How the lists are made
Curated is the default and the one to trust. Every weapon is placed by hand for the current beta, weighing damage, price, effective range, fire rate, how many fight distances it covers and what losing it costs you. Launchers and the AMR 50 sit in a Specialist row because their value depends on the threat in front of you, not on the other guns. The source and revision are stamped under the list and the placements are revisited each patch.
Community votes is the players' list. Pick a tier for any weapon and the card shows the running average, the spread of votes and how many people have voted. A weapon needs a handful of votes before it gets a letter; below that it waits in its own row. Votes are anonymous: one per weapon per browser, and changing your mind replaces your earlier vote. The averages refresh about once a minute. Every vote is stamped with the game patch it was cast under: when the game updates, voting starts fresh for the new version, the old result is frozen, and each card shows how its average moved against the previous patch. Pick any patch to see its final list.
Computed from ballistics scores every modeled weapon 0–100 with the same combat model our comparison tools use: time-to-kill at 25 m and 100 m against a Level 2 armored target, effective range, a handling proxy from aim-time and recoil data, weight, and price. The weights come from an editorial pack, tiers are population-relative, and a weapon missing a core figure stays unranked rather than being guessed into a letter. It is a spreadsheet, not a play-test: it assumes every shot lands, and it knows nothing about recoil, attachments or how a gun feels. Treat it as a way to check the curated placements, not to replace them.
Price is part of the balance
You buy your kit out of persistent Cash and start with $10,000. A weapon that is 90% as good for half the price is usually the right buy, because the money left over becomes armor, ammunition and meds, and a bad life does not wipe you out.