User blog comment:AntiScootaTwo/Advanced Warfare patch for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 released today/@comment-402843-20141204222710/@comment-3967954-20141205205216

No, visual recoil does not affect accuracy stastically, but it does affect the player's aim. No visual recoil = clearer view of the target. It just so happens that the EM1 has really clear sights and no visual recoil, which makes it ridiculously easy to get accurate shots on people.

It's all well and good pulling up statistics from the game files and talking about how the weapon performs in theory, but go ahead and play the game and you'll see people abusing the EM1 quite often. Even if the EM1's damage is worse than most other weapons - it's still extremely accurate, so while your opponent misses half their shots (which most players do with regular guns), it's pretty hard to miss with the EM1. You'd have to be exceptionally bad at the game if you couldn't shoot straight with it.

So yes, if every player had great accuracy and equal reaction times, then yes, the EM1 would be balanced in theory. But that's if you completely ignore the way people use the EM1 compared to the usage of every other gun in the game. You have to take the behaviour and habits of the players into consideration here, otherwise you're not going to get anywhere. I'm sure the Bal-27 was also considered statiscally balanced by the devs before the game was released.

The EM1 certainly was not in dire need of a buff. I managed to get all the marksman challenges for it pre-patch with relative ease, whilst still maintaining a fairly positive K/D with it. Like I said, a small buff would've sufficed. It was not horribly underpowered, Sledgehammer just amounted to peer pressure from people who never even attempted to use it sufficiently. Or maybe they geniunely thought it was underpowered, I don't know. I'm not even that good at the game and I managed to use it just fine.