Monkfish (DayZ)

I'm not sure I fully understand the desire to prevent, tone down or in some way restrict KoS. It's a choice you and everyone else has borne out of the game's mechanics. Trying to change that would be changing the core of the game and I'm pretty sure most players, and certainly the devs, would not want that. Sure it's annoying to have your head blown off by someone just after you found that shiny bit of kit but that's part of the fun/tension of DZ. Literally every encounter you have with another person could be your last for that life. Instead of trying to fix a core element of the game, why not play differently? Think smart; stay alive.

This sounds like the best solution. Zombies are permanent entities on a server and therefore exist at all times and the loot only spawns in when you get within a certain distance. Not sure how that would work with performance but I guess that's for the devs to figure out, eh? ;)

This. A huge aspect of survival in DayZ is that you have to travel to destinations yourself. No warping or anything like that. It makes vehicles incredibly valuable.

Miasmata has an excellent map mechanic using triangulation to find location. Perhaps something like that could be added (would add a use for pens/pencils).

Additional health complications? Broken arms would be a good one and better than teeth. Taken a bad fall and bust an arm? There goes your ability to use anything that requires two hands. Perhaps you could select whether your character is right or left handed and busting your shooting arm means that you have to use your other to fire pistols, making them wildly inaccurate at anything but close range. Breaking an arm could also make other tasks more complicated and time consuming. Opening a tin of food could take longer and you'd spill more. As a related aside, I quite like the fall mechanism in Miasmata. If you run down a slope too fast, you fall over and the screen goes blurry whilst you roll around the place. Something similar could be tied in with injuries. For example, whilst running away from something, you could slip/trip down a banking, fall over and break an arm. Head injuries could also be more severe than normal injuries (assuming they're not already) A blunt force trauma to the head could result in serious bleeding and death quite quickly if it isn't treated. Tie this in with the falling mechanism mentioned above and you'd have the possibility of braining yourself during a fall. Bike helmets would prevent this and give them a use other than looking like a bambi. :D EDIT: In addition to the above, perhaps breaking a limb would result in your character screaming in pain. Others in the area would then hear this. What happens after that would depend on who hears you scream...

I like the idea. Mrs Fish has watched a few videos (FrankieOnPC's) with me and likes the look of the game in terms of its survival mechanics but only have one character means she can't play unless she has her own Steam account and purchases another copy of the game. Allowing multiple characters per game would be a nice way around this. Perhaps it could be implemented in a way that prevents multiple characters from one 'account' playing on the same server. This would eliminate the problem of someone using an alt to kill a main's killer or retrieve their stuff etc.