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Hi, this is my first post. I apologize in advance for the length, and if I have in my ignorance misapprehended some aspect of DayZ, as I have not played the original mod, or the standalone alpha. If the goal is a "realistic" Zombie Apocalypse game, the reality is that abundance would follow in the wake of a ZA, or any other ELE scenario where a lot of people die in an event that causes relatively little property damage (supervirus, biological or chemical attack, etc.). In a Zombie Apocalypse, the population suddenly drops to one ten-thousandth (or so) of its previous size. Yes, all the dead are replaced with zeds, but zeds don't eat human food. They eat humans. So, there are now enough durable goods and non-perishable food in settled areas to support the survivor population for a long time. Take a small city of 100k inhabitants before ZA; a 1:10k survival ratio means the town has 10 people left. Together they now effectively own what previously belonged to 100k people. They are 10k times as wealthy as they were before. If there was previously a week's worth of non-perishable food in the city, it becomes 10,000 weeks worth of food. Dialing up the survival ratio won't "fix" this, because the more one does, the less severe the Zombie Apocalypse becomes. Protip: canned goods generally last far beyond their stated expiration dates, which are very conservative to persuade uninformed customers to throw away their old stock and waste money on new. Gasoline and other fossil fuels do spoil quickly - in a matter of months - but their shelf life can be greatly extended with various additives on the market. From what I understand, most internal combustion engines can be converted to run on pure ethanol with very little modification. People have been making ethanol in simple stills for centuries. So it wouldn't take much to get a new, if limited, fuel supply going for vehicles. Then there's the game population, which would explode and run rampant without humans to keep their numbers in check. Zeds might depopulate a few of the dopier species (Possums?), assuming they find them tasty, but no way are your standard zed mopes going to catch any squirrel not on its last legs. So, there would be an abundance of game to support the much smaller survivor population. Protip: small game hunting is where it's at. Not as proud an enterprise in civilized times, but it provides a better return on investment; it's easy to fill a backpack with squirrels in a short time if you're proficient with a 22. Small game is much more abundant, and easier to snare. Snares also avoid gunfire, which draws zeds and bad guys. In short, humanity would not be facing starvation en masse. The biggest problem would be security, and restoring power for all those wonderful labor-saving modern conveniences. Same goes for a lot of stuff, not just canned and freeze-dried food. Ammo? If you actively search for ammo and conserve what you find, you should be able to get enough ammo to last a long time. Especially once you get lucky and stumble across an ammo hoard. Modern lithium batteries have shelf lives around 10 years. Speaking of hoarding, that would be the real problem. Over time, survivors would pick surrounding areas clean of all the most valuable stuff and stockpile it. I could definitely see people starving each other into conflict over hoarding, but it would take a lot of time and effort to hoard so completely that everything is out of sight and protected. Rather pointless effort, at that. The economics of abundance heavily favor labor. Everyone is rich, so labor comes at a premium (see the Black Death for details). Cooperation is more valuable than food or water, and far more valuable than durable goods or real estate. A frontier society seems like a good historical analog for a Zombie Apocalypse scenario. Men of action, harsh and quick justice, vigilantism, feudalistic distribution of power. There'd be some violence as people sorted out a new order, sure, but generally speaking, they'd fall into line quickly and work out arrangements with their neighbors, not wander solo through the wilderness stealth-killing everyone they meet. Humans would be far more cooperative than they are now, because the stakes would be very high with hordes of hungry zeds roaming the world. It's also important to remember that if the survivors hit the zeds hard, they will rapidly reduce the zed population. I have no idea what DayZ zeds are like, but going by the mope zombies they have in TWD, I can easily see a dedicated, competent, able-bodied male killing 10,000 zeds a year. 30 zeds a day? The way they herd, you could kill hundreds, even thousands in one sitting given a decent .22, a secure position to shoot from, and sufficient ammo (.22lr weighs like 7.5 lbs per 1k rounds, IIRC). I'm not saying all of this should be in the game. I'm not saying any of it should be in the game. I'm just pointing out the real-world consequences of a sudden die-off. What I have outlined above is far more realistic than starvation scenarios. Stephen King's "The Stand" is a good example a novel that deals realistically with the consequences of widespread depopulation. King made the post-apocalyptic standoff between good and evil the centerpiece of the story. DayZ could certainly benefit from this more realistic treatment of a massive die-off, and the sage decision to focus on the human (and supernatural) factors. I don't think DayZ should be a Survival Game. I think it should be a simulationist game with survival elements. I have no problem with those elements being realistic, but I prefer they not be biased toward an unrealistic scarcity scenario simply for dramatic purposes. If scarcity emerges due to hoarding, that's fine. But why force that scenario, if we can find more interesting things to do in our post-apocalyptic landscape? On the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing the scarcity survival scenario available as an optional play style, or used in particular scenarios (obviously I don't mind people preferring that play style, they're welcome to it). I would like this sort of thing to be story-driven. Good stories sometimes feature starvation, but they more often do not. Starvation can drive a story, but it needn't. I see no good reason for DayZ to be any different in this regard. At the very least, I think there should be a compelling explanation in DayZ's plot for why scarcity obtains, instead of the more plausible scenario of abundance. And at the very least, "realism" should not be the reason for scarcity. P.S., this comment is a great example of elevating the survival aspect over the realism aspect (out of all proportion, IMO): http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/227645-survey-worst-part-of-dayz/#entry2292995 His preferences are his business, but I prefer realism. Fresh water is really easy to come by. All you need is a typical water source, a filter, and something to remove contaminants. Portable water filters range from $15 to a couple hundred bucks. Water purification drops are cheap. This is all standard survival and outdoor gear. Hikers all carry this stuff. Or you can just boil it. I hate to break it to you, but the availability of water is pretty high in settled areas. Which is where the Zombie Apocalypse happens. Antibiotics have a shelf life of several (if not many) years (as with canned goods, manufacturers' interests are in persuading people to throw them out long before they spoil). Also, antibiotics for pets and livestock are fundamentally no different from antibiotics for humans. It's not a "miracle" that there are good drug stocks everywhere, it's realism.

