yessaul robinovich

bump for great justice. this guy is actually proposing stuff that answers many of the questions even newer players have with respect to 'what do yo do after you've kitted out, just run around and rack up a kill count or do stupid shit out of boredom?' regarding scrap and base resources, this would be a matter of breaking down existing items. most of these ideas of economy only work in the context of a private hive with initial item spawn and, pretty much, nothing else. you can have plants that grow, you can have animals to hunt. ability to repair items using the right components and raw materials would create much less of the current 'waste spawn' of badly damaged things while still promoting the good fortune of finding pristine items..as opposed to looking pristine, repaired items would show that they've been patched up and reinforced via their textures. raw resources would include cloth scraps/yarns, metal scrap, cement and wood. etc..and would be combined into multi-step recipes with other items. badly damaged weapons could be repaired or alternately field-stripped down to components from which a series of improvised weapons could be made. I've outlined a bunch of those with images in this thread: stuff like pistol barrels crudely marred to industrial roofing nail-guns. and other improvised zip type things, machetes or shanks.. the world starts off a depopulated version of the one we live in, but changes towards something more post-apocalyptic as different things are improvised and re-purposed. anyway, take a look at this video 5 mnutes in. http://youtu.be/9ZJnFfoi7gg public radio spectrum could be a decent replacement for the 'side chat', could allow some people to solicit trade and meet up, while other people could just as well be listening in on that conversation and plan ambush.. etc http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/162717-solving-both-end-gamemeta-game-and-kos-problems-at-once/?p=1649709

if having complex gameplay systems drawing upon real skills rooted in reality is 'too complex' than you're ending up with a game that isn't a true survival simulation, but an fps deathmatch over a really big map. maybe thats the game you want to play in perpetuity, but i (and evidently many, many other people) don't. look at the 'medical system' poll to see what i mean.

dean has mentioned several times that he wishes for more of the gameplay systems to involve complex mechanics grounded in real-world knowledge and principles that can be utilised by someone familiar with the subject. I think he is rather sincere when he says that. I also think that, this being an alpha test, what we get in the final game is what we argue for and assist in devising. I would just ask any moderator with sufficient access to point dean towards this man's threads because the stuff outlined herein seems like the groundwork for healing people in dayz at least as involved and nuanced as ..killing people in dayz. instead of just "traipsing across Chernarus in search of widget X or magic potion Y." One question i have for roshi though - under your medical system, how would you abstract treating injuries that heal over considerable lengths of time or require complex surgery? Ie: serious fractures/shattered bones. shattered kneecup? no problem, here's some morphine. also, how come all survivors have hemophilia?

many equate individual player skill in dayz with marksmanship. you've gone a long way in creating an outline for dean to implement a medical system that similarly draws upon knowledge and understanding of medical basics that are a fully-fledged skill. please accept my humble beans.

i was referring to the name 'sniperloot' for the table used. a decent indicator of who you might find in those buildings.

my favourite bit is the actual naming convention for loot spawn points in that building, courtesy dayzdb. sniperlootpointEdges (3) ​ pointFallenBeams (1)pointWorkPlanks (2) Canned Baked BeansCanned SardinesCanned SpaghettiCanned TunaCrunchin Crisps CerealPowdered MilkRiceAppleBananaOrangeKiwiRotten AppleRotten BananaRotten OrangeRotten KiwiLarge Gas CanisterMedium Gas CanisterSmall Gas CanisterCan OpenerZluta Klasik SodaZluta Kolaloka SodaZluta Malinovka SodaCanteenWaterbottletrashpointFloors (3) pointTopOfStairs (2) Rotten AppleRotten BananaRotten OrangeRotten KiwiBlue Taloon BackpackGreen Taloon BackpackViolet Taloon BackpackOrange Taloon BackpackHunting BackpackBlue Mountain BackpackRed Mountain BackpackGreen Mountain BackpackOrange Mountain BackpackBaseball BatSplitting AxeFirefighter AxePipe WrenchweaponspointWorkPlanks (1) pointFallenBeams (1) point4thFloorGroundNextToEdge (1) FNX45MagnumMosin 9130.45ACP Rounds7.62mm Rounds.357 Round12 Gauge Buckshot12 Gauge Slug7.62mm 20 Rounds300 Round Box.45ACP Rounds7.62mm Rounds12 Gauge Buckshot12 Gauge Slug5.56mm Rounds7.62mm 20 Rounds5.56mm 20 RoundsclothespointOnBricks (3) pointFloors (3) Blue Taloon BackpackGreen Taloon BackpackViolet Taloon BackpackOrange Taloon BackpackHunting BackpackBlue Mountain BackpackRed Mountain BackpackGreen Mountain BackpackOrange Mountain BackpackBaseball BatSplitting AxeFirefighter AxePipe WrenchtoolspointEverything (4) Alkaline Battery 9VDuct TapeHammerPliersScrewdriverWrenchBeige Working GlovesBlack Working GlovesBrown Working GlovesYellow Working GlovesRopeShovelWrenchCrowbarPipe WrenchBurlap SackWooden StickFire Extinguisher now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

