Pendulum Effect

That's what I was thinking, too.

I got to the point where I would look for cover when I heard helicopters go overhead in real life. Yeah, I'm a 24 year old college student and I had difficulty differentiating that. Same with my friend. Sad life of a survivor.

DO NOT USE THE ARGUMENT KoS IS FINE. IT IS FINE. THESE ARE OPTIONS TO INITIATE OTHER FORMS OF PLAY, OTHER THAN KoS. I ENJOY IT BEING IN THE GAME. HOWEVER, IT SHOULD NOT BE THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY THE GAME. People who DO NOT read the OP are either too lazy or too stupid to participate in the conversation. Posts that say, "omg kill on sight is fine, you're a pussy, cry-baby, whiner" or the like are not constructive to the conversation because the topic is not on the removal of kill on sight. In addition, you probably have not done your research as thoroughly on the game and thus you are missing the key point: Rocket himself has said that the inventory degradation is designed to deter kill on sight banditry and he is actively looking for outlets to further deter banditry as it stands in the game currently. If you ignore this fact, then you yourself are an ignoramus and a fool, not I. Oh, here you go, I did your research for you. Fast forward to 12:30 to hear Rocket himself say that he wants to change the way Kill of Sight works by giving players something to think about. INTERESTING: ------------------------------------------------ TL;DR This forum topic is best viewed in it's entirety and should not be judged by the hasty and horribly dumbed down TL;DR summary. In short, my proposal is that Kill on Sight is roughly the only way to play the game and while I'm not lobbying for it's removal (because it is a HUGE part of the game), I want more options to encourage team work for those who want different avenues of play other than a "mil-sim version of Battlefield." Currently, KoS is the ONLY way to play (more-or-less). This would work in conjunction by solving the horrible end game content (or lack thereof). Adding the equivalent of helicopter crash sites (albeit with different twists on them) in the form of random abandoned military bases and different wrecks and the inclusion of a reason to deviate from the standard "gather supplies in the south then head north until dead" gameplay. This would include a military harbor island in the South with the rarest form of military loot and the highest quality base-building materials, complete with a monumental challenge: tons and tons of slightly more difficult zombies (hundreds of zombies, respawning to create illusion of several thousand), a ton of area/buildings to explore and loot, and the ultimate goal being the aircraft carrier docked at the far end of the island. You could attack it in different ways, utilizing as many or as few people as you wanted, and mastering it means you'd be able to create efficient ways of utilizing your creations as you build them (i.e. helicopters and armored cars) to tackle the challenge in different ways or become more efficient. Could create interesting PvP, Cooperative and PvE play. Read entire post for more details as this TL;DR doesn't do it justice. In short, don't judge the ideas based on this alone! ------------------------------------------------- Full Post: This is a snippet from a post that I made on a wonderfully put together Suggestions forum by MR DELICIOUS here: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/162663-how-to-make-the-map-more-engaging/, but decided that the content I'm posting here could also be served as a both a suggestion and a discussion. This is meant to discuss the possibility of these ideas solving the aforementioned issues. Any other map suggestions should go to the link posted above. {Edited 13:49 1/7/2014 for those who aren't going to read the posts garnered in this forum before replying. Arguments are already inserted for cohesiveness.] A little background: I am a DayZ purist, meaning I'm against the inclusion of anything gimmicky and totally not in line with what Rocket has in mind for the future of this game. I believe that the suggestions I am about to make are not perfect, but would still provide a good skeleton or framework for some interesting ideas in the future development of the game. I do not support acquired in-game skills that give you an edge based on time played or leveling, I don't support NPC's that patrol safe zones and the like, nor interfaces for which to interact with non living entities. DayZ is about players doing what players do, to create stories. The avatar that you create should never know more than what you know in real life. You shoot better because the person behind the keyboard has got actual practice with the firearm, etc. Anyone who wants the framework of this game to go towards something gimmicky, arcade-like or MMO-esk, should stop playing this game. That being said, here we go: The world of DayZ is incredibly static and not a whole lot goes on after you've been geared and travel North. Yes, it's in Alpha, but this was kind of a running problem in the mod, too. These ideas are meant to spark/kickstart the community into doing more than be bland bandits. This will open up new opportunities for bigger betrayals, but also bigger cooperation. Especially with the third idea, which I'm most proud of. Stick around for that one, if nothing else. -Aircraft: I'd like to see the inclusion of mysterious aircraft, on random spawn timers, unaffected by server restarts. These aircraft can fly overhead and drop supplies, crash, or possibly land. The AI controlling these vehicles will instantly despawn if they land (or perhaps just die in the cockpit due to injuries sustained). Crashes and landed aircraft will be home to zombies roaming. This could get people to follow aircraft in the hopes of stealing supplies or even the vehicle itself. This could also make for interesting PvP or friendly player encounters. The origin of these aircraft is unknown, but players can RP that the military is sending supplies, reconing the area for potential incursion or research. -Randomly spawned bases: Now this can be a bit of a problem as bases are more static and immovable. For vehicles, they would either be destroyed by the flames or stolen for people to use, thus creating a convenient way for these objects to disappear from the map after a set amount of time. Bases, however, can be tricky to remove from the map, or even add. It can be immersion breaking if done incorrectly. My current idea is that these bases would spawn in a similar manner to Wasteland (in areas that are unoccupied by survivors and are out of line of sight), the materials can be used for building bases of your own, or be entirely taken over if one wishes. This would be a great way to attract other players for the possibility of loot, building