cheeselol

What are the projected benefits of overhauling the movement system to begin with?

As a bandit I kill because this is the only game where you can truly hunt another player. The game is expansive and well-modeled enough as a zombie sim where the threat of violent death by another player is always immediate but secondary to the premise of the game. There's no other game where you can patiently stalk prey like you can in DayZ. You can't do it in CoD or Quake or Arma because those games are arenas where the other players' main objective is to find you and kill you as well. Also, the stakes are really high in this game (for a lone wolf, at least) and that makes the act of killing uniquely visceral. As a survivor I love the fact that there are other players out there who want to hunt and kill me because it makes the game challenging, ergo interesting. It also makes trust a much more rare and valuable commodity, and I'm pretty sure that's the way the game should be.

I think poop would work well as a loot item. You drop it on the ground and someone can come and pick it up via the Gear menu. Perhaps it could be a throwable item as well as fuel for a fireplace. The implications of poop as an item extend to other possibilities as well, such as secretly filling your buddy's backpack with your excrement or even leaving feces in a fresh corpse for other scavenging survivors to happen upon.

I know zombies can't hear SD ammo being fired from a non-SD weapon, but what about other players? How do they perceive these shots?

Sneaking around town during the daytime is pretty much impossible now without crawling the whole way. Perhaps being able to ninja sneak through a zombie-heavy area is something that you want to prevent in order to promote more clever tactics like diversion or teamwork, but as it stands the way stealth works is just not intuitive--it is frustrating. The way zombies behave towards players is really unpredictable and that makes stealth tedious rather than tense. I believe adding the LOS checks paves the way for a really good stealth system that just hasn't reached fruition yet. I believe a good system will encourage the player to be careful and methodical and not to just move at a proned pace. As it stands, I think zombies' should have better visibility--it doesn't make sense to be able to crawl past a zombie in the middle of the day in an open field or street. Because there's a LOS system in place, it stands to reason that the stealth should focus on patience and staying out of the zombies' vision. DXHR and MGS are really good examples of this kind of stealth done right. Zombies are always shambling around, so they always disperse from an area a player needs to traverse if that player is patient; if the player ever needs to move a stationary zombie (e.g. an indoor spawned zombie) they can always use some sort of diversion to draw it's attention away. If I'm not mistaken the zombies already sort of act this way, but as evidenced by the interior raytracing problems, perhaps the LOS system isn't quire mature enough yet to make it appear so. Another problem might be how unbelievably loud the player is. It's strange that zombies can lock on to a players crouch run with a house obstructing their line of sight. Perhaps zombies should investigate footsteps rather than immediately knowing a player is right there. Perhaps the stealth system could be simplified and footsteps altogether cease to aggravate zombies. The noise footsteps make is flawed anyways as given any surface type in the world (e.g. grass, forest, field, hard dirt, concrete) it's unclear how much noise the player will make by walking on it until it is too late and that one bad step aggros the zombie. If you look at good sneaker games, like Thief and Splinter Cell, the type of surface is clearly illustrated so the player automatically knows the risk of stepping on that piece of metal or, god forbid, tile. DayZ currently violates this principle. For example, there are two types of grass that appear identical to the player that the game treats differently in terms of stealth. That's just my 2 cents regarding stealth. My other beef is with the hatchet taking up the primary weapon slot. It really seems unreasonable to just use the hatchet as a tool that harvests wood now, but perhaps it's supposed to create a divide between hunters and gatherers (hunters carry a rifle to raid towns/kill players for beans, gatherers relinquish the ability to carry a primary to harvest food in seclusion). Not sure how I feel about it, but all I know is that it threw a wrench into my previous play style.