pillock

Yes.

No, it was just you.

Raincoats and hats will presumably have some useful mitigating effects by the time they introduce negative factors on your character from being exposed to weather, or else it'll be bollocks. I'd have thought you'll be able to dry clothes by a fire in future? Maybe even find towels to dry yourself off with?

Can you catch fish in the sea, or is it just lakes? I'd like the introduction of rowing boats, for both fishing and naval combat.

Perhaps in future they will make hunting more difficult by improving the animals' behaviour to be less hilariously unrealistic. Then, while fishing might still be boring and time consuming, it'll at least be more reliable as a way of securing food.

Hopefully, as development goes on, there will be Other Things To Do in the game. This might reduce the proportion of players who shoot everything that moves, but it won't ever eliminate it completely. Server admins can try to encourage friendly/co-op interactions by posting global messages on the server, but that's as far as they can take it. If you want to play in a friendlier environment, the only thing you can do is be friendly yourself all the time to everyone you meet, and hope it rubs off on some of them. You can be friendly, or at least interact without being openly hostile, while at the same time maintaining a degree of caution that doesn't totally expose yourself to the risk of murder.

Yes, but it could be taken much further. I hope it is as development carries on. It's too easy to get "Healthy", and not different enough in terms of affecting your ability to survive and operate effectively in the environment.

Nope! I do not. The reason is that NPC AI is always flawed and, in the end, predicable. People are not. Hunting supply caravans or bandit squads and factional conflict is all possible without NPCs, and will be much better for it.

The only NPCs I ever want to see are animals and zombies. Sorry.

Impossible.

When vehicles are in, there shall be banger racing. Hopefully the driving mechanics are up to the job.

This video's explanation matches exactly my experience of the effects of eating the wrong stuff. It also shows the health mechanics to be much more in-depth than I'd thought they were. I do think the health mechanics and the relevant notifications of your status need to be refined, but it looks like the foundations are in place for some really interesting gameplay features coming in down the line. It's well worth a watch, even if it is quite long and the narrator's "jokes" are pretty rubbish.

There's two types, right? There's "spawned" crash sites that supply loot, and "environment" ones that are just scenery? Cos I've seen a crashed helicopter in stable recently (Saturday), but there was no loot there.

This is so true. Once it becomes difficult to stay healthy, injury free and properly nourished, and when sickness and injury have longer-lasting effects, it's going to make the game way more interesting in every aspect.

Plus, you could adapt the guitar case into a disguised RPG launcher.

As I see it, there isn't an 'end game'. There is just 'game'.

My idea of the purpose of persistent storage is so that you can keep a bigger variety of equipment to perform different tasks than you can fit into one backpack - not so that you can hoard spare guns to gear up with quickly as some sort of way to 'cheat' death. If you want to go hunting or fishing, or you want to build a fire, or useful items, you can't carry everything you need in one go alongside all you weapons, ammo and medical supplies. So storage allows you to leave what you don't need for whatever specific task, and return later in the knowledge that it hasn't been wiped out by a server reset. Hopefully, inventory size and weight will, in future, affect your character's ability to move quickly and quietly over longer distances: so if you're going to a gunfight, you travel light in order to be fast and stealthy, and not tire too quickly; you don't lug around fireplace kits and tools, which you leave back at 'camp'. As I understand it, the devs' goal regarding persistent items is to eventually make everything persistent, not just things you put in certain 'storage' containers such as tents or vehicles. You could leave fishing equipment in a backpack near a lake so that you can always go there if you need/want to; you could hide a gun somewhere near your location so you can run there if threatened; you could collect books; etc. Regarding persistent storage as as means to defy death: in my view, you should be locked out of the server you died on for 24 hours, to prevent people re-gearing off their old corpse or stored items. It would also force you to start afresh in a new server where you don't know the whereabouts of other players and loot, and you can't rejoin a gunfight that you were fairly and squarely eliminated from. This'd mean you properly have to start again from scratch after a death - as it should be. The only exception to this would be server admins on their own server - you have one steam account nominated as admin for each server, and they and only they get to respawn on that server after death, as a perk for providing others with a place to play for free.

I ate worms recently and got sick. I'm not certain, but I assume the mechanics for 'worm poisoning' and 'rotten fruit poisoning' are the same. My sickness status indicator progressed to dark orange in colour and I was getting messages saying 'I feel faint' and 'I feel unsteady'. I kept eating and drinking whenever I could, though, and managed to maintain the 'Energised' and 'hydrated' status. After a while, the sickness indicator disappeared, and I stopped getting the messages about nausea/unsteadiness/faintness. I did take me over an hour after this of maintaining the energised and hydrated status to regain the 'Healthy' status, but I now seem to be fully recovered.

As long as you hadn't stumbled across two other servers in the previous hour, you'd be fine!

Sounds fuckin awesome. I want.

I think they should introduce landmines into the game. And if you manually change servers more than twice in a 1 hour period, you "randomly" spawn on top of a land mine. And the explosion breaks your arms and your legs and it ruins all your gear and leaves you crawling about with nothing to heal yourself with. And they should introduce this feature without telling anyone. This forum would be fucking brilliant if they did that!

I would like to be able to bring down birds with me shotgun. Jolly good sport.

No. The game shouldn't force you to do nothing in order to recover from something like exhaustion, injury or sickness. But it should force you to play differently. I believe a more detailed set of animations are on the way that show to a better extent what a character's status is (limping and such) - I'd really like to see them go to town with this. So, you might see someone who's shattered from running, malnourished and bleeding, stumbling about desperately in the rain, trying to find food, shelter, medicine or help. This would give other players a visual indication of the potential threat of someone they come across, and lead to far more likely and interesting player-to-player interactions. New spawn bambis should be weaker than hardened, long-lasted survivors, and their body language (ie. animated movement) should show it, ideally. Surviving should be difficult and punishing - not because "it's realistic", but because it adds depth to the gameplay and makes DayZ better than the competition.

I think the game needs to feel realistic, intuitively, even if some elements of it are toned down for the sake of "fun". Being able to jog and sprint for unlimited distances without any penalty just feels wrong to me. So does being shot several times and still being able to run around as if nothing happened. There's no good reason why the game should allow players to traverse the entire map in a single, short play-session, just because "it would be annoying to meet up with friends otherwise". Forcing us to spend more time in a single portion of the map, and making long journeys into a real mission/adventure is something that adds to the fun, not detracts from it. Similarly, stamina affecting your ability to carry heavy equipment would add to the enjoyment. It would give you more decisions to make, give much more variety to the lives of your character and between the lives of different players. Complicated (not necessarily ultra-realistic) medical, health, injury mechanics add to this variety to scope for different play methods. Having weather and terrain affect your character more adds to the experience, adds to the fun. The assumption, when deciding whether or not some new feature would be too realistic in order to maintain fun gameplay, should be that, actually, it would not be. Start with the game being as realistic (and therefore potentially very difficult) as possible, and then tone it down if it's proving to be annoying, rather than starting with the assumption that realism will be bad, and then under-cook the authenticity.

I tried taking the test on the linked website, but then it started asking me questions about my orc-killing preferences. So I sacked it. From your descriptions, I chose 'Spades'. Good poll!