Oblud

the best was to avoid items vanishing is dropping them in allready existing loot. just go loot at some empty cans or whatever is nearest and add what you want to trade to the pile. even if the item should not be visibile it will still be possibile to pick it up by looting the pile its in. also you can open the backpack on other players so if you have some free slots in there thats also a way your mate can give you stuff even if there is no loot near you.

now here are a few ideas for both realism and satisfying as many people as possibile: A slightly diffrent look for people that have killed other survivors is actualy realistic. nof after one or 2 but after say 5-10 kills you would change psycologicly. you would get "harder" less emotional and that would reflect on both facial expressions and the way you act in general and the easyest way to represent that is a slightly diffrent outfit in game because you would only notice the diffrence when you are close. now in my mind beeing a bandit or a survivor is not depending on one kill but you would slowly turn the more people you kill. that way someone who just killed someone in self defense does not become a bandit right away. you could even make the transformation somewhat unpleasant meaning that you experience some of the sideeffects mentioned earlyer for the first 2 or 3 kills and then they slowly wear off because you get a hold of the emotions. now again this is slightly on favor of peacefull survivors obviously so why not add a little twist? Both survivors and bandits have certain advantages. say a survivor can run faster because they feel fear a lot stronger than a bandit who has killed most of his emotions. so a survivor can probalby run faster. on the other hand an experienced killer would not be so afraid of the zombies as the other survivors so he could probably keep his hands a lot steadyer so make aiming slightly easyer or let them surpress the effect of pain for them so they are not so dependanton painkillers. those are just some examples the and im sure there are better ones but the main idea is punishing bandits by makeing them easyer to identify and taking a few perks away but at the same time giving them some other perks to make up for it. that way becoming a bandit would be a somewhat realistic system in my opinion.