supplies, vehicles and zombie killing. There would be NO NPCs, only zombies.These would be heavily fortified bases. It's defenses could be turned on other survivors. To add a twist as well as functionality: the bases are on self-destruction timers. A survivor has a set amount of time to find a base after it spawns or the self destruct protocol kicks in. It is possible to delay it via a computer terminal or by adding more fuel to the generator, but do you take the risk going in if it could explode at any moment? It makes sense that the military would have such a feature, in case the base was overrun or unguarded after a certain amount of time. The explosion would destroy the base and clear it from the map, cutting back on server resource allocation. Could also be home to zombies that are more durable; body armor and helmets make them more difficult to take down. Think of the riot gear zombie from Walking Dead. -Island Raids: Now before you bash me and say that this is not World of Warcraft and such, hear me out. This has the MOST potential out of anything. Currently there is little reason to head to the islands other than to make bases or camps that are more difficult for other survivors to take over. I for one would like to see them utilized for something really epic and in layman's terms, end game content. In one of the versions of the DayZ mod there was an aircraft carrier outside of Chernogorsk. What if one of islands was home to a giant military base/harbor, much like Pearl Harbor. This base could have an aircraft carrier docked, but eerily abandoned. Why? This was the place they ferried thousands of survivors in the final hours of the outbreak in the hopes to sail somewhere unaffected by the plague. However, things went horribly wrong and obviously some of the infected made it over. A massacre ensued, leaving the entire Island infested by zombies. The real twist here is that currently the objective of the game is to travel North after gathering supplies in the South. After that, the game stagnates and becomes about killing other players so they don't kill you for your gear. This game mechanic would force people to gather supplies for the trek North, build a base, fix a car and then ultimately head back South, brave the gauntlet of new players (Bambies) looking for highly geared players to kill and then go to this military Island. You could acquire a speed boat for this trek, you could eventually get a ferry complete with spots for vehicles, or you could spend time swimming. This island is home to a myriad of zombie types (based on the zombie life cycle), just like Dean Hall has envisioned for his game. In addition to regular zombies of the life cycle, Alpha zombies, a faster and deadlier version of what's on the main land. To enforce the notion that thousands of people were trying to evacuate this area, there will be a pool of as many zombies as they can comfortably spawn in this location. But they will respawn if killed. This will present a highly significant challenge as wave after wave of zombies will throw themselves at you, but really only if you make too much noise. Going it alone is doable, but you must be highly skilled and bring a lot of ammo, but you will probably die 99% of the time. This also presents an opportunity: cooperation! Being so difficult, you would most likely need to find a group of people to take over in order to survive. You could attack at day. Or you could attack at night with night vision! You could take a group of four, equipped with suppressed weapons and stealth your way across the island, looting as you go. You could take a group of 10, going a hybrid of stealth and loud. You could place snipers on the roofs of several buildings, giving cover to the rest of the group. Or you could go with 20-30 people, create a massive assault on the base where you clear the base moving as if you were a wildfire. Friendly fire could ensue. People could be picked off by zombies and you could watch your numbers slowly dwindle until you find yourself alone or scattered, being swarmed. You could finally finish sweeping the entire base (this would be an hours long task, with mid to high end military loot) with your group, finally ending at the air craft carrier at the far end (Ultra high quality military loot and the jackpot of all loot spawns), only to turn on each other. Or you could agree to meet up for another run at a later date, keeping a cooperative spirit that would last. Do you kill on sight now? You could be killing the same guy you raided with earlier. Now he's devoid of gear and won't show up to the next raid. You're shit out of luck, because he was the one with the keys to the Ferry you used to get your armored Humvee to that island. You need to find another group now, Champ. Do you kill Bambies, or do you go to the South to help them survive, nurture them and groom them to become a part of your team to raid this island? This would help enforce communities and even servers where people will tend to logon to most often in the hopes of finding people they played with once. I must also point out that, by design, server hopping would be entirely impossible on this island due to the massive amount of zombies respawning. If you were to spawn anywhere on this island, you would be overrun and mauled within seconds. Zombies would even spawn in buildings. It would probably be best, too, if stashes were implemented before this, as people would want to hoard as much weapons and supplies as they can, just in case they die. Also, if going to do this island raid, you will most likely want to stash everything but medical supplies and magazines for your weapons. Explosives may be necessary. Include an option to pull the pin on the grenade and blow yourself up, just in case you get trapped. Like C.J. from Dawn of the Dead (2004) with his propane tank in the van. Martyrdom at its finest. ------------------------------------------------------- EDITS, REVISIONS & FURTHER CLARIFICATIONS: My idea with the islands is a tricky thing.. It's not meant to be Dead Island on steroids or Left for Dead. It's not supposed to have different "types" of zombies (where there's a bloated zombie that bursts everywhere or a zombie that screams and stuns you), just slightly faster, slightly more agile, slightly more damaging, etc. Something that's based on Dean's idea of the zombie life cycle and his idea for the Alpha zombies. The idea that zombies respawn comes from the fact that this Island is supposed to be rather large (Elektro or Cherno in size, with a docked carrier at the far end). It's not technically feasible, at least to my knowledge, to have a thousand zombie spawn in that one location. Even if the network bubble or server could sustain that many zombies, it's unlikely that a mid-ranged computer could process that many zombies at once. To