Weapon rebalancing: Why, what and how?

[h3]Soldiers![/h3]
This Monday we don't have a content creations post. However, we are going to take a deeper dive in the weapon balancing changes for build 1.20. We will discuss why we decided to make changes, what changes we made and how we are going to continue balancing the game. To make sure this isn't too much of a wall of text, I did take a look at the screenshots you guys have made recently, and used those for this post! I want to thank everyone for sharing your screenshots! Thank you to Maximilian Sommer specifically for providing the featured image of this week!

[h3]The four elements of balance[/h3]
Those of you who are active on the forums or on discord, may have heard Reto.Hades talk about the 'four (main) elements' in relation to weapon balancing. Before we go into what they actually mean, let's first take a look at what the four elements are:

1. Weapon class/group
   
2. Weapon modifications
   
3. Badges
   
4. Individual weapon statistics

Each weapon belongs to a certain group, a submachine-gun, a machine-gun etc. Within this element, we try to make sure each weapon has a specific role which it is good at, while not being that great in other scenarios. The other three elements probably speak for itself a lot more. Each weapon can have a variety of modifications, which can improve your weapons performance. Players can equip badges that can also improve their performance and lastly we have the guns themselves.


Made by steam user Kurz(98)enev: Let's hope they picked the right gun for the job!

In the first update we did earlier this year, we focussed mostly on the first element. We tried to give weapon groups specific statistics, that would fit their desired role. As we have not completely archived that goal yet with the first update, the second update will build further upon that goal. We expect that this should be the last update, to get the weapon groups to perform as desired.

The main focus of update 1.20 has however been surrounding the weapon modifications. The difference between an unmodified weapon and a modified weapon can in many ways be very large. Giving more experienced players a large advantage. While we certainly don't want to take away all their advantages of knowledge and skill, with this update we are trying to decrease the gap between a new players and an experienced player.

In the near future, we will also have an update for badges, where we will focus on normalising the badges and dividing them into groups. Within each group the badge will give similar bonuses. Several badges that gave bonuses that were very high, will see a decreased percentage in the future. The normalisation mostly means all badges will follow the same route. Bronze gives half the bonus gold does and silver gives 75% of what gold does.

We hope that with all these changes, the three categories will be taken to the state we want them to be in and if that is the case, we will not make any more large changes to them. We will however, keep doing smaller balancing on an individual weapon level.


Made by Steam user Laika: Semi-automatic rifle reporting

[h3]Why we change everything, to keep it the same[/h3]
This title may sound very odd and we hope it has caught your attention! In update 1.20 we have spend a lot of time with the weapon modifications, what that means in practical terms: We have decreased their advantages AND disadvantages by a lot. Some modifications have stayed unchanged, like for example the Field Adjust sights, while other modifications have seen a decrease of 20%, 30% or sometimes even 50%.

Now our goal was not necessarily to decrease the power of the modified weapons, we just wanted to decrease the difference between modded and unmodded. So the next step we decided to make, was to increase the basis values of a lot of weapons. In the specific example of the Gewehr 43, we have reduced the modifications by a rather large percentage, in exchange however we have increased it's base-damage by 10% and have increased it's rate of fire by 20%. The rate of fire when modified is now slightly lower than it was, but it is also more accurate and does more damage. All in all this should make sure the modified version of the Gewehr, is about the same as it was before.

The unmodified version however, is now more powerful. It shoots faster and against an enemy that does not wear the heavy set badge, it is now lethal after only two hits rather than three. Making it a much better weapon in the hands of a new player. Many changes like this have been made to other weapons, making sure that almost all weapons perform better without modifications, and similar with modifications compared to the current version of the game.

[h3]What did we change?[/h3]
This is not a changelog, so we will not provide a full list of changes here. But we will look at some specific weapons or weapon groups and explain what and why we changed them.

The biggest changes are in the submachine-gun group. This was the only group that wasn't quite where we wanted it to be. While it's certainly effective in cqc-environments we noticed it has too much competition from other guns that are not really made for this range. Rather than nerfing these other weapons we have decided to give the smg's a boost in close quarters, while decreasing their value on range. In order to do this, all SMG's (except for the PPD-40 and the PPSh-41) have received a 20% damage increase on short range. That means, that an enemy without heavy set will now die after 3 hits, rather than 4. To make sure however these weapons don't become overpowered, at the same time we have decreased their range by a large margin. We have decreased the so called 'range near' (this is the point where the damage starts decreasing) by 40%. At the same time we have decreased the 'range far' (the point where the damage stops decreasing) by 20%. This takes away quite a lot of range from the weapons, making sure they can dominate indoors, but are near useless in the open fields.


