FlimFlamm

Presumed rendering issues aside, Why not let me make 1-4 man buggys and 1-2 man auto gyros by implementing a complex and content creating modular vehicle system? So long as actually constructing a vehicle is quite difficult, what at all could go wrong?

As it stands tents are invisible from a particular distance. I see no reason that at the extreme distances trees begin to disappear (or their foilage), so too can tents and medium sized player constructions. Or, the developers could acknowledge this problem and fix the rendering side of things. As for the problem of badmins keeping aircraft all to themselves, I hate this and I think it wrecks what the game could be. Let me make my own auto-gyro (with great difficulty) so I don't have to have to meta bandits and badmins just to get in the air.

Confirmed. If in real life if you hear the tink of a bullet on the rotor or fuselage or the pop of gunfire below, any pilot worth their salt instantly begins internally weeping, pissing and shitting themselves, and they instantly gain as much speed and distance from the source as possible while potentially maneuvering left or right to spoil any continuing fire. Owning and operating aircraft in DayZ SA can be as much of a hassle and risk as it feels rewarding. Everyone in a 2km radius can see you land and likely hear you, and you have probably attracted more people on your way to any given Landing Zone. In order to have safe protocols you can basically only land in areas that you are sure are player free, and then the zombies you might attract may also present insane problems by creating hordes. All in all helicopters and planes will be best used for reconnaissance, player drops, and very quick and organized pickups at secured LZ's.

Finding a heli was not GG in the mod unless you had an impenetrable base with unlimited fuel in which to park it. The first time I found a heli I didn't know how to fly it and I crashed it. The second time, me and some guy flew up north, where he shot and robbed me. The third time I think I flew around in fear for awhile before running out of fuel and stranding myself in the extreme north, where I starved. Owning and maintaining a helicopter might be a part of what people normally consider the endgame, but there is really no GG at any time. No matter what happens, you are still inevitably in a never-ending struggle against starvation, disease, the elements, zombies, and human bandits. Since the mod had easy as pie survival (zombies sucked, no common disease, food common, guns common, vehicles common) people then had time and nothing else to do other than to fly around looking for people to kill. This is the crux of where we differ in opinion on aircraft in the standalone. If maintaining a helicopter is actually difficult, then people flying them around player hunting and putting them at risk for senseless reasons becomes a much more risky and purposeless affair. Getting shot at is likely to cause more realistic damage to your heli, and getting shot at yourself means your precious heli and gear stand a good chance of being ruined. Along with the sheer difficulty of everything else, players will, in a very direct way, have much less time and capability to spend flying around player hunting. The standalone is making everything more difficult, more demanding and more complex. New features of the standalone are going to limit the ability of players to player hunt from helis in the following ways: Helicopters will be more difficult to acquire than on the mod; Helicopters will be less armored and beefy; Helicopters will have weaker attack capabilities; Fuel will be more difficult to acquire in every way; parts and maintenance will be more involved and more difficult in every way; the clothing, food and medical supplies, guns, and misc crap that the pilot and crew need as a supply kit for player hunting is harder to get and more valuable than the mod. The result is less overall time to get straight down to player killing, and less of a desire to do so because of the increased risk. Given the sheer difficulty and complexity of everything else, the absolute end game feature of flying around killing people (unless you are a hacker or get extremely lucky) will be something exhibited rarely, and only by the most affluent and hardworking (and therefore deserving) groups. It means you are too successful, and this should in many cases be indication that something needs to be made more difficult. I'm going to go on petitioning the community and developers to fulfill a better vision of DayZ (I think we have similar visions about immersiveness) and to have difficult to acquire and fly makeshift aircraft and very limited standard or otherwise aircraft. More diversity and more difficulty gives us more of a challenge and more things to do. The more difficult 'something' is to acquire the more of that very specific DayZ feeling of total loss that 'something' is capable of inducing. That particular feeling of loss simultaneously measures and encapsulates why the original DayZ worked. You see bases and aircraft as powerful trapping of success, but I see them as costly liabilities requiring constant love and reassurance from large groups. Whether your a lone-wolf with a tent and a bicycle, or a large militant group with a fortified base and and a few vehicles, you always could be moments away from losing it all. How well you can secure your own survival is the true end-game, and it cannot be done indefinitely. Finding a balanced hierarchy of access to resources along the way will ensure that unlike the mod, there are no M2 humvee or M134 Mi-17 like vehicles which can fly and drive up and down the coast and fuck the game up entirely. Players should still be able to fly and drive up and down the coast fucking the game up, but their weapons should not be as powerful as in the mod. The idea of wasting ammunition, fuel, food, medicine and putting your vehicle at risk just to kill a few bambis to just about any group should seem like the most stupid, dangerous, and costly waste of resources imaginable.

