TheBrassThief

Talking to teenagers makes my brain hurt. Being cynical is cool at that age. I get it. I went there too. The world was a dark dark place and everyone sucked and all was terrible and i wished everyone would die because there is so much evil and I HATE MY DAD IM GETTING ANOTHER TATTOO IM GONNA LISTEN TO DROWNING POOL! Or something. Anyway i got over that and then decided to dedicate my life to helping people as a doctor. I imagine in a real zombie apocalypse the biggest killer would be regular run of the mill infection. Malnourished people are more susceptible to infection and have less of a chance of fighting it off. Especially since basic hygiene is out of the window even the smallest scratch could end you without anti biotics. The game as it is now really doesnt put as much emphasis on how important they are. This is the apocalypse. Lakes and rivers hold stagnant or dirty water which is the ONLY way to stay clean and clean your wounds as well as drink. Youre hungry. Probably full of lice and parasites from the river water you keep drinking. Cold. Expending a LOT of energy over the day moving from place to place and you probably sleep less. The chances of you getting ill and dying from a cut increase massively. I imagine my medical skill would be invaluable in treating a group and keeping them all nourished. Bullet wounds dont just close by themselves. Basic surgery is a must to remove them as well as shrapnel. Do you see how, without INTENSE training in ALL areas you need friends. I have 5 hours flight time in a light aircraft, rifle experience and some medical training but I dont know shit about survival skills. Unless youre bear grills with a medical degree and a rifle you gather a LOT of friends to cover the bases you cant. People NEED to pack up. Its in our nature to form social groups. Maybe they might be small. But total isolation just isnt how we are built to live. In real life the skill sets YOU need to survive are too large to be covered by 1 or 2 people. Youre gonna need 5 to 10 at least. Even if its just to cover ground in finding food which will be WAY scarcer than in DayZ. Being a Nomad doesnt really come natural to us either in our culture. Chances are you want to hunker down. I imagine KOS will be less prevelant. I imagine it would be hunkered down groups of people who are very isolationist or very eager to expand with new people. Society didnt happen by accident. People who formed societies had an advantage over those who didnt and usually ended up taking all their land and integrating them into their society.

If it already does that ramp it up. Hugely. In my view a survivor with: A pistol, two bandages, some ammo, 2 cans of beans and a canteen should JUST be as fast as a zombie. Only on the basis that the zombies have slightly impaired motor function. Everyone else should get progressively slower than that. Someone with a sniper rifle a pistol and any amount of food shouldn't be able to sprint anywhere. Jog at best.

At the moment the game is fairly straight forward. There is an optimal way to survive. And thats to turtle. Turtle hard. Get ALL the tools, gather as much food as you can, a heavy pistol and a large sniper and turtle to victory. Become sedentary. Which is the total opposite of what a real zombie apocalypse would be like without a permanent base. In real life you could only carry enough water and food for a few days or even a single day (water is heavy) and even then the total weight of that plus your weapon (large sniper rifle if we are talking DayZ) would make you zombie chow when you tried to run (hobble) away. In real life you have to make this decision on every hunting/hiking/walking trip by balancing two factors. What do i need? How encumbered can i afford to be? In a game where sprinting for your life is important i imagine this choice would make the game far more interesting. The DMR would no longer be an instant pick up because it would slow you down massively. Taking 5 cans of food and 4 canteens along with every tool wouldnt be a very valid play style and would carry huge risk. Players would have to travel light and fight hard to survive every hour. It would encourage more scavenging more frequently and more pressure when you need to do so. You walk in fast and walk out slow with supplies. Makes for a tense escape. Real decisions would need to be made on what you can and cant afford to take. Maybe going around with just a pistol would be more efficient to allow for more food? Maybe dropping all your stuff for a fast escape would be a new tactic (which people would totally do in real life). Maybe you dont really need that toolbox? Or that heavier bag? DayZ doesnt have an endgame so it cant have a linear progression in items. There has to be compromise with an upside to every weapon. Having any one weapon better than all others is boring because players hunt for them and get them and then have nothing to do but deathmatch. More focus is needed on making basic survival harder. On making taking the DMR as colossal risk IF you can even find one. Encumbrance is the best way to limit gear hoarding.

