RedAxiom

1,3,4 would be great. 5 would be an interesting experiment. Don't like 2, rather have things emerge from behavior naturally. 6 I don't like. There should be some way to communicate trust and distrust among groups though, or a reputation system, because you can watch someone murder your friend from close range but you can't recognize that player later which is silly. Never mind trying to communicate to others which player murdered your friend. All are things that are extremely easy in real life. But just putting text on the screen is clumsy.

I think you've got it backwards. We can't see faces and eyes and other details in game. The heart beat represents YOUR reaction to seeing that person up close and evaluating all those details that you can't see. It's your spidey senses tingling - you get a bad feeling about that guy.

When players meet other armed players in the city it's the same. But I've found that when I'm newly spawned and I run across another newly spawned player, we end up talking because we can't shoot eachother and it's like why not talk? Sure we often end up murdering as soon as someone finds a weapon but... many times we get along well enough that keep playing, both armed, almost like we were on Skype where we now treat every other player as enemy instead. It's just fun to hangout without people and makes for a more interesting game. And that forced hangout time works as a good icebreaker. Part of it might be just be my getting bored with Shoot on Sight, even if it means dying more often. Gameplay is more interesting when interacting with people.

Most of your complaints are bug fixes and engine limitations that have been repeated a hundred times. Except for the server stuff which is simply a very different philosphy. FWIW, I think these points:

Can you we start with a couple of flares? Or maybe a chemlight? I think that might encourage people to not just ditch the server they spawn at night. I find playing at night to be really fun personally. But I don't like the flashlight at all and never use it once I find chemlights and flares.

I like the crazy flying with the hatchet. It's a little silly but REALLY fun.

Bug: Hatchets spawning as ammo in groups of 15 to 20. Bug? Hatchet hitting a zombie destroyed the wall of the building I was in.

I'm pretty sure the building being destroyed was a bug. Try killing a zombie near the wall, that's what triggered it. It might have been the physics of the zombie hitting the wall rather than hatchet itself.

Also I'm not finding one hatchet I'm finding like 20 at once. WTF. Someone add a zero to the spawn rate by accident? They are UBER powerful it seems. Pretty fun. I like the knockback.

Ok, so I have destroyed a BUILDING with a hatchet. Something is wonky! Underpowered? Are you kidding?

I think the problem with zombie difficulty is that they are way too hard right up until they are way too easy. New players get slaughtered by them over and over. But then you learn the tricks, some of which are more like engine tricks than game tricks, and they aren't a threat after. I'm just getting to that point in the new patch now. You can abuse line of sight to get out of any situation really. I'm thinking full sprinting + lose in los is so much easier than stealth that stealth is never really worth it. I'd like to see dodging via line of sight abuse nerfed a bit -- give the zombies some kind of fuzzy memory so they don't forget about you so instantly. They should still have a vague notion that fresh brains were somewhere over in this direction, running in this direction. And in the other direction it should be a more effective to sneak past them. All the zombies have incredible sight and hearing right now. It might a bit early to tell for sure, I do only have a few hours in 1.7.1.1 but I think the recent zombies changes are resulting in people sprinting everywhere instead of sneaking. Just doesn't feel right. Should be a mix of the two.

I agree. There are a few weird problems. Super hard to find food for some reason and stealth doesn't seem to be right yet, sprinting is still the best technique. Really fun now though!