maintain the illusion that the entire island is infested, zombies would respawn but not necessarily throw themselves at you. They would respond to stimuli gathered around their particular spawn point (preferably out of vision of survivors) and that would affect if they would attack or not. So theoretically, if you were quiet enough with taking down all the zombies that you aggroed, no more would attack you. However, the number of zombies you killed would respawn somewhere on that island in idle mode. But if you go in guns blazing, they will likely keep swarming from their set spawn location due to the amount of noise you make, probably from several hundred meters away. It could be possible for you to "clear" the zombies, as there could be a set number of times each zombie could respawn before they are "dead for good." This way the illusion is kept and it's still "realistic" in that you killed every zombie on that island. Trust me, when I suggest this idea, I mean it in the least possible way for it to be arcade-like. I remember trying to extract one of my friends who was new to the game from Berezino and we were just shooting every zombie because we were cornered. We ended up on a scaffolding before we were finally overrun. But it was fun like that. That's the kind of experience I want for this island, except more intense. Stealth is almost paramount in it. The game, as it is right now, does not simulate a true experience for losing your humanity. I don't want the game to decide whether I'm a bad person, or if I'm going insane or if I feel bad for killing someone. In the past, Dean has used a meager score to judge if you were a bad person or not. The use of skins were utilized to give a player the sense of dwindling personality, and also give other players a visual representation of what a persons intent was. Sure, what I'm suggesting is not a perfect fix, but the game is a psychopath simulator. It's either kill or be killed with no realistic repercussions to yourself. Sure, you can mount an attack on the "Sniper in Cherno" who's griefing the new spawns, but there's no common ground for which to meet someone outside the forums. That's immersion breaking for me. The common ground mechanic that I'm proposing is simply providing new ways to cooperate that require multiple people to tackle. You can choose to ignore them if you wish and just resort to banditry, but you will lose out on some great mechanics that are fresh and fun. The issue with that particular mentality (and Dean needs suggestions on how to balance it), is that currently there is nothing stopping people from killing on sight. The whole idea of item degradation from bullet damage is to make people think before shooting and instead taking alternate routes to attain a person's gear. Either get a clean shot on their head, take them hostage, bind them or team up was supposed to be the outcome of the encounter, as Dean had intended. While it has certainly helped, there's still no real repercussions to killing on sight. People have wanted stupid ideas like your character becoming more insane and shake. That takes the player out of the game and makes things artificial. What Dean wants is something that makes people really think on whether or not they should kill a person or not. He wants the risk vs reward of being friendly or a bandit to be more evenly balanced. KoS is, and always should be, a part of the game. There should just be more thought behind the taking of life. What better way than to give highly geared people a productive outlet to channel their boredom and gear? Banditry is still an option, but it's not the only option this way. KoS, as of right now, is seen as the only option rather than one option of several. You have much more to gain by killing (life, gear and safety of your friends) than letting them live. Yes, you may get a temporary ally, but 99.9% of the time when you turn your back, you'll be dead. Having a higher end goal that requires multiple people to complete could possibly give the player more to ponder before pulling the trigger. I know that when I'm with my two friends, we'll pull the trigger almost every time on anyone we see, simply because it took us 45-60 minutes to meet up and we don't want to wait another 45 to link up with someone if they are shot while trying to be nice. However, if we had a common goal late game, we might think twice and recruit this person to come along to that island, if only for a meat shield. Sometimes we're given a lot of options, but those options are rendered useless because the climate doesn't effectively utilize them. Just trying to think of a way to balance the pros and cons of all strategies and mentalities. Again, the kill on sight mentality is not meant to be removed from the game. No, it's not broken. It's imbalanced. This is not an opinion that I'm expressing, but rather one that Dean Hall himself has addressed as being an issue that he would like to see resolved. So read the posts before saying that I'm trying to bring CareBears into DayZ. In real life, you'd feel bad if you killed someone out of cold blood having had no provocation. After awhile you might not feel so bad, killing people for fun or for no reason. How do you simulate going insane without taking control from the player? Answer: Giving them a lofty goal, unattainable without the aid of others, and killing a person that could help you get there. There's nothing wrong with the little things in place now, but higher risk = higher reward. The ideas in this post are future goals for the game after the implementation of everything Dean wants as a baseline. We can ALWAYS craft our own experiences, but randomly spawned aircraft or bases are exactly like helicopter crash sites. The infested military island is just like the proposed zombie horde, that could be wandering through the NWAF. It just happens to be on an island, where there's no where for the zombies to go. These mechanics have always been or have always been wanted in the game by Dean! They're just given some focus, some variety and some relative life to an otherwise cookie cutter, uninteresting world. Sure, there are signs of zombie outbreaks and desolation, but the military presence there seems as if it never made an effort to do anything to halt the advance of the infected or save the citizens. That's all. ------------------------------------------------ CONCLUSION: So, there's my list. I'll come back to it if I come up with more ideas, but as it stands, these are the most interesting (in my opinion) ideas to keep the game fresh and interesting, especially after you've done all you can in the game as it is right now. Feel free to amend, add to or even use my ideas as a template for further endeavors. I'll follow this post. I hope it gets attention from both the community and the dev team.

