It started off as a meme, grew into a theory, and now is widely accepted by the community: When new guns are added into Modern Warfare 3, Sledgehammer makes them way too powerful and nerf older guns into the ground, and players are sick of it.
Every season, Sledgehammer will introduce at least one new weapon to the game, giving completionists a weapon to rank up. This is a good idea in theory, but what you find is that any new gun added is immediately the best in the game, and dominates the meta for weeks, while older guns that have been in the game before have their effectiveness turned down.
This causes great frustration among fans, and FlowKom took specific offense to this on Reddit, complaining about how the launch of the Kar98k has gone.
“New gun=good, Old gun=bad,” wrote the CoD fan. “That’s their entire philosophy for balance. There’s no reason for the SP-R and SA-B to be utterly useless while the Kar98k is the new best sniper in the entire game.”
FlowKom made their point by showing the effective damage range for the Kar98k and the SP-R208. While the Kar98k is powerful up to 50.8m, the SPR208 only has a damage range of 13m, which is almost four times less powerful than the new inclusion.
Unsurprisingly, the comments were largely in agreement with the post, with one fan writing: “I get they want to make the new guns better than the old ones, but they didn’t have to make the old ones that bad,” while another questioned the process entirely: “I personally don’t see the point in making your new gun [overpowered] when we know it’ll get nerfed into the ground later. Is the appeal that you get a couple of weeks of enjoyment where you feel like a god?”
It’s having a clear effect though. As shown by WZStats.gg, the Kar98k is currently the most-picked weapon in the game at 5.37%. The SP-R208’s pickrate? 0.02%. Clearly, something isn’t quite right with Sledgehammer’s balancing principles, and I, along with other MW3 fans, would love to see it changed.
