Compensating Differentials and Warframe Weapon Balance

In Economics, there is an idea of a “compensating differential” in wages. It means that if there is an unpleasant aspect of a job, people will have to be paid more in order to get them to do it. More generally, if you want two options to be equal in value, if one of them has a disadvantage, it must also have some advantage to compensate. This idea can be applied to video games and item/weapon/ability balance. If a weapon has a positive aspect that players like, it is balanced with another weapon iff the other weapon has an advantage over it.

The ultimate baseline for guns in most games is damage per second (DPS).

Here is a basic framework of how to determine weapon DPS based on weapon characteristics:
Mastery rank: +5% DPS per mastery rank to use

Quest related/difficult to acquire: +1-5% depending on how difficult it is to acquire.

Rate of fire: -5% for beam, 0% for automatic, +5% for semi automatic, +10% for slow rate of fire (snipers/bows/etc)

High critical chance: -20% to -10% base (unmodified) DPS. With mods, this will overtake a low critical chance weapon, so it is balanced by requiring a more limited build.

High status chance: -20%-10% depending.

Area of effect: You have to consider how many enemies, on average, a player will hit per shot. Some advantage should be given for players hitting more enemies than average by grouping them and some penalty should be applied to using AOE weapons against single targets. A large AOE weapon that normally hits 5+ enemies should have 30% or even less DPS against single targets. A moderate AOE weapon that typically hits 2-3 enemies should have a DPS about 60% of a single target weapon. Beam weapons that jump to the next target should have a DPS about 120% of a single target weapon when all the targets are added together. So for example, if a weapon hits the first target for 100% and two additional targets for 50%, that gives a combined damage of 200% max. This should reduce the base DPS of the weapon by (120/200) to compensate.

Accuracy: +5 to 10% DPS for bad/horrible accuracy weapons. Weapons with projectiles should get an additional +5% to DPS.

Ammo economy used to be an issue with some weapons but because there are so many tools to mitagate it, I would hesitate to give more than a 5% bonus damage to only the very most ammo inefficient weapons.

A note on power creep: Developers are always looking to add new better items to games to generate excitement. By using higher MR requirements/making items more difficult to acquire, they could fulfill this desire while maintaining a balanced game. They could also decide to apply a flat 1% per out of game month bonus to new weapons, that way newer weapons would still be mostly balanced but would slowly increase in power over time to generate new sales.