Diversity and variation are key in games where you don't have rolling content or events. If things are entirely player driven, there's only so far it can go. With the community and the dev team working in tandem, we can see a lot more interesting content than relying on one or the other.

#Doublepost. :(

This is the kind of PvE that I'm referring to. As it stands right now, zombies pose no threat and you feel no repercussions for firing a loud weapon in the confines of a town. You should fight the dead and fear the living, but it doesn't mean you that the environment and the zombies in large groups can't be equally frightening. Sure, this isn't meant to be a Left4Dead zombie killing spree but technically you could play it that way if you wished (if there were zombies to kill). The notion that the inclusion of these areas would eliminate or ruin PvP is not true by any stretch of the imagination, due to their nature. It could form 3 way wars, where two factions inhabit the island at one time but must also contend with all of the zombies. Do they open fire, ignore each other or do they team up? This is eventually going to be a part of the game by design, even in smaller towns. It adds tensions and uncertainty to an otherwise concrete fact: the two groups will kill each other because they know that it's likely that the others will kill them. The main goal is to survive in this game and currently the environment just doesn't pose enough of a challenge. You should have a greater and greater risks and rewards system and more importantly a better balance of what might kill you; zombies, disease, exposure, hunger, thirst, injury and people. You must brave all of these, tenfold, when you go to the zombie island. It's not changing the way the game plays, but it gives you a higher risk/reward quotient to work with.

