Moriim

This is a terrible idea, as many people can only play at one time or another. Nobody wants to be forced into playing in one mode all the time just because of their life schedule.

First off, flashlights on belts is an awesome change. However, I find that playing at night could be improved dramatically if the running animation was changed so that the player still holds the flashlight in front of him. After all, if I'm sprinting for my life and I have a flashlight, I'm going to hold it steady as best as I can on the terrain in front of me so I don't trip and die. It would make moving around at night significantly easier and would allow me to actually play the game once my classes start again in August.

I think the "creation of civilization" idea could either be the greatest thing to ever happen to the mod, personally. The shoot on sight mentality is a little too prevalent and there needs to be some incentive to group up with other people besides just "make zeds super duper powerful and make soloing hard as nails." The only feasible reasoning for this would be the types of goals you're discussing here, where numbers would be necessary for large scale, but localized, hordes guarding hoards. It would also encourage server loyalty, since if you spend hours (days?) building a town you're probably going to come back. Server loyalty is always a good thing because people grounded on one server are astonishingly more friendly to newcomers in my experience.

Neat idea, not sure how far the community building would go, since the sadist assholes who kill people for literally nothing would be attracted to it like flies to raw meat.

Honestly I wouldn't mind if the zombie movement speed was just reduced wholesale. They run like freaking Olympic champs, not a bunch of recently "dead" Russians with weight issues. If we're going for the infected type zombie rather than the supernatural kind, realistically speaking their physical abilities shouldn't be that outstanding. If this means the player speed needs to be reduced, I'd take that over missing four times before I'm actually able to land a shot on the speedy buggers. Personally I feel like zombies as an archetype should be harmless alone or in small groups, but dangerous in large numbers. That being said, getting large numbers of zombies is much too easy. But that's a completely subjective design opinion. Another thing about their animations is that it makes it difficult to determine if you actually hit the bloody thing. You shoot it, then .5-1 second later it reacts and falls over. When you're dealing with multiple zombies, this makes it very hard to conserve ammo as you might waste a shot on one that's already been dealt with. Once again, this could be a realism thing but it makes the game considerably less fun for me, so it's up to the rest of you guys to decide on that factor.