It has been a while since the last major balance pass and players, my self included, are full of ideas about which weapon is the best, which is the worst, and how to change the stats to once again attempt to create balance. Many threads are already popping up but there is no data to support changing one weapons stats over another. All we have is speculation and anecdotes.

It would be amazing if we could get efficiency stats for each of the types of weapons, specifically the ratio of kills to weapons lost for each one along side what percent of total purchases a given weapon represents. This stat would be best provided for two different 1 month periods, specifically: prior to the last balance passes (where light weapons and side arms were reworked) and a month more recently.

Additional ratio snap-shots after earler weapon balance passes would be helpful but as well but two should be enough to see how the last balance pass affected the weapon choices of players and the resulting kill efficiency.

Once we have these stats we can start to see how different weapon changes affected usability and propose small tweeks, based upon evidence, to further balance all the weapons.

TLDR; Many players in the community want to make further changes to weapons to make the balancing even better but lack numbers to do so with. Getting effiency ratios for all the weapons and weapon variant prior to the last major balance pass and not long ago will allow us to see how changes that were made in the last balance pass affected weapons' usability and can then be used to suggest new changes.

efficiency ratio = kills with a weapon for a given period of time / # of times that weapon was lost due to death of a user during the same period of time

Balance isn't that bad right now, I see a pretty diverse variety on the battlefield.

I also don't think publishing the numbers would be the best idea.

Firstly, a lot of people would panic die to regular fluctuations . IE: If the AR happened to perform well one month, people might jump on the nerf bandwagon early.

Secondly, if you could look up how a weapon is performing at any given moment, I think people might go and manipulate stats on alts to ensure a weapon doesn't get nerfed. IE: use ScR's on alts and die over and over to make the gun look worse.

I do hear what you are saying about the potential flavor of the month issues that regularly presented effiency data would produce.

I'd like to throw out the concept that transparency in efficiency data would get things balanced much more quickly and eliminate any flavor of the month bandwagoning in the first place just by making transition cost (in terms of SP and "this isnt my favorite weapon why am I even using it" factor) much larger than any minor advantage gained by switching to whatever weapon happened to be the in thing that month.

So people concerned that this kind of open data would cause a bandwagoning effect: maybe in the short term, but in the medium/long term we would be much better off, much more quickly than if we kept everything hidden.