Modern Warfare 3 devs talk multiplayer gun balance and how the meta will shift "from season to season"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 developers Sledgehammer Games (umpteenth reminder: that's Modern Warfare 3 as in the 2023 game, not the 2011 FPS of the same name) have hosted a Reddit AMA in which they answered a bunch of questions about the evolution of the game's competitive meta. That's meta as in the overall balance of power between Modern Warfare 3 loadouts, playstyles and so forth based on a variety of factors such as map design, rather than the Alan Wake 2 kind of "meta", where characters talk about how they're just characters in a game and so on. I would dearly like to see some crossover between these types of "meta". I guess the Call of Duty that comes closest to fulfilling that idea is Black Ops 3, with its fourth-wall-breaking cyborg theatrics.

Anyway, the discussion is interesting because it touches on the fact that the evolution of an FPS competitive meta is an artful balance of prediction and reaction, imposing new directions on players at times, taking direction from them at others. The developers want the Modern Warfare 3 meta to change "from season to season" - the question, of course, is how to do this without alienating fans of certain weapons and strategies.

"Weapon balancing is one of the biggest things we are looking at on a daily basis," reads one of the developer responses. "Our goal is to have a meta shift from season to season to keep things fresh and interesting.

"That being said - we want as many weapons as possible to be viable to suit the variety of playstyles we have in our community. This is where we are looking closely at the data to target immediate tweaks for weapons that seem to be over or under-performing. We expect Season 1 to have higher-level tweaks with S1.5 to have some