Everyone down my road has at least 1 bike. Assuming countries are fairly poor and families own 1 bike or 2 bikes for larger families off the top of my head, this means in a population of 800 there are at least 300 bikes. WHERE DID ALL THE BIKES GO! What if the zombies were ACTUALLY BIKES?!

I think right now the zombies animations and "alert levels" are way to binary. When still the zombie shambles around limping, his arms sag, his legs drag and he looks like he can barely hold himself up. Looking at him like this i expect him to have the coordination and awareness of a heavily drunk person. The second i make a noise near him though its fucking go time. He stops the fake limp, once useless saggy arms come up and his boxers muscles bulge and hes flying at me, using his telepathic third eye to tell where i am. This seems unrealistic. And its a litte immersion breaking to watch such a random and contradictory transition. Instead i propose this: Zombies have 3 different alert levels rather than 2: 1. Passive 2. Aware of your general location and shambling a little faster toward it - ALWAYS caused by sound. 3. Actually SEEN you and chasing you - ONLY caused by sight. Zombies shouldnt fly into a state of rage over a SOUND. THEY make more noise than me. The fence sound effect makes more noise than me. Make them investigate my noise without them flipping out kenyan style. Now i hate the carebear thing. So lets keep this game hard. Add more zombies. Way more. With a legitimate way to distract and evade them adding a whole tonne of new zombies shouldnt be an issue. Also change zombie spawning. As WELL as this, EXCEPT in major towns and cities (cherno for example), when you come close to a loot location a block lump sum of zombies spawn and thats it. No more spawn until you leave. But no loot respawn either. This way zombies wont spawn on you and killing them is worthwhile because each kill makes your time there looting that much easier until you leave. It also makes leading zombies more predictable since none can spawn-ambush you and you can more tactically moniter movements. It also means establishing a choke point and gunning them down is a viable tactic. What do you think so far? Discuss.

Waste of time with the flag dude. Get a flag tattoo and save yourself the space and weight! Youd be better off packing a tarp to provide you with a little more shelter. You arnt going to do so well if you get caught outside without one.

I for one love it. Hatchets really set a tone inside the homestead... But seriously someone fix that crazy shit.

Flawless. I love it. If i was killed by these bandits id be more inclined to laugh than to cry. Awesome work. This is what banditry is about.

The OPs battlebus isnt fit to smell the real BattleBusses exhaust fumes. Poorshow chaps. Your battle bus makes lone unarmed survivors hide in a building. The REAL battlebus causes full vehicles of armed people to piss themselves in fear. Damn. If only this was in DayZ.

Awesome idea. Definately want. +1. I have an addition to make though. How about if you "talk" to someone else, you both "swap" contacts and get eachothers tags for people you havnt tagged already. Imagine it like literally swapping stories. "I met this guy down in cherno and he took a pot shot at me, id stay well away from him, he looked like this...". This encourages survivors to pool information and encourages survivors to interact without neccessarily grouping up, thus keeping the lone wolf style viable. Survivors can link up to get usefull information and then part ways. How about if youre within 5 m of someone you can click on their tag to rename them and select compare tags. It then lists all your known tags against theirs, showing where names overlap and where they dont, and you can copy a few down. You might find "helpfull stranger" for them was "known bandit" for you. You can then rename accordingly. You get to know more people and it encourages a community of survivors and bandits. Bandits can know other friendly bandit groups and know not to attack them.

Im afraid youve fallen into the realism trap. Many people do. Its a bit of a paradox of gaming. Games are meant to be fun. Real life isnt that fun. Lets be honest if you had a 100% realism eating with the fork by clicking and right clicking on the pasta and you had to take a dump every 12 hours it would be boring as fuck. You know why? Because in a real zombie apocalypse it would be utter shit. Youd hate it. Id hate it. You dont roleplay as "the savier of mankind" in other games to watch him eat pasta and use the bathroom. You play it to do the interesting things. The game with 100% realism would be boring. Because real life is boring. If real life was the goal why would we play the game at all? Real life is JUST outside? I could have spent 25 quid on paintball rather than Arma, or purchased a membership down at the shooting range. The game needs to offer an experience more accessable and fun than real life can offer to be worthy of my time at all. I play DayZ to get the survival experience WITHOUT spending 7 hours at night being cold, and WITHOUT having to eat pasta one mouthfull at a time and such. It cuts the boring corners to get to the FUN of surviving.