DoozyWombat

To answer the questions about why killing someone would make you weaker, there is definitely a large psychological cost to murder. You pay for it, either in remorse or in loss of your humanity. This, I am guessing, is why the "humanity index" penalty was added. Becoming a bandit was supposedly a deterrent, except that it did not work, as players apparently did not care what it did to their appearance, as long as it did not affect their abilities in the game. I am simply proposing making the penalty tied to players' actual ability in the game, rather than just their appearance. I am not suggesting the elimination of pvp. You'll always have that. There is a large difference, however, between having to make a serious decision about whether to kill, cooperate, or avoid, and simply killing everyone you meet, because it is safer (or much worse, because it is fun.) You want to take down another player to get their gear, go ahead. You can do it once, or even a few times, without serious consequences. There will always be the danger that someone may snipe you, and interactions with other players will always be adrenaline experiences. Just as in the real world, however, being a sociopath should result in big penalties. Start killing a lot of people in the real world -- even in a mythical post-apocalyptic zombie world -- and the sane humans are going to gather together, hunt you down, and shoot you like the animal (or uninfected zombie) you have chosen to become. Dayz isn't set up to allow that kind of cooperation, but in a game this realistic, there should be a cost to murder.

Proposal: Permanently reduce a player's maximum hit points when attacking another player other than in self-defense, or killing another player. Rationale: Lots of solutions have been proposed to the problem of players who just want to practice being Columbine wannabes. Aside from the larger ethical and moral questions of training large numbers of people to practice Columbine-style mass murder, it sucks for the noobs, who just want to survive and escape/fight off zs, and then get sniped. Start all over, get a little further, and get sniped again. IMO, the only way this will be resolved is to make a permanent cost to killing part of the game. I.e., if a player's full-health (maximum) hp is around 12,000, make it so that an attack on another player costs a PERMANENT reduction of 200 hp, unless that player attacked you first. If you kill another player, even in self defense, it costs you 300 hp. So, an unprovoked fatal sniping of another player costs you 500 hp, and even if you are fired upon and return fire to kill the other player, it still costs you a permanent reduction of 300 hp. Kill enough people, and a single hit from a z will kill you. The reason for having a cost to killing, even in self defense, is that reflects real life. If you kill someone, there IS a cost, even if the person thoroughly deserved it, and you killed only in self-defense. If you can defend yourself, and get away WITHOUT killing the other, you save yourself a lot of grief. Sometimes you are dealing with a predator, and taking them out is the right thing to do -- but there is still a cost. The person who can kill another person without remorse is the very definition of a sociopath. I'd like to see the game actively discouraging that trend. Details: I would use the combat timer to determine when this is reapplied. In other words, you might shoot at another player multiple times during a single gunfight, but it only counts as one gunfight. If you cease fire long enough for the combat timer to go off, however, and then re-engage, you incur another penalty. Determining self-defense may be problematic. I know there is a humanity element already in the game that uses this, so I would use the same thing. If it is too complicated to enforce that, I would say that making it a simple 200 hp if you hit another player, and 300 more if you kill him/her, would also work much better than what we have now. Then near misses don't count, and it's almost always better to avoid killing another player. I suggested a fairly low penalty for it, because I think it would change the game too much if you made it too high. I think this much will put an end to the Columbine syndrome aspect. If some of those people leave the game because of it, I say, good riddance. Maybe they will get counseling before they decide to try it IRL. PVP does happen and is part of the game, but by making it costly, you provide a real-world balance to violent interactions with other players. A player could still take out another player who is well-equipped, but doing so is not free. If a player is doing that more than two or three times in the course of playing, they are killing for some other reason than gaining equipment. Friendly fire mistakes also happen, and while you would still have a penalty for it, it should not be crushing. IRL, it is much more devastating than a self-defense killing, but I wouldn't want to try to distinguish what is and is not friendly fire. Doozy Wombat