In Mechwarrior 2, the mech lab allows players to customize the weapon and armor of any drivable mech. However, the mech lab leads to game imbalance issues, as the player can exploit the free and open weapon choices to create gunboats. The practice of 'boating' gave the mech disproportionate firepower for its size (at the expense of mission endurance due to limited armor and ammo.) For example, most story missions, including those intended to be challenging, could be easily won by a Maddog medium-mech equipped with 12 machine-guns. The player simply charged the enemy, opened fire at point-blank, and destroyed any battlefield mech (up to and including the Dire Wolf) with just 1-2 seconds of sustained fire. (The same strategy works almost as well with the Maurauder as a platform for 10 medium lasers, although this required greater discipline on the part of the player to avoid overheating.) Though perfectly legal within the rules of the game, boating is banned from player-vs-player tournaments, as boating matches devolve into a non-skill contest of 'first shot wins'.