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.

Let me just say, I like the "scarcity" scenario too! I just think DayZ should strive not to be locked into it. Think different gameplay types, one for "dramatic scarcity," one for "realistic abundance," others for "whatever." Or settings to let admins tweak the "Apocalypse Assumptions" to their taste on their servers. I think putting some of these choices into the customer's hands is a really good idea. Seems like something that would need a pretty good explanation. I shouldn't think it's standard disaster relief policy to remove the food and other essential survival commodities from an area filled with refugees, the missing, etc. It'd be tantamount to starving the people you're trying to help, but happened to be unlucky enough to get left behind. Amen.And yes, I'm looking hard at modding this game. Depends on how extensive the mod tools are. I have no experience, but I'll learn, if the tools are powerful enough to make something I want to see. Thank you kindly. :)

Okay, thanks, first time I saw that map. I must've seen maps from previous Arma type games. In any event, there's lots of coastline.

Depending on species, of course. Given a few months or more, you'd start to see a rise in the predator populations, because these are among the species civilized man puts the most pressure on. Man hardly puts a dent in the squirrel population, I'd guess. In fact, man's culling of predators means squirrels (inter alia) probably benefit from the pressures man creates; the squirrel population would likely drop somewhat, if all their old predators suddenly came back. You haven't demonstrated that at all. You're still ignoring the thread and talking as if you're alone. I've been over this five times.

As for clean water, Chernarus is an island, no? Fresh water would be very easy to come by. You just go to the nearest beach, walk just into the dunes, and dig a hole down to the water line. If you get sea water, move further away from the beach and try again. Repeat until you hit fresh water. If you don't hit the water line, move closer to the beach and try again. Repeat until you hit fresh water. It's one of those "amazing facts" things that I barely understand, but is based on solid info AFAIK; there's supposedly always a gradient where the (fresh) water table hits the salt water table beneath beach sand. This means the fresh water is pushed upward near the beach, and is easy to access through the sand. Filter as normal, presto, plenty of water.

No. I'm not really interested in one-way communication. If somebody replies to my topic by ignoring it, I ignore their comments. Unless I'm in a mood to do otherwise for some reason.Plus he just came off like a childish ass, twice. First, there's still the wild game issue, which I keep mentioning, and people keep acting like I don't. :)Second, poor people tend to rely more on non-perishable food staples than rich people do. Canned goods, dry rice, these are cheap. All fresh ingredients, organic this or that, mostly a rich people thing. Luxury goods. In the developed world, anyway. Game isn't set in the 3rd world. Doesn't really matter, though. The numbers involved are so big, you can make a big dent in them and still not reduce the abundance enough to make a practical difference in game terms.I guess you could go with poverty handwavium, but it seems kinda unrealistic and uninspired to me.Why is there a civl war, again?Plus, there's still the game issue, which I keep saying, and people keep acting like I don't. :)And again, if the zedpocalypse doesn't strike suddenly, then we have to explain why it's really a zombie apocalypse; burning your dead (or whatever) doesn't seem like a big hurdle for advanced civilization. Hard to get a lot of deaths at once with starvation, which take weeks, with a highly variable duration. Feel like I've said this three times already, too. :D Your straw man isn't very realistic. A can of beans a day is starvation. A sedentary adult usually needs something like 2000+ calories a day, a can of beans won't cut it. An active adult (say, running and walking all day, fighting, etc.) requires several times that number. 6-8k calories a day would seem a decent ball park estimate for a very active adult.

