Forget equal balancing of melee (unarmed) and firearms skills. In f1/2 there it works, because it was single player game and there were not any other players. I just dont understand why man with knife or even katana should dominate over man with assault rifle. Best is, to add purpose, location or role for this skills. I.e. in every pub you should use this kind of skill without penalty of being killed by guards,... Actualy, right now it is cheapest PK or maybe anti PK combat skill for mining places.. If you want to defend yourself but you dont want to loose your stuff. And bring another types of this.
But it would be easy to avoid with current settings since everyone can just run away.
No no no, the enemy approaching is the hard part but also the fun part. It requires tactics, but if you manage to do it the outcome should be deadly to the enemy.IMHO the only thing about getting close that should be done is introducing always run, and that's on the todo list already. So the only thing to be made is: Hand to Hand range + Hand to Hand fighter = Death of the Ranged weapon user.It could be done many ways - increasing damage which is the simplest one but in my opinion not the fun one. Another, debuffing the enemies ability to shot when being at close range like the "In Your Face!" perk(imho that should be default with melee weapons though) - this one seems more interesting than just increasing damage. That shouldn't affect HtH vs HtH fights.
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
Plus, if you're more than sinlge players, say 3v3, if you've got a Melee guy running at 3 people and they all run, then they have 0 output ... where as Mr Melee's friends can shoot so they have 2.Melee damage isn't bad, Auto Run would make it easier to pull off and Perks will make it so you weren't so easily shot on the way in. Until those things are done I won't fiddle with anything else (except for the low tech boost that happens on next update).
what about a weapon with a chance to block bullets....