When I heard how carefully Lars phrased that sentence when I first watched the video, the immediate thought I had was some sort of insidious automated system that tracks weapon popularity and nerfs / buffs accordingly. The point of such a system isn't to try to get the game to a balanced state, but to keep the metagame shifting in a natural way. Everybody is using Closing Time? Let's slowly make it less good over the course of a month so that people who try something else might get rewarded. Nobody is using Red Death? Let's slowly make it more powerful over the course of a month so that people can rediscover how good it is. Especially since Bungie is trying to shy away from printing numbers on weapons, it might just work if the changes are subtle and gradual enough. But obviously there is a horrific number of serious problems with such a system, you can only twist the knob so much (4 shot BR turning into a 5 shot BR will not go unnoticed), players don't like getting stabbed in the back, the entire system in general isn't transparent and would lead to a lot of paranoia and backlash once it's discovered... I'd be curious to see if they had any ideas to address those problems, but my gut feeling is that it's way too heavy handed and insidious to work. A more realsitic system would be to give every weapon a default power rating depending on how far it's been upgraded and what weapon it is, and then breaking up the competitive mode into several hoppers that are divided by power level ranges like 0 - 500, 500 - 999, 1000 - 4999, 5000 - 9,999, 10,000+. You cannot enter a hopper if the maximum power of your build (considering an optimal combination of items in your inventory) exceeds the maximum value, but if that number is lower than the minimum value, you get an experience / loot boost if you do well with a weaker build. At that point, you tweak each weapon's default power rating depending on how popular they are, and you communicate that to players with some helpful charts and such. So if you have a stupidly powerful build, over time people will copy you, and you'll find yourself being pushed up to higher hoppers and having to work harder than you were when you were sandbagging with this new build. The only time at that point that you would actually need to modify a weapon's performance is if it becomes stupidly broken or overpowered. Sounds good for off the top of my head I think. Pretty much what I assume you were getting at with the latter part of your second to last post.

It is a similar approach but my suggestion focused on a single weapon at a time. Think of it like looking through someone's medals/weapon kills in their halo stats. From the start Bungie knew the rocket launcher would be a casual weapon so they didn't give it any medals - which could be seen as a reward system. It wasn't really special to get a rocket kill. Now that the game contains other more meaningful rewards they have more ways to have meaningful reinforcement of skill. I will try to frame this possibility in with your suggestion to show the possible difference it makes. (Remove armor from the discussion for a minute because I'm not really sure how it would play into either of our descriptions at the moment - although it would also potentially need to be addressed because it definitely has the ability to become over powered now) Scenario: You've been playing for a year and have a wide range of weapons - you've even held on to a couple of weapons you found earlier in your career that have gone un-upgraded and you just hold on to for sentimental value. You have a couple of friends who just start to play and you want to play some competitive MP with them. You equip two common weapons but you keep your exotic because you would like to show off from time to time and probably use it to get you out of a sticky situation or two. Should you be penalized overall because your total weapon power is > X or should you get quality points because you're primarily playing on the level of others. What's interesting about such a scheme in either way is thinking about it in terms of Halo weapons. Consider the beloved marksman weapon (BR/DMR). Everyone who played the game regularly used that weapon because of its general versatility. In Destiny I expect that the overall kills with the weapon (possibly K/D but that would get tricky fast considering weapon swap times and other factors I'm surely not considering) would set the "power" level of a weapon. Matches would have surely become more varied as some people would have commonly used other weapons for their likely outrageous rewards because no one else was using them regularly. Coming back to the armor. I suppose it could work as a general rewards multiplier. The base level would probably be inversely determined somehow by deaths with a certain piece of armor across the player base. But the worse your armor perhaps the better in general rewards you get off all kills. The same could work for level as well - as a general rewards multiplier that considered your level and your opponents level. But thinking back on it I would have to generally agree that "less good over time" has to mean with incentives instead of power in general because he did make it a point to mention nerfing if needed and it seems like any direct power change could be considered a nerf no matter how small. If this is the case I wonder how frequently these things would fluctuate and if it would be visible to you as a player in any way other than your rewards. Definitely interested though to see how any such systems influences the decisions people make regarding their exotics.

Yeah, kill to death would definitely be a bad way to set the power level of weapons. I've got a 119.00 kill to death ratio with the Spiker in Halo Reach but... well, you know :) Incidentally with regards to your original post, my next thread is about the possibillities of ascending superior weapons to exotic tier. Should be fun, I've got a really nice graphic prepared to hook people into the thread...

ETA or just Soon™? I've been waiting for your thread on factions for a while - not sure if I missed it. Although not sure if the info that has been released has changed perspectives and ideas about the general faction setup.

I'm pretty sure I never got around to the faction thread, it seemed better for thread replies as opposed to it's own article thread thing, though I guess I can always revisit it. I'm trying to get better about speeding up the writing process, so we'll see how that goes. I've got the core ideas for this next thread hammered out, I just need to generate volume and then polish it until it works. I'd like to say Sunday, but with school and such there's no promises :)