+1
As a old returning player, coming back to see a 100 dollar weapon that does a bazillion damage is insane to me and something I cannot really wrap my head around. In the old days you would get iconic looking weapons that weren't 100 dollars and had decent stats for their price value. They were also realistic stats. You wouldn't be able to one shot vehicles, npcs, or people. You would, at max, 3 shot them if anything with a sniper. There was never a time where weapons cost 350 million. Back in the day, some weapons at maximum costed 10 million. The most coveted sniper was the IQA-11 at that price (if I recall correctly). It still didn't one shot players.
If we are considering adding hostile factions, thus the implementation of PVP, we should curb the idea of extremely overpowered guns that can one shot people regardless. Banning weapons during events or activities is also strange because you are actively denying someone who has paid for a weapon that they have expected to be able to use for any activity. There are several cons to each side here, but I think for the server's integrity, no longer releasing extremely over tuned weapons is the play here. They should have realistic stats and compare to the weapons in the perma shop that cost several millions. Instead of overtuning stats, I think making holiday skins for the weapons and selling them will still turn a profit for you if you cannot release OP weapons. You could also make variants of weapons that have quirks, like how the Christmas Sniper has a after effect when you kill something. You could even add small modifiers to variants like fire damage, paralytics, corrosion, etc. But obviously, very realistic stats (compared to the perma weapon shop).
From my perspective, when I re-joined and had to start from square one (I had no money, and I lost all my perma weapons from so long ago. Which was expected.) and rebuild what I had from before. Rebuilding was rather easy from my rather... lucrative business deals, and the support of older friends who have spare money to give me. I noticed the existence of the Christmas Sniper, and during a PVP event with the 501st and Bounty Hunters, the BH's were using the sniper to one shot us. I was "new" to the current server's state of affairs and if I was truly new to starwars RP, something like this would of instantly turned me off from participating. It's not fun doing no damage to other people with your default weapons, but then getting instantly 1 shot by someone else who has the sniper. You can't retaliate, you cant respond, and by the time that you do "respond" you're already dead. People can call it "skill issue" all they want, but it isn't. It's a silly response to an underlying problem that does need to be solved.
"But it's a Sniper, Arti!!!" Yes, it's a sniper designed to one shot people. Great, we should also tune the other sniper rifles like the NT242, DC15X, and the Cycler Rifle (which disintegrates people into flesh puddles) to also one shot people! I'm sure that'll go well in the long run with everyone running a sniper and the PVP experience just devolving to "who sees who first". It'll become a huge mess with no solution in sight other than to debuff all of them to actually reasonable damage numbers where people can actually use their "skill" to kill other players.
I think I yapped enough here.