Inthe mod if ou went out of the bounds of the map, all you would find is wasteland and the soothing tick of a geiger counter. the story goes that when the zombie apocalypse broke out world powers nuked the most fucked areas to try and save the rest. This is all pretty standard mod lore.

I'm going to try and start condensing this concept, while refining it, into easy to digest sized pieces of information. A brief description, a parts list, and a pros and cons list... Here is a pros and cons list that I have been slowly adding to (yes it is quite biased, something which I need targeted criticism to improve) Pros: Supplemental access to vehicles without making them common or easy to get. Instead of servers jacking the vehicle numbers to make them available to players, this system allows the total number of vehicles (not including regular spawned ones, which will also exist) to reflect the amount of time and effort that the given population is or has been willing to put into them. Server/global economy control of parts, engines cannot be transferred to other servers, which gives servers individual control to limit how many modular vehicles can exist. Complete customization. Inherent in the concept is the fact that every player build vehicle will be completely modular and therefore extremely unique. Variety and diversity of transportation. Having only a few of the same vehicle models isn't exciting. With modular vehicles, ability and performance depends on what it is made out of, with better/stronger parts being harder to get and more rare to find which naturally widens the versatility and utility that modular vehicles can come to serve. Complexity/Difficulty. This system adds difficulty to the game, and complexity. More tools, more uses, more difficult and complex processes, more rewarding; more fun. Building your own vehicle is more difficult and complex than repairing one that you find, and endlessly more rewarding. Developmental time-saver. Rather coding and modeling for a bunch of unique vehicles (good luck making them modular or customizable at that point) like the V3S and the other incoming vehicles, Devs would simply need to code and model a relatively low number of relatively small and simple individual parts. Then they simply need to program the way they fit together and create modular vehicles. The end result is a massive increase in content compared to the same amount of developmental work. Cons: Realism: some players feel survival should be too difficult to have the spare time or safety to work on a homemade vehicle Authenticity: Some players feel that the mechanical knowledge required should be presumed lacking and therefore modular vehicles should be disallowed as a matter of fidelity to 'authenticity'

You are being quite obtuse with regards to the discussion at hand. Helicopters are gonna be in, yes, but the real fight (at least from your camp) should be about arguing for as sensible/realistic/authentic types of aircraft as possible. The same goes for ground vehicles. The discussion that takes place now has a good chance of influencing the decisions of the dev team, so unless you are honky dory with aircraft that strain credulity like military helis or ground gun mounted APC vehicles, now is the time to speak up. P.S, I have never once complained about things being too difficult. I only complain about a lack of content and petition for the addition of more!

