I would hope CCP take most of what we say with a pinch of salt. However, I can't see how they can try stuff out for themselves. Even with the server in VIP mode, how many mercs do they get into a battle, for how long, with enough playstyle variety for them to draw meaningful conclusions? Or perhaps that's not what VIP mode is for.

I think it's great that we get to give feedback. But that should be all it is. I had a thought earlier that some of us lot should be involved in some play-testing in VIP mode or something. But I don't see how that would change our feedback from getting let loose on it for real. Because I want my scout to be better, and someone else wants their heavy to be better. Aside from this natural bias that influences any feedback, neither one of us can determine whether anything we don't normally do is balanced or not.

And how the hell you choose who gets to do that is beyond me - we have a CPM some of whose actions and representations are dubious, and they were hand-picked based on reputation. I don't know if I could be objective enough to provide balanced feedback if I were to play-test.

Pulling some numbers out of thin air, if 80% of the player base use assault rifles, and most of them are (it's human nature) gonna want to kill better, then they're going to look for weaknesses in the AR and want it buffed. This is not balanced feedback, and is further skewed because you've already got a higher volume of buff suggestions simply because 4 out of 5 mercs aren't gonna say anything different. I'm sure there's a statistical term for this skewing.

So are there any answers? I dunno - test servers have been mentioned in the past, but not sure if they're feasible or if they'd even solve anything, short of fragmenting the player base. But basing balance decisions off of metrics must surely be skewed due to the flavour-of-the-month effect - we basically change our loadouts and styles when a release drops, so can you really compare apples to apples?

I just put 3 levels into dampening, because I was getting scanned to crap. So I already became incomparable to previous battles :)

Two penneth.