Balance is an issue that has come up a lot recently in the Planetside community. Specifically, there is a lot of disagreement over whether the New Conglomerate’s equipment is “overpowered”. The problem with this is that there are actually two ways a game can be balanced. The first is to make each team/character’s loadout equally viable. This is the approach that I think a lot of people think DBG uses, but it isn’t. They use the second method, balancing so that each team performs the same. This is why ZOE and the PPA received massive nerfs while NC Max shotguns and the Vanguard shield haven’t. ZOE and the PPA caused Vanu to dominate live play, while the NC still lose. Even if the NC has better weaponry, they still lose, so the game is balanced according to the second standard. The problem with this strategy presents itself during competition with more balanced teams like ServerSmash. NC dominated the field because they were balanced under a live playerbase that couldn’t take advantage of their equipment like SS teams could. Unfortunately, there is very little Daybreak can do about this. If they balanced NC according to the first criteria and made their equipment as good as the other factions, NC would no longer be competitive on live play. Keeping NC how it is makes the coin flip for teams a done deal, since everyone picks NC. The easiest solution is for all competitive play to be TR versus VS. This allows live play to stay balanced according to the second definition, but allows competitive play to have more equal teams.