No, its just making very obvious to those that may not pick up on what happened; the way in which statistical analysis and the way results are presented can be used to overstate the importance or the difference in certain aspects. Thus implying that whatever it is is more or less significant that it actually is, which of course is an issue when abstracting and collating data for comparative purposes.
For a moment imagine someone who doesn’t understand the units, being presented a comparison between;
- 10hz vs 12hz [Rate of fire, a measure of Cadence]
- 20% faster(((6-5)/5)*100)) vs ~84% the speed ((1-(6-5)/6)*100)) [Relative difference]
- One second Slower / Faster. [True difference]
The thing is that they all describe the same thing, even though the numbers are wildly different.
It’s not very different to a news anchor claiming that someone was;
The point I am making is that Context, Modality and Intent make a massive difference as to how a situation may be constructed to suit a narrative.
That having better performance especially surrounding abstract metrics like Mobility (is the tank with better acceleration or top speed, more mobile? I would say that it depends on the map).
Is most useful to players that better understand how to take advantage of it Its otherwise a detriment and effectively relies on either extensive understanding of the map as to take advantage of power positions. As the average player really isn’t that good (and again causes issues relating to the law of large numbers, and outliers. Thus balancing) and tends only know about a handful of them them at best, or how to evolve a route and respond to the match as it develops and so skews performance metrics.
Balancing issues tend to be caused by overly simplistic (SL earnings per hour) Efficiency stats that Gaijin use, not taking into account relative population sizes, and a Skewed Matchmaker optimized for a global 50% W/L rate. Which can only do so much against above average skill players & stacked squads, since as far as we know there isn’t an active system (we know at least one was developed) for skewing RNG.
Because Aircraft were selected as the method to equalize player performance, a tank only mode without a set of overhauled & uniquely developed maps would devolve rapidly into a small number (e.g. a 4 stack squad or two) of players holding power positions and the lines being near static and with little movement as can be seen on maps like Port Novorossiysk [Domination] and Mozdok [Domination] among others.
In the specific and contrived situation of my own construction where the main consideration is sheer Rate of fire, yes it is, and that was the entire point of constructing it in such a manner.
If it was to be compared to something that had a cannon (or alternately the Mk19 or FGM-148 [CROWS -J] mounted) then it might be a noteworthy difference, yes the M2 has more utility but the M1 doesn’t really exist in the space where it often is all that useful as employed by the average player
Let alone the fact later M1 variants are missing its service .50 SLAP ammo which entered service in 1990, that would obviously make a significant difference to the performance of an M1 furnished with said ammo at expected combat ranges, though likely be less impactful than carrying a small number of HEAT, MPAT or Canister shells against said targets.