i don't make a distinction between the two outside of these types of conversations, when the term is used by others. and when it is, i use the term in its wider application. Typically the term PVE is used *exclusively and specifically* to mean "Barring Non-Consensual Player Vs Player Interaction" - when you use it to describe broadly everything, thats mostly semantics. When I see PVE, i read it as "NON-PVP. by the same token, I see a lot of the struggles a player faces during the course of normal play in dayz to be PVP even when they do not involve killing other people or combat whatsoever. You're competing over limited sources with other people. These resources are vital necessities and there is not enough for everyone, or anywhere close. The less availability - the fewer vestiges of first-world humanism remain. Sometimes, anyway - some also persist despite the harsh setting, which can be pretty life-affirming and memorable when it happens. What i mean to say is, there is no clear line between the two, its just survival by any means possible. See, i'm looking for storytelling also, but not the cinematic sort that involves designing the player's behaviour/responses through a scripted experience you're trying to give them. I'm looking to see how people behave under adverse conditions and whether the experience can be compelling enough for them - THE PEOPLE, not the 'characters' or avatars or whatever - to react without thinking. This is one of the few games where people can sometimes react as though what is happening is happening to them, not ones and zeroes somewhere on the internets. I think that is a very rare thing, and one worth fostering with more ideas and discussion about its future.. i guess we just disagree in the sort of experience we want. And dean seems perfectly fine with that, as he got hands-off about people modifying the original mod into all kinds of different things to suit their needs/desires/expectations.. but i'm talking about the definitive thing, the main thing. the dayz standalone experience a person gets to have when they wish to experience dayz itself. And if it doesn't have those kind of visceral moments, that connection and response that people can and do get out of this game.. why on earth would those people go on to play some different side-version of it?..

pve servers are viable. rp servers are viable, servers where you have no zombies and increased spawns are viable, servers where you have people parachuting out of the sky driving tanks and spawning with 50 cal sniper rifles are viable. basically anything you can modify the standalone for, same as with the mod before, and run a server for is nominally viable. but at that point you might as well..you know, play arma 3? or left 4 dead? or other games that, from the ground up, offer the experience you are seeking. instead you are talking about the game that differs from these experiences precisely in the way we're discussing here, and suggesting that someone might take that core part of it out. all of the examples you've cited are viable because someone can - and in all likelihood will do it. but they are also not dayz. they dilute its evocative power of visceral response, sterilize the experience and create distance between player and character. at that point you might introduce stats, 'skills', end-bosses and cinematic cut-scenes. you're playing stalker. ---------------------------------------------- re: crafting.. i don't think we need to go so far down as collecting wool and tanning leather. just the ability to recycle items into some kind of base components - scrap metal, yarns, rubber, etc etc.. and then create multi-part recipe tree for complex products similar to the structure of tech2 equipment. ie: more complex products of combinations that are combined with other ready items and can be combined with other weapon parts or mods. field-stripping broken/degraded weapons that may not function but could be used to make others.. recycling clothing into scraps that can be re-fitted into other things. harvesting things from the environment (hunting,fishing, foraging, cultivating) and creating various provisions.. relevant part is about 4 minutes in, i think.. but its all good. http://youtu.be/9ZJnFfoi7gg

