This is the assumption I made.
Did I mention any weapons being at maximum potential? My main argument is that a cheap weapon should never fully surpass a much rarer, harder to acquire firearm. God, imagine if something like that was in 3.0, where you could upgrade the damage of something like the Scholfield/Hawkhound. Already they come close to being better than the Timberwolf, factoring in the fact that they both take civilian ammo, are incredibly common, and do very similar damage to the Timberwolf, one of the rarest guns in the game with some of the rarest ammo crates used to refill it.
It’s clearly designed to be an end-game sniper rifle. If the Scholfield/Hawkhound were able to be upgraded to have higher damage, or even increased range, then the Timberwolf would become obsolete. Even assuming the Timberwolf would have an upgrade or two that pushes it past 300m range, considering the effort behind getting the weapon, finding the high caliber crates to refill it, and the likely difficult nature of upgrading literally one of the end-game weapons makes simply upgrading a cheap civilian weapon more effective. Not only that, but just how far do you want people to be able to upgrade their guns before it utterly ruins the balance?
Either way, there’s a certain threshold for a gun before it simply becomes more effective to upgrade a weaker gun to be comparable (or even stronger). It’s also the reason I am heavily against caliber changing, as it removes any balance regarding the rarity of calibers. If you have a strong gun, being able to remove one of its downsides - a hard to get round - effectively ruins balance.
Since you seem to want to use the argument that we shouldn’t assume things that are currently in 3.0 are going to be like that in II, I might as well mention how you assumed you can simply sneak past zombies, nevermind the fact that you completely disregarded the potential difference in difficulty between an area with a higher tier firearm and a lower tier firearm. Knowing that Nelson wants to make the Turned an interesting, almost “mutant” threat we can infer we’re getting more than just the basic zombies in 3.0.
Regardless, if the harder to get gun is weaker than an easier to get gun in which you’ve upgraded, then the harder to get weapon becomes pointless to loot for.
