dirtyscab

I've been playing DayZ for like a week now pretty vigorously, and I'd like to leave my feedback. First off, the game is extremely difficult to play with friends. The best method to meet up with friends is to constantly respawn until you spawn near one another, and even then it takes an annoyingly long amount of time to respawn your character. If you try to meet up with a group of 3 or 4 people you can easily burn through a couple hours just trying to meet up and not die in the process. This could be solved pretty easily by allowing up to choose from a list of coastal cities to spawn at, while spawning at a random spot near the city, so spawns cannot effectively be camped. The second fairly large problem is that there is no objective other than to live. At first that's difficult enough, put with a dash of luck and careful sneaking you'll pretty shortly be decked out in automatic weapons, have a range of tools, enough medical supplies to keep a hospital running for a week, and have no need to even enter a city (where the zombie danger is) when you can collect water from lakes and food from animals. Once you reach the point that survival isn't a challenge anymore, the game loses any incentive to keep playing. You can explore the map, but the map basically just serves as spawn points for items. There aren't any cities or objects within the world that are inherently interesting. The only thing that I can think of that can be relatively easily changed and still add some spice to the game once survival is no longer a challenge, is make killing zombies fun. Currently they respawn infinitely, and way too fast, so killing them is a fruitless effort. They need to respawn much more slowly so an area can actually be cleared out for a period of time. Being able to clear areas means that you need to be able to move onto the next area to clear, so vehicles need to be more plentiful, allowing you to cruise through towns. Having like five cars per city street would be stupid, but after a week-ish I've only seen two vehicles. One was a boat, that is nearly useless (and it had no gas so I couldn't use it anyway), and the other was a tractor that was somehow stuck on a picket fence and rendered useless. Making cars more plentiful also aids friends meeting up with one another. A final small point, is that navigating the world after a fresh spawn is pretty obnoxious. Without a picture of the map open on your computer separately from the game, it's nearly impossible to learn your way around inland. Throw the survivors a bone and let them spawn with at least a compass to aid in navigation.