wrong game, sorry. dayz does not encourage 'role playing' in the traditional sense. quite the opposite - dayz elicits visceral emotional responses from the player behind the avatar that often blur the line between the two. it is not about how your character would feel, but how *you* feel in any given situation. as for cooperative play not being exciting, that is a ridiculous thing. what you're trying to say is that you want to incentivise PVE play, which i point out as being very challenging because, ideally, there are far more zombies than there is available ammo and there isn't (and there cannot be) any point to killing them besides preventing your own death. how you choose to interpret this set of circumstances is entirely up to you, but the experience is very, ah, genuine and pure in being what it is. from what you're saying, you want to gamify that into some kind of 'left 4 dead online' - i don't think that is the same experience. as for people being more dangerous and adversarial than zombies, i suggest you pick up any number of films or literature on the subject. even the tropey genre itself seems to acknowledge it. at its core, this is and always will be a pvp experience. real question is what will serve to drive it in the future as the game stabilises and acquires more depth-- whether it is things like fear and necessity or boredom for lack of end-game depth. OP suggestion borrows endgame from wow. I (and possibly dean, since he's states several times he was in touch with folks at CCP) feel that games like early UO and EVE are much closer in how they approach endgame to the direction that better fits dayz in the long term. Also, i'm saying that a lot of the gameplay systems that are currently nonexistent or placeholders greatly serve to motivate individual playstyle. for example, if we had something like a stamina system that took into account the amount of weight carried by an individual, not only would a wide variety of different-sized packs be viable, but a single individual player would find themselves less capable of carrying a kit for all of post-apocalyptic life's little occasions AND expect the same agility as a fresh spawn in jeans & t-shirt or another player operating in a group with delegated responsibilities. And that is just one example that compels people to collaborate out of real need. Not because of WOW raids for epic lewt, brah.

I don't really have a way to reconcile server migration with balancing economy/availability and consequently the behaviour amongst players that emerges as a result. the best i can offer is a vision of fewer servers running on more substantial hardware allocations/instances that can support higher player and entity counts necessary to take full advantage of the map and mechanics we currently have, and to encourage further development from there. I think this approach would also be liberating in ways for the developers because they would not have to be tied to performance of a low-end dayz server as a baseline for what is acceptable in taking the game further. giving up on server migration solves most of the problems, while creating relatively few like the issue you've outlined. from my own experience, have mostly played the vanilla mod over at the billy mays/BMRF servers. i found them originally because the white-list offered good protection from the script madness. But also felt very comfortable with having my main character on just one server. I would also join other private hives that BMRF was running when the main server that i played was undergoing maintenance or down for whatever reason. In some ways the ability to create other characters on other servers allowed me to play with somewhat less stress, experiment without endangering my main 'life' that i was most attached to. I think it was kind of fine. many of my friends had joined over time, so there were people to play with, as well as some friends made in my adventures. I find that the whole 'KOS problem' is less significant between constantly needing to expose yourself (or work with a group) in order to secure resources, and having a smaller community of regulars who are playing on the server one day after another. Though you can kill people with impunity and without any artificial constraints, you will eventually be acknowledged by various groups as dangerous/unfriendly and people may go out of their way to make your life difficult (nothing so black and white as heros or bandits, just various existing social circles on a server where you've got 40-50 people at all times and hundreds of individual characters regularly playing) when you're playing alone, being a dick on a regular basis will eventually leave you getting hunted down by groups of people. at that point, however proficient you are at surviving or making others die, the odds simply aren't in your favour. while a pretty exciting way of playing the game, it doesn't exactly promote survival in the long-term, which some believe to be the goal more than others. i guess thats what makes the game fun in the end, the fact that different people are drawing completely different things out of the experience. If everyone just sat there holed up with their long-range scopes waiting for another person to run through their field of view, things would be pretty dull.

he has been very vocal in his acknowledgement of the current state being a skeleton to build on, and his thoughts on further development with respect to endgame. in some ways the experience of initial survival is not extricable from endgame, and the main division between these experiences/resulting gameplay is the 'master hive' approach. if dean wants to have an easier time balancing the vanilla product, 'main hive' as it is currently understood should be abolished, and hive data stored separately with unique server identifiers on bohemia's side. i'm not saying you should trust server hosts with their own hive data (many admins will abuse it..) but the current implementation is not sustainable in trying to balance the game/resource availability/economy and these things are inextricably tied to the way people actually play the game/resulting mindset with, amongst other things, respect to pvp.

