I have a suggestion to make.
Contrary to popular belief, gunpowder is not used in most modern firearms. Pure and undiluted gunpowder would be phased out in most modern militaries by 1900, replaced with smokeless powders such as ballistite and cordite. As of such, gunpowder itself has largely fallen out of use in the modern world; nowadays, it’s really only used for re-enactments or minor sports such as hunting or target shooting. There are very good reasons for this; gunpowder is both less efficient and more impractical than most smokeless powders, as it creates a large smoky cloud once ignited; which, considering the incredibly volatility of the substance, is not a surprising. However, the substance is not totally without merit; it is far easier to produce and can be created using pre-industrial methods.
In the world of Unturned II, there will doubtlessly be very few chemical plants or factories in functional operation. As of such, it will be very hard for the average survivor to create smokeless powders; while it would be possible to, by hand, create small amounts of smokeless powders if they had the specific requisite materials as well as specialized chemical equipment, large-scale production would not be possible. It would take months to obtain the necessary materials to create the powder for a single magazine; the apocalypse would make large-scale production of any high-grade modern explosives or firearm ammunition impossible. Gunpowder, however, is quite a different case; to make gunpowder, you simply need to pulverize and mix sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, making it rather easy to produce. Due to this, it became a fixture of warfare from the 11th and 13th centuries onward in Asia and Europe respectively, where it was used in quite a large number of roles: these included, but are not limited to, cannons, matchlock implements, and even incredibly primitive rockets.
So far, I have given what is, at the base, a lecture on gunpowder. Aside from a passing mention of the game’s environment at the beginning of the second paragraph, you would not be mistaken for thinking that this was an essay on gunpowder that had most likely been waylaid; instead of being submitted for a school project, or posted on a more adequate forum, it had now been posted on a discussion board for what seems to be an unrelated subject. This, however, is not the case, as I have yet to lead into the real purpose of this essay; the introduction of primitive gunpowder elements into Unturned II.
As was already covered, gunpowder is rather easy to produce; if you are able to get your hands on the widely-available constituents and the very basic tools required to synthesize it, it is quite possible to make it in a completely pre-industrial environment on a large scale, provided that you have the time and the resources. The implements that this resultant powder could be used with are manifold; potentially, players could be able to create primitive rockets with the addition of wood and cloth, or, if they had the metalworking expertise and access to reasonable amounts of scrap, matchlock firearms. Potentially, they could even create cannons.
I am proposing that, in short, the process of gunpowder creation and the resultant uses thereof are added into Unturned II. The benefits would be many, and the downsides would be few; it would add more variety to the ways someone could arm themselves, and it would lead to more creative methods of combat aside from the, so far, incredibly basic two-man long-rage firearm duels. In addition to this, it would heavily increase the realism of the game, as well as the PvE aspect; allowing players other ways to access weaponry outside of the standard military outpost fare would most likely have a large, and positive, impact on the game.
- I support this suggestion mostly as-is.
- The suggestion requires heavy revision.
0 voters
Game design is, at the very base of things, not easy. Every single variable in a game has to be positioned in such a way that it creates an engaging, balanced, and most of all fun experience for the player; and it is very easy to get these things wrong. Games that fail in some or multiple aspects of their design are, altogether, not uncommon; failures such as these are not unique to any certain production value, as several high-profile failures, such as Bethesda Softworks’s Fallout 76 have shown. These are not entirely intentional failures, however, and not failures created from lack of effort; it is beyond certainty that every aspect of these big-budget games was debated over for hours and settled on by a team of experienced designers.
However, failure in game design is not unique to published games, or even games themselves; the proposal written above is a clear example of such a breakdown. Political policies do not need to be implemented for their virtues and failures to be seen; and game design proposals do not need to be coded and modeled for their problems and flaws to be laid bare. The suggestion above gives minimal thought to the legitimate impact of what is proposed; any actual thought on what the impact of this proposal would be is, at most, an afterthought. It spends several paragraphs elaborating on the idea, but very few words on actually explaining the impact. Adding gunpowder weaponry, such as cannons and primitive rockets, would be a horrible idea; it would be either devastatingly overpowered or heavily underused; in short, it would create a horrible imbalance.
Further Elaborations on the Futility of the Suggestion
Allowing users to create cannons, matchlocks, and primitive rockets would not go over well. Cannons would be borderline overpowered, at the very least; allowing a way to raid without needing advanced military technology would be a horrible idea for reasons I need not state. Even if this raiding property was removed, it would still be a bad addition; it would be incredibly ineffective otherwise, as a standard firearm could far more effectively take down another player or a horde of zombies than a cannon could. In addition to this, it would be incredibly out of place in the game’s general theme; cannons do not fit in with a post-apocalyptic Canada. The primitive rockets suggested would go much the same way, and the matchlock firearms would follow the same dichotomy of either being too effective or heavily underutilized. There would be no real solution to this; crafting restrictions would not have a major effect on this, as it would, at the most, permanently make the gunpowder implements an unused sidegrade to more conventional raiding and combat supplies.
