- - - Let me start by being fair, because I actually can be. The ballistics nerf? Deserved. On paper, no argument. Since 4.8, ballistics weren't a choice — they were THE choice. The only one. Energy weapons might as well have been decorative. So yes, something had to give. Nobody sane is going to defend the pre-4.8.3 ballistic meta. But here's where I lose the plot with CIG's approach: > > > You don't fix a bad rework by stacking a worse one on top of it. You don't put out a fire by pouring alcohol on it. And that's exactly what 4.8.3 feels like — more mess layered onto an already broken foundation, hoping the two problems somehow cancel out. They don't. They compound. - - - Let's be honest about the timeline Pre-4.8 balance was already mediocre. Not terrible, but nothing to write home about. Post-4.8 balance is a joke. And 4.8.3 doesn't fix the joke — it just changes the punchline. The core disease is untouched: "bringing weapon velocities closer together" didn't rebalance anything. It stripped weapons of their identity. The tradeoffs that used to make loadout choice interesting are gone, flattened into a narrow band where nothing has a real personality anymore. - - - The survey said the quiet part out loud There was a survey on the rework. Roughly around 95% of the player base said it was bad. The absolute minimum decent response to a number like that would have been to rollback and take a fresh approach. Admit the direction was wrong, pull it back, regroup. Instead we get patchwork — another band-aid on a wound that needed stitches. - - - The community already did your homework Here's the part that actually stings: people have been proposing real, workable balance frameworks for weeks. This isn't a community that only complains — it's a community handing you solutions for free. I spent 20 minutes — twenty — putting together balance proposals for most of the commonly used S3 and S4 weapons (in the link below). > > > Are they perfect? No. thoses might need reducing cannon alpha while keeping their DPS — lower the alpha, raise the RPM. > > > Are they already 1000x more coherent with the current flight model we actually have than what's live right now? Absolutely. link to the post >> https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/61894/thread/what-if-weapon-velocity-was-a-meaningful-choice That alone starts giving weapons distinct roles again instead of homogenizing everything toward the middle. If a guy doing this on his couch in 20 minutes can produce something more internally consistent than a shipped patch, that's not a flex on my part — that's a problem on yours. - - - The ask Pick a real direction and commit to it. Rework the flight model, or rework the weapons around the flight model we have — but stop with the half-measures that make the game worse for most of the roster while the underlying problem never gets addressed. Curious what everyone else thinks, and drop your own balance ideas below. - - - > > > PS #1: At this point, honestly — just admit there's a technical limitation. Admit your servers can't reliably handle high-velocity weapons. That's genuinely what a lot of us are starting to believe, because it would explain a whole lot. But no — by all means, keep preferring workarounds over bug fixes. Much easier to nerf the design than fix the netcode, right? > > > PS #2: And please, for the love of everything — it's been years. Repeater fire and cannon fire look identical. Weren't M5As green once? Weren't Panthers red? A CANNON shot has no business looking like a gatling projectile. It's completely immersion-breaking that the biggest, hardest-hitting guns in the game fire the same visual pea as a rapid-fire repeater. Give weapons their visual identity back too, while you're at it.