alexander_q

I say have them overpower you, and give you the chance to escape them, kill them, or succumb to them based on your stamina, and any assisting zombies. This way a single aggroed zombie could be defeated.

I'd prefer health to not regenerate, AND not have food recover blood. I want players to be forced to seek assistance from other players in some circumstances

I think it's an intuitive and reasonable change to make. Also helps in a situation where you are unconscious holding an epi pen, and your friend can take it from you and use it.

You raise a good point. I think that infection should have a strong random element. You may display many symptoms of infection, but you will never know if/when you will become a full-blown zombie. There would be nothing you could do to cure yourself - some people would succumb, others simply wouldn't.

Make a two minute log out timer, that you can sit around in-game and wait for, in case you may want to interrupt it, or just log out immediately, if you want to risk being killed while your body still exists in the server without your accompaniment. If the player logs into another server within two minutes, because the timer is serverside, the database can just have them wait for the remainder of the two minutes before it lets them in.

When I kill another player, it is almost always because I feel threatened by them. If they were able to surrender to me, I would take that as an indication of friendliness, and let them be (or rob them depending on the situation). The surrender action should be toggleable, should drop whatever weapon you are holding onto the ground, and require about three seconds to get out of. When you are in the surrendered stance, you should still be able to crouch or stand, and walk around at your leisure (though your assailant may demand otherwise). When in this mode, your assailant should be able to loot your back pack, your inventory, and whatever weapon you still have holstered. A good companion to this would be a skill advance system, wherein players get better at doing things with practice. This will make them value their lives, as there is something that they cannot easily recover. It would also be good if players had to pay $1 to respawn.

I like that you approached it from the story angle - this is my habit also when considering game mechanics. You are correct that being sniped without warning is a terrible ending to your story, however, you must also consider the story from the sniper's perspective. Ideally, sniper ammo would be rare and available only in unreliable spawns (such as helicopter crashes). Thus the story of the sniper would be one of surviving against all odds, scraping together what little ammo he could find under adverse conditions, and taking someone out cleanly and looting their stuff to survive. In summary, I think we can rebalance ammo for the sniper rifles before we remove them entirely. EDIT: Additionally, there is a problem whereby grass doesn't render beyond a certain distance. If grass rendered to the maximum range of the rifle, if the first shot failed to kill you, you would become obscured by grass, and may have a better chance of escape. This seems to be an unfortunate technical limitation.

At first I was like "done before, use search button", then I was like "Ooooh that's sort of interesting/clever" and then I was like: No. Players won't necessarily know whose disconnection they want to prevent. Just have a general log off time for everyone, thus forcing them to get somewhere safe before they try.

Rocket has spoken about this recently. I'd love to have to rescue a cornered dog from a pack of zombies, or consider which of us I was going to feed. If I logged in and my dog was gone, though, I'd be PISSED.

-Zombies move at different speeds, there are more of them, you can't outrun them forever and they will grab and overpower you -Almost all buildings are enterable, and you can barricade them from inside or out -Increase the time it takes to perform an action, and give us the ability to assist actions by other players to reduce that time

Both ideas about clothing work together. If clothing remains unrecoverable, and you customise your skin via found clothing, then having such clothing would be an indication that you have been playing the game for some time without dying. I think DayZ needs more incentives for survival, and this is a decent one.

Are people still able to do things like this, despite BattleEye?

The criticisms of this idea are right on the mark. If you want people to cooperate, you need to incentivise that cooperation and provide mechanisms to foster trust. Punishing banditry is not the answer.

A good start would be: -Eating canned food leaves an empty tin can behind. You're free to pick it up and take it with you if you wish. -Weapons leave bullet casings. -Eating meat leaves scraps. -Vehicles leave tire tracks. -Dead animals and fireplaces are slower to despawn.

If there are bears, we have to be able to climb trees, otherwise NO FAIR

How about don't feed into a central server. I don't understand why this was ever done in the first place - it's a bizarre contradiction of the purported approximation of reality that can be easily avoided. Either we have one persistent world for everyone, or people have a different character in a different location per server. If you log out of any server, your character remains for several minutes on that server. Next time you log in, you might log in dead. No ghosting, no logging off to avoid death in most cases, even to avoid zombies.

I find first person view to be more difficult than third person view. Because the nature of this game is highly competitive, I do not like to play in first person and handicap myself. However, when I play in veteran servers with first person forced on, I enjoy the immersion, and don't feel the handicap because I know everyone else is forced to be in first person also. I can see where the op is coming from. I think, like me, he wants immersion, but doesn't want that to be a handicap. However, I don't support a mod-level forced first person because I hope that in the future, we will have customisable skins, and a fully-fledged cover system.

Make the recipe for molotovs whiskey, matches and a bandage (for the fuse)

It won't decrease hostilities between friendly survivors. Bandits will whistle just as easily as they currently say "friendly" before they shoot you, so no one will trust a whistle any more than that. Survivors can already signal their intentions by stating them directly: "I am friendly and have no intention of killing you". The only way to create trust is to make it a necessity.