eh... the auto rifle gravitation is likely because it's easier to grab a full auto and hold the trigger down while pointing it in the general direction of the enemy than it is to have to actually aim each shot, and pull the trigger for each individual shot (eg scout rifle, hand cannon, and most pulse rifles albeit pulse rifles fire three per trigger pull, but do still require repeated trigger actuation)

Hahaha.. yeh.. like i would believe that. If that's so, why did they patch raid? Now we cannot use the platform to beat the templar on hard. Do you know how hard it is to stay alive in hard mode? And if you die, you cannot be revived. I really don't like the way bungie wants us to play. Raid normal mode is not fun anymore because of the poor rewards we get from chests, templar and final boss. We do still play it tho, but that's because no 1 wants to do raid on hard anymore after the patch. Thanks bungie !!

Correct me if i'm wrong, but don't they reccommend the entire group be 30 for raid hard mode?

Yeh but not everyone wants to play raid 100 times until they get all the proper gears/weapons. I beat raid now 3 times this week with 3 different characters. All i got was ascendant energy/shard, chatterwhite shader and the same blam-ing shotgun. I'll say remove that blam-ing RNG and give us better rewards like gears so we can reach level 30.

Source it bud.

everyone single game out there would use data, not only the forums. complaints might light fires under them or point out something to look at, but they wouldn't make any decisions without first looking at data.

Source. It.

its facts but, do the research yourself. League for instance basis their decision on win rates of champions. its part of development, even outside of video games.

Data = # of people bitching and complaining?

Less clear winners? I'm sorry i've yet to come across someone in my strike/raid/patrol come to an end and say "Ha you losers, i have more kills than you". Nerf it during pvp match's fine - They should have a clear system that has damage modifiers to balance weapons in Crucible and outside of that they don't exist. Its the highest rarity weapon, from the last boss, on the hardest level of the only raid. It is supposed to give a feeling over dominance over the enemies. They are treading down a very dangerous route when the effects of PVP and PVE intertwine, MANY games in the past have shown that when you fiddle with things in one and it effects the other the impact to the overall playerbase is not good. This will happen again in the future with weapons and it will cost them players.

The fact is that what's balanced in PvP tends to be balanced in PvE; the other way around is not true. You can have a massively overpowered weapon in PvE and it's still "fine" because the things you're shooting with it don't complain, but at the end of the day, it's still an imbalance. You want uniformity in weapon performance and handling across game modes, and if all the weapons don't have a role and a niche to fill then some become pointless (as was the case with scout rifles prior to the patch: auto rifles were nearly always better, regardless of range). Your idea, of having separate handling and balance between PvE and PvP is a horrifically bad one. Not only does it defy logic (why does my gun magically work differently here?), but it is incredibly counterintuitive; you're effectively turning each weapon into a two DIFFERENT ones. At the end of the day, different weapons will be more useful in different situations, whether those situations arise in PvP or PvE. Use the right tool for the situation, or in lieu of that, change the situation to suit your tool (if you're in close either switch to an AR or shotgun, or get range so that your sniper/scout rifle is viable again). //signed A PvE player that hates the Halo/CoD garbage PvP.

Clear winners in relation to weapon classes being dominantly used. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to confuse you with such an obvious implication.

And delay the inevitable? The only way they could solve this issue is by creating exotics of each weapon type with the same damage modifiers as the VMC. Every game that includes items as part of its ecosystem has one particular weapon type at end game that is widely used above the rest purely because the best weapon happens to be that weapon type. I would rather use an Auto-rifle personally but the VMC happens to be better, so i use it. You modify your play-style to fit the BiS items you have. They should of introduced a few more weapons with similar damage that can drop from Atheon in HM but instead they chose to make the VMC in line or marginally better than the exotics you get from Xur. This game was always going to bring up conflicts of interest as it appeals to both MMO players and FPS players who natively don't understand each other. FPS players will whine about things which they seem only to affect them, such as a certain weapon/class is OP and needs to be nerfed (regardless of how its acquired) because thats all they know, and for the most part all that can be done in FPS games. MMO players will whine due to other reasons. It will be interesting to see how Bungie handles balancing issues in the future.