Made by steam user Flux_: Soviet soldier with SMG dismounting

The range far was decreased by the same margin for the PPD-40 and PPSh-41 as for the other submachine-guns, the range near however, went down by 70%! They did get something in return for it though. Other than the damage boost that the other SMG's received, these two soviet weapons receive a very large buff in their rate of fire. The PPD-40 now fires 44% more bullets per minute than it did before. The PPSh-41 receives a 23% increase. This makes both of them by far the fastest shooting SMG's in the game. With their 71 bullets missing a few doesn't matter much which makes these guns excellent for running into a room guns blazing. Be careful though, because the range on this gun is much more limited than on the other SMG's.

For the rest, the most noticeable changes will be for the MG-42 and the M2 carbine. The MG-42 due to the changes to modifications no longer fires around 1050 bullets per minute, now it fires 1150! We have increased the base rate of fire from 850 to 1000, giving it the speed that it deserves. Seeing the weapon was statistically the best performing weapon in the game however, we have also increased the recoil quite a bit, to account for it's higher rate of fire. Did I mention yet, that the MG42 can now fire 100 bullets before it has to reload rather than 50?

No (automatic) weapon received more gain from it's modifications than the M2 carbine. A weapon that tends to underperform without modifications, but performs on the highest level when the modifications come into play. It is exactly those modifications, that have been reduced by a very large percentage. Of course that would leave it dead in the water on the highest level. So we have increased it's damage, gave it a little bit more rate of fire and made it a bit more accurate as well. We hope that with these changes, the M2 carbine feels less like an SMG and more like an assault rifle. If it does not, we will keep tweaking it here and there until it does!

Lastly, in the previous patch we made some changes to the STG-44, one of those changes was to decrease the rate of fire from 500 to 476. We noticed this impacted the performance of the weapon a little bit too much, so we have reverted the changes and the STG-44 will now be back at 500 bullets per minute.

We have made many more changes to many different guns, if you want to know what they are, be sure to check out the changelogs or just jump into the game to try them out when you get the chance to!


Made by steam user Cuffer: Death to tanks!

[h3]It's a tank! Let's go kill it![/h3]
While not actually part of the weapon rebalancing changes, we have made some changes to ribbon unlocks for the anti-tank weapons of each faction.

In the past years we have added quite a few tools to take on enemy tanks. However we have noticed that some of them are quite difficult to get your hands on. While the American soldier can get an M1 bazooka for only 40.000 credits pretty early in his career. For the Soviet faction and the German faction it was proven to be much harder to get a good low tier anti-tank weapon. Without adding any new weapons, or changing any statistics, we have decided to simply move around some ribbons. The Soviet faction has plundered an American depot and has found lots of M1 bazooka's it can now make available for it's troops. Both the Americans and Soviets, unlock the M1 bazooka at the same ribbon level. For the German faction, the Granatbuchse has become the weapon of choice. We have decreased the reload time by a full second on this weapon and since it's buying price is much lower than that of the Panzerbuchse, it will be an excellent choice for each German soldier.

We have swapped around some other weapons as well, and the PTRD and Panzerbuchse have both received a small reload time reduction as well. Be sure to check out the changelog to find all the changes once it comes out!


Made by steam user K1dda: Tank opens fire

[h3]How will we move forward?[/h3]
When we started with the rebalancing, we had a plan of where we wanted the balance to go. Seeing that there were a lot of subjects we wanted to change, the changes were split up so that every update has a certain theme to it. The first two updates, were all about infantry versus infantry combat. Changes to weapon groups were made in April and should be finished now with the release of 1.20. Modifications may get some more fine-tuning in the future, but for the most part they are set now. Badges are already in the system and will also be changed before the end of the year. And with that, all the big changes to infantry combat should be at an end. Smaller individual tweaks will continue to be made within the game.

The Sherman E8 is one of the best medium tanks in the game. It can take out enemy tanks, enemy infantry and if your aim is good enough even a plane from time to time. But a question we can ask ourselves is, does it have to be so effective against infantry? When the enemy has tanks, the E8 will always be the best medium tank the US has to offer. But when there are no enemies in sight, the M4 sherman or even the Lee tank may become more interesting.

For the next update(s) we want to start moving away from infantry and towards the vehicles. The planes, the tanks and also the recon vehicles. Of course this will be combined with another look at infantry anti-tank weapons. Just like the infantry weapons, one of the goals will be to give each tank but also each plane a 'class'. This will make sure that every tank has a place on the battlefield and simply taking the highest tier tank is not always the best strategy. Which changes will we make exactly? Right now we don't even know ourselves yet. But we know what the goal is, all we have to do is reach it.

As some closing words, big changes to balance we only have to make once. The biggest changes we had to make were related to infantry weapons and while future update will certainly give noticeable changes, every update that follows should be smaller and smaller.

Thank you for reading!
RETO MOTO