty much no discernable advantage. The only automatic weapon that comes close to its power is the M249, which has more Damage Per Magazine and Total Damage. At the cost of slower reload, a movement speed penalty, lower accuracy and lower DPS. Nice.

The problem extends beyond the P90: survivors have been experiencing power creep in many other ways, including the buffs to low and mid rank weapons. Spawncamping has become a constant, and zombies generally have to rely on unfun mechanics such as the digger's trip, the swarmer's stuns, or the brute's instakill, which tend to result in very unsatisfying deaths. Although the buffing of these mechanics and the community's overall switch to longer maps have maintained "balance", the fun factor of the game has undoubtedly been damaged.

The thing is, when anyone calls out a new weapon for clearly unbalancing the game, people just say "oh, its high ranked and expensive, so it's supposed to be OP." I have never understood that reasoning. How much a weapon costs has no bearing on how fun it is to fight, or how powerful it is. Adding an OP weapon still makes survivors stronger and less fun to fight, regardless of how costly it is. High cost does not address the problem. In fact, it makes the game even more difficult to balance by removing consistency.

Take the Skull Champion. Just 5 survivors with the P90 could kill the Skull Champion in around 10 seconds. If the P90 was commonly accessible, the Skull Champion could just get a health or speed buff. But it isn't, so now we have a wildly inconsistent system where the Skull Champion will either singlehandedly end the round or die in half a minute depending on how many OP weapons the survivors have on their side, rather than how many survivors are alive.

Better approaches to weapon balance have already been implemented in the game. The best example is the balancing between low and mid rank weapons. The M16A1, AK47 and HK416 all have their pros and cons. Similar story with the DB Shotgun, Wingmaster 870 and Shotty 12. Although certain options are overall better than the others, the difference is small enough that personal preference and fun factor are generally higher priorities.

Of course, we still need to maintain progression. As their rank gets higher, people will expect better weapons. That's simply the state of the game. But that sort of progression has been done well too. The M249, Barrett and Winchester are probably the best examples of this. They are all extremely powerful, and they are certainly preferred to a Remington or Skorpion. But they still have well defined weaknesses. The M249 has the movement speed penalty, which when combined with the long reload leaves windows of vulnerability. The Barrett and Winchester are unmatched in killing special zombies, but their sluggish firerate means that against a hoard of normals, the Dragunov or even the R700 would be preferrable. My personal suggestion for this weapon would be only getting one magazine per ammo station reload, like the RPG. 10 Shells per refill is nothing to scoff at, but the user will have to remain mobile to use the weapon at its full potential.

I can accept high rank weapons being obnoxiously powerful. What I can't accept is high rank weapons having no weaknesses.