Hey, (long time player, 1st time posting) First off, dayz gameplay, the concept and it's implementation thus far, i think have been extremely good for alpha code. I've enjoyed dayz very much. Unfortunately not so much now. Don't get me wrong, i can certainly see why the no starting weapon change, might be a welcome addition for may experienced players, and that's good. But for new players, or even existing experienced players who disagree with this change. It's going to be a closure point. ie they stop playing. Because you die over and over again. And in a game where the fun of playing comes from playing with content that you might consider to be end game stuff in any other game, dieing over and over so early on, and never even getting to that good stuff, is going to leave lot of new players asking themselves whats the point. Which is never a good thing for new players to be thinking about your game. And thats fair enough, you might say... well we already have an existing community built up on dayz, the majority of whom like this change to the game, and if we lose *new players* because of this change, so be it. And that too is fair enough. But adopting such a attitude with a game that is only as popular as it is and only has said community built up around it, because of a sudden and large influx of *new players*, is to say the least, abit of a weird attitude to take. So it largely comes down to the fact of whether the devs are happy with the size of the community as it is, and want to deliver on what the majority of that community wants or whether they favor it's continued growth over certain sacrifices in the games hardcore nature, namely a staring weapon. Of course this is all at alpha stage so changes like this are still in debate. Another interesting thing about making changes like this to the game, is how it can exacerbate already existing issues. ie this funny and yet tragic trend that is now occuring, where *those snipers* who used to camp spawn points, no longer do so. Now they just brazenly stand on the coast with any weapon, and shoot the proverbial fish in a barrel, ie new spawns. At the end of the day dayz is a very polarizing game, with two camps of people on many aspects of the game, namely the whole PvP aspect, another part of the game which has a very definite split opinion.
