I’ve never played Clan Wars.
I couldn’t understand why I’d want to in the first place, and everybody I saw that was really mad at this game, seemed mad because of Clan Wars and Uranium. It didn’t look like trouble I needed, and I assumed the mode just wasn’t for me.
Plus, the META is hideous, I won’t use it, and I’m not sure that’s fair to inflict my clown-cars on people taking the game that seriously. I’d rather play where the META is less relevant.
I think the game balance over all, ebbs and flows with the player population, as far as PVP goes.
I think the matchmaker struggles to forge fun matches from an empty lobby, and when it does struggle the game feels more unfair and unbalanced, and maybe it actually is. The variations in power-scores of team-mates suggest that maybe it is sometimes, and I think this has a stronger influence on perceived balance and fairness, generally, than the seasonally overpowered weapon of the day, or the statistics of weapons, modules, and movement parts.
In regular PVP, I think the matchmaker jerks things around a lot, and getting the game you want and might enjoy (fairness/balance) depends a lot on how you build and play relative to the system used by it to set up matches, and it’s system works better when it has a large player pool to sort matches from, IMO. I think that when that system breaks down things begin to seem unbalanced and unfair, even if there aren’t OP weapons or movements parts in play to make things miserable.
Clan Wars is an entirely different animal than PVP, and matches are not arranged the way they are for PVP-Missions. Truly OP weapons, modules, and movement parts shine there and make more of a concrete difference there than they would in regular PVP Missions, where the matchmaker tends to lean on the scales in a variety of ways to make matches “fun.”
I don’t think regular PVP is a truly competitive (fair or balanced) mode, or a good place to measure actual “skill” at this game (if there is such a thing). It’s not as serious of a mode, and I think the matchmaker “flavors” the game a lot there. Clan Wars, on the other hand, is probably a cleaner and more refined place to measure the actual functionality of the features in this game, like guns, modules, and wheels, due to the lack of influence the matchmaker has there. It makes sense to me that OP weapons, exploits, and the META would reign supreme over that mode, and be defined by the players there. If the game is actually off balance, I would expect that to be the place where it’s evidenced, initially discovered, and the most pronounced.
That’s just my unscientific opinion.