I've been looking for a way to say that, so thank you. There doesn't need to be huge, complex ways to provide variety and challenges. They can be simple (at least concept wise) and let them run it's course, which has been what DayZ is all about anyway. Competition for supplies and better loot will always be a part of the game but you could, for a brief moment, put all that aside for and fear the more direct threat of zombies or the absolute unknown. Without adding new stuff, the veterans will very rarely feel the terror of not knowing where everything is on the map or not knowing where people could be sniping from or not knowing how to successfully navigate and loot each and every town. If you come up on a random base, you don't know the exact layout or how many zombies spawn or what the loot table might present. Or the island with nothing but zombies that can tear you to shreds in a heartbeat if you make one wrong move. That gives you a nervous feeling in your gut. That's something you never want to lose.

Thank you for this thoughtful post. Other than a handful of people, most have been too quick to bash without reading or flat out provide no constructiveness. You have demonstrated both higher brain function and common decency, all of which were lost to several users in this particular thread. I love your idea on zombie behavior and I agree 1000%. These are the zombies I hope we all see in the future, with more believable animations and behaviors. While this idea would be better implemented after they have sorted zombies clipping through buildings and attacking through floors and walls, the idea is very compelling for game play and providing a bigger threat for people to cooperate against. I imagine scenarios like (and I cringe to bring this up) when Shane shot Otis, leaving him crippled and unable to get away. This way if you were ever being closed in on by zombies, you could sacrifice your friend while you slipped away from zombies that were curiously approaching your position. This means zombies can still kill the most battle hardened survivor if he slips up and makes too much noise. He could find himself stuck in a house with no where to go. So does he wait for someone to come make more noise to lead the zombies away, or does he try to shoot them all and slip out before more arrive? I imagine much of this zombie behavior being included in my vision for the zombie infested military harbor. I also agree that zombies should be found behind closed doors and buildings. Not all the time, but every once in awhile you should come across one that scares the shit out of you. In that moment you make a knee-jerk reaction: you kill it silently or with a gun. If you fire your weapon, that one mistake just brought a world of hurt to your position. It could be another survivor or the infected; the possibilities are endless with that.

I guess I've never really played on a Private server based on my own prejudice, mainly because of the reasons I have expressed about being able to have several characters at once. I have had a "main" server that I played on quite a bit during the mod because my friends and I had vehicles and tents on there but after awhile we realized that the server became less and less populated due to our success in hoarding all the vehicles and a helicopter in which we were able to use to reclaim our vehicles. I suppose if we find an excellent private Hive to play on, we could give it a shot and see how it goes. I'm intrigued by your reasoning for it, so I feel compelled to take a chance. Do you suggest any private servers? Oh, I agree. I still think there would be far greater dispersion in mentalities than there currently are in this game right now, though. A lot of people would try to cling to their semblance of humanity and law abiding behavior. Some wouldn't kill unless threatened. Some might be more acclimatized to violence. But as it stands right now, most realize it's a kill or be killed scenario. I love the tagline, "Fight the dead, fear the living." Because it's true. But the overall mindset of people in DayZ does not represent what I think a real life scenario might bring. I'm curious if there's a way to simulate that.

I agree. The only problem, the way I see it, is the idea that you could theoretically have many characters and therefore not be as attached to your "one and only." Sure you would have your favorite character on your favorite server, but what if this server becomes full, gets taken down, temporarily offline, or no longer sees people logging on. Then your character and your progress are lost (or unable to be utilized). I'm trying to brain storm ideas that would combine servers in a drop in/drop out mechanic based on proximity, but then you have the issue of player created construction.. I'm curious if you have any ideas.

Thank you! I do want the game to live up to its potential first in the basic implementation of everything that has been discussed thus far. That is the first priority. However, it's never too early to foster great ideas to keep the development team and community interested in the long term success of this game. The more ideas we come up with collectively, the longer the lifespan of this game. It is the true nature of MMO style games in contrast to non multi-player games. Even games that are of non MMO architecture recognize that in order to stay relevant, they must continue to add new features and areas to explore. As humans we crave that which is new. So this, adding features concept, extends far beyond the KOS issue. It is entirely possible that it will become something entirely different by the time the framework is updated. If what Dean is working on now is considered the skeleton of the game, this would surely be considered the meat.

