Tripwire not having fixed it yet doesn't at all seem like they're condoning it, it just means that it hasn't caused major enough trouble for them to be bothered. On other weapons, the rebuy exploit isn't a huge deal, since most other ammos are cheapish anyways, and you only get two pipebombs. I think the Xbow once had to be updated to make this exploit less effective, so I think TWI is aware of it, and does see that it can be a problem. On the M99 as it currently is, the exploit is a major advantage, but because the M99 as-is is underpowered, a cheat giving a major advantage isn't trouble.
If TWI encouraged the technique, I think it's very unideal of them to handle their game that way, because it's a convoluted, unintuitive, and unreasonable mechanic, much like scrake headshots, dual pistol mechanics, and lots of other things in this game. These complexities can have a certain charm to them, for people like us, that have played for years, "emergent gameplay", but it's trouble for newcomers, and I think it's why a lot of people can't get used to KF, and come to love it.
And yeah, I do think the trader kinda is a cheat, for not paying us back for ammo. The difference between buy and sell prices, which is justified and reasonable, obscures that issue, though.
It's broken because it's unbalanced. "Balanced" means a balance between advantages and disadvantages. Just because the damage of the M99 is incredibly high doesn't mean that it's unbalanceable, it just means that it needs to have equally incredible disadvantages. This would create a balanced, but hyper-specialized weapon. But right now, the extremely prohibitive ammo cost tips the scales too much, so most players entirely dismiss the M99, because it's underpowered.
Since the scale of the disadvantages and advantages is so high, balancing issues kind of get magnified, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to get them to be acceptably low. 250 dosh bullets are more balanced than cheap ones, but it's too much, and TWI could do better by lowering their price.
Ideally, TWI would gradually cheapen the ammo by small increments until m99 is seen in moderately common use, so they could stop buffing it when the balance is perfectly dialed in, and be certain that it'll never become significantly OP again, overshadowing its competitors like it once did.
But TWI clearly isn't interested in constant balancing tweaks like that.
So that's why I'm pushing the 100 figure; I imagine it's approximately the sweet spot, and if TWI would listen to me, they might be able to balance the M99 quite nicely immediately, with only a single tweak.
Team play shouldn't be about everyone being a part of everything, it's quite the opposite, I think. Good teamwork is when you've got varied specializations, each working for the good of the group, in different ways, against different problems. If the commando kills nearly all the stalkers and crawlers, the medic does nearly all the healing, and the m99 does nearly all of the scrake killing and FP damaging, that's good teamwork. At the cost of depending on each other, there's synergy; every problem that the team faces has someone focused on it and equipped for efficiently dealing with it.
While you can certainly validly say that the dependance is a crutch, I think it's a more interesting and fun dynamic than when all the players are versatile.
Six do-everything rambos that stick together just for brute force can be fun, but aside from the exciting chaos of lots of stuff going on around you, you may as well be playing by yourself on a lower difficulty.