Given that the land surrounding Chernarus is filled with radiation, it is reasonable to assume that nukes went off. Perhaps the EMP blast from the nukes is what made 99% of Chernarus cars break and become useless junk. If this is the case then building your own vehicle from a working engine might be your only option!. (authenticity is aesthetics) I'm fine with the idea of finding vehicles that must be repaired, but there is a major flaw in this system. If there are very few vehicles available, then most players will not get the chance to experience them at all. Groups will hoard them and hide them, and in order to make them actually findable servers will need to increase their numbers drastically, which would then work against authenticity and difficulty of the game by making them too easy to get and therefore under-appreciated. Players should still have the chance to find and repair full vehicles, and these vehicles should be pretty decent. Modular vehicles (yes at the expense of some petty forms of realism,feasibility. authenticity) would exist along side these regular vehicles and provide supplemental access to them. Players who luck out and find them still get the same experience the devs say they want (really rare vehicles), but if you cannot find them or they are all hoarded up, then modular vehicles will give you a chance, via appropriate effort, to get your hands on a vehicle that will be inherently inferior (in most respects) to a factory made vehicle like a V3S. Modular vehicles will be mostly shitty in terms of cargo, armor, passenger capacity and speed. The main purpose would be to outrun zombies, and as per realism, only the most difficult to complete modular vehicles (with the best wheels, engines, and chassis,) should be able to travel at comparable speeds. There is a very wide middle ground where modular vehicles might find purchase in DayZ. The mechanic of supplemental access to vehicles while keeping them difficult to get completely solves the vehicle rarity problem while adding content and extending the end game. The most common argument against modular vehicles that people have raised is the 'authenticity' issue. Mos1ey above writes "someone with mechnical knowledge would be more likely to repair one of the many wrecked cars that are lying around Chernarus than build something from scratch". To this I say that the wrecked cars are wrecked. It's really not unfeasible at all to harvest from these many wrecked cars the parts required to build for yourself small manageable transportation. The benefit to gameplay/mechanics is so perfect that the relatively small sacrifice to our own biased notions of authenticity isn't really enough to shut the idea down.

There are several ways to have construactable modular vehicle and prevent server hopping from becoming a major issue. Engines could be something that you cannot put in your backpack, in your hands, or on your back (so they cannot be brought to another server). In order to move them you could require some sort of push cart that can also be constructable. That is one solution, but also parts can become a part of the central economy, (per server, or globally) with only a certain number of engines existing and hence a limited number of powered vehicles. There are many other ways to curtail outright failure of a system and limit player abuse. The difficulty of actually acquiring the parts and tools to build a vehicle in real life isn't an easy chore, and in a zombie apocalypse, while not having to pay for anything, it would be more difficult for sure. That said, in order to build a makeshift buggy in a zombie apocalypse you are going to need a secure place of residence where you can begin storing the parts you have accumulated (or else hide them in a remote location and pray nobody finds them). While you are investing time and evergy into gathering parts, your place of residence will require possible defense and maintenance, and you will require food, guns, ammunition, and medicine in case of emergency. The hunt for parts will be long and tiresome, you wont always be able to find the parts you need (fuel tank, engine, metal for chassis, wheels, etc...). Once you finally get all the parts and tools to put one together, then you need fuel. The completion of a modular vehicle will represent the culmination of potentially weeks of time and effort and risk spent completing all the necessary tasks. The reward, much like the holy grail V3S Hicks wants to see, would be a very dear piece of equipment that in DayZ logic, players will gladly die for (regardless of how much roleplay dictates they want to live). The thought of losing something you have worked for weeks toward (while maintaining everything else) would make you paranoid, and tending toward unwillingness to put the vehicle at risk for any reason. Eventually it will be stolen or destroyed, and the resulting pain and feeling of loss that will be induced will far exceed the pain that any luck based V3S has ever caused. It's not necessarily just the joy of lucking out and finding a vehicle that makes them fun, it's the pain of losing one, or the feeling of taking one away from someone, for me anyway, that creates suspense and high stakes. Constructable vehicles can be ridiculously diffiuclt to complete (as difficult or more difficult to find and repair one), while simultaneously co-existing with traditionally spawned in vehicles. The model you are suggesting is that you find a V3S via luck, and then put some work into it to get it up and running. (luck +work =vehicle) The model I am suggesting merely replaces the luck of finding a broken down vehicle with a bunch of work. (work + work + work + work + work = vehicle). That said, the work of putting together a car from raw resources and parts you must also find via luck is still a system that incporporates luck, it just spreads out the vehicle lottery into more numerous smaller and more winnable lotteries. In the end, modular vehicles that players can themselves construct can end up being more difficult to acquire than spawned ones could ever be, regardless of them spawning in a broken condition. The main appeal here is that me and my grandma can sit down and invest a bunch of time and have something to show for it rather than just playing the 'will i find a vehicle, be able to repair it with nearby parts, and not get shot' lottery. My grandmother is religious, and she hates the slots. She believes in the value of hard work! You want vehicles to be rare and awe inspiring right? You want them however to be accessible so players can experience them without having to fight over a few rare ones right? This is the perfect way of supplementing existing vehicles and achiving that. (while also delivering on the customization promise) "there is a distinct and unique feeling that you get from something like a vehicle, that requires people to come together to maintain it, to protect it versus popping say a Tavianna server or modded DayZ mod server and finding a vehicle in a couple minutes, it just doesn't have the same importance. It's almost a completely different game," (from your link) Here is a thread I recently made which details a conceptual system : http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/223970-modular-vehicles-conceptdiscussion-thread/ I'm going to make an edit which adresses your objections, any additional criticism you might feel inclined to share would be most welcome in the thread. :)

