BeefBacon

Eh, no. A two minute walk isn't going to deter server hoppers. I can see a 'no logout area' causing a lot of problems.

So everyone wants perfectly accurate weapons. Why not cut out the middle man and make all the weapons hitscan too? I've never fired a weapon before, and I probably never will, but I get the impression that if I was half-starving in the middle of a zombie apocalypse in clothes that haven't been washed in 3 months I probably wouldn't be able to shoot the balls off a fly. If you want all weapons to be as accurate as their real-world counterparts when they're fired by trained soldiers then fine, but please look up "balance in videogames" before you suggest it.

Christ that's horrible to read. Not your fault, of course. Some of these suggestions have been made before and others are on their way to being implemented. For example, I believe there's already a thread on having ruined clothes and backpacks lose slots and, as far as I'm aware, rain will eventually cause sickness; so staying dry will be important. Fresh fruit I can sort of agree with. Doesn't really make sense that some fruit would be totally rotten and yet other fruit is pristine. Would be nice if you could get apples from what appears to be an orchard outside of Berezino. Weapons, I'll grant, are easy to find but I don't think there needs to be a huge decrease in their number. Mid-high tier weapons should be reduced, sure, but I'd like to see more .22s and shotguns. The fact that I can usually find an M4 or an SKS before a farmer's shotgun doesn't feel right to me. In regards to backpacks, I sort of agree. I think it should be much, much easier to make a makeshift bag. I spent nearly 3 hours the other day going from village to village looking for some rope and a burlap sack. I found the rope in the first 30 minutes. If burlap sacks and other similar materials were more readily available then that'd be good. I'd like to see more makeshift bags in place of mountain and taloon packs.

I don't think this idea should be put aside so hastily. The idea itself has some merit, but the way it's proposed to be implement is terribly thought-out. But the idea of a bandit or a hero having a very minor advantage or disadvantage when they newly spawn is kind of interesting. I'm not saying that the hero should spawn with an M4 and the bandit should spawn with a wrench up his arse, but I do propose something a little more subtle. Let's assume that there's some under-the-hood system whereby the game can accurately identify heroes and bandits. I don't know what this system would be, but let's assume it exists. Perhaps a new spawn hero could spawn closer to good loot. Maybe they have a better chance at spawning in Kamenka near the military base. Also couldn't hurt to maybe spawn them with no hunger or with a tin of beans or something (but no way to open the tin). Bandits, on the other hand, spawn in areas far from good loot. Perhaps they also spawn with slightly more hunger than the average player. So nothing game-breaking, but there should be little buffs and debuffs. Heroes get a very slight head-start while bandits are set back a little bit. Players who weren't bandits or heroes but who were identified as them anyway won't be hugely undeservedly rewarded or punished. Personally I'm not too fussed. The game seems fine as it is. However, I can see the merit of having little rewards or penalties depending on the playstyle of your previous life.

I don't want this thread to turn into a flame war so pipe down. As I see it, SA only has third-person because the mod did, and the mod only had third-person because Arma 2 did. SA is an alpha and it's supposed to be a hardcore game, so I see no reason why 3pp wouldn't be subject to change or removal. I've gotten used to first-person and although there are features of 3pp that I miss, having the game locked to 1pp makes the game much more rewarding and it assures me that there isn't a sniper on a roof staring at the floor so he can see me without me having any possibility of seeing him. If people want to mod the game to reintroduce 3pp then that's fine, but I believe that the base game should be locked to 1pp, and it should be balanced around 1pp. Just because the FoV is 90, that doesn't mean it should be increased to 180 with a third person camera because, as far as I'm concerned, it creates more problems than it solves. This is, of course, my opinion. I've only been playing hardcore for a couple of days now but I can easily see the benefits of it. To me, 3pp is just a tool for wallhacking and little more. On the other hand, perhaps it's good that the game caters to casual gamers and, as has already been stated, the hardcore community is fairly strong. It's not too hard to find a 15-player server before midnight.

