Profile of MMX

The way I understood it IPlayForKeeps was an infamous top ranking (universally agreed upon) maphacker, while Deadbolt just copied his name, is this correct?

Because as far as I know IPlayForKeeps was British, while Deadbolt is German.

that's how i remember it, too. there was a somewhat lengthy interview on gr.org with him way back with a bit of backstory to the guy after he won a tournament... and before he was exposed as a maphacker, obviously. i'd seriously doubt these two are the same person

after a bit of getting used to it i kind of enjoyed novgorod while it was in automatch rotation. still, vilshanka is no doubt the more diversified and fun to play out of the two... if it weren't for the ui bug of course. i still voted no to the swap since i'd rather see the 'vilshanka bug' fixed for good than another great map getting axed. after all the bug may be most prevalent on vilshanka, but sadly isn't limited to this map only.

A lot of the muni economy already feels lacking in purpose and like an unnecessary micro tax as it is, so I'm definitely not in favor of converting already existing abilities into muni-sinks.

I don't see any problem with the existing recon abilities large enough to justify sweeping changes that will surely create exponentially larger balance issues elsewhere.

I do think there might be a few recon abilities that are too strong, not because they are too cheap, but because they provide so much sight that they dramatically alter the gameplay formula without a strong counterplay mechanic.

i'd second this assessment. there may be some recon abilities, such as overwatch flares, that currently do too much for what they cost and need adjustment. and although this a a well-written and - at least on paper - sound proposal, i simply fail to see the need for a total overhaul of all stock vision options just for the sake of standardization across factions.

i'd also say there is nothing wrong with some recon options outranging at-guns or flares being 'uncounterable' by aa. as was pointed out before, the latter applies to single-pass recon planes as well; the only problem with flares is that they provide too much vision for a too long period for too little cost or other restrictions (e.g. being bound to a unit with certain activation range). for me, this is the only really urgent recon-related issue that needs to be addressed at the moment and there are already plenty of good proposals for how to achieve this. for example, my personal favorite for spec-ops flares would be to tie it to the command panther instead, although i won't doubt your suggestion will work well, too.

Well maybe that's it. But that would mean that the stats as shown there might be pretty useless to assess unit balance if we apparently get 7% difference.

i wouldn't say useless, but surely they should be taken with a grain of salt. in the end, i guess only rigorous testing if and how stuff like the alleged frame limitations and rounding affect the true dps output in-game could give an answer to how accurate these formulae really are.

but given how difficult this can be even for relatively simple things like tank guns (where usually most of the variables are neither range dependent, nor randomized between min/max bounds), i'm afraid proper testing would be an enormous undertaking.

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I noticed something similar when comparing DPS values plugged from the weapons_report.csv (exported from the attribute editor) and those on Serealia's site. Most of the time both are quite a bit off and i also won't get these jagged curves Serealia has for some weapons (e.g. the Gren LMG).
After scratching my head for a while the most plausible explanation I've come up with is... rounding.

There's a lot stuff where the need for rounding is pretty obvious; the number of bullets fired per burst for automatic weapons clearly needs to be an integer value (and is probably rounded down to the nearest integer), hence if this varies with distance there will be some sort of breakpoints that the formula you use won't produce. The same should also apply to things like reload frequency as in your example, and depending on how this gets rounded there will be a jump from 6 to 7 shots per cooldown at some range.

Then there's also the issue of frames and if these are rounded or truncated as well somehow. For example, there's a note in the editor that the fire and ready aim times needs to be at least one frame (0.125 s), but on Serealia's site there are often lower values given at close range (due to the n,m,f multiplier for aim time).

To cut a long story short, there are a lot of unknowns in the DPS formula that I've got no idea how these are actually integrated in both the live game and Serealia's DPS code. So if anyone has more info on that I'd also greatly appreciate to know!