whoa there! no problem with a sense of humour, you don't go full aggro on people for failing to laugh at a joke you made.. just sayin'. you've hit upon something that i want to talk about more and explore in finer detail. and i've read this logic in some of the other things you've written prior. so lets talk about skill and being good/bad at the game. how do you define being good at the game, and also what kind of metrics are you using to gauge performance. i'd like to better understand what your goalposts are when it comes to the game. dayz experiments, or at least aspires to a sandbox format you can kind of see some examples of that in a couple of true mmos, which it isn't just yet, but you can see from some of the design choices taken so far between the mod and the standalone that the team's intention, at least, is to take it there. Lets assume that the goal is simply to survive through whatever means necessary, alone or with a group of people. While i agree that killing things is a primary component of dayz as it stands, a good deal more is achieved by having mechanics that let you do and excel at things that are equally-necessary. and you kind of point out that there are all kinds of people who like to explore and experiment and do all sorts of things besides sitting with a sniper rifle waiting for someone to run by. I'm not saying that isn't a valid way of playing, nor that treating the game as team deathmatch is any less valid.. just that the more ways there exist to play the game and excel in different aspects of it, the better for the game as a whole. tl;dr: both the 'waaah make it stop! ' and the 'yolo murdererz noscope die bambi ur doing it wrong' camps appear to be missing the point.

we're all in agreement with you on this. I think pendulum effect was encouraging a conversation about the long term, and looking at what the game is about to different people, being a sandbox. i don't think thats a bad discussion to have, whether it affects underlying philosophical/social issues or technical limitations to overcome on the way to making the whole more than the sum of its parts (which it already is to some extent, or we wouldn't be here having this conversation..) i think the sort of thread where things are actually being written for the purpose of being read is best...at least browsed through before the usual suspects start hammering keys in anger with bits of spittle flying at the screen. in order for these things to be funny, compromising or elicit some kind of a genuine reaction, they have to be at least slightly substantiated. you're slinging shit at me all ape-like despite the fact that i've written several pages worth of stuff in agreement with.. the point i presume you're trying to make?.. but yeah, dayz forum. reading comprehension. i mean, fuck, just..reading? i don't know, ask your doctor about ritalin?

..mate, is this seriously the best you can manage? back! back to the fiery pits with you.

false dichotomy. i don't know which game you're playing.

if we are going to start moving forward and looking at the long-term prospects of the game, i don't think that the current limitations will persist in perpetuity. by this i mean some way of implementing dynamic seasons and temperatures that cycle similar to the day/night change or weather patterns. these could eventually be reflected on the landscape by making several alternate versions of the map (along with player-made changes to it) and cycling them in at appropriate times. i also do not think that the game needs 'respawns' - this is something that an individual administrator of a private hive will likely be able to determine for the purposes of gameplay they want to foster. My own take is that you dramatically increase availability of everything in the initial spawn and never respawn anything again. You will indeed begin with a glut, people will indeed stockpile canned goods where they find them.. what does need to respawn are animals to hunt, fish and plants to pick and perhaps eventually cultivate and harvest. as a survival simulator, dayz focuses on the period immediately following a great upheaval, but gets kind of unglued the further on you continue from there. which is to say that people adapt to a new set of conditions and find ways to endure. long-term prospects of running around and scavenging are limited because there is kind of no game after that besides human-hunting out of boredom. but i don't think 'raids' against zombies are a worthwhile idea, because zombies are something to avoid instead of engaging if you can help it. in order for there to be some purpose to your island idea, it would have to come with some kind of a powerful reason to be there. and if you introduce one, it just boils down to power creep/scripted stuff less about social interaction/ad-hoc stories and more about getting people to play out a story you've written. which is more of a theme park approach. what you're suggesting is a zombie theme park in a game already full of zombies. it does not appear to work for me from the idea's inception. regarding zombie respawn, i think a more nuanced mechanic is needed than zombies simply appearing out of thin air in a region they have been cleared from. best solution i can think of, in addition to default spawn locations we already have, are points on the map that continuously generate zombies to make up for those eradicated. zombies disperse from there and proceed to a number of locations. once they reach those locations, they behave as they do now, shambling about towns and attacking. in order to keep areas clear, the occupants would either need to maintain some token perimeter guard to nab one or two zombies heading back to own every now and then, or maintain presence at the hotbed of zombie respawning, eliminating them continuously at the source to keep them from accumulating and re-occupying cleared areas. and, going back to your original point, there have been ideas tossed around regarding spoilage of foods and premium value of non-perishable provisions in the long term. if the canned goods are looted and consumed in the very beginning, this leaves the players with very little to deal with issues of nutrition on the go. one stop-gap measure proposed by someone and acknowledged by dean was picking apples and pears from the orchards, as well as other vegetables reasonably assumed to have been planted by people in the yard plots next to their houses (consistent with rural eastern europe) and now growing wild. I'd just like to see more scarcity of everything combined with ability to break down things into some type of raw and specific components, then to combine them in multi-step recipes. what troubles me is that 'skill in survival' as recognised by a lot of the dayz community is pretty much code word for 'accuracy with firearm at long range'

to the above poster: do you even read, bro?

