Too many similar weapons.

I'm making this thread to know what is your stance with having weapons in the repository that work almost the same. I'm doing this because I'm seeing an influx of submissions that are basically faster chainguns or shotguns with different animations, but still do the same thing.

I remember seeing posts here complaining about having too many shotguns and getting rejected because of that, and while some of those claims were true, sometimes they had very good sprite sets.

tough dilemma, really. i think it might make sense to have a subcategory for weapons that are functionally similar, so people can have multiple choices for weapons that act similarly. not every weapon submission is gonna reinvent the wheel, so it might make sense to have some additional categorization there. in fact, i'd argue most players now are searching for weapons that are generally similar but semantically different to doom's defaults. i'm guessing the board must get a lot of similarly functioning machine guns / shotguns because they're fairly easy to make and are pretty popular.

edit with some further thoughts:
it might not be a bad idea to have some sort of "reskin" subcategory, since i've seen a lot of weapons that are ostensibly reskins of existing realm667 weapons. i've had the thought before to reskin realm667 weapons with newer sprites and sounds, especially considering how dated some of the spritework / sound design on some of the older submissions feel. i feel like doing so could give realm667 some new life and allow the community to produce some nice addons for weapons that are functionally alike but feel very different in execution.

...You bring up a very good point. Maybe the modders should change rather than the submission rules. Maybe we could encourage more unique weapons? I'm not on board with straight up rejecting anything that's another hitscan weapon.

Now that I think of it, there aren't many gas based weapons.
...I might make one right now, actually.

Some of the realm667 weapons do need a "refresh." I thought that was what the UPDATE submission was for. So, if someone makes a better, more Doom-y style of a weapon of something that is already on the site, why is that a *BAD* thing?

I tend to also think that having too many similar weapons, code side, is not great, to me it kills a bit the fact of having a selected repository with unique stuff.

Personally speaking, I love coding, I have my decent experience, I can code whatever I want (not even close, but...), what I miss are the damn sprites (that's why I always get weapons from here but I modify them to fit my things).
So, from this point of view, I would love to have more weapons to "steal" sprites from, but if I were a random guy who just wants to add a couple of weapons with unique features in my mod, facing like tons of guns that have the exact same or very similar mechanic is not really appealing and can be disappointing.

That's why I'd like to suggest a sort of "Default Weapons Repository", where people can drop their "classic/standard" weapon with unique sprites.
Though I'm not even sure about this idea, cause it might feel complicated or redundant.

I'm not going to add a "special category" for reskins or weapons that are similar to others (not that I can manage stuff in this site beyond the repo, but if I could I wouldn't) because it'd be a waste of space.

I dunno man, I feel the choice of weapons feels limited. Agreed there are a lot of hitscan weapons. Need more rocket and plasma weapons.

I've been working on the Doom Eternal Ballista with some reworks to the projectile system. We'd need something with some big kick, kinda like a cluster bomb rifle or something. Ricochet projectiles are something I'd love to see or seeker ammo.