I'm new at this forum, but i've playing dayz SA for about 250 hours now.. My experience with the 0.55 patch: I got KOS'd at the prison by a guy camping behind a wall, so i had to start over and the following happened: I spawned near cherno and went from house to house. Found some military gear at the weirdest places and it was very hard to find some food. I almost got killed twice by laggy zeds. After that i managed to find some food and water and i even got healthy (with a little help of some friends). Then i went up north to Zelenogorsk. On the route i found a shotgun, and some other rifles and bullets and dealt with some powerfull zeds again. I even found a kevlar with attachable pouches :D After arriving in Zelenogorsk I adapted to the new patch. Moved like a sneaky little rat to avoid zombies and looted some more. That went pretty well. I found an SKS, a scope and a friend gave me some bullets. (BTW, i found a few tents, and they didn't disappeared when pitched) I like the new loot distribution. This will cause the loss of interest of highly popular places for looting. And the zombies: I think it is a beginning, but weird, laggy animations are a bit annoying. I hope that they will fix that with priority. The ideal situation to me concerning zombies is this: You can avoid them with stealth and killing them with a melee weapon shouldn't be too hard with some skills. But when you decide to shoot in a town, attention should be drawn to a lot of zombies (like 30 or so), and you'll have no other option then to run for your life. This will make PvP harder but still considerable in less crowded places. I don't agree with people saying that this patch will force you to hunt, because before you have found everything that you will need for hunting (a weapon, cooking pot, cooking tripod, hunting knife, axe, matches and an animal), you'll already have found 'lots' of food to come around. (Edit: Sorry for possibly bad English)