I just want to quickly make a note on Pendulum Effect's points: part of the reason why your suggestion regarding the island is unnecessary is because that is what regular towns in dayz will look like once the current problems are dealt with. part of the 'current problems' is dean's desire to provide enough hosting for people playing the game after having purchased it through steam early access. Because of the way SA handles entities vs. the way the mod did, the hardware requirements on the part of the would-be server administrators would narrow the number of available servers dramatically and likely create a situation where some people are unable to find a place to play, which probably wouldn't help the testing process. most of the 'problems' with the current state of things are not conscious design errors or omissions - they are merely placeholders reflecting the current, early phase in the game's ongoing development. also, as many people including Pendulum Effect himself have pointed out, the KOS mentality is not a problem per se. you have to look into the reason people kill on sight and notice the amount of granularity there. Fresh spawns are very aggressive because they have nothing to lose. Geared players are aggressive as a means of pre-emptive defense - they have everything to lose. Then there are players who are playing call of duty in dayz, which is a problem fostered by 'main hive' architecture. play private hive and you immediately run into the following things: 1) reputation through causality. act like a dick, eventually you will be recognised as a dick. sure, your name does not display, but you'll be more readily recognised through your actions by people you repeatedly encounter. They'll figure out who you are eventually and your life(s) will be made considerably difficult. no 'humanity' system or any kind of design to moralise required. 2) resource scarcity/high cost of living - you're spending too much time foraging for food and water to be camping someplace with a mosin. assuming you've actually managed to get a mosin. and an LR scope. in an environment where you've got a private hive with constant 30-50 people population vying for the same resources. Your time gearing up is considerably increased and far less safe. By the time you've managed to acquire the tools conferring upon you a significant advantage in PVP at range, you've likely spent a lot of time and effort, are paranoid of engagements (potentially against multiple opponents, potentially against fresh-ish spawns who are fearless..) and likely have limited ammunition without constantly exposing yourself to situations that are tactically not advantageous for you in order to forage for more. 3) increased zombie population we're guaranteed to see in the near future is bound to make larger population centers a bad place for engagements involving many combatants or high noise levels. its not that fighting zombies in some silly RP way and discharging ammo into them is somehow the point of the game. no one could argue for that - ammo is something you save for real emergencies where its use is unavoidable. which usually means against other people or unplanned situations. what this means in practice is that being in a city is an exercise at your ninja skills and melee take-downs. which, if you're not a complete moron, is already the way to play this game. I want to make another small note on the significance of zombies, the infected, uppvakningur, whatever you want to call them. the walking dead are 'the other' - a way of dehumanising other people in situations where humanistic social base instilled into all of us living in the first world needs to be suspended in favour of basic survival and self-preservation. zombies are a device ultimately serving the act of quickly taking human lives without ethical qualms. in that sense, there exists only marginal difference between zombies and other people, in that other people may benefit you in their death not only though cessation of any threat they could pose to your own survival, but also in the tools of survival you may obtain from their still-warm bodies. the only real reasoning to keep from killing people is if you are unable, feel that engagement is too great of a risk or feel that they have some skill/ability that you do not posses yourself. ultimately these will remain the only reasons for people to cooperate in re-establishing these bare threads of society. everything else is clumsy gamification striving to simplify some thorny philosophical themes for the 360 noscope yolo crew.