TUMBLE WEEDS MAN, TUMBLE WEEDS... WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Or we could go real OG (it's even easier with modern engines): Wood, wires, and a wee bit of metal tubing + engine = CAMEL

Here is a compilation of the very best and relevant videos and pictures of aircraft variants that I think would be perfectly suited to DayZ from almost everyones point of view. The first if the Mozzie, I've posted this video elsewhere but i might as well post it again: Here is a relatively similar looking but in fact quite different aircraft most of us are familliar with, the Auto Gyro : Here is what the auto gyro can do. When it comes to planes, I am still willing to make any percieved sacrifices to realism in order to get an aircraft that can actually transport some kind of load or more than one person: This is a homemade ww1 style bi plane. It is painted wood with some metal and wire for structure and controls. This is the sort of plane that I would have buildable by players at the appropriate cost of time and resources. I would also suggest at least one helicopter that also can carry more than one person. I know in the eyes of many people it strains realism, but the functionality and enjoyability /end game altering aspect that multi-person air transport gives is a benefit that cannot be understated. I would however make it quite restricted and as improvised as possible. with any luck, we could get something like this by christmas! :

Oh man, this one video is 100% evidence... Obviously a man who buys a heli, gets in and hits the throttle like a bat out of hell is so stupid that he represents the lowest of the human range of intellect. Darwin would give this man an award. ' Here is a far russian dude taking the sensible approach, and learning to hover at low altitude: IN A COMPLETELY HOME MADE SHITTY LOOKING MOZZIE MUAHAHAHAH

Further separating from the arma mod dayz? Or becoming less of a game? The removal of content isn't a sound strategy, and there is no reason why military helicopters need to be carried over into the standalone; they won't be. Your realism fidelity argument needs to be improved. I think you should lobby for very restrictive and simple types of aircraft as opposed to relying on an argument that usues faulty premises (we're all ignorant survivors with no skills of any kind) and a game play argument that nobody has actually properly fleshed out yet (aircraft will ruin the gameplay experience).

