Originally Posted by BaneII

I think the discussion about which kit's weapon is superior is of no significance. Superior is an opinion, not a fact.

These are pretty silly statements. Surely developers aren't merely fooling around wasting time trying tweaking the weapons in the game for balance. If it were insignificant whether some weapons were superior to others, then developers wouldn't bother.

That a person can find a weapon superior to another an opinion based merely on their preference for one weapon over another does not imply that one weapon cannot in fact be superior to another. It's not just anyone's opinion that POE2 weapons are vastly superior to vanilla weapons. They are (in fact) superior.

Just like in real life, each weapon handles differently; that is why there are multiple types of weapons.

In real life, some weapons are superior to others. It doesn't follow from there being multiple types of weapons for different circumstances, or that it's hard to determine which ones are superior, or that some weapons are just incomparable with others that there are no facts concerning which weapons are superior to which others. Yes, a stone handles differently than a M16. Yes, stones never jam. Yes, stones can go through metal detectors without setting them off. These might be advantages of stones over M16s. But, in fact, the M16 is a superior weapon to the stone. You may even learn how to use a stone very proficiently while not having had much practice with an M16; or you may be crazy and prefer the stone to the M16. Still, the M16 is in fact a superior weapon to the stone. Our military spends a lot of money developing new weapons. They don't do so just to throw tax payer's dollars away. They do so with the intention of providing our soldiers with superior weapons. We no longer use Kentucky flintlock pistols of the revolutionary war because we now have far superior small arms to arm our soldiers with. It's not just opinion that today's small arms are superior to revolutionary war small arms. It's a fact.

This is only an obvious case to make my point. It's not so clear with the weapons in POE2, but that's what the discussion is about. As far as virtual weapons go, just because you can look at the stats on two weapons and see that one has a higher value than the other in one aspect and lower in another doesn't mean that there's no fact to the matter as to which one is superior than the other. They may be in fact balanced or they may not be. What our opinion about it is another matter. The hope is that our opinion matches the facts. For instance, we might code a rifle that has zero deviation, far greater damage, and higher rate of fire than the VEPR. But, if we also code it so that the gun blocks out your entire view save for one pixel in the center of the screen, then the VEPR is surely superior to this weapon. That's not just an opinion. It's a fact. Nobody here has made the claim that one weapon is better based on the damage and deviation stats only.

You may prefer a weapon that's in fact inferior, as in the case with the shotgun. But don't confuse this with there not being a fact about whether it's inferior or not. But, don't confuse preference with what people are talking about here.

Lastly, I think people have cited a number of particular reasons why they feel some weapons are superior than others--among them comparing the way counterpart kit's weapons recoil and the view through the scope. While this by itself does not mean that a weapon is in fact superior to another, it constitutes evidence that it's so. As we play the game some more, we'll have more feel for the weapons and gain more evidence. It was pretty clear after a couple of months with the previous version that the VEPR was vastly superior to the GER counterpart. If this was mere opinion and not a fact, the developers would have had no reason to nerf the VEPR and beef up the GER gun. But, they did, and for good reason.

I'm sure the developers like to receive this feedback. I'm sure this is the sort of thing that they asked the testers about. They don't just put random values on the guns and go, "you know what, superiority is just an opinion, not a fact. The players have to realize that the weapons in our game are just different, just like in real life. There's no such thing as a superior weapon. It doesn't matter what stats we give the guns, since there's no such thing as objective comparison." No, the developers don't do that.