Riachame

I hadn't even thought of that! There could be interrogations! Plus anything that reduces KoS is always good.

That's all a very good point. Perhaps if, like you said, loot was really slow at respawning in these rooms it might not be so biased. Alternatively, I don't know if this is possible as I know nothing about how games are coded, but maybe the loot could only spawn again in that room once the holder of that particular key died? With regards to owning a key giving you too much security, I imagine the keys will be passed around through deaths too quickly for anyone to gain a massive advantage through them. Also you would have to bear in mind that the more stuff you amass in your safehouse, the more whoever kills you will get access to! (As long as they find the place before they're killed.)

I had an idea that in every settlement there could be a couple (maybe 3 or 4 in cities) private houses which are locked and have a particular door number. There could also be a store room in most factories/hospitals/police stations/airfields which are locked. There could also be on every 50th or so zombie (or 100th, maybe 200th when we get more zeds) a numbered key which corresponds to one of these houses or store rooms. It could be labelled with a number or just a tag saying 'store room', so it could be for any of the huge amount of store rooms in the map. These rooms could act as safehouses, as you could lock the door behind you, and maybe the windows would be already boarded up. There would also be some decent loot in there and also another copy of the key that you could give to a friend. An important aspect is that there should also be some form of chest or locker in there in which you can store your own stuff, but of course you lose the key when you die so there can be no easy restarts where you can just rush to get your stored stuff. I think this would be a great addition, as it would add the element of hunting for the matching room once you found a key, the excitement of unlocking the door and also, if you got the key from a dead player, it could be brimming with loot! It is also not detracting from the realism of the game, as some houses are bound to be locked in real life, and it stands to reason that people would have been carrying these keys. To avoid exploitation the house numbers and their corresponding keys' numbers could be randomly generated so the location of the house numbers can't become common knowledge. The only issue I can think of is that if the safehouse has already been occupied and the spare key taken, there could be another player out there with the same key as the one you've looted. This could be rectified by having an option to change the lock to the door once you are inside and cut another key, though this might be complicating matters and diminishing realism so if might be better to just have the one key to each room... I'll be interested to hear people's thoughts on this, and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in the idea that I haven't considered!