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If organic life is really so fragile, then it's kind of hard to explain how it's still around after millions of years. Steadily progressing, too. P.S., I'm still amused by the notion that hoarded food somehow disappears into thin air. As if starving people are just going to sit around twiddling their thumbs saying, "it's all been hoarded, oh well, guess we'll just starve to death quietly then!" LOL.

Surely there are similarities that obtain across all plant species*, or at least, all plant species of substantial food value; that's the point that the author attacks. Say, a bioweapon designed to starve the enemy, while your (GMO?) crops are unaffected. But, the virus mutates, and jumps across to your crops, too. Or, a virus designed to eradicate an invasive plant species mutates and jumps to everything.(Or maybe there aren't; if you left frickin algae unmolested, people would figure out a way to survive off of it, lol)There's no hard and fast rule that says a microorganism that attacks plants that was deadly enough couldn't eradicate the species it afflicts in a short period of time. Yes, excellent point. If you want to kill of lots of people by starvation, it's best to leave them alone, and target their food supply instead. A virus just kills them all off before starvation can kick in, lol.

Great example of Alexandria idiocy, the way the guy leaves the psycho priest to close the gate. For hundreds of years, militaries around the world have had regulations for how to handle guard duty. In fact, it's so simple and central that it's one of the US military's ten commandments (I forget their name for it); you don't leave your post until properly relieved. It's hard to believe nobody in that suburb had military experience, particularly since they're known to be gov't types, and gov't is riddled with vets. Even if there were no veterans, it's also common sense, and in any of about a million military manuals (which you might think people would read after a Zombie Apocalypse, lol). It's pretty simple. When you put people on guard duty, you tell them not to leave their post until they are officially relieved, and that there will be severe punishment for failing to follow procedure. ETA: Five years is way beyond a slacker timeline, lol. 5 years is what it should take to clean up the whole mess and put down all the zeds. That's just 5.4 zeds a day per survivor, given a 1:10k survivor:zed ratio. And waiting 5 years before rebuilding is crazy. You start rebuilding immediately.

Pretty much everyone on that show behaves like a moron. Especially the ones that let Ranger Rick play leader, lol, that guy's a grade-A moron. I think his finest moment was leading the whole group of idiots right into Terminus. Then he doubled down on the stupidity and led the whole group of idiots right into Alexandria. Lucky for the idiots, the Alexandrians aren't cannibals. The concept of sending in one guy to scout the place eludes him. The concept of setting up ambushes eludes him. The concept of setting up rally points eludes him. The concept of disciplining his son (to save his life and others') eludes him. The most self-reliant character on the show, Darryl, can barely bring in a squirrel. Woodbury and Alexandria were/are full of idiots playing at suburbia. It's basically just lazy writing to get "teh dramaz" without thinking too hard about how to go about it. The producers seem to have taken the "it's based on a comic book" thing very much to heart. Don't get me wrong, I love TWD, it's my favorite show. But I have no illusions about its flaws. I just decided to love the show anyway, warts and all. I was just saying that I could easily see the horde of idiots that has survived TWD's zombie outbreak failing to do anything much in the way of rebuilding civilization or even sustainability. It's really not. It's really hard to write up a proper post-apocalyptic scenario that humanity wouldn't bounce back from, unless you just say Earth Is Doomed Beyond Repair. Because if shit isn't on an inevitable decline to annihilation, man is a busy little progressor, lol. What I mean is, you can write a story that's set a few years past The Event, but not 100. Because in 100 years, either man would be extinct, or he'd have bounced all the way back. Man has too much built-up knowledge not to bounce back from anything that won't destroy him completely. Which isn't to say The Road isn't realistic for what it is, but rather to say that it isn't more realistic. Think of a hundred-sided die, with each number representing a possible apocalyptic scenario; The Road is one of the 5 or so really, really nasty scenarios that man can't (or couldn't, if that's the way the author wanted it to be - I've only seen the movie so I may be missing a lot about the ending from the book) bounce back from, while the other 95 are scenarios that man would bounce back from in a couple generations. I don't want to belabor the point any more than that, but if you like, we can sit here and throw some apocalyptic scenarios around, and I'll show you what I mean. I've thought a lot about fictional apocalype scenarios that a) don't completely wipe out the human population and B) man wouldn't bounce back from in a generation or two, and they're almost impossible to write plausibly. They basically require intelligent design, and almost wiping out a dangerous species like humans isn't very intelligent.

After several days of testing, I have come to the conclusion that this: Is really, really horrible. Spectacularly bad.

No, it doesn't depend on how long it's been per se, unless there's some other factor, like environmental and crop failure in The Road, or sudden mass mental retardation, like in TWD. Otherwise, human progress would mean the further the disaster recedes into the past, the better the living conditions would become. I meant "whoosh" as in flying over someone's head. :D One might just as well say it isn't a survival game at all then. In the sense you describe, it is no more "violent," "difficult," "post-apocalyptic," "about survival" or "about zombies" than it is "realistic." :) Same here. I'd at least like to see a realism setting or gametype available. That's my opinion too, more or less. Great argument, very convincing, if totally devoid of support. :) True, you didn't present a straw man. Or an argument. :)

I'm fine with that. The first is basically fact, the second a matter of opinion. Which is kind of what I was getting at with this thread. I kept reading posts where people were conflating scarcity with realism, and it annoyed me. I don't know if it's because this unrealistic scarcity is a genre staple (e.g., TWD's ludicrous scarcity), or people just don't want to face reality, or what.