There's a couple of zombie-related ideas floating around, so I decided to add my own. Zombies are nasty, half-dead people who's only goal is to beat people to death and then calmly walk away. But being half-dead I bet they sure get tired, but darn it, they want to beat people up so badly. So I propose three things. Firstly, zombies should lie in wait. They should lie in the road as though dead. In other cases they should be sitting around and doing other idle things. It's not like they'll always want to be standing around, is it? When you approach them they attack if they detect you. Secondly, zombie corpses shouldn't despawn. Thirdly, zombies shouldn't respawn unless the loot in their town respawns. I use zombies as a measure of how much loot there's likely to be. If I don't see any zombies then I assume that the place has been cleared. If I see loads of zombies then there's a good chance that there might be a fresh apple in one of those buildings. You enter a town full of zombies. You see a couple of dead zombies and a couple of open doors, and so you assume somebody's been here. You go further into the town looking for somewhere that hasn't been looted when one of the zombies, previously thought to be dead, leaps up at you. Zombies will become more of a threat, as even zombies thought to be dead can thump you one. You'll be able to survey towns more accurately. No more seeing that there are no zombies and deciding whether it's because somebody killed them all or because they just aren't there. Now you'll see the corpses (or the sneaky ones who are pretending to be corpses) and can conclude that somebody has probably beaten you to the punch. Thoughts?

Seen similar suggestions before, but I like it. If nothing else the military zombies should be tougher and faster.

I didn't see a thread on this, so here goes. A simple idea. A concealed carry holster that goes under your clothes. Very rare. In the holster you can store either a small melee weapon like a knife or a pistol. If a bandit handcuffs you and searches through your stuff, they won't be able to see the concealed carry holster. If they steal your backpack or your gun, they'll assume you're unarmed. If you're released or you break free you can use your holdout weapon against them in an attempt to recover your gear... assuming they don't just straight-up shoot you. The concealed carry holster can only be revealed by removing the shirt but, due to its rarity, it'll likely be assumed by the bandit that their victim doesn't have one on, and thus won't check. Could also, perhaps, allow the storage of items such as morphine auto-injectors and can openers; items that might be useful after losing the contents of your backpack. Thoughts?

At the minute it seems as though there are only three melee weapons. The fireaxe, the hatchet and every other melee weapon. I'd expect the machete to do more damage than the baseball bat. Like, a lot more. But it doesn't. I circle around zombies for a full minute slashing at their heads with a pristine machete waiting for them to die. It seems as though you reach your melee endgame when you find a fireaxe, but if you don't have a hatchet or a fireaxe you may as well be using your fists for all the good that crowbar will do you. So I propose that melee weapons be reworked a little bit. Two-handed weapons should be slow, and one handed should be fast. The machete should be able to kill a zombie in 3- 4 hits, not 20. There should also be advantages for different weapons not only based on damage. For example, baseball bats and shovels should be very likely to knock zombies and players down. I've noticed that if you can hit a zombie in the back with a baseball bat it'll go down, but if you smack it in the face while it's sprinting at you then it'll just shrug it off. So I'd like to see further balancing to the melee weapons, giving some weapons advantages over others that aren't based entirely on the damage that they do. Also wouldn't mind a shove mechanic so that melee fights with zombies don't devolve into running in a small circle with them trying to catch up with you. Also also, perhaps a system whereby melee weapons can break entirely, or at least one where the condition actually matters as thus far I've not seen a difference between a badly damaged fireaxe and a pristine one. Feel free to correct me on that. Thoughts?

I know nothing about ballistics, so I've got no idea. Would be a nice feature to have ballistic shields, though, even if they only reduce damage rather than completely mitigating it. On a sort of related note, what does 7.62 x 54mm or 5.56 x 45mm mean? Do those numbers refer to the size of the bullet? If so I'm not sure how unless it's referring to the width in terms of the diameter of the bullet, or something.

In regards to building variety, Chernarus isn't a big place. Small towns here in England are all very similar. I wouldn't expect to see a huge difference between Cherno and any northern cities. The difference between, say, London and Edinburgh, however, is vast, so perhaps it could be cool to have north and south cities have a slightly different architecture. Would definitely be nice to see a couple of different fire/ police station variants, though.

Ballistic shields are in use by SWAT teams, aren't they? I imagine they could stop small calibre fire, and maybe even a Mosin shot from the other side of NWAF. At close range I imagine they'd be considerably less effective, however.

In an RP scenario I think a holdout weapon would be awesome, but I think you're right that for the average server maybe it'd just promote KoS. Granted KoS isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for as long as KoS is especially prevalent perhaps holdout weapons would be more of a liability to the community as a whole. But you must be able to see its applications on, say, a hardcore RP server?

