Having spent some time with of the primary weapons in the game I feel like the only weapons that are competitively viable are the FAL, AK and Mettler.
All of the other fully automatics sacrifice accuracy for an enhanced rate of fire yet they do not reduce the time to kill significantly enough to justify having to control that recoil. The primary buff that these weapons offer is within blindfire, yet blindfire doesn't typically occur especially often as the radar and emphasis on sticking together force engagements to occur at more reasonable ranges.
This applies to weapons like the HCR and MP34a, but weapons like the coperhead suffer too. The copperhead has significantly worse time to kill than FAL or Metler, and much lower accuracy too (as a scoped long gun), with its only advantage being in blindfire. The thing is though, nothing stops you aiming a FAL or Metler at a guy that's 2 feet away, and it doesn't get any less effective up close.
I was commenting yesterday how a FAL burst up close, does more damage than a shotgun blast. It also has more bursts per clip, and the potential to be used at range too. The same is true of many weapons actually, the time-to kill on the FAL and Metler is remarkable at range, but that doesn't somehow disappear up close, and these weapons retain a faster time to kill than the specialised close ranged weapons that have made several sacrifices to range and accuracy at close to close-mid ranges.
It feels as though both the MP34a and HSC need a boost to their damage, and the HSC also needs a boost to its stock ammunition and clip capacity (otherwise there's no reason to use it over even the MP34a). The shotgun is pretty useless as it stands and while I can see why it would be annoying if it were incredibly effective, it would be great if it could be a consistent two-shot kill rather than quite often three.
This is what I would say the weapon 'tier list' looks like at the moment. I'm open to being wrong, but hopeful that it might spark some interesting discussion.
S
FAL
Mettler
A
AK 47
B
HS93
Copperhead
MP34A
M14
C
HXC
12 Gauge
I've chosen not to include the bolt action sniper rifle as theoretically it can be the best or worst weapon in the game with perhaps the most variance in that performance depending on the player using it. I doubt we will see much beyond FAL and Metler at higher levels of competitive play, and that seems to be the thoughts of the community on the UnchartedMultiplayer subreddit too.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that, precision weapons should always have the greatest potential I suppose, but it would be nice for the balance between the pool of weapons to be a little tighter, in my opinion.