Only if you take the misanthropic assumption that people would just lay about and do nothing while stocks dwindle. Which they wouldn't.

Gun Ownership Map (no idea of source): http://i.imgur.com/QDF3vWA.png Stats for a few high-ownership countries: Country: Firearms per 100 people (source: deseretnews.com): Iceland: 30.3 Germany: 30.3 Austria: 30.4 Canada: 30.8 France: 31.2 Norway: 31.3 Sweden: 31.6 Uruguay: 31.8 Iraq: 34.2 Saudi Arabia: 35 Cyprus: 36.4 Serbia: 37.8 Finland: 45.3 Switzerland: 45.7 United States: 88.8 So, while European countries may not match the US in ownership rates, the continent has 9 of the top 15 countries!

*Whoosh* goes the thread. :)

Fortunately, if this guy is right, the game's design is in the ballpark of what I'm talking about: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/06/im-a-survivor-dayz-standalone-thoughts/

In terms of gameplay, I think my point in all of this is that I don't enjoy games with too much grind. Sure, I should have to worry about food, water, meds, guns & ammo, shelter and clothing, security, etc. I just don't want to have the difficulty of meeting basic survival needs blown out of proportion and turned into a grind that will deny me the opportunity to simply stop and smell the post-apocalyptic roses. Constantly fighting off an absurdly accelerated hunger mechanic just isn't my idea of a good time. I don't want DayZ to be that type of survival game. I think this game is bigger than that; a player who has mastered the game's skill set should be able to rise above a constant razor's edge battle to simply survive - he should be able to do a bit of thriving, too.

Thank you, I'm glad you like it. :) Small quibble, IIRC, incubation time is the period after a person is infected, but before he starts showing symptoms. There'd be no supply chain problems until after the incubation period came to a close. A quibble that has no real impact on your argument, obviously. Terminally ill people's appetites tend to drop off real quick. Maybe they'd eat half the food, but that would still leave a ton of food lying around (e.g., 15,000 days worth, instead of 30,000). Most of the dying wouldn't consume much food. And the x days of food on the shelves is a real quick and dirty rule of thumb. I have 1-2 months of food, and I'm barely even a prepper in that regard. Truth is people would run out of food at very different rates. The supply chain wouldn't just grind to a halt right away, either. Authorities would do everything they could to make the food supply chain one of the last things that stops working. And while the supply chain would eventually grind to a halt, there'd still be a ton of food left in trucks that were on their way to delivery, in factories waiting to be loaded onto trucks, etc. Btw, I'm quite familiar with my local grocery store. They simply do not turn over their entire inventory in a few days. Sure, a wave of hoarders could clear their shelves quickly, but hoarded food does not evaporate. And again, this doesn't put a dent in the wild game population, unless the virus is a plague on all mammals, in which case we have a zombie squirrel horde to worry about. In fact, now that I think about it, rodents that could infect people with a bite would be the end of human civilization. Way too many small lil critters to defend against. Like I said before, balancing all of this stuff and keeping it plausible is hard. At one extreme looms the Inescapable Doom of Humankind level Apocalypse, and at the other cringes the Sissy Apocalypse. One must be careful to avoid either extreme. The first is too nihilistic and pointless to be enjoyable for many people, and the second isn't challenging enough. You make a good point, one we've been ignoring by focusing so closely on food; durable goods. There'd be a huge stockpile of guns and ammo lying around, for starters. Tons of outdoor/survival gear, too (it may be a niche market pre-apocalypse, but surely more than 1 in 10k people in America and Europe are backpackers, climbers, survivalists, etc. Meaning, their outdoor/survival schwag, and all the outdoor/survival schwag vendors have in stock, will be laying around for the taking). Funny aside: if some DayZ player looted my house, he'd cream himself. 2 ARs with 8 mags, red dot optic, decent ammo cache, 9mm + ammo and mags, complete INCH bag full of outdoor/survival gear and clothing, a half-dozen knives, a month or two of food, etc. And I'm a totally junior league prepper. ETA: Stephen King's The Stand points out one of the biggest problems in the wake of a massive die-off by virus: all the decaying bodies in houses. Huge health hazard.

A perfectly reasonable position, as far as it goes; I still think supporting both play styles is superior. I bet I can guess how you sell tickets. :) Hard sell, am i right? Sawyers are like $20.Giant cooking pots aren't exactly rare, and boiling water in them isn't that big of a deal. If you want to fall back on the "ass end of the Earth" and "backward post-Soviets" crutch constantly, I suppose it's doable. ETA: on the other hand, NGOs tend to crawl all over the more backward spots on the planet, and love handing out stuff like cheap, durable water filters. Lifestraw was made for this purpose, IIRC. I don't have a clue what that means, except to say no, I've never even been to Canada. :)

Let's just say I think the contaminated groundwater everywhere thing seems kind of lurid and cheesy. The whole world's a big place to contaminate beyond redemption. Lol, no, purifying water in a typical portable filter isn't "arduous." It's standard backpacking practice, people do it as part of their entertainment.