Makes sense that male zombies would be stronger, because males are stronger than females. That's not sexist, it's just a fact. Men typically have around 10% more mass than women. Whether this is due to genetic or cultural factors is irrelevant. However, in the case of zombies I daresay that this 10% difference would be unnoticeable. I do believe, however, that military zombies should be tougher and stronger. They have been trained and are at pique physical condition. They also likely have ballistic armour. They shouldn't be much tougher, maybe 5 - 10% tops, but it'd be nice if they weren't just as tough and as fast as your average farmer.

Precisely my point.

Aw, no. The north is my little hidey-hole. The space between Berezino and NWAF is void of people. It's great. There's so much loot there that people just don't bother with. Will be nice to get some new buildings, though. Really I'd like to see all Arma 2 assets removed or at least retextured, because until that happens it'll still feel like a mod.

I went AFK on some remote hill once. Came back two minutes later and I was dead to the sound of a zombie squeezing out a turd on my corpse. Plus the aggro range of zombies is immense. If they catch a glimpse of you when you're logging in you can bet that they'll lose their shit. It would mean that you'd have to log out out of the line of sight of zombies which in some cases means a 5 -10 minute walk. If I've got to go somewhere or do something IRL I don't want to have to spend 10 minutes going over a hill to make sure I don't die when I spawn in. Oh. So that's why my character was dead when I logged back in. I was getting ready to quit when I saw some zombies running towards me from quite a distance away. I couldn't be asked to deal with them so I quit. Won't be making that mistake again.

Well, again, not necessarily. It could be helpful for someone who's getting held up and it could be useful for a bandit if a hero turns his back. It has multiple applications, even down to just being an alternative to a regular holster. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when people can see how well I'm armed, and I don't necessarily want to use up inventory space, especially considering that I tend to favour the DIY bags and hunter packs rather than mountain packs. Everything in this game comes down to its application and its circumstances. Is a player sitting on a hill above a town with a sniper looking to snipe new spawns or is he looking for bandits? I can, of course, see the validity of your objections.

I like it. Some movements should be dependent on the animation - such as rolling while prone - but for the most part the animations should be subservient to the movement. At the very least animations should blend better. Can't tell you how many times I've been hit by zombies when I stop running to slowly put my rifle away and take out my axe, or I've been crouched and have had to play out the whole standing up animation before I can move. For now I always just walk when I'm inside buildings or when I'm on balconies or roofs, just to minimise the risks of falling.

It is annoying, though. I hate having to reconnect because my character got reset. But it's only 5 minutes. I just go make a cup of tea.

Could work the other way round. A hero meets a player who would have KoSed if he had the chance. The hero disarms him, assumes he's safe and gets shot in the head when he turns around.

They're not 'lying in wait' in the predatory sense. They're doing it because they've got nothing else to do. If they're just infected people they'll still get tired. Why would they stand around for days on end? It makes the world more immersive. Hell, in 28 Days Later which is what these zombies seem to be most similar to, that's exactly what they do in the church scene. What's his name walks into a room full of dead people, calls out and a couple of them get up. That goes without saying. Optimisation is important, but it isn't my concern.

I like this. Lore issues aside I think it'd make a really interesting addition to the game, especially if you go back to find your corpse only to find that it's wandered off. Some random player could come across your loot 5km from where you died. But perhaps there needs to be a few caveats to appease the people obsessed with the lore which seems to extend to "there's a virus and there are zombies. Have at 'em". Perhaps only players that have starved to death or have died from disease or bled out can come back? There's nothing to suggest that zombies need blood because when you hit them they don't start bleeding. I've never seen zombies eating any players so they presumably don't need food. Disease is really self-explanatory. In regards to the coding, Arma 2 had a feature where you could essentially leave the game and then AI would control your player, implying that player characters and NPCs are the same, only the latter is controlled by the AI. You get a similar sort of system in games like Fallout and, to a lesser degree, STALKER. Same thing could happen here. You character dies and so the AI takes over with zombie behaviour. Of course this wouldn't be a revolutionary idea to the devs, but it helps to explain a way it could possibly be achieved.

I'd like to see this with all weapons. Take the SKS and the Mosin for example. You can load those instantly even without the clip. Same goes for the revolver. These weapons should be slow to load, making the clips/speedloaders very valuable when in combat.

Well. Maybe. Isn't that subject to change? I'd quite like to see zombies that are generally docile, but then freak out when the prospect of a fresh man sandwich arrives. If the snack evades them then they return to their original docile state. In regards to the running up hill thing - yes. Please fix that. When I'm running away from zombies I have to make sure I'm going down hill, because when I'm forced to jog or walk by an incline then they just keep on sprinting.