Absolutely not. Have you noticed that all aurum variants have a higher meta? If your poorly thought out idea was implemented, it would make this game pay to win, or in other words putting more of an edge over your opponent stat wise then merely skill.

Please rethink your suggestion.

His logic is not flawed. As a long time player, I wholeheartedly agree with him, and put myself squarely in the "against this idea" camp.

The metalevel of an item is designed to be a quick reference as to the value of the item compared to other items. It represents the stats; it doesn't change them.

EDIT: for example, do you want an officer level item to gave a 10% bonus across the board? The game would be heavily outbalanced. Take weapon damage modifiers, for example: we've already seen how only a 2% difference effects the game when we changed the damaged modules from 5% to 3%. The 5% mods caused there to be huge difference in effectiveness and newer players were slaughtered in droves over and beyond what was reasonable. A 10% bump would be god mode.

so I'd wanna see more data but initially despite the issue that the #'s are used to catalog items...I wonder if it's feasible and I would want to ensure it doesn't increase the power differences between basic and proto. I really like the fact that someone who has lvl 5 duvolle can use a standard variant and still get the operation bonuses...and I don't fathom being at even more of a disadvantage than it already is because you'd potentially be getting what like 5% more efficiency? 8%? I wonder what's the largest lete level difference from a basic to a proto variant? would they need to be standardized so all weapons progressed meta levels at the same pace? do they already? how much work would it be to assign stats to meta level? is it significant enough to warrant the development time?

These are more questions I have as I pondered about your idea.

What about tanks? If I use an officer weapon that normally does 10% to vehicles these added 10% might actually double my damage depending on how exactly these 10% are added.

The meta level not only has meaning already, it does the exact thing you want it to do. Just not the specific way you prefer. OFC is 10% and it's not self balancing. If anything, the lack of officer and LP versions for many weapons and modules would cause significant imbalances between the racial variants.

And this is a good thing...why? It still increases the power gap between low and high meta items. You downplaying the extent of which it does that does not actually change that fact.

You keep trying to fix problems people bring up but have so far failed to explain why we should bother in the first place. Why introduce this system to the game? How does it improve the game?

If it wouldn't be that big of a difference, then no point in adding it.

As people already said, aurum items makes this idea not so great, BUT....

How about the exact opposite? The lower your meta, the better your efficiency. It doesn't make sense lore-wise, but it would be a slight help to NPE.