You're so wrong it's ridiculous. A large chunk of ISIS are corrupt ex soldiers and officers of saddams old army. Many of them have all kinds of miltiary training and some pilot training. Flying helicopters isn't some impossible task that only grand master pilots can attempt. No ISI soldier has been trained on anything nearly as complicated as a black hawk. There is no point in flying a black hawk at all unless you know how to actually use it to attack, from a tactical perspective. A civilian helicopter can be flown by reading the manual. You might crash, but that's fine. The manual of a black hawk would probably ten times as large and complicated as civvie helo, and also secret technology that only the richest of nations have been able to afford. The iraq army flew mig jets and bell/MI type helos, which pale in technological complexity compared to a black hawk. Your notion that flying even a civilian helicopter is so difficult that not even ISIS could do it is so completely ridiculous that it strains my ability to believe you aren't being disengenuous. :) You either severely over estimate the complexity of small/older/simple helicopters, or, severely underestimate the complexity of a black hawk military attack helo. The concept of 'rotary flight' isn't some extremely complicated thing to understand. You have a throttle and a joystick which controls pitch, yaw and tail rotor (equivalent to rudder). Those are the two main controls that you need to take off, land, and fly around. People fly quadcopter drones all the time rotary; flight is simpler to do (and easier) than fixed wing flight (don't believe me? you ever fly planes in DayZ mod? You ever see people always crash and fail miserably? compared to the ease of helicopter flight?). The mechanics of the aircraft being more complex (rotary flight compared to lift generating wings/planes) doesn't mean at all that it is more difficult to fly.

I was really hoping for some feedback and discussion, perhaps the post is too monstrous :( . I think that the ability to get your own vehicle is an incredibly important and impactful change that needs to be made to DayZ. I am dying to know what the developers are planning and whether or not we are going to have to wait for modding to get all the cool stuff...

An AKM with a 75 round drum mag is quite powerful. Any aircraft that get added in should be able to be taken out by this gun. The game of DayZ might be about making it to the next town when you are freshly spawned and on the coast, but if the game is about endless survival by traveling from town to town with no ability to progress or improve your situation then there is no real point in playing.

You can learn by jumping in the cockpit with someone who knows how to fly, and then they can give you on the spot training. the more complex the controls the longer it takes to learn, but it is possible.

OK so if you have ever seen the inside of a regular helicopter, and a military helicopter you would know that the two are basically not comparable in terms of flight difficulty. First of all, jets are a kind of aircraft in a class all of their own, nobody wants jets, so don't mention them as a part of your argument. Military helicopters compared to civilian ones have so many extra functions that it doesn't surprise me that ISIS cannot fly them. You've got guns to worry about, missiles, flares, all kinds of sensitive trageting, advanced navigation, communication, and more. A civilian helicopter, a smaller helicopter, is much easier to fly. Less buttons, more straight forward. If you think none of the ISIS militants know how to fly a helicopter at all (instead of not knowing how to fly advancd american military jets and attack helis) then you are being quite foolish.

I never implied that it is easy, I Implied that it is possible. Thousands of hours in flight sims is a great learning tool but it is also possible to fly helicopters with on the job training. That said, not every helicopter is as complicated as the next. I have personally put thousands of hours into flying planes of all kinds in realistic flight simulators. Should this not mean that it is in fact plausible that I, a normal non pilot citizen, could fly a plane? The rigor and expense of pilot training is to ensure that pilots are absolutely competent before they are allowed to fly alone or carry passengers. It's possible to do a successful take off and landing with one day of actual training, we just don't let people do it because we're all about safety. It might not be safe to let inexperienced pilots fly (and in DayZ it shouldn't be either), but it beats getting attacked by zombies or killed by ground crews.

Why on earth is it so disconcerting to have people piloting aircraft when statistically they should not have the knowledge? It's not a relevant 'realism' flaw. Nobody should care about the plausibility of piloting skills. It's not rocket science so what is the big deal? If you take that logic and apply it to other aspects of DayZ it is easy to see how ridiculous of an argument it is. Players are granted all kinds of knowledge of survival skills (not really, they have to learn them in game) and medical skills and military skills, and without these the game is literally pointless. Run around with axes and can openers and looking for beans. You can do all kinds of posturing based on lore but that is a double edged sword. Perhaps pilots had a higher chance of survival (the immune ones) because they had the ability to escape the zombie hoards. This would increase the pilot population, and depending on the length of time that has passed since the outbreak, give piloting knowledge a chance to be passed on to the general masses. You will get much further with the 'not enough resources' argument where at least we can find some compromise and middle ground (rarity, quality, performance).

