Thoughts on the community and recent developments

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Unturned has seen a lot of positive changes recently for the community, making it a much more welcoming place. These changes include the removal of certain slurs from chat, the addition of the Ukrainian flag to the menu, the Pride event and new cosmetics, statements of support and donations for persecuted groups, and the inclusion of pronouns on the forum. In particular, the improvements in the Discord community have been quite significant.

However, there are still some concerns I have about the wider community:

Servers: While I agree with the closure of the Ukraine vs. Russia maps, there are still servers and server networks that raise concerns. Some of them have extremely hostile rules, staff, or plugins targeting minority groups, either overtly or in practice. There are even plugins out there that enforce a “white-skinned” character appearance and remove all LGBTQ+ and Pride-related content from the server, including quests, cosmetics, and text.

Regarding the Unturned official Discord:

Rule 3: I believe this rule could be worded better. If enforced too strictly, it might seem like it discourages peaceful discussions of groups supported by SDG. It’s also somewhat vague and confusing,(e.g:possibly leading a trans user to think they need to hide their identities to avoid punishment). While I haven’t seen Unturned official staff enforce it in a problematic way, I’ve encountered similar rules in other servers that ban discussion of many persecuted groups, including Ukrainians, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, and more. This is a worrying trend.

Volunteer Moderators: It’s great to hear that more volunteer moderators are being added to the team, as moderation has been slow lately. However, I think this should be done cautiously. Some users in the Discord community who follow the server rules might hold bigoted views outside of the server. It’s essential to conduct thorough checks to ensure that no problematic individuals are brought onto the staff team. Additionally, having diversity on the staff team is crucial for recognizing dog whistles and addressing them effectively.

In summary, while Unturned has made significant progress in fostering a more inclusive and welcoming community, there are still areas that need attention and improvement to ensure that all players feel safe and valued.

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If anyone is curious, here is the skin color plugin in question, I wasn’t able to find the cosmetic one though: Unturned Store

I could understand using it for PvP servers to prevent green skins, and there actually is an option to randomize skin colors to realistic ones, which I actually think is a reasonable solution to the issue. However, that isn’t enabled by default and it will normally set change everyone’s skin color to what is set in the config, which many (cough cough SOD) servers just go with.

I also saw this plugin, which seems pretty questionable as well. Unturned Store

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I think there should be a slider of realistic human skin tones that can be fallen back to in the survivor editor if a plugin like this is used, that way players are able to play what they are most comfortable with, while still dealing with the “green skins”

I think having a random skin tone is still partial erasure, but its better then a single realistic human skin tone

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I feel like the best course of action would be preventing plugins from doing anything with skin color entirely, and adding a config option to disable setting rgb skin colors. If disabled make people only able to set the non gold (realistic!) skin colors.

Also, I feel like disabling cosmetics is somewhat questionable in the first place, it should probably be all or nothing in terms of what cosmetics are allowed.

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True, a server or client-sider setting for that would be neat.

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This would be ideal, but I think the denizen yellow could also work well.

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yea, Though not perfect, even having the default skin tones provided without the gold DLC as fallbacks would be way better then a random skin or 1 single real life set skin tone. but having a race neutral fictional skin tone like your example would be a fine “lazy” way to fix the issue. Though still yellow is not entirely perfect as some people still associate yellow with lighter skin tones (such as like how the Simpsons handles skin tones)

This would need to be implemented properly or it would be just as problematic as other issues discussed within this thread.

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Define “properly”. A client side toggle that can be enabled (or disabled) serverside sounds good to me.

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I would say the “proper” implementation would be for players to be able to select both one of the (10 I think?) realistic skin tones, AND a gold RGB skin color. On servers with gold skin tones enabled, the RGB skin color the player selects could be used. On servers with it disabled, it would fall back to the realistic skin tone the player selects.

This would allow for server owners to combat greenskins with a server config option, but still let the player use a (realistic) skin tone of their choice. Also, it would let Nelson keep using the current character setup UI with minimal changes ;).

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Reasonable take