Beizs

In regards to the meat, it's not particularly difficult to tell different types of meat apart, for the most part. Having an image (and only an image) of the meat would be the most realistic, but it wouldn't exactly be difficult to learn what to avoid (just learn what human meat looks like. Even if the image is from a randomized selection, it shouldn't be that hard, though pork does apparently look a lot like human meat). As for the drinks, it'd be ridiculous to not be able to tell what's what (and I don't believe you currently can). If you have a sense of smell, you can tell bleach, petrol, water and disinfectant apart, before even tasting it - and the second I taste it, if it's not water, I'm going to spit it right back out.

Only for calls, internet and GPS. Every single other feature on the phone would still work. It does drastically limit their capabilities, but they still have plenty of uses. For example, the compass (at least on my phone) uses a magnetometer. This means that it would be functional even without any connectivity. In fact, go ahead and put your phone in airplane mode. It still has a wide range of features that work perfectly well. In regards to charging, there is a tonne of different options out there. They're adding generators into the game, so that'll be one way, using a standard cable. Battery operated chargers (like, ones that take AA's) are also very common. Wind up phone chargers are also pretty common. There is PC's present in the game (obviously non-functional), all of which look like they're from maybe the early 2000's. Considering Chernarus is a poor area, it's unlikely they'd have up to date PC's. This implies that the game is set in, more or less, modern times. Smartphones are incredibly prevalent. Cheap ones would be all over the place in Chernarus. You realize that China has the largest number of smartphones in use in the world, despite the vast majority of its citizens being very, very poor? China has a smartphone ownership rate (in 2013 - it's probably increased dramatically since then) of 46.9%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration In regards to how realistic smartphones would be in terms of whether people would actually have them or not, it depends on when DayZ is actually set. But even if it was around the dawn of smart phones, there would still be few rich people in the area and those people would probably have them. So, in my opinion, there's no realism issues when it comes to smartphones. There's also a wide range of uses. However, the question is whether it's actually worth the development time when most of its uses can be replaced with other items. How many people would actually use one, when they'd need a slot for the phone, a slot for the charger and several slots for batteries, when they could just have a compass and map and have the most important features without half as much work.

Your first post in the thread was adressing the subject. Your first post to me was attempting to refute my argument related to the subject. What are you talking about?

No, I absolutely see what you mean there. I'm cool with that. Still doesn't change the fact that you've refuted nothing I said to do with the actual topic at hand. Your only argument in this entire thread was that people would loot the stores, but that isn't really relevant to the topic as the food still exists, it's just moved into the households of the people who have looted it. You've put forward literally no evidence to support your argument and have done nothing but made your own assumptions that are more removed from reality than anyone elses on this thread.

You claimed that the argument was 'so stupid' you thought people were trolling, thus attempting to refute the argument without any actual argument of your own. Ironically, this makes you appear stupid. Oh, and yet again, you've yet to actually put forward any argument. You've refuted nothing. You've presented no evidence. Bye.

Do explain exactly how the world works, then. You've presented no argument. You've simply strawmanned the idea, without refuting a single thing backing it up. If you want a constructive conversation, actually explain what you're talking about. Otherwise, don't bother contributing at all. If anybody seems like they're trolling, it's you. Seriously, it's simple mathematics. It's economies of scale. A zombie virus would spread incredibly quickly, especially in a relatively small, quarantined area. The resources in that area would not all be consumed in that time. There would be an absolute shit tonne left. The maths I did looked only at resources in civilian households. Nothing related to shops or any military/police/commercial storage. Using low estimates. Do tell me what's so incorrect? We're talking about it in relation to the game. Not real life. We're just using real life (and in the case of my post, real virus models) as a base... Y'know. Like literally every single person does. What are these false assumptions?

