Say what you will about Halo's power weapon based level design (and I do bitch about it at great length sometimes.) but it allows them to directly control on a match by match, map by map basis exactly how much more powerful a person is once they have a chance to pick something up vs how powerful they start out. In call of duty anyone can have any weapon and perk combination on any map. In Halo if they don't want you to have something, you don't have it, and you barely notice because you had to go pick it up to get it anyway.

I can't wait to see how reach's balancing pans out because I feel like the power weapon's more 'OP' aspects look to be countered rather nicely by liberal use of the right armor abilities.

Still the best balanced FPS i've ever played is team fortress 2 on the PC, because they rebalance the thing almost every week so it never stops changing. The best balance is change, because everyone has to adapt to it so no one can break the system in their favor if they are always having to learn new things and any tactic can be nerfed by some random balancing change at any time. It leads to a much more open game where people try more things.

I too am an avid player of TF2 and it is indeed a balanced game. Shoot I wish I had talked about that in my game.

Haha I've played a little TF2 and it's really hard to get into, but I can see with my limited experience how much depth and balance it has. I also read that the guys behind Monday Night Combat have a system in place to do over-the-air updates in the same way TF2 does, so I think there's gonna be a ton of replayability there. That said I don't think anyone balances a traditional arena multiplayer game like Bungie does. I mean Infinity Ward didn't make any effort to balance MW2. Sure, I guess I'm a COD hater, but aside from perks the series' multiplayer has gone downhill since COD 2. 

Lol good call it has MOST DEFINETLY gone down since cod two. Oh, those were the days.

I feel sorry for monday night combat because it strikes me as a game that will be unbalanced forever simply because it has too small of a player pool to do really good matchmaking. So battles will often be decided by which team got stuck with 3 new inexperienced players. The idea of combining TF2 with a tower defense game is clever enough and well executed enough in MNC that I respect the developers even if their game isn't really fun for me to play due to the matchmaking and some balancing decisions I personally don't agree with.

Being a person who has avidly consumed Monday Night Combat, I feel like I need to defend MNC in some way.

Most of the "perks" (endorsements in game) only add a slight advantage. The assassin, for example, is so fragile that any grapple attack outright kills her. You can give her an endorsement in armor so that she can, but you forgo offensive options like increasing her rate of fire.

Also, in the broad scope of the game, every character has a function that makes them fun and useful. MW2 by comparison, players only use the ACR or the SCAR or a smaller variation based on preference. Nobody ever uses the F2000, for example, because it's simply not as good as the ACR.

In another defense, the skills each class has gives them a chance to throw this OP argument straight out the window. Assassins can assassinate and one hit kill. However, snipers can drop traps, gunners can ground slam, and tanks can simply survive this attack. But the circumstances change based on skill, but it's never clear who'll win 100% of the time.

The argument of inexperience? Valid for a small community, but the community itself is quite healthy in my opinion. I don't think there's an objective way to measure it and the only other way is to compare it to a game like MW2 (which is frankly, unfair). I take part in the forums there and the following is strong and loyal.

Hell, I might get stuck with a team of 4 scrubby assassins, but the same thing happens in MW2 and Halo with inexperienced team mates running in acting as score fodder. Inexperienced players is a problem for any game, not just small games. And in the end, people who really enjoy the game simply set up private matches.

@Marcel I wasn't stating that the game was bad or poorly balanced. I just said it wasn't my type of game for the reasons I stated. I don't play mutliplayer shooters with friends in private matches I play them by joining random games as an individual, that's because I don't have very many friends who play shooters to coordinate with. And in my experience the larger a player base for a game the more friendly it is for random joiners to have a good experience with the matchmaking.

As for the game's balancing, my only real problem with it is how fast some of the weaker classes die, In some situations it can be pretty near instant, which does promote more cautious play, sure, but it also means that it's harder to learn a class because you are punished hard for mistakes so you can't really learn what you can and can't get away with easily. Experience in a class is hard to gain when all you do is run out to the fight and then die. A lot of this is probably also to do with the fact that most of my matches in random matchmaking are being on a poorly coordinated team against a team of hardcore teamwork practicing veterans (a problem you get with many shooters, but their are ways to mitigate, such as a larger matchmaking pool or a playlist specifically designed for loner players like modern warfare 2 has.)

I say I feel sorry for Monday night combat because it's a great game that is very hard to get into. And it being very hard to get into will lead people to think it's a bad game, and that's a damn shame and will keep it from being the hit it should be.