The only reason why I suggest the island being a thing, is because I don't think they are technically going to be able to sustain the number of zombies that I'm suggesting at the island across multiple towns. Dean says the goal is 10000 per sever due to the use of a network bubble, but I can only imagine the server load being quite high. If a town carries 100 zombies, a city has 1000, then i'm thinking that this island (the size of cherno or elektro in overall area) would have 5000. Yes, this is an over generalization of what I'm thinking of and obviously there are serious gameplay, latency and overall bad design implications, but I don't think we should be limited on the variations of locales we can see. Dean can, and has, take ideas from other mods of DayZ. This island would only be added after the serious and more pressing concerns are evaluated and solved. Realistically speaking, it could be added within the next two years as a form of "expansion" or "rolling end game content." I'm all for making more zombies in existing towns, solving other problems and bugs first. The points you bring up are extremely valid and I agree that they should be addressed first. But the devs need to realize that every once in awhile there's a need for them to "steer" the economy or social climate at certain way, to make things balanced. What if people stockpile shit loads of food, but the server keeps spawning more? People live longer, they no longer have to scavenge as hard for food. There's no current system that suggests time has passed (other than day or night) like the seasons. Why is food always available? To my knowledge, they said seasons are impossible with their current engine. To simulate the progress of time, they could introduce other areas with higher challenges and greater risk to even out that economy. Just a hasty thought, I can clarify more when I'm not on my phone. No, he doesn't. He's a career troll on these forums. He should be banned by the admin, as I don't think he's made one constructive post during his tenure here.

Of course being in a clan is "the way to go" if you want a friendly experience. But like I said, finding one in the forums is immersion breaking and having an incentive to have more friendly encounters IN GAME should be a part of the DayZ. You can not deny that without more end-game content or persistent base building with stashes, etc. that this game literally is a death match with high character customization. I love perma-death, because there's nothing more exhilarating than when you get shot at and your heart stops. You care about your character! What's the point in building your character if you just lose everything once you die? Yes, perma-death is part of the game but besides my body, what am I leaving behind? Nothing. I haven't really changed the world in which I live in. I'm not leaving behind a heavily fortified base, or house, or car behind. No matter if you spend 10 minutes or 1000 hours, the world is going to look the same. Yes, these are going to be fixed down the road, but people playing the game have already started off on the wrong foot. They look at this game as a giant death match. CoD for example offers character customization, but no stake on the world you inhabit. You cannot persistently change the world. Therefore it is a "lets play dress up and murder each other sim." This is literally what DayZ is becoming if they don't add interesting things to the game that provide people outlets to tackle new challenges or reasons to interact. Yes, the whole charm of the game is that you don't know who will shoot you and when. But again, for the MILLIONTH time, KoS should not be the only thing keeping this game alive otherwise it is a post-apocalyptic mil sim. The ideas in my post provide more flavor to the game without straying from Dean's visions and giving more avenues for the dev team to explore by varying the loot tables found at each of my locations. Yeah, people are idiots. I updated the TD;LR to show that even Rocket wants to change how banditry works by adding realistic challenges to circumvent KoS. It's not a matter of my opinion, it's Rocket's opinion that KoS should make people think more than it currently does. That's why he has items being damage on the character when they're shot. He wants more ideas to make robbery or tentative cooperation to be a part of the game more than it is. Uneasy alliances are just as scary as the possibility of behind KoS'd. Thanks for your support, it's been getting annoying with people either not reading or just saying I'm a crybaby for not liking KoS. Where are they getting the idea that I don't like KoS?! Jeez.. haha.

Literally.. it's like.. people are stupid.. I really don't have words. I just said KoS isn't the fucking problem. I kill on sight every time. I expect to be killed on sight. I LOVE KILL ON SIGHT. Jesus, I'm giving reasons to make it not the only part of the game. You're stupid, you add nothing to this conversation, you didn't read. Good day.

Yeah, that's why I was worried about putting a TDLR up there.. Oh well. Hope it's compelling enough to warrant a full read through.

Exactly. You don't need to limit the way the game is played. You can add interesting areas without being too gimmicky, and still satisfying the core mantra of DayZ. It's still a survivors story, it's just adding a more interesting and fleshed out world to inhabit. You didn't read. Good for you. I will when I'm not on my cell phone.

