>>321944
>How badly unbalanced were the weapons?
Really unbalanced, particularly the newer guns. The last few months/year of S4 was a real clusterfuck of balance. From all angles. Unrelated to specific weapons, they tried things such as damage fall off from range and limited ammo on all weapons (which could actually lead to draws in DM if the map had no death pits and neither side brought melee weapons). Neither of those went over very well with the playerbase.
They also had this weird fixation of releasing strong weapons with limited ammo, as if that would balance them. You had things like bombs, rocket launcher, mk2 versions of weapons, and homing rifles. Bombs and rocket launchers were especially bad because of their wide range and high damage. Ammo didn't really matter since you'd usually die quickly anyway. IIRC rocket launcher's alt fire did around 90 damage and you had 5 shots. Bombs had the annoying "feature" of exploding immediately if the user died. This lead to people throwing bombs and then throwing themselves off the map for an early detonation. Homing weapons weren't actually homing, they just had very generous hit detection which made them impossible to dodge at close-medium range. Mk2 weapons were often just straight upgrades to the normal version (for example, the mk2 turret gave massive damage reduction while in turret form. Didn't save them from wallshooting though), except the lightning bomb which actually went in a completely different direction to being a utility weapon. Still really strong, imagine an aoe bind that also drained all sp. The last couple melee weapons I'd say weren't that imba. Maybe iron boots were pretty crazy in TD with their special sprint that let you cover like 4 PS dashes of distance in less than a second for just 50 sp. Runners wet dream. Fists were annoying left click spam but not any worse than spy dagger right click spam.
>And why didn't they have a rotating cast of employees just checking for cheating reports and banning people since they didn't afford an anticheat? Not that these things ever helped.
There was an anticheat, it just wasn't very good.
I think there was only like 5 GMs at most and they weren't always online and they had to cover multiple servers and channels. Cheaters were just so prolific, there was no way they were going to catch them all and even if they did, it was trivial to just make a new account (I ran though like 10 accounts myself when starting out just because the pen economy was so bad and I wanted to try different loadouts). They tried to combat this by restricting accounts from certain channels based on level but I imagine that just made new people put off from the game when the low level channels were filled with cheaters.
Also, let me elaborate on the cheats a bit. There were all kinds of cheats. Of course, there was the standard ones like infinite health, ammo, sp, super speed, etc. But there were also ones like changing the hitbox on your melee weapons to cover the entire map, or modifying aspects of your skills such as being able to place infinite number of walls. Camera angle cheats were also effective since for most guns (all but hmg I think), your bullets ignore terrain as long as you have los from your camera. There was one that put your camera way up high so you could shoot people from anywhere. Some cheaters were even impossible to kick. Even if you had a successful vote, the system wouldn't kick them. Some cheats were really weird in how they worked. I remember one time there was a cheater one shotting people but for some reason he did normal damage to me so I just stunlocked him the whole match.
>Also, man do gacha capsules and p2w elements sound like an asinine prospect in an action game where your build matter a lot.
It's korea, what do you expect. It's actually kind of surprising they gave pen users access to fp weapons at all, even if you couldn't get all weapons in fp form. That said, early on, you could actually turn off stats for the entire room as a room option. Of course they did away with that eventually.