Bean King: fair enough, still think it's food for thought. (ETA: Orthodox Christianity has made quite a remarkable comeback in the former USSR, from what I hear. Food for thought indeed, if we're trying to depict a culture based on those of that region. ETA2: sorry to keep editing, but violence in games offends a lot of people. In fact, a lot about DayZ in particular offends a lot of people.) On the previous issues: Plus, isn't the zombie infestation supposed to infect people? Sick people consume more water and meds (relatively speaking) than food. They don't hang around long eating food if it's the Zombie Apocalypse. The longer it takes the disease to overcome the human population and bottom out the survivor:zed ratio, the more spread out over time the fatalities will be. And the more you lower the death rate, the less plausible it will be that people can't figure out the dead are coming back and take preventative measures. The more sudden and overwhelming the Zombie Infestation, the more plausible it is that preventative measures were too little, too late. It's Apocalypse Math, don't blame me. =)

One thing post-apocalyptic mass entertainment skips over, to the detriment of the genre (IMO), is religion. People would get very religious in a Zombie Apocalypse scenario. At least Christians, Jews, and Muslims (don't know enough about eastern religions to guess) would tend to. Think about it, a hell of a lot of lapsed members of Abrahamic faiths would see a ZA as Armageddon, not to mention Proof of the Holy Word. Mormons are obligated to prep for disasters and end-world scenarios, I think it's safe to say they'd be dialed more toward the fanatic end of the spectrum in a ZA than they are now (no offense meant to Mormons, a people I admire, btw). A sensitive issue, but one worth thinking about, IMO, even if just in terms of game world background, level design, writing, etc.

I get what you're saying - write it so that humanity starves before the zeds come along. But this demands a plausible explanation for why the disruption of the food supply is happening. Presumably, it was the zed infestation that caused the disruption. The zombies aren't going to sit around twiddling their thumbs while people eat up all the food (stuff that will spoil first, then the stuff with a shelf life). If they did, why would the food deliveries stop in the first place? It also demands a lower survivor:zed ratio (starvation takes weeks, varies in duration depending on size, age, weight, health, etc; people would die in a relative trickle, so they'd have plenty of time to figure out if the dead are coming back as zeds, and take preventative measures, e.g., immediate death rites), thus further weakening the menace of the Zombie Apocalypse. I've got a couple weeks worth of canned food and peanut butter set aside in my cabinet, always do (come to think of it, probably more like a months' worth, bumped up to 2 if I've just been to the grocery store). Lots of people keep similar stocks (I live in hurricane country; most people live somewhere that justifies a bit of preparation, whether for earthquakes, storms, floods, volcanoes, unrest, psycho gov't, etc., so stockpiling a bit of stuff isn't that rare. They're also more likely to be survivors, incidentally.). The longer it takes the zombie horde to start outpacing starvation (which takes weeks) in terms of body count, the more sissified it starts looking as an Apocalypse. You've got to make the Zombie Infestation dangerous - at least to the unprepared, pre-Apocalyptic population - or you kill the mood the game's trying to create. And again, there's the game supply. The same objections keep coming up, and I keep having to give the same answers. P.S. I've already offered an explanation for scarcity, if that's what you want: The Road scenario, which I think I mentioned twice before. Or something similar to that.

Doesn't really matter what the actual number is (I used a week, not far from three days at all when you actually run the Apocalypse Math). Apocalypse Math says you have to divide the amount of stock by the Survivor:Zed ratio. If it's 1:10k, that means you multiply the stock by 10k. 3 days times 10k is 30k. Thus, you have 30,000 days before the food runs out, issues of distribution aside. That's roughly 82 years worth of food. If the ratio is only 1:1k (meaning, the Zombie Apocalypse will be cleaned up in days or weeks, not months or years), then that's 3,000 days worth of food. There'd be so much food around, people would find it impossible to hoard enough to starve one another without some truly organized and heroic efforts.