jquinn914

The idea of typical classes in Day Z is silly (would only imbalance things), generic (and therefore boring), and just a whole different mood than an Arma II mod should ever aim for. I almost want to say you ripped my idea of skill traits as well like the medical/mechanical stuff and turned it into a childish dream-up but I don't care enough to get into it. I don't think having some sort of background to your character is a bad idea, but I think all of that should wait until Day Z actually fleshes out and we get to see what direction the devs are taking this thing into, ATM it's little more than a PvP sandbox in which zombies pose a threat up until you find a weapon. I hope to god this is just the bareboned skeleton of what they intend, and given that it's an alpha I have a lot of faith.

Firstly, there absolutely has to be some set spawn locations exclusively for low end weapons along the coast even if it's just hatchets and crossbows. There's people who defend the current state of this to death, selfishly, because they happened to stumble upon a revolver within the first 10 minutes of play. Yet, there's a significantly larger portion of people that have played for hours and even days without finding a single weapon. This is not only irrelevant to any sort of wit or skill but completely luck-based. The current state also encourages new players to unrealistically head straight for the major cities where the majority of zombies and bandits are. I've even seen trails of suicides by players looking to spawn near a city instead. Secondly, just about everyone's first instinct is shoot players on site because the immediate reward is clearly greater than any sort of repercussion and given that it's a video game we don't feel bad about it. Would it honestly make sense during some sort of zombie pandemic for survivors to kill each other on site without second thought? My suggestion is to somehow present a reward equal to killing someone and taking their gear for working together. Maybe allowing each player to select a certain skill trait upon creation like Medical, Mechanics, and so on so that players will come to rely on certain others for different things. Thirdly, and this is a suggestion for later in development, zombies need some sort of scaling. The game becomes less about the zombies and more about the players very, very quickly. I know zombies possess superhuman speed, so I was thinking maybe some more evolved and dangerous forms of zombies could populate some higher end loot areas and major cities, possibly zombies that simply take a few more shots and deal a bit more damage preferably with a different appearance than typical zombies. Zombies with axes or other melee weapons could be a cool more challenging intermediate form.