deadline-balancing

Deadline balancing guide

This document describes how to reason about balance changes. See stats.md for stat behavior and units. The root CSVs remain authoritative for the values they define.

Goals

Balance work should support four goals:

• Fairness: no option should dominate its alternatives without a meaningful cost.
• Variety: options should create distinct strengths, weaknesses, and use cases.
• Realism: real equipment should be the starting point for relative performance.
• Aesthetics: realistic and visually coherent builds should be encouraged.

Comparison scope

Compare an attachment against the alternatives a player can actually choose between it and. Attachments that only fit one weapon do not need to match another weapon’s equivalents: FAL handguards sitting far above G3 handguards is not itself a problem. What matters is that interchangeable options compare well.

The exception is aggregate movement. If a whole class shifts in one direction, such as every FAL handguard gaining a few points, that changes the weapon’s ceiling and is worth noting as an inter-weapon effect.