Diwwah

I think that the light level and gamma characteristics should remain the same for everyone playing the game all the way until the signal reaches their monitor. Whoever designs the night-time lighting should calibrate their monitor to display 2.2 gamma ( with a hardware calibrator to ensure accuracy ) and design based on that. That way the designer has the PC standard gamma performance and designs the night-time lighting with that standard in mind. The players are responsible of conforming to that standard. Of course, some people will have monitors that are better performing and/or better calibrated, just like some people have faster internet connections, more accurate mice or higher framerates. That's not the developer's problem. After the standardization I propose, the ball is in the players' court. The advantage here is that there is a clear "the way it's meant to be played" light level. If the developer can say they've designed the night with 2.2 gamma in mind, then everyone can set their monitors to display 2.2 gamma and see the night as the developer saw it when designing it. If there is no such standard when designing, then the designer might have 1.8 gamma which would make the nights too dark for anyone with a correctly calibrated monitor, or 2.6 gamma which would make it too bright for a correctly calibrated monitor. This is the approach movies and digital photography take to ensure everybody sees the movies and pictures as similarly to the original intended presentation as possible.

NO. Because it will be so much easier for geared people to grief players in the coast. Also there's a fine line between challenging and needlessly frustrating.

NO. I group with bandits and I don't want to hear that every time I look at them.

Great way to see just one side of the issue.

I think it's a bit dodgy as well. I have no shock icon, I haven't had any action in a long time, and it can still pop up seemingly randomly when logging in.

It's only a punishment if you consider it one. I don't and most of the other posters here don't seem to.

I'm pretty sure disconnecting from zombies is considered an exploit by Rocket as well.

AFAIK road flares last five minutes each. You get ten to start with. That gives you 50 minutes of illumination. 50 minutes should be plenty of time to find more flares, or find chemlights which last one hour each and come in packs of 10 I believe. That's 10 hours of light for a single pack of chemlights. I wouldn't call it unplayable.

I think the game needs a melee mechanic before removing the starting weapon.

Is it not possible to prevent connecting to a server, or the main server where the characters are stored, during an allotted period of time after disconnecting?

I don't think it will be enough for many scenarios, but it's certainly better than nothing.

Very nice, but just five seconds? I feel like that time period still leaves disconnecting as a valid PvP tactic.

Server-side regulation is exactly what we're lobbying for here. Also:

The result isn't the same for bandits who are out to kill players for their gear. You deny them their rightful gear, their rightful victory, by disconnecting. The equivalent in sports would be the other team beating you but getting no league points for it because you walked out of the field before the time was up.

I support this. Great idea! It is a good idea with a long enough timer and a long enough time to cancel the logout process. A player shouldn't be able to camp a door while logging out and pull a gun in time when someone appears.

I think the log-out timer should be implemented so that the player is actually disconnected immediately but the character stays on the server for the duration of the timer.

15 seconds is very little though. Consider two players in different rooms in a sort of mexican standoff. 15 seconds is a time people would probably risk to evade the situation. A minute is probably not. Even a minute is short if you consider a sniper taking a few shots from long range, missing, and then logging out in fear of having been spotted and subsequently hunted down. I'm repeating myself but I really think disconnecting should be eliminated from being a factor in PvP as completely as possible. Server hoppers might be dealt with with very similar measures, perhaps an ever increasing disconnect time with frequent, rapid disconnects.

/Golfclap :) Does the new running animation imply a change to zombie speed? I think it would be best if zed speed was decreased to slightly above player speed and make them able to attack while moving, so they would naturally slowly catch up to a running player and be able to attack them without stopping for the animation. Very happy about the performance fixes, I hope they work out. Now about that rampant disconnecting... *nudge* :P

I just think the time needs to be such that disconnecting is completely invalidated as a survival tactic. Five seconds is nothing. The two clicks from disconnecting properly instead of alt-f4 are nothing. It should never even occur to anyone that they might try disconnecting to avoid death.

I think there should be a fairly long logout time during which your character will remain in the game world. You would still be able to rejoin the same server and resume playing. The time needs to be fairly long, a couple minutes at least, simply due to the fact that firefights etc. happen over long distances and you'd often have to run a while to reach a sniper's location, for example. Certainly anyone can find a reasonably safe place to leave their character for a couple of minutes. As for server hopping, there might be a longer timer before you could join another server after disconnecting from one. Even five or ten minutes would diminish the loot-hoppers and backstabbers considerably. I have no idea if this is technically possible.

I hope they can make the centralized system work though if at all possible. I don't mind if it takes time, I just want the cheaters, disconnecters, server hoppers etc. gone.

Is PvP disconnecting a bannable offense? One could burn a couple dozen people just by posting a few Youtube links.