So, as I stated in Space Lobby to the displeasure of some, I feel like this is a solution that completely avoids the source of the problem: Micros are too small, graphically speaking. That's not a new complaint, either - back when I was running around as a micro on the station, I heard about all the supposed evils of microkind plenty enough, and most of it boiled down to the same thing
I'm looking through the replies thus far and I don't see anything that indicates that this
isn't the case, either. Let's review:
Micros are imbalanced as fuck in combat already
Micros are hard to see, which is why they are imbalanced
Micros are hard to hit with the game's current mechanics
I'm presuming the first statement is beget from the other two, honestly, especially since every instance it has ever come up in has ultimately culminated in one or both of the other complaints. Further, both of these complaints are symptoms of micro's sprite size and targetable area rather than from the presence of guns in the equation.
To me, this seems like we're really reaching out for more problems rather than solving the underlying problem that has been with us all along. Why can't we just look into finding a more appropriate sprite size for micros, getting them away from their ~4px size instead of introducing more and more restrictions on players and characters? Especially slippery restrictions like this. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you guys have the best of intents, but if we ban guns, then what? People who abuse micros for fighting with an advantage will then use Toolboxes. So we ban them from using those. Then they use crowbars. So we ban them from using those, so on and so forth. And to make a point, I want to mention that when I was on the server, neither Silver nor Mus
never used a gun, but I still got to hear about how micros were overpowered or unfair plenty of times, even though I thought I played Silver and Mus relatively appropriately in-character. If we're catering to that sentiment, but not addressing the actual issue of the sprite size, then I feel like we're just going to have this come up again, and again, honestly.
I get all the RP concerns about this issue, but let's not fool ourselves - self-restraint is a powerful thing in the hands of those who are truly concerned for the purity of their character's IC/RP value, and Self-Restraint can be turned on and off whenever it is appropriate and allows for more flexibility for roleplay scenarios. Hard rules and mechanics do not.
There are also other issues that this causes with the shifty landscape of balancing characters based on their size, but trying to fix that with these methods only causes that to become even more of a mess and provides no immediate relief to the underlying issue, much like Nightwing pointed out.