So, I think we're starting to close the gap between our perspectives here and this is good news! Here are my rebuttals :) ! On 'authenticity': The mod only felt authentic when you were new to DayZ. Walking around in unfamiliar territory with scary zombies everywhere, not having barely any gear and not knowing what to do next; that is the authentic zombie survival feeling. But once players mastered the environment, the game evolved. The vanilla DayZ mod was about slowly acquiring better and better gear until eventually you have 'full military gear'. You would also hide a tent in as remote a location as possible, and you would seek out and stash vehicles to make it so that traveling places was not a nightmare. This was the vanilla endgame. It turned out in the end that surviving zombies while competing against other players and trying to maintain some semblance of secure survival (how many days could you go before dying?) wound up being more fun than an eternal struggle for survival against zombies with no place to call home and no ability to improve your situation. Tents were liabilities, vehicles were rare, nothing was safe. The mods that came out and dominated the game addressed and enhanced these aspects of the game. Instead of tents mods let you build semi-secure locked bases. Instead of relying on luck to get a vehicle, they allowed you to construct them with materials and labor or purchase them from traders with in game currencies. The ability to build a secure base and reliable access to vehicles became the main selling point of the mods. It was this model that inspired spinoff games, including H1Z1. The standalone by default is going to feel much more authentic than the mod ever did, due to the in-depth nature of the survival mechanics, and also because of the (as some people put it) gritty design of the things that players have access to. Where aircraft fit into the standalone in terms of 'authenticity' is a difficult question. Rarity/cost, quality/type, look, and performance of aircraft can all be tailored and moderated to fit in with the rest of the environment and so aircraft have no inherent authenticity problems. The issue is rooted I think in the availability and the strength of aircraft versus a vision of 'a difficult survival game'. While some players are looking forward to a very in-depth and challenging survival simulator, they see the flying of aircraft as a direct affront to their immersion and feel that if people are rich enough to fly aircraft, then they have completely transcended survival. (Is this a fair approximation?) As a rebuke to this argument, let's go for a ride with the ghost of DayZ future and do a thought experiment where we put ourselves in the shoes of that survivor you see up in the sky, the one who has transcended survival and laughs in the face of realism... "His name is BillyJoe (That's my in game name! What a coincidence!). He is in the cockpit of some sort of one seater wooden bi plane. His plane is painted sky blue and is contrasting against the clouds. It is traveling relatively low compared to modern aircraft, and is going quite slow, maybe 500 meters up at a speed of 180 km/ph. As we get closer to him we can see that there is actually a small gun mounted to the nose of his plane. It looks like some sort of modified AK mounted to some sort of firing mechanism, but we can see there is no available ammunition. BillyJoe himself is wearing a warm looking pilots cap and a bomber jacket. The cockpit is open and it looks quite cold; Billyjoe doesn't look very comfortable. We follow him until he lands on a hill near a fortified castle, which looks quite spectacular. He runs inside as fast as his tired legs can carry him, in through the broken front door, up through the battlements and finally arrives in a room where three sickly looking players, his friends, lay dead. They had recently been raided, and while they managed to hold out in this one area, they had taken damage and their wounds festered. They no longer had adequate medical supplies to treat one another owing to the raiders absconding with nearly everything, including food, which they were desperately short on, and they slowly died waiting for the return of BillyJoe. The raiders had taken everything from them, and BillyJoe swore to the sadistic zombie gods that he would have his revenge. In the same instant that he finished uttering his oath, he heard the familiar sound of an engine