Yep pretty much. I think it's why (for me) warzone has become really boring recently.
Since the weapon balance is so poor there are only a select few guns that are even worth making a loadout with, and since every team and their nan have their loadout within 10 mins anyway, you're sort of forced to run with the best there is.
"Weapon balance" is an oxymoron in this game. In most competitive shooters, there are other ways to balance weapons beyond the physical stats of the guns. I'll use CS Go and Pubg as examples since I've played a lot of both. Both games realize that not every weapon is created equal, and they don't try to force the issue and tweak weapon stats to make all the guns "balanced" with each other. Instead both games make the better weapons "rarer", with the idea being they realize certain guns are better so we'll make them harder to get to balance it out.
CS Go does this by making the better weapons cost more money. You can't buy the better weapons every round if you keep dying, or you'll run out of money quick. Sometimes you have to save or settle for less competitive weapons in a pinch. Pubg does this by reducing the loot rate for the better rifles, snipers, and attachments. You quite simply won't find the better weapons and attachments as often. That way if certain guns do happen to be better than others, like they are in real life, less players will have them because they are just harder to find. So this forces players to use "less than the best" in nearly every game, because either you don't find the best guns or you don't find the optimal attachments. This is how a BR game should work.
But Warzone CAN'T do this, because weapon rarity has been rendered obsolete by design. You loot for 5 minutes to get $10k, and then literally ANY WEAPON with ANY ATTACHMENTS you want all cost the exact same $10k. There is no physical way to make better weapons/attachments cost more than crappy weapons with no attachments. Why should an Overkill Loadout with a fully kitted HDR/FAL cost the same as a Loadout with a stock Bizon/pistol with Ghost? Not only does that not make sense, but it completely removes any kind of balancing from that perspective.
So they can't go the CS Go route and adjust the costs of different weapons, maybe Warzone could do like Pubg and make certain weapons rarer as floor loot? They actually do this, as red chests and the legendary weapons are a lot tougher to find than the crappy stock/green blueprints you find everywhere. So yes, they did try to enforce some balance here by introducing rarity among the better weapons, however this is completely undone by Loadouts. Who cares if floor loot is "balanced" when you can just loot for 5 minutes and buy a Loadout with whatever guns and attachments you want? The balanced floor loot is only used for 5 mintues and then rendered obsolete.
So what are you left with then as far as balancing weapons - just the stats. So you wind up with the devs having to tweak weapon stats so that literally just about every weapon in each class is balanced with all the others in terms of DPS/TTK. So at that point, all guns are essentially the same and it doesn't matter what you use because they're all balanced to be identical. And MW even fails at this, whether accidental or purposefully, because there are certain weapons every season that are just stupid broken. Until they "fix" them and then something else becomes stupid broken.
My 2 suggestions. First off stop trying to "balance" all the weapons with each other. I can list 4 examples off the top of my head where this game just makes no sense with how they try to balance different guns:
- The SKS is a crappier rifle that was only really in service until the AK47 came out, and the AK is literally better in every way. So there is zero excuse for the SKS to be competitive in any way.
- The FAL is a battle rifle (precursor to the modern, smaller assault rifle) that fires full-power 7.62mm NATO rounds (like older snipers and modern DMRs) designed in the 1950s, yet somehow the devs (temporarily) made it the best close-quarters "SMG" in the game? Literally hysterical.
- The Galil was designed by Isreal to improve the design of the AK and use the more modern/better 5.56mm NATO round. They did also design a variant to use the 7.62mm NATO round, but the main purpose was to modernize the AK and use the 5.56mm round. So what does MW do - they don't use either the 5.56 or 7.62mm NATO rounds, instead they make the "CR-56" use the basic 7.62x39mm AK-47 ammo. No clue what they're doing here - a Galil chambered for 7.62x39mm is basically an AK clone and should have identical stats, but somehow it has more damage range dropoffs and lower bullet velocity? LULZ.
- The new AN-94 is a real weapon - it was designed by Russia to (like the Galil) improve upon the old AK-47 design and use a modern 5.45x39mm cartridge. It hasn't seen mainstream adoption across their armed forces because the rifle is "complex and expensive" to produce, specifically because of the goofy mechanism that allows the 2-round hyperburst. So what we have here is a weapon that is literally more expensive, complex, modern, and better than the AK in all facets. Yet what does MW do with it? Somehow despite using ammo similar to the standard 5.56mm NATO round, they coded it so it does more damage than all the other 5.56 rifles mainly because they had to balance the lower sub-600rpm ROF. If the other 5.56 rifles have like 750-900rpm ROF and all deal similar damage, how would they ever possibly balance a sub-600rpm AN-94 without artificially inflating the damage???
So stop trying to force "performance balance" among all the weapon classes. Some weapons are just better than others, so rarity needs to be introduced to this game somehow. Either get rid of Loadouts entirely and just rely on the rarity of floor loot Blueprints, or.....scale the cost of a Loadout with what you purchase. If you want that stock Bizon/pistol/Ghost loadout it should be miles cheaper than an Overkill HDR/FAL loadout. If they want to keep the Loadout system in the game, scale the cost of Loadouts based on every single weapon, attachment, tactical, lethal, and perk you choose. This would introduce balance to the game, because in order to afford the better Loadouts you would have to loot longer to get the required cash. Sometimes you'll have to settle for a medicore Loadout if you have an unlucky game loot-wise. Also get rid of the free Loadouts altogether - the process of having to spend your time looting for cash to purchase a Loadout is what balances them. Giving them away for free to everyone on the map is just dumb.
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