The WARDOGS meta

How to read this table

The hit rates the ranking assumes

Close, medium and long are relative rather than metric - the study does not yet decode the range falloff curves that would let us attach distances to them. Replacing these with measured play-test figures is the single biggest improvement available to this page.

What the ranking does not know

Each of these would move rows, and several would move them a long way. None of them is in the model yet.

• ·Armour, helmets and durability
• ·Hit-location multipliers
• ·Penetration and ammunition types
• ·Range falloff, drag and bullet travel
• ·Recoil, spread and handling
• ·Attachments and build parts
• ·Magazine capacity and reload
• ·Aim-down-sight and burst timing
• ·Real player pick rate
• ·Cost, which is the axis this site ranks on

What a rank actually costs

Take the ranking above and put the price beside it, and one question answers itself: could you have paid less and done better? A weapon is on the frontier when the answer is no — when nothing cheaper in the table outranks it. That is the whole rule. It is not a score with weights to argue about, and you can check every row of it against the table above without taking our word for anything.

5 of the 14 weapons survive it. The rest are beaten on both axes at once — outranked by something that also costs less, which on this site is the definition of the wrong purchase.

Weapon	Price	Budget	TTK rank	Verdict
A-91	$0	0%	7	Nothing cheaper ranks higher
BUSHMASTER M17S	$0	0%	8	A-91 ranks higher and costs $0 less
KH-2002	$0	0%	9	A-91 ranks higher and costs $0 less
T-21	$600	6%	6	Nothing cheaper ranks higher
AMP-9	$900	9%	13	A-91 ranks higher and costs $900 less
MP5	$1,500	15%	14	A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,500 less
AK74	$1,600	16%	10	A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,600 less
GALIL	$2,200	22%	11	A-91 ranks higher and costs $2,200 less
SUPER-45	$2,600	26%	4	Nothing cheaper ranks higher
M4	$2,800	28%	5	SUPER-45 ranks higher and costs $200 less
M249 SAW	$3,200	32%	12	A-91 ranks higher and costs $3,200 less
SVD	$4,800	48%	2	Nothing cheaper ranks higher
BMR-308	$6,000	60%	3	SVD ranks higher and costs $1,200 less
FAL	$6,500	65%	1	Nothing cheaper ranks higher

The line that does the most work is the free one. The A-91 is the faction recruit rifle, it costs nothing, and on this model it outranks 7 weapons you would pay up to $3,200 for. With one caveat the table cannot hold: its tile says “Unable to equip attachments”, and attachments are on the model's own list of things it does not know about. A paid rifle you can build on is not competing with a free one on rank alone. That is the shape of the gap: the arithmetic defends the free rifle, and the arithmetic is not finished.

What this ranking leaves out

6 priced and ranked weapons are held back from the table above, and not because they did badly. In both cases the model measures something other than what the weapon is for, so including them would produce a confident wrong answer rather than a missing one.

Sniper rifles · MOSIN NAGANT, SV98, SCOUT RIFLE TD

Hit-location multipliers are outside the model, and a bolt-action rifle is bought for the shot it does not have to repeat. Ranking one on shots-to-kill measures the wrong thing — which is why all three sit at the bottom of the study.

Sidearms · GGX 18, M1911, DEAGLE

A sidearm is the second slot, carried alongside a primary rather than instead of one. It is not competing for this budget the way the rest of the table is.

A further 13 of the 33 weapons we have recorded reach neither table: no price yet, no damage figure, or neither. They fall out for want of data rather than for want of merit, and the catalogue holds them either way.