I know this sound's fucking farfetched, but I think Rocket should consider consulting a sociologist to help fix their KoS problem.

I guess what I want to see from this game is the will to survive. I know there are people out there that want to survive in this game because they want to find a pair of handcuffs, detergent, and an M4, so that they can – well, you know the rest. But there’s also going to be people playing the game because they want to survive and therefore don’t want to risk confrontation with an encountered player. Instead of shooting on sight because somebody found an M4 and have been playing the game for ten hours and suddenly got bored so they might as well kill somebody – because what’s the point, really, in staying alive? I’m just trying to shift the feeling of accomplishment form “I killed three people today” to “I survived another day today”.

I'm curious then, what actions would come about as a result of achievement-whores infesting this game - if "staying alive" is THE achievement? Won't that encourage cooperation and reduce KOs?

Of course the "survive for 90 days" achievement idea has already been thrown around. But honestly I don't really think that's going to be very hard considering I can just join a server with nobody in it and just kick it there for 90 days. So, in my opinion, the achievement should be something more like survive for 50 days, but the clock is only running when you're in a server with, say, 20 or more people. I've heard that Rocket will not do the whole "achievements" thing. And yes, the theory is, achievements are just more or less something to boast about and take away from the whole open-ended experience. And in a sense, I totally agree. If I'm in the apocalypse I'm not going to think, "Shit. The world's gone to shit. I better get 1000 kills with this fire axe." But the achievement above that I mentioned would be totally awesome in my opinion. I would think, EVERYBODY playing this game right now is playing it to get THAT achievement. That is their goal and they will get to it by whatever means necessary.