cresting the hill, and then suddenly the terrifying pop of the same machine gun that had destroyed their front door. The raiders were back. Mixed with the engine roar and the firing of the guns, he heard a sound that he recognized to be bullets striking wood, a kind of splintering explosive sound. He knew his aircraft was disabled or destroyed. Before he could think he heard footsteps from below, winding the narrow stairs. He had no ammunition, it had all been spent. As he pulled out his flare-gun, which was something he always carried with him when piloting aircraft, he could hear them hammering and sawing something below. He knew that there was no way out. There was too many of them, he had nothing to fight them with; he and his friends had overreached. Weeks worth of work and planning had come to an ignoble end. He fell to his knees and pointed the flare gun at his own head, and then somberly pulled the trigger..." There is no such thing as transcending survival in DayZ. At some point eventually your character will die, so long as you play long enough. Groups who raise bases and build aircraft attract enemies, and no matter how well established or how powerful they are, they will eventually fall into decline and into ruin. The bigger a base is, the cooler toys they have, the more at risk they are of being raided and potentially having their base, and everything else they have worked for be taken from them outright. The game can be interesting/fun and dynamic on a day to day survival level (the need for food, medicine, ammunition and other resources) while also catering to the actual end game or long game aspects of things. Operating a base and owning aircraft need not fly in the face of difficult survival whatsoever, given the logistics and effort it will require to get there and stay there, combined with the ever growing threat of raids that comes with affluence. I know a lot of people are interested in more PvE elements, but we should never forget why the DayZ mod earned the nickname "human nature simulator"... Banditry is an unavoidable element of DayZ, but in my mind this only enhances the experience. Having aircraft and raidable bases gives bandits something that is very fun and high-stakes. DayZ consists in my experience of roughly 30% bandits who would want aircraft just so they can steal them from hardworking groups. On aircraft in a zombie apocalypse: Private aircraft like cessnas and even lighter private aircraft which spend long periods of time sitting under tarps or in hangars do not require constant reassurance or will fall apart. Maintenance on them is not the same as maintenance on a jet. They can be very robust. If you're not willing to accept that there would be at least some viable small aircraft leftover at an airport, then would it be acceptable for someone to build their own DIY ultralight or wooden bi plane? There should be all kinds of engines leftover, all kinds of materials and such, and does it really matter that most people don't know how to build or fly planes? Can we not presume that if people are motivated enough and the data exists in libraries and such that they could figure it out? Yes aircraft if flying low would trigger zombies, and this would be one of the draw backs of landing a helicopter on a roof somewhere populated. Not only do zombies see you, but players also see you. They see what direction you are heading and if they are covetous enough they will head in that direction too. Aircraft can be as much of a liability as they are an asset. Many people indeed are going to feel that because planes and helicopters existed in the mod that they should exist in standalone too, but just because they might be pampered with convenience and therefore biased doesn't mean that they are wrong. In DayZ you starve to death in 3 hours or so without eating. Being forced to drive everywhere in real time on the ground means you need to spend an inordinate amount of time stopping and eating. The speed of point to point travel that aircraft grant means that the amount of time you spend eating in game is more realistically proportional to the amount of time you spend traveling. It's not just the reward of fast travel that makes sense for DayZ, it's also the joy and dynamic of actually flying things. I personally feel that DayZ would be less of a game without aircraft whatsoever. The skies would be wasted and while playing DayZ if I looked up, I just couldn't bear it.