RIght, after you got the chopper it was really a question of: "what do we do now?" Sure you can go around the map and look for crash sites or kill zombies, but it's not much of a reward when it doesn't really lead to an actual utility to advance. When you have a chopper, there's really nothing to do with it other than to travel places quickly. However, if it could be used to airlift base materials to your HQ then it could have an actual use. Or use it as a shortcut to the aircraft carrier, thus negating the need to scour the base and risk getting killed without actually reaching the loot jackpot. Of course the weapon balance, zombie clipping, optimization, etc need to be fixed before something like this can exist. But it's fun to think about. I imagine it being roughly something like this, but more intense, more zombies and a much bigger area: (A little heavy on the military RP, but something that could definitely be used)

I've thought that many times. I've also thought: "I hope he doesn't have back up." or "Am I going to loot now, or wait?" But something a little deeper would be nice. Like I said, I KoS all the time. I've been killed straight away, too. It's frustrating, but it's part of the game. I just want game growth, not just some military sim.

Nope. Definitely just said I want it in the game, I just want people to think before pulling the trigger. What keeps you from killing people in real life, besides the law? Those same reasons should come into play. Just because it's a video game doesn't mean it can't ask these questions and add real motivations for NOT killing.

You obviously don't read well, then. I have actively said it's not a "problem" but it's not "balanced" correctly. Dean himself has said he's trying to make people think before pulling the trigger. The game SHOULD ALWAYS have kill on sight. But it SHOULD NOT be the only viable option. Why do you think items are damaged after being shot? Dean's trying to balance it. INTERESTING. Do your research. Besides saying that, I will not indulge your stupidity and your lack of understanding. Read the entire OP before commenting like an idiot. Good for you. Do it.

I agree, 100%. The game should force players to make their mark and have a stake in the server that they inhabit. A lot of cool things can happen with taking over buildings, making fortifications and such. It should be possible to wall of an entire city if you wanted to. No two servers would be exactly the same, but new areas should be added to explore and inhabit. Not all outright, but constant development of the terrain on the development side should be implemented to keep things from bottlenecking. It's happened in the mod, where people only go to a set number of locations and never traverse the map as intended. By adding the proposed island from my post, it could open up new areas of unexplored terrain and at the same time keeping things fresh. A good balance of risk and reward by map flow. New areas could be added every couple of months, kind of like how MMOs add new dungeons and such, just to keep people interested and keep exploration a key part of the game. Without adding new areas, players are likely to build their base, fend it off for awhile and then become bored of the existing map and quit. These additions shouldn't be gimmicky or "dungeons" like a traditional MMO, but just enough to keep the appeal. Of course private hives or some sort of enforcement for server hopping would have to be employed in order for bases to survive and thrive. I'm at a loss at how to fix that, other than making a private hive or binding a character to that particular server. That of course poses problems for people who want to play, but their server is full or down. I'm not suggesting any deviation from the current formula, just more options. A bandit should never be easily identifiable.

I suppose a faction of players could decide to take up the role of military, but that's left up to the players. You could do that now, technically, if you wanted. You'd have to remind me what you're referring to when you say point 9. Also, do you have an ideas to expand on? You said you broadly agree with third, fourth and seventh. I'm curious if you have any input.

No NPCs. Does not fit DayZ's mantra. It's interesting in Wasteland, but it's not for DayZ. Good for you.

While they aren't evacuating people or trying to send teams of researchers to the country, they could be sending supplies for several reasons. This could be the ground zero of zombie infections, it was contained to the mainland, but at a cost. There are clearly survivors and since survivors are immune to zombification, the plague will not spread or create more zombies. Also, there is a zombie life cycle as proposed by Dean. Therefore, it presents a unique opportunity. Instead of risking more personnel, their decision is to supply the survivors with the means to defend themselves and "thin the zombies numbers." Speaking as a researcher, firebombing the area would result in the loss of data and specimens for which to garner information. Direct contact with anyone in the country would be prohibited and rescue could mean that the dormant contagion could travel with a survivor, but assistance could be provided to ensure that some day the land could be retaken and research could commence. Highly logical, in this case. So yes, supply drops can make ABSOLUTE sense

You seem intelligent. You can do that if you want. It is part of the game. Have fun.