This is true, but you'd still have a bounty of stuff a few years on, also, if my mathematics is even anywhere near correct (and, using scientific modelling for the infection and simple maths, I feel like it's pretty accurate to be honest). Excluding food and ammo, you'd have a lot available to you for longer than that, too. Though 20 years? Okay. Clothes have probably all been eaten by moths, there's absolutely no food left over, other than the occasional undiscovered bomb bunker with a bounty, most of the guns have been used to destruction, there's just about no ammunition left and everything you get is going to have to be made by you. At that point, however, I think that the last of us has far too much for 20 years in. Nobody can seem to get it quite right. :P It's not about the supermarkets though, man. Most people buy a week or so's worth of food in one go. Add that to stuff like pastas, rice and tinned food, which just about everyone I know generally has quite a large surplus of as they are commonly forgotten about while you're shopping and you have an absolutely ridiculous amount of food lying around. Following scientific disease models and emulating a zombie apocalypse through good old math, the population of Chernarus would be reduced to less than 1% in a mere matter of four days, leaving a ridiculous amount of food for those who did survive. I did literally all the maths you could possibly need to prove that abundance would be a very real thing and, assuming people who survived the initial wave actually rationed, it would last years, even at low estimates. I'd like to see more realistic food consumption. So, if you drive everywhere and do pretty much fuck all, you're not gonna need more than like 2k calories. If you're running a marathon daily, you might rocket up to anywhere between 6k to 10k calories. You'll need to drink a minimum of about 6 pints of fluid a day to remain healthy. If you're running a marathon a day, that rockets up to 12 pints or more. So long as there's a realstic, healthy medium, I'm fine with that. However, as the server times can be changed, it makes it difficult as you don't know whether to go by real life time or server time when it comes to modelling the calorie consumption. Basically, it'd be nice to see them actually do the maths and get realistic calorie consumption in game, as well as water. It's really not particularly difficult maths and would improve gameplay a lot for me, honestly. However, I disagree that gear should be rare at all. Realistically, it would not be. It should just be hard to get, because the zombies are in the towns and cities. That's an ideal DayZ for me. DayZ isn't a starvation simulator. It's a survival simulator based in a zombie apocalypse, absolutely no more than a year (we're probably talking a couple months at the most) after the apocalypse. Everything would be in abundance, if you were brave and smart enough to get through the zombies to get the loot. The actual worries in the game should be zombies and players, and, to a lesser extent, diseases. Realistically, even without the huge bounty available to you in the 'abandoned' towns and cities, it would be very easy to survive food and drink wise out in the wild. Historical research, recently, has pointed toward the idea that humans who were hunters and gatherers way back when actually had significantly more free time than us, as hunting and gathering, once you know the basics, is so damned easy. Throw in modern methods and tools to do these things and you'd have literally no problem at all.

Just to add to this, as they are planning on adding animal companions, this kind of mechanic is, in my opinion, even more necessary. I assume the companions will basically just be dogs. The ONLY way a dog is going to be able to defend itself properly is by barreling into someone, taking them by surprise and knocking them down, before continuing to shred their faces. Just like zombies. Just throwing it out there - this system would kill three birds with one stone; improving zombies, improving meele PVP and animal companions.

The main issue is that the servers just can't handle enough loot to get anywhere close to a realistic level. It would be awesome if they could and they could actually get away with completely disabling restarts for a long ass time if loot was how it would be in real life. But yeah, it's not very good for gameplay to have complete abundance. It would work, however, in my opinion, if the zombies were at a point where actually going into a town or city to loot it would be genuinely dangerous, especially for a group who can't stealth their way around very easily.

Read my longpost a couple up. Even with food and ammunition, it's really not realistic for there to be scarcity for a couple years at the very least, frankly. If you don't have time for the longpost, it's summed up in a TlDr, though the actual maths and crap backing it up is fairly important imo.

Yep. Now factor in the fact that in this kind of situation you're probably talking about 0.1% of the population or less surviving for any noteworthy period of time and that suddenly goes up to 70 per person. Even the Netherlands would be left with 39 per person. Here in the UK, you're talking 66 per person and this is a place that is considered tight on gun controls. Factor in military and police guns and that probably goes up well past 100. Also, the Czech Republic is at 16.3 per 100 people. Think that's worth noting for Chernarus' statistics. Could be talking 163 civilian, registered guns per person in this kind of situation. Factor in the civil war aspect of the story and heavy police/military presence in the region and I'd not be surprised if it was 200, 250.

