Etabubu

Hi Knautscher, fantastic post and thread, probably one of the few worth reading here. I agree with basically everything you said and, as someone else already mentioned, I'm convinced that the game is currently played in this way because people adapted to it and not because it was meant to be like this. Rocket has probably no idea what every new feature he adds will cause in game. Players just make the best of it, they "exploit" it. I'd like to point out a few things though. I've been thinking about it for a while. Maybe you want to take them in consideration and try to "insert" them in your analysis. I really like the idea of this game trying to be as realistic as possible, under all aspects: - physical (you have a body, you have to take care of it) - psychological/emotional (basically what you explained) - tactical (the fighting, both zeds and PvP, the use of weapons, basically Arma2) Some of those aspects are already implemented, others need a lot of work. But there's one aspect which I think has been completely ignored: the environment. I'll try to explain, bear with me. When Rocket created the first version of this mod, he basically took one of the maps used in Arma2 and modified it a bit, adding spawn locations and resources. That makes perfectly sense... to create a new map from scratch would have taken ages. The problem is in the "spawning" of resources itself. Think about it... it's probably the most UNREALISTIC thing ever. The whole game tries so hard to be realistic in many details, but fails in this simple thing. Food magically spawns everywhere? What? THINGS spawn magically... and even worse... WEAPONS AND AMMO. That's not a realistic scenario. Not even close. I know, I know. Of course Rocket used this classic game mechanic, otherwise there would be no game. But the game now exists and it's going under big changes and I think the devteam should start thinking about this aspect. If realism and social interaction are the main ideas behind this concept, then I would suggest to implement "crafting/producing". No, not like in Minecraft. For instance, take the issue with food. Hunting animals is perfect and makes perfect sense. But why not being able to restore a farm and make it produce food again? Or take the even more interesting case of weapons and ammo. You want that super-duper sniper rifle? Sure, but you need to make that factory work again. That means collecting primary resources, restoring electric power and have a certain number of people performing specific tasks. This won't stop PKilling or bandits or whatever. Nobody wants to stop that. You want to kill on sight? Fine, but now your ammo is REAL. Once you shot, it's GONE. It's not gonna respawn in a barn thanks to some invisible god. You need to buy it from people who know how to produce it, or you can try to steal it. That's risky, but hey, you're badass, right? I know very well this is the tip of an iceberg and it would take a long time and huge effort to implement this kind of features, but it would also open up so many different game styles without ruining the game for anyone. It would be an even more interesting social experiment and it would for sure encourage teamwork. I'm not gonna go into details of these mechanics, I have enough work in my daily job as a game designer/programmer. I'm just suggesting a direction DayZ could follow. Ok, I'll stop here, anyone is welcome to discuss these ideas! Or ignore them :)

I really like the Yogscast, but they should have stayed away from DayZ.

@OP: so, you're playing Arma2 in a mod called DayZ, which is a mod for Arma2. Seems legit. Have you ever heard of... Arma2? You should give it a try!