powdered-swords

No. Realism has priority when positively affects gamplay or doesn't affect it at all, and as far as the gameplay goes it's already much much easier to play a random killer than a paragon survivor. I'm open to alternatives, but the survivor/bandit balance is already one of the most glaring problems and doesn't need to be made worse.

I have no problem with bandits being an integral and important part of the gameplay and roleplaying aspects of dayz, but I still feel there's a huge difficulty imbalance between playing as a bandit or a survivor who's attempting seek other survivors to team up with and I think that's where a lot of this frustration comes from. It's very easy to PK any beginner who's typing in direct chat, looking for friendlies and has less equipment than you do. On the other side it's very difficult to find player to team up with ingame and not get killed by them or an opportunist in the process. Yes this game encourages survivalist role playing, but it also encourages teamwork and I don't think that one should be so out of balance with the other. Likewise I still think that things like betrayal and mistrust should be important, but I don't think betrayal should be ridiculously easy while the teamwork should be extremely difficult. The player that pk's is bored and unsatisfied because it was too simple while betrayed becomes frustrated because it's far to difficult to anticipate or avoid being betrayed. So, one addition I would suggest to include to balance the difficulty between the two play styles would be to give players to the option to activate a 'friendly mode'. In this mode your player name is visible to people close to you (*not sure if this is technically possible) *excluding bandits, and the game would display a list of your recent player kills *if you have any. This would benefit new players since they would quickly learn to avoid players not using friendly mode, and it would facilitate more team building which IMO is more fun that 'lone wolfing' in the middle of Chernarus out of fear of being killed. It would even improve pvp and social manipulation by making it more meaningful. If you've killed in the past for example and want to infiltrate a group of friendly players you might have to lie about your past. If people can see your name you might have to be more careful to avoid being double crossed or revenge killed. Ultimately the best part is it makes pk'ing more difficult without adding unrealistic penalties like "zombies do more damage to you". Personally I'm not a fan of humanity based spawning. Areas that are labeled as being full of gullible newbies are basically pvp magnets and quickly become more dangerous the spawn points that are supposed to be more dangerous.

I don't recall the devs ever claiming that players should be forced to team up and avoid 'lone wolfing', being alone is meant to be very difficult, but that doesn't mean being in a group should be a cakewalk, currently that's all knockdown really presents. Knockdown as it is presents no challenge to groups and instead of providing great challenge to individuals it's more of a roll of the dice or the result of the inevitable glitched zombie. There are a couple of issues with the zombies that if corrected would make knockdown a non-issue, namely the ghosting through objects and wild zigzag running that forces you to choose between being hit or wasting tons of ammo and possibly be hit while reloading anyway. Unfortunately these issues look like they're the results of the game engine so the only thing that can be changed is the mechanics of knockdown. My suggestion would be to make pain a meter like hunger and thirst is. In addition to the visual distortion, once you reach a certain point it becomes possible to be knocked out (through fainting) with intervals increasing the more you're in pain. IMO this would still present a significant challenge, but remove some of the randomness, it could also make epi-pens more useful. Tajin pointed out that you can easily kill zombie hordes just by running into buildings and taking them on, one by one. Examples like this where something that's extremely difficult can be made into a cakewalk just by using one technique (possibly glitch/exploit) are not examples of good game design. There should be no move in a fighting game that beats all others, there should be no gun in an fps that's just as easy to acquire but is far superior to every other one. These are just examples of poor balancing. Therefore teaming up shouldn't be the magic bullet that makes knockdown a non-issue. It should make things a lot easier, but making surviving as a team dull and easy while surviving as an individual inevitably impossible is not really fun whichever way you choose to play.