I played thousands of hours on the mod, and I must say that aircraft were the farthest thing from stupid. Black hawks were annoying from time to time, but unarmed aircraft were never 'stupid'. What do you mean by stupid? Why couldn't aircraft be acceptable if there were no military variations? Why not have gritty aircraft to go with gritty survival rather than military aircraft to go with military gear like the mod had? Having aircraft be so extremely rare or hard to get that merely seeing one induces a state of awe is too rare to be a relevant game-play mechanic. Perhaps if aircraft were modular and upgradable, then the top possible tier makeshift aircraft should be something awe inspiring. The point of having aircraft at all would be so that players get to use them. I just want to know why you would consider the concept of ultralights and autogyros to be stupid, and why everyone being decked out in military gear would make light aircraft 'more acceptable'. I want DayZ to be difficult, but I don't want the end game to consist of 'day to day survival' and roaming around engaging in banditry and the like. I want to be able to do fun things once I master the game and have invested so much time into it. Otherwise why play the game at all? Mods became so popular because they added features and functions and vehicles. The more content a mod had the more popular it became. Given this trend vanilla DayZ should strive for as much content as possible, and aircraft are too enjoyable and dynamic to leave out.

I think it's time for some good old fashioned STATISTICAL ANALYSIS! There is an inherent margin of error in this analysis owing to the fact that multiple selections are permitted for each poll. The resulting margins of error will be represented where possible. In the main poll, featuring the question "Do you want to see aerial transport in DayZ?", out of a total 186 participants, 63 people voted for the option 'No - I want to keep DayZ on terra firma/assorted bodies of water'. From this we can infer that around 34% of participants do not wish for aircraft to exist in DayZ. However a total of 208 votes were cast in this category, meaning multiple voted multiple times. Given that all the other options inherently imply the existence of aircraft, the 22 vote discrepancy gives rise to a margin of error between who wants aircraft (aircraft of any kind) and who does not. We can use the other two polls, "If you clicked No, why?" and "If you clicked Yes, why?" to corroborate our findings and reduce the margin of error. The option “I didn't vote no" was voted for a total of 120 times. The option “I didn't vote yes” was voted for a total of 64 times. These numbers fit well with our previous findings 64/186 is 34% of participants, and they are saying that they do not want aircraft. 120/186 is 66% of participants expressing that they do wish to see aircraft in some form or another. The 22 vote discrepancy margin of error can in a crude way be halved because of the corroboration of the secondary result. 22/186 ambiguous votes meant a potential margin of error of 12%, but since we can halve that, we can reasonably conclude from the polls that 66% +/-6% desire to have aircraft in DayZ, with the inverse being true for people who do not want to see aircraft, which is at 34%+/-6%. To state it more formally, two thirds of participants think aircraft of some kind ought to be in DayZ... This is along the lines of what I expected, and since I am one of those persons who wishes to see aircraft, I certainly like the result. What is however I think more important and more interesting is the spread of reasons given within both camps for their choice. In the minority AA crowd there is disagreement between why there should be no aircraft and in the majority camp of aircraft supporters there is disagreement about what kinds of aircraft should be implemented or allowed. Analyzing the relevant statistics for these issues is a bit more complex than the broader scope which I have analyzed here, and if I have the time I will do more analysis on that subject in a later post.

@S3V3N There are a lot of ways that aircraft can be balanced along the lines of what you're saying. There already are certain places that are hard to get to, the extreme north west is shielded by mountains and has few access roads. The prison island involves swimming, which nobody would want to do. Making more islands is a subject for which I have been planning to make a thread there is a lot of unused space and it would make boats/aircraft fill more of a necessary function. I think that barricading bases against players and setting traps for them ought to be how large bases avoid raids. Lone tents should indeed be invisible from the air if under tree cover, I agree with you there, but even still, it's only a matter of time before an unprotected tent gets found by players on foot or in a vehicle, no matter how remote. (other players also seek remoteness, which is ironic because they find inhabitants) Regarding the difficulty of actually getting, building, and flying an aircraft, it should all certainly not be easy or simple. I don't actually think that pre-spawned vehicles are alone enough for DayZ. I think that DIY modular light aircraft should be constructable, along with modular land vehicles, and these should represent the bread and butter of end game transportation. Actually building a vehicle should be a long and arduous process with as steep a learning curve as the devs are willing to program into it. It should involve resource collection of as many kinds as possible and the rarity of the resources required should be balanced appropriately. This way there can be many vehicles on a single server, but it will only reflect the work that groups put into building them rather than competing with one another over super rare little birds and cessnas (and other land vehicles too). When it comes to flying aircraft, it should be also as difficult and sim like as the devs are willing to program it to be. Without auto hover players will have a much harder time not crashing and dying, and so taking flight seriously will become an absolute necessity, given that crashing and dying means you have just lost something which an insane amount of work went into. If vehicles and aircraft are modular then different size frames and engines and wheels, etc, are going to make particular variations behave differently, which gives rise to a whole new emergent field of study over simple maintenance of spawned vehicles.