This is, however, not a schizophrenic rant, composed to either confuse or entertain the reader. I did not write this to simply get angry at myself; rather, I am writing this about something I notice on the whole in the forums. Suggestions like the one above are a dime a dozen, and the flippant disregard for the actual impact of the suggestion beyond the direct and immediate changes to the certain genre of content. For example, a massive rework of the firearm system among more realistic lines might be more realistic, but would it be balanced and fun? Would the average user know enough about real-life firearms to even use them in-game? In the end, would it legitimately change the game for the better? Take the suggestion above. Would adding makeshift cannons and matchlock firearms make the game more enjoyable, and would it make the game balanced? Would the average user care enough to actually put the effort in to make a cannon and the requisite material, or would the average user be able to skip tiers of progression by using these makeshift implements? These suggestions tend to spend paragraphs, even pages focusing on the idea, but most of the time don’t even spend 2 sentences on the impact.
You may be asking; is there a large downside to such suggestions? They may be a little light on the detail regarding the actual and immediate impact on the game, but do they cause any legitimate harm? These suggestions do cause harm, but it is not immediately visible on a surface level. Firstly, consider this; how many suggestions, over the years, have you seen implemented in the game in a timely manner? (Please note, I am discussing purely the forum in this situation; the Update Cabinet is a different matter entirely.) At the very least, actually-implemented suggestions are far and few between; most of the time, they were already planned by the developer, or the update adding them occurred weeks or months later; something that could also be attributed more to coincidence than the developer actually using the suggestion for inspiration. There are a bevy of reasons as to why this is the case, but there are two correlated to this very issue that are quite evident.
Firstly, the lack of actual thought gone into the suggestion’s impact could cause the developer to simply reject a suggestion due to the balancing issues. If too much time is put into the idea, and very little thought is actually given to the impact, then the developer has a good reason to deny it; after all, nobody would willingly implement an obviously unbalanced idea into the game. In addition to this, even if the idea is quite well-made, the lack of supporting evidence for the actual benefits of the idea will simply fail to convince the developer that it is actually worth putting into the game. This leads me onto the next problem that this creates; with little actual supporting evidence on the impact of the idea, posts suggesting otherwise good ideas can devolve into comment wars over the overall balance of the idea that can turn normally peaceful discussions into battlegrounds; often, things can degenerate to the point where moderators have to step in to resolve the conflict; but the scars do remain. Constant debates and arguments do not help the overall health of a community, and help to increase the general toxicity of a forum, which can be quite lethal over time. The great irony of these massive debates is that they could often be solved if the post had simply presented more evidence and actually given proper thought to the impact of the idea; either the debate would be lessened, or the post simply wouldn’t be made in the first place as the author realized it was a bad idea; on the whole, things would be greatly improved.
So, what even is my suggestion? The name would be a misnomer if I suggested that my “fake” suggestion above was the point of it. No, I do have a legitimate and actual suggestion.
When making a suggestion, think about the impact first, not the idea. It’s more important that you describe the effect that this would have on the game; while the idea itself certainly is important, and by no means should be neglected, the impact is by far the most important part of each suggestion. Without the impact, suggestions aren’t really suggestions; they’re just ideas, loosely tossed out without much thought. Thinking about the impact helps reduce flame wars, and it also increases the overall quality of suggestions on the forum; and could, additionally, help the developer receive better input from the community on what they want in the game.
TL;DR: When making a suggestion, actually think about what it does to the balance of the game, and what impact it will have on the game’s enjoyability and ability to entertain players.
Extraneous Details
I genuinely don’t know where to put this; if I put it in the Meta category, the first half makes no sense, but if I put it in the UII category, the second half is heavily out of place. It’s a meta post about suggestions that, partially, is also a suggestion; frankly, I’m really not sure. If anyone wants to move this, go right ahead.
The poll was a general barometer for the reality of the fake suggestion; if it got mostly positive responses, then I know I wrote it convincingly enough, while if it got mostly negative responses, this wasn’t as big of a problem as I thought it was.
Also, if you genuinely think that the gunpowder stuff was a good idea, please DM me about it instead of posting it here; I’d rather not synthesize debate over a suggestion created for demonstration purposes.
it's long so it must be good
i repeated what danaby said give me likes 