What I would like to see would be the addition of radios that players can broadcast to if they have the right setup. Imagine how much that could add to the end game once proper base building is in (and I know and am very happy about the base building they're planning on rather than the actual construction of buildings). I'd love to set up a small base, get a radio tower going with a generator and broadcast out to any survivors out there, I am Legend style. Maybe even the static radios could be listened to to add a bit more to the game, though you'd have to throw a new battery in there 80% of the time or something to get it working. How cool would it be to be on a server, throw a battery in a radio and sit there, listening for any frequencies that are broadcasting (with a simple method of switching through frequencies quickly so you don't have to sit there for an hour. :P Maybe it's just my inner roleplayer coming out, but damn those kinds of radios would be awesome. Wouldn't really require much on top of the current walkie talkie system, either. Just some new items (obviously this would only be feasible after the generators were added in), a bit of tweaking and the conversion of the static radios to usable objects with fairly consistent spawns.

Maybe with the in depth vehicle repair system, they can just port the core mechanics over to the guns and have it far more realistic in just about every regard. Definitely could use some genuine maintenance mechanics which would help with immersion, add some realism to the firefights and balance out the guns a bit better.

Firstly, I agree with you pretty much 100%. However, with the new character controller, the animation thing will no longer be an issue (and the devs will have a better system to play with). With the desync etc, hopefully, that's not a permanent problem. I agree that it'd suck to have that happen with a zombie that was desyncing, but considering the fact they're specifically working on the performance with the zombies and their impact on the server, hopefully, that won't be an issue for much longer. I absolutely get where you're coming from with quick time events, and actually agree with you. However, with a simple grabbing system, I don't really know how else it could be achieved. The zombie swings for you. If it connects, you have I dunno, half a second to punch the zombie/left click to counter the grapple entirely. If you take more than a second, it locks deals extra damage. If you take any longer than that, it knocks you to the ground, at which point, you can struggle out or die, basically. It's a bit more of a fluid quicktime event and could (assuming the desync is sorted) see it coming fairly easily and avoid the attack without much of an issue. The main thing would be if a zombie came at you from behind. Realistically, you'd be fucked if a zombie got behind you. To be honest, it could only be possible if the zombie was behind you. I think that the game really needs something along these lines. I really don't mind the implementation or the method of countering so long as it actually makes the zombies a threat - even a single one, if it catches you unaware. I don't really think that the quicktime events themselves are what pull me out of the immersion, but the way they're handled. If they feel kind of janky, or out of place, they definitely pull me out of the game. But if they're fluid and work well, they're absolutely fine. A bad example would be TWD quicktime events, which are pretty meh. A good example would be, as I mentioned before, State of Decay. I also remember, I think it was maybe Call of Duty 3, where there was a quicktime event fairly early in the game where some guy jumped on you with a knife and knocked you over. All you had to do was spam a button a couple times, as you kicked him off. If the animations were done well and it was handled properly with the actual connections etc, I think even just a quicktime event could actually work pretty well. Not sure though. Like I said, I'm sure the devs can probably come up with something far better than I can. Or the community if we put our minds together. Again, though. I just really think the game needs something like this. Otherwise, no matter what, the zombies won't quite be there. If someone is within swiping distance, I can grab them. If I grab them, I'm instantly harder to deal with than if I simply throw a punch at them - and the current attacks that the zombies use take me out of the game far more than a good grappling and biting system would. I'm just trying to think of games that have good grappling mechanics. A few wrestling games or something could be a good 'research project' for the team in that regard.

It's post civil war. There were militia all over the place before the zombie apocalypse, according to the story. Guns would be plentiful. It's also full of farming communities, and rural areas, many of whom would own guns for hunting purposes and protection purposes due to their remote location making the police virtually useless. Also, the sheer number of guns the military and police have, even in places like the UK, with a significantly reduced population (as there would be after a zombie apocalypse), it's really, really a non-factor.