We are going to talk for a moment about endgame, and how this ties into people's approach to playing the game. There are several separate problems at work. Some are easy to remedy. Some are not really problems at all - merely consequence to a very flawed and temporary 'main hive' system that will resolve themselves as private hive mechanics are implemented.But the endgame itself, that seems like something dean has given a great deal of thought to. What happens after your immediate concerns about survival have been at least temporarily remedied. What is the actual game about? It was very comforting to hear that dean has been in touch with the folks over at CCP, because they are probably the only developer with a live, top-tier MMO that have to grapple with this concern in the post-Ultima Online period. A short while ago I found a post - either here or on dayz reddit, that consisted of an in-game screenshot modified by a player in photoshop. the additions to a scene of typical buildings you'd find in a larger town were boarded-up windows, up-armoured store-fronts, barricades and spray-painted warnings to wound-be bandits indicating a number of survivors having taken up residence there. The author of this doodle asked why the environment seems so pristine despite the level of upheaval that has taken place there. Raph Koster, perhaps better remembered as Ultima Online's Designer Dragon, struggled with similar issues of endgame as far back as that game's beta, back in 1997. And it was during that time that he nailed a very solid line of reasoning. To make your players have a stake in the world you're attempting to build is literally just that, giving them a stake to put down in it. Some sense of physical ownership of some part of that world to call their own. I think, and it seems to be something that dean has conveyed between a too-great number of posts and interviews and anything in between, that the emphasis of this game is you, the survivor, and the interaction you are capable of with others in an environment where the threads of society have been severed. Attempting to rebuild them in various ways that work (or do not) is a pretty compelling thing for a game to tackle. Even in its infancy, as a mod, dayz is one of the few games that has successfully managed that. Imagine the kind of ability to modify vehicles you see in origins translate into pretty much every part of the environment where it makes sense, and have all of that be persistent with each individual server. Let the player leave their mark on the environment as much as they can on the lives of other survivors. The two can be and often are inextricable. Create ways for players to claim parts of that environment for themselves proportionate to the amount of effort they are willing to invest into the process and the upkeep. These sorts of things foster teamwork both in terms of playing as an organised group and forming ad-hoc relationships out of pressing need as opposed to some rigid constraints. don't design to moralise. These are still sort-of artificial goals. For example, a lot of people in the mod would band together to fix the helicopter as some end-game content. But what was the actual purpose of having the helicopter besides flying around and being able to spot abandoned vehicles from up high? You can get a lot of emergent content from having players organise into these sort of semi-permanent encampments, in part because other players will organise to take them over. This is where we could get into a lengthy conversation on balancing the economy, sinks and faucets, resource scarcity and other reasons for people to fight over besides skillbro 360 noscope pissing contests and/or ~ ~ top lel keke ~. the other problem you're pointing out is much easier to tackle. current public hive situation allows for gearing up that is easy and painless - plenty of low population servers to cycle through in a location where you know things to spawn. whether those locations are close or further inland kind of isn't the point. if you can get in there and cycle through the servers, you've assured yourself a military weapon and plenty of ammo. there are hardly any zombies, so having firefights in a z-heavy environment isn't likely to attract significant enough attention to keep someone from using something very loud like a mosin in that setting. mosin is great for those accurate head-shots that bring players down in one hit while saving the loot, but it isn't the most effective thing against zombies. all of these issues are largely resolved with private hive, disabling the ability to hop for gear, ghost in fights, etc.. another thing to consider is just how much food and water someone currently requires to merely get 'healthy' - its something around 10 cans, depending on what they are cans of. sometimes more. and a comparable amount of water. though i imagine that multi-step preparation cooked meals will fill one up much more efficiently than canned produce we have today, there is a fairly high 'cost of living' with these bare necessities. as for covering your ass in case of infection, broken limbs, shock/pain..etc.. well, that's an even greater amount of stuff that you must haul around. i am guessing that once some kind of weight carrying/stamina system is implemented, there will be a tighter balancing act between ability to move and camouflage/conceal yourself and ability to carry everything you may possibly need to survive. there are many variables that currently appear to be placeholders - loot composition tables, weapon performance and dispersion. but also just the low amount of variety in weapons and equipment. these are temporary problems affecting the current balance of things which will be remedied as more things make their way into the game and diversify the amount of meaningful options a player is given. the process of gearing up should be thereby considerably extended, serving as fertile ground for the kind of stories and situations that make this game worth playing. i think that is actually dean's intention to provide the greatest amount of meaningful options to the participants in playing out these sort of survival adventures instead of creating rigid systems governing player interaction. I think that sort of sums it up. tl;dr: the future of dayz* is territorial ownership and systems to support it. take over buildings, armour them up, have a whole economy around sourcing scrap and scraps, tools to do metal and woodwork, multi-step crafting recopies. other problems with KOS currently affecting the game are merely product of 'main hive' architecture and the game will never play right with that. if you want vanilla dayz experience as intended, play private hive in FPS. or make your own hive and play it however you want. If you've got a full server of folks wanting to play it your way, does it really matter how the others do it? well, maybe it sort of does for the game's popular perception. but not beyond that. But private hive is the only way you can balance resource scarcity. Otherwise some guy will just log in and out of the same building on 10, 100, 1000 servers with low pop until he's got everything he could possibly want/need. and then its COD time. * - the future also likely involves fewer, more robust and dedicated servers with larger number of players and entities, with (quite possibly?) a few official hives/servers operated by bohemia itself. given enough time and enough flexibility, no two servers that have operated for a significant length of time would have the game world looking the same way.