Haven't reared my ugly head for quite a while here, but I'm still keeping tabs on Promo Knights and just how utterly ridiculous the game's gotten. Apologies to the folks that have befriended me, but I just can't stand how this game is at the moment.

Anyways, I love this little tidbit from the "Aphrodite Has Spoken - Some of our questions answered."

To address a couple of your other points. From the balancing survey - we did
tally it up and the data is being used by the devs. A lot of that is being
implemented into the gunner update, and other bits are still in progress.
Balancing all the gear in the game is a tricky thing and will take time to
implement. PvP is something that the team wants to take a closer look at, but
it isn't at the top of the list right now. Auto Targeting is one small piece
of PvP. The team wants to take the time to look at the entire system. Making a
small, quick change to AT might be a bad idea and throw things off. The team
doesn't want to make a quick fix and break PvP.

Seems reasonable right?
Not wanting to make sudden changes to one of the game's features so everything's not thrown off balance. They'd want to test things out a little bit first.
But then OOO does the complete opposite... multiple times.

Cue the release of TWO new gun types with brand new mechanics that have never been tested before being released.
One being the reward for an arguably horridly balanced boss fight that takes massive grinding to even attempt.
The other being something you can buy for money.
Both of which are considered pretty strong for PvE and PvP, with the new promo money-grab gun being disastrously broken in PvP.

This just seems extremely silly and also contradictory to what Aphrodite has said about how OOO is going about balancing the game.
Though, I guess that was already apparent with how the Chaos armor change and random Autogun buffs were just so suddenly put into the game and how that utterly shattered the balance of the game.
Auto Target testing be damned, those untested changes broke both the balance of PvP and PvE.
What's worse is that OOO has acknowledged that these changes were problematic and probably not for the best, even going so far as to say that they'd do something about the Chaos armor, but lo and behold. Nothing.
Just like those Iron Slug buffs that were promised by Nick himself more than a year and a half ago. It's getting new mechanics in the Gunner Update, but that's no excuse for having a nigh useless piece of equipment that could have been buffed with some minor number tweaking. It's not like it's impossible for them, looking at what they did for the Autoguns and especially the Blitz Needle.

Considering that all of that was most likely a precursor to the Gunner Update and OOO's wonderful sense of balance, there's really not much hope of the Gunner Update to do anything good for the balance of the game.
Even more so when looking at the amazing variety that the testing servers showed us.
Ooh. Dozens of armor that have very little variance in what they do.
Ooooh. Dozens of "new" guns with only minor differences to how they currently function.
So hyped guys. You have no idea.

And that's not even touching on the fact that OOO thinks its perfectly fine to start putting completely unique usable gear in their promo boxes.
That was seriously one of the best points towards this F2P game, in that everyone has access to all equipment.
A unique shield with brand new unique stats was the first straw, but it was a small one considering how trivial shields that don't give attack boosts can be.
But now there's a unique gun.
A unique gun with unbalanced stats, which can be fixed... maybe, but leaves out F2P players.
Unless the P2P playerbase pour so much money into this promo to make there be enough guns in existence for every player to have one or OOO releases a reskin as a non-promo, this does not bode well to the future of SK at all.
Not that anything else really bodes well for SK's future, mind you.

But whatever.
Everyone'll just probably just write this off as another negative thread, lambast it with their own negative comments, and it'll be buried and ignored just as fast as all the threads in General Discussion.
You guys keep having fun running the same content for months more to come.
I'm gonna go play some new games with new experiences to have and on forums that have basic functions that don't give loading errors every other page.