Lionel Hutz

Hmm. I agree with a lot of this. My thoughts: ManInTheWall (OP) Make loot harder to find > Not so sure about this. I think the availability of basic loot (food, clothes etc) is about right. There's a threshold below which the game will become too much of a grind to survive, and will no longer be fun. As the game expands in complexity, it makes sense to free players up to do the fun stuff like base-building etc. Maybe the issue at the moment is that there's not enough other stuff to do once you have geared up with the essentials. Make Zombies a threat > Agreed, but having hundreds of zombies is going to be difficult to achieve in this engine, no? I think even hordes of 10-20 would be a huge improvement on what we have now. This shouldn't be implemented until we can secure buildings against zombies though. Private Hives > Dunno about whitelist servers etc. To me the whole point of the game is being able to choose whether to be friendly, or an a-hole, or somewhere in-between. I think the more idiotic strains of KOS behaviour will become less relevant once the gameplay acquires more depth, and there are real bonuses to playing in groups and trying to build something significant. Not that everyone will play nice all of a sudden, but more effort/aggression will be channeled into raiding bases, holding territory, acquiring vehicles etc. Base building and farms > Yes, would love to see this. Would be good if you could stockpile food and equipment in persistent storage containers. Again, the fun will be in building up a secure and well-equipped base, so that other players face a choice between asking for your help, or infiltrating and betraying you, or raiding you outright and taking over. Imagine if you could hold down an entire town, and control all the resources (fertile land, fuel, machinery, building materials) that go with it! I think this kind of thing needs to persist over multiple play sessions / server resets, allowing an epic ebb and flow of who controls what. I know this will require a lot of thought and possibly re-working of the way servers work (e.g. what happens when the "owner" of a base logs out, or where two groups build a base in the same location but on different servers and then try to log in to the same server as each other). Still, I think it's the key to DayZ becoming about more than just running around looking for trouble. Consequences > Agree with everything here except suppression effect. For less experienced players, getting shot at will induce panic IRL, while more experienced players will keep a cool head. Adding "meta" mechanisms over the top of this will get annoying. One extra "consequence" that has been suggested before: dying should mean a ban from the relevant server until it resets. This would go some way to reducing death-match style play. Even more so if death meant you could no longer log in to a map containing a base that you'd built (maybe for 24 hours). Vehicles > Yes, agreed. Scavenging parts, tools etc should be important, and you shouldn't be able to carry massive items like tyres etc in your backpack (thought that aspect of the mod was a bit odd). In line with my other comments above, I see vehicles as an incentive to co-operate (to acquire/fix them) and a way to dominate territory. Daringd Playing as a zombie would be great - I like your ideas for zombie-vision etc. Maybe you could also have a zombie growl/snarl/yell that attracts other zombies, so individual zombie players could also influence the movement of zombie NPCs?

I like the OP's idea - provided it can be toggled on or off by server admins. This is not just about preventing corpse runs to reclaim loot. In fact, I think the main benefit of this feature would be to reduce deathmatch-style play (especially in areas that are close to re-spawn points) by removing killed players from the action, i.e. if you die you can no longer influence the scenario unfolding on that server. This will become even more important once we have base-building, and vehicles allowing quick movement around the map. Attacking and defending a base will be quite different if attacking players are able to die, re-spawn and get back to the same area relatively quickly, with all the intel they gathered on their first attempt. Same goes for defenders. The idea of re-spawns as "reinforcements" has some validity in a military game, but surely not in a post-apocalyptic survival game. I can't see how this would significantly cramp anyone's style - you could always play on a server that has this feature disabled, or you could agree with your group that you'll all move to another server if one of you gets killed.

I agree that PvP (or the threat of PvP) is and always will be the essence of the game. By PvP I do not necessarily mean death-match style play. Rather, I mean that even if you play as a reclusive "survivalist" loner eating berries in the forest, other players will always be a threat, and will always be the most unpredictable and dangerous element of the game. Like some of the other recent posters, I think most complaints about the current state of PvP stem from the fact that there's not much to do in-game at the moment, other than get geared and go looking for trouble. This leads to a particular kind of PvP interaction, where you're dealing with players who are bored, a little reckless, and no longer interested in playing like a zombie apocalypse survivor. I think this would change if there was more to "achieve" in-game (base building, vehicles, stockpiling, farming, harvesting wood and other resources, etc) - not because everyone would suddenly hold hands and be nice to each other, but because you'd have more to defend, and more to lose. There will always be a few bandits who kill for the sheer fun of it, but I think they will be fewer in number and less annoying once the game has more depth. I should also add that none of the above is a complaint. I've already had way more heart-thumping, hair-raising experiences in DayZ than in any other game, even with the game mechanics as basic as they are!

I think this is a good idea, and thought I'd give the post a bump. I have just been struggling with this in-game - at the moment it's either stick to SteamChat with your friends, or risk giving away your position to hostiles by talking to the friendlies you've just teamed up with. I don't think you could use the real-world volume of the player's voice to move between whisper / normal / shout modes though - too tricky to calibrate different mics, and hugely annoying when you accidentally end up shouting. It would be better to have one key binding that toggles between the three modes.

Hah! Didn't think of that - interesting idea. Not sure dismemberment is in the devs' roadmap though... ?

Okay, so the Zombie feedback thread is now huge, and very hard work to trawl through. We've all heard the various changes that different people think are needed, and we've all heard the arguments for and against each change, i.e. how it will affect gameplay, "realism", etc. Now I thought it might be useful to get a more summarised / structured view of what people think. Not that I expect the devs to build the game based on polls, but I'd really like to see how the numbers pan out. So, if you have a view, feel free to record it in the poll above. Sorry if someone has already tried this - couldn't find any duplicate threads when I searched!

Okay, here goes my first post! A quick (and hopefully easy-to-implement) suggestion: how about giving us the ability to craft a decoy head, using a (1) a stick, axe or baseball bat, (2) a gas mask or other mask, (3) a hat or helmet, and (4) duct tape to hold it all together? Great for drawing sniper fire while you or your buddy figures out the shooter's position... Whaddya think? Sorry if it has been suggested before - I did do a search beforehand!