Triggerhippy

It might be in alpha, but the current direction is about adding new gear, adding transport, adding better zombies etc. And while I agree that these things are good the fact remains that it is a game, and as such people need a reason to play it. At the moment there is no real reason to play, no achievements, no reward, nothing to detract from the gear up and fight people mode of playing. Part of the process of getting from an alpha to a full game is also to round the gameplay element as well as the content element, and therefore I think that something like this is a perfectly valid option to explore. It's as important to a complete game to be a game as it is to have content, often people will forgive lack of content if the gameplay is great.

There have been some topics with similar titles maybe, I searched and found a few but they were also mixing this idea with other statistic keeping. First the problem: There is nothing to do in dayZ, you all know it's true, once you get good enough you can gear enough that you are not going to die to environment/zombies in no time. Then while poorly geared you hunt round a bit, dare an airfield rush or what ever and get guns/ammo, and then you hit the, what next wall? The answer in most cases is to goto some high population town and look for trouble, basically I'm geared now lets use it and hopefully I'll get a great PvP fight before I die. This works even better if you are grouped, it's so much better looking for that trouble if there are 3 of you :) In my eyes this leads to two problems, firstly the pointlessness of survival, it's supposed to be a survival game, but in reality it's a run round for 1-2 hours gear up and then hope to have a good PvP game. Secondly the 'lone wolf' is not a good play style, combat in dayz tends to reward the group over the solo, (I'm sure you can all post some youtube vid of an imba guy taking down 3 people single handed, but it's the exception rather than the norm.) I think the solution is easy, record time alive on a character, allow the player to see his time alive, even give each account a table showing their best ten time alive. But here's the kicker, have the top 100 currently time alive, or even better the top 100 currently time alive and online available for all to see in a list at the start. Double even better show what server they are on if you go down the route of time alive and currently online. What will this do? Well firstly if (lets call them trolls, but those that like to mess up other peoples game experience) know which servers these long survivors are on, they will probably go hunt them, to end their streak. This is good, it's gets these people roaming the map more looking in all the corners trying to find this survivor. It gives people something else to do rather than just PvP in Elektro and also spreads people out over the map. The people trying for records (again maybe keep a top 50 of all time list as well as the current list) will find it a lot more scary trying to stay alive. Imagine you sit in the woods until you 've eaten all your food and now you HAVE to go into that nearest town, but because you are number 3 on the current survivors list and everyone knows which server you're on it's going to be dangerous. I think something like this would break up the current gear --> PvP --> die --> gear again gameplay and provide a different direction that would spread the population of servers out more, and also it doesn't take anything away form the PvPers who just want Elektro combat, that route is still open. Also people would become famous, you wait till some guy hits some massive amount of hours alive, (you know there are people out there who will do it), then the glory to the person that finally finds and kills him will also be the greater. It will add some depth and a point to the game other than just gearing and PvPing.