I had this idea quite some time ago, but never articulated it. I am deciding this all out of my stomach, i just put myself into the design chair for a moment here and explain what i would do if i had the say on xT.
So the idea is to reduce the amount of submachine guns in the game (except covert class characters, they have silencers and there the weapon gets unique and interesting on its own) and give SMG weapons a more accurate and nice and non-spongy feel by reducing all the artificial design decisions and (pseudo complicated) variables (especially spread behavior).
So: weapon type 1 (is available in two versions, just like Thompson/Mp40, but with same variables). Weapon type 2 = the same, but looks, feels, behaves different than weapon 1.
And from here i would freestyle to distinguish both weapon types, most important about this decision: remove all the artificial variety on SMGs, have a nice balanced game with focus on character abilities rather than character weapons. Also: weapons like Shotgun are suddenly not disappearing, they are not SMGs.
I believe that making that restriction on the SMGs can make them feel way better (W:ET is even more restrictive in that sense, since beside Sten the Thompson/Mp40 are the only SMG-type weapons). Since SMGs are by far the most used weapon class in the game and most of them still feel not ok from perspective of shooting feeling (compared to, for example, the Thompson in W:ET; this weapon simply feels amazing, powerful, accurate, unique, fun … ), because of mostly spread-behavior combined with the small hitboxes, they obviously need to be improved. This is my approach to improving them. It might, at first, feel that this does not fit into the f2p business model, but, from what i have seen, SMGs are currently not part of any transaction model (except the weapon skins on different models).
And i would like to add: some might think that other games also have alot of SMGs, especially titles like BF or CoD and that thjis is totally unreasonable what i propose. Well, this might still be your opinion, i justify mine by seeing both games from the fundamental way of how weapons behave: the TTK. Obviously, you take longer to kill someone in xT compared to MMS titles. So, adding artificial spread is more noticable in xT (which affects TTK). Games like BF3 or CoD can add these many SMGs, because they have faster TTK and as such differences between weapons are far less accentuated. In that sense, almost all of their weapons boil down to just slight variations (sound, look, damage per bullet, firing rate, reload time, spread), while in xT, stuff is much more sensible and becomes immediately noticable when, for example, spread is modified. This is because xT is another type of game in terms of weapon behavior, it is a game with close combat battles, sort of like Kung Fu close combat, where the feel of the underlying combat system (arms, foot) is much more sensible and important, because everything happens at close range and is designed to keep it at close range, with constant contact to and therefore feeling of your enemy. Because of these reasons, you can’t compare xT with MMS titles and their many SMGs. If xT would start to mimic BF3 or CoD TTK and weapon behavior, i would be in favor of more SMGs in the game. But not with the current way weapons are designed in xT and how the combat system works. It needs a fundamental change in this way, as i will promise you, if the feel of the weapon shooting does not improve, newcomers will find this among one of the primary reasons to not play this game after they tried it for the first time.
