FoxKeegan

So...Hello. First post. Started playing today. Played for several hours. Didn't die, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to continue as...well, I couldn't find a box of matches anywhere. Checked dozens of houses and a city, and finally looked it up on the wiki and read they're supposed to be rare. So, I tried to find this question on the forums, but failed. Either I didn't find it, or it hasn't been asked, so I guess I've a few questions about all this: 1. Why is something as common as matches rare? 2. Where are all the lighters? (Did people give up smoking?) 3. Why do I need a match? The first two are pretty straightforward. But I'll explain the third: Any boy scout knows that when I killed and gutted that boar the hatchet was all I needed to start a fire. Rubbing sticks together isn't a fun way to do it, and should take a hell of a while but it's a perfectly legit way of starting one with the right tinder. Hell, that flashlight I start with is one of the old kind with the reflector. Those parabola are perfect for focusing the sun to the center and lighting your tinder. Granted, the above methods are pretty primitive, but they work just fine. Now, I've never tried it but I'd bet a fair wager that if I took one of these dozens of road flares I keep tripping over and jammed it into a pile of leaves I could set a whole field on fire, cook my raw meat and entertain myself while eating by watching all the stupid zombies in the field burn to the ground. After reading over all the forums I seem to have had a much better first experience than most. To be fair, I guess most people these days wouldn't know how to start a friction fire or how important silence is while hunting/hiding. *shrug* Unfortunately, armed with all that knowledge (and road flares) it was increasingly annoying (for me) to know I had several ways to start a fire, and couldn't. And I really needed that 800bp. It's not a big deal now as I got stuck at the "waiting to create character" screen for about 10 minutes before I hit ESC and clicked "Respawn", half expecting what happened to happen, but I didn't care at that point. :) Anyway...yeah. I can guess why they're rare, and that's fine, but cavemen did it without matches. We're supposedly smarter. Creating fires, in my opinion anyway, shouldn't be that difficult. Campfires are the screen savers of the wilderness. It's not a camp without one...and I really want to camp. And add tarps and paracord. Tents are for pansies. Thanks for listening, --Fox

Honestly I'd prefer matches be more common, but consumable. Fireplaces should take longer to make, fires to start, and food to cook. While cooked meat is certainly linked to the blood mechanic as it raises blood by 800 points, you can still survive without raising blood. You'll die without food. I don't think about healing myself much with food. I think about keeping myself alive with it. I was really surprised I could scarf down three steaks and heal myself 2400 points. If anything I'd prefer the food took longer to eat, there existed a limit to the total food you could eat, and gorging yourself would slow you down or make you sick. Health shouldn't come back immediately upon scarfing food either. Obviously the rule of 3 does not apply to DayZ. (Survival rules: 3 min w/o air, days w/o water, weeks w/o food) This said, since times between having to eat and drink are decreased, time required to regenerate health should as well, but not the instant regen it is now. I suppose there's a limit to when things are realistic to the point they're not fun, and that varies with everyone. But I don't want to die of starvation for no reason other than because the supermarket just wouldn't spawn a can of pasta or a box of matches. That's as bad as dying of dehydration while swimming in a pond. Just because you couldn't find a canteen doesn't mean you should die of thirst. *shrugs* Perhaps there's some very intricate system of checks and balances involved in all of this during the gameplay development stages and my suggestions throw it dangerously out of whack. I wouldn't want that to happen and I doubt this post will have any impact anyway. But if it doesn't, I think it would at least make more sense to players who haven't read up on every little aspect of survival in this game and are running under the assumption that "some things just make sense". *laughs* Besides. I'd love to see some unarmed noob running after a wild boar trying to beat it to death because he's been driven to that level of desperation by hunger.

I started playing today. I played for many hours. I didn't die once. This game will probably have a tutorial one day...but I'm not aware of any Alpha releases that ever have. It was my belief that a reasonable person would recognize that when a game advertises it is an unfinished product and in a very early testing phase that it will be unpolished. Said game might not coddle you or hold your hand...especially this one. That said, rather than coming here to bitch, perhaps you should have come here before you spent the afternoon pissing yourself off. Honestly, during the testing process, I wouldn't want a bunch of "NOOBS" in the servers. They can play when the game goes gold.

However Less Than Lethal (LTL) weapons would make an interesting addition to the game, and give survivors the opportunity to subdue without killing if they feel threatened. Probably not worth the effort though.