Nuigurumi

I wanted to post something similar. In reality, you would have so many options to hit a zombie with practically anything: a brick, a twig, a chair, a fire iron. In the game, you have to run through half the map to find a particular kind of hatchet. While it is clearly impossible to enable player interaction with every stick and stone in the game, finding a basic melee weapon seems unrealistically difficult. Ability to use your bare hands may help to mitigate the problem.

Would it be possible to make the barrel sway, unless you look through the iron sights? Sort of like it is now when you're hurt or breathing heavily after running, maybe more? Keep the real crosshair, showing the exact position of where you're aiming at, so with some practice you could still develop a skill to aim with it more or less accurately, while the iron sight would still be hugely favored?

I don't think the temporary crosshair for the new players is a good idea. Just when you got used to shooting with the crosshair, you will have to forget that and re-learn to shoot without it? But how about a free laser aim with a depletable battery for every new player? And clear message that when the battery is depleted, youwill have nothing, so you would try to use it less and less, thus getting used to the absence of the crosshair? And when it's out of power, you will be more or less ready for it.

The crosshair should definitely STAY. Actually, I think we need MORE crosshairs, like at least three. Seriously, though, all those being in favor of the removal should ask themselves what actual aspect of real life does it substitute. In real life we all have sense of direction, orientation, muscle memory and whatnot. In a game it is a stripe of pixels drawn from the bottom right corner and roughly to the center of the screen. Well, maybe you can learn to shoot with that stripe of pixel, but it will have nothing to do with "realism". There's more than enough unnecessary hardcore in the game, disguised as the realism, while being in fact not realistic at all. It's amazing to see people wanting more...

FRIENDS & TEAMS Yes. Death is baaad, m'kaaay? You shouldn't die. Playing with friends would emphasize that even more. If you die, not only you lose all your stuff, but your team will lose a member and be at a disadvantage. You will try not to die even harder. They will try healing you at all costs, instead of shooting you in he face, waiting until you return Kenny-style and giving you back your gear. Commiting mass-suicides after losing several important members would probably happen. Anyway, your teammates will join you sooner or later, one by one or all a once, doesn't matter. While alone in a new world, you can start establishing camps, collecting supplies etc. to equip them better when they arrive, so the social aspect won't disappear. Good point, completely forgot about that, despite being in a similar situation myself more than once. We can have a programmable suicide button - enter "89", press the button, and you're there. Can probably be abused, though. Better yet, you send your friend an invite, by accepting it he sets his life count equal to yours. TIMEOUTS Won't work. Just a simple example, imagine yourself with a broken bone and low health meter, crawling around with your vision fading in and out, looking for food and medical supplies - it will probably be faster to suicide, wait your 10~30 minutes, run back to the corpse to take your stuff, than to restore your health from that condition. The only thing timeouts may help against is suicide-respawning. Big timeouts (and I mean BIG, maybe even progressive) may help, but how about those who don't have all day for playing? Confusing, you say? More than stuff disappearing from your inventory or the process of equipping your hatchet and reloading it so you can swing it? I'd argue it'd be nothing in comparison. Besides, even those glitches aside, it's not a casual game, and as such it is inherently confusing, and it takes getting used to, and everybody is aware of that. I didn't think of anything like that, but the idea seems interesting. After you die, you go to hell (an unappealing, boring place) and have to find (fight?) your way back to the upper world.

I posted the second half of my post, addressing other comments (about teams, friends and while timeouts won't work), but it disappeared. Well... to hell with it.

GLITCHES Essentially, what you're saying is "there are glitches in the game, which can cause death, so as a workaround let's make death really meaningless". Glitches have to be fixed. Hackers have to be dealt with. They are ruining the game experience, regardless of how many separate worlds are there in the game. And there's nothing fundamentally unfixable about them, either. PERFORMANCE I must admit I have no experience with creating MMO games, so I may be totally wrond here, correct me if you can, but I think that for a properly written and optimized game server the load will be more or less proportional to the number of online players currently in game. So what's the difference between 50 players in one world and 50 players scattered throughout the worlds? Perhaps the latter scenario will cause even less server load, because there will be less players interacting with each other. In the extremely unlikely event of this idea being adopted, it WILL require changes in the game servers, so it is probably not even relevant to discuss preformance or glitches of the current game servers now. My thoughts exactly, although how much that would really help with the performance is unclear. EMPTY SERVERS Yeah, I thought that would probably be the biggest problem. Although, would that necessarily be a bad thing? Maybe if you meet other survivors only very rarely, it will force people to cooperate more, thus changing the social dynamics, making them die less often and balancing the issue? Another solution could be a centralized cloud, or something, sort of like it's made in Starcraft 2 now, where you don't even need to select your game server... Another possibility is to kick you out of your current world not on every death, but like on every 10th death, or something. Would decrease the number of worlds, too. MISUNDERSTANDING I specifically mentioned those wouldn't be separate servers, but rather each server would hold all worlds possible (of course only simulating those with people currently playing). No, it wouldn't be a single global server for every world, either (see above).

I was reading some forum posts about how death is not penalizing enough, because all you have to do is to go to your corpse/tents/teammates to get your gear back. I got this rather obvious idea which I haven't seen discussed yet: Each player has a global number of deaths (or incarnations/lives/whatever) attached to the account permanently. Each world/server has a number, too. The player is only allowed to enter a world, which number is exactly equal to his incarnation number. For example, when you first start playing, it's your 1st life, you can enter only "world #1" on any server. You die, and it becomes your 2nd life, so you can enter only "world #2" on any server, but you can't get back to "world #1". Your corpse, your tents, your gear from your previous life - they are all still in the "world #1" on the server where you left them, but you will never see them again. Your teammates, if you had any, can only join you after they die, too, so their life count will be equal to yours. Sort of "parallel realities", so to speak... As I see it, it will make your death way, way more unpleasant, and without all those questionable half-measures like "block you from the server for 30 minutes", "make all your tents instantly despawn" or "make your own loot unlootable for you". When you die, you really start fresh, no matter how much stuff you had in your backpack and your tents. If you have teammates, you wouldn't even want to suicide for better spawn location, because it will kick you out into the yet next world, further away from them. I am not sure how much load it will add to the server - obviously, we can't have a separate server for each "world #", because those numbers will be getting quite big. So maybe the idea is unrealistic performance-wise. Or maybe it all can be packed inside a single server, since most stuff will be identical across the worlds. What do you think?