Great lay down and honestly this is a dialogue I would prefer to have on coms or maybe you can come on to the Biomassed podcast with us one day.

First...the stats seem quite solid, albeit difficult for me to interpret a bit. Note that I think they are factually accuate.

Second...the stats don't always tell a full story and watching FOTM trends is not unlike the stock market. Numbers move based on peoples perceptions and that doesn't always mean the ground truth. It's very risky to balance game play on pure numbers without accounting for the human factor.

RR and CR were heavily invested in post 1.8 due to them being a new weapon and they were over powered in comparison to the PR and SCR in particular. More people using the weapon lead to more kills which drives player perception that the weapon is OP. I remember when the venerable Duovolle AR was being labled "OP" left, right, and center (even by me once or twice) and there was only the SCR to compare it to. The proto AR of today is more powerful than the old "OP" version.

I have no doubt that RR needed to be addressed. My point is that there may be serious design concerns that are making the weapon difficult to balance without fully painting into a corner similar to something like the LR. I do believe that the new amount of recoil is simply too high...it far exceeds any of the other weapons in this regard now. For the RR...higher recoil means more diffculty in applying it's already lowest in class DPS at it's optimal range and that doesn't strike me as a good thing. The problem is that almost anything done to lower perceived or real CQC effectiveness will also directly impact it's ability to engage at long range as well. Also, the recoil clearly feels much to high for the ARR if that is a short / mid-range oriented weapon.

I think my concern is the tools being used to bring the weapon into balance simply will relegate the RR to status of the Flaylock of a few months ago. My bigger concern is that the racial lines are balanced to be equally competitive in the current play environment of Dust.

There is an inherent issue when by default all tactical objectives force you to have the majority of your engagements in CQC range to secure victory and one race is a clear outlier to that design. The concept that Alena offered to you in regards to the ARR does help, however, you need to look across the racial lines in a holistic fashion I think.

I sincerely appreciate the work you are doing and support your efforts on behalf of the community and I'm glad you are letting us all be a small part of the process.