My line of ad hominim was designed to secure a real response. It had to hit what I would assume to be personal territory to get the detailed response I wanted. I apologize if it wasn't necessary. Yes, this game is full of scrubs. It's also full of griefers, has an easily exploitable design, terrible AI, and no end-game content. Early game content is corrupted by heavily armed bandits sniping in major cities. My point is that surviving, by itself, is both easy and tedious. Perhaps you're extremely careful and only play when you have 5 or more clanmates on. But surviving isn't really rewarding in any way, shape, or form in Day Z. You could die, respawn, and have everything you have now back in an hour or two. What's the difference between a day 1 character with full gear and a day 40 character with full gear? My point is that survival isn't meaningful in any measurable sense. I'll offer a kudos, but it seems like just a waste of time to me to spend longer preserving one life than it would take to replace it. Length of time between kills is irrelevant to whether day Z is a deathmatch or not. You suggested that the way to prove you wrong was to produce an obviously "deathmatch" game where matches go an hour or longer, while not accounting for the fact that deathmatch games always have smaller maps than day Z. It's a logical fallacy, how you categorize it is far less important. That certainly isn't taking into account the people who are still learning to exploit the extremely stupid AI, or as another poster pointed out, die from a secondary cause instead of directly from the bullet. Everyone dies a boatload of times when they first start. This introduces a lot of filler deaths that make the number of player kills much lower than it actually is. Does it count people who suicided because they broke their leg and were nowhere near a source of morphine and didn't want to waste their time? I'd need a more detailed breakdown, and focus on people who have been playing long enough to learn the ropes, and check to see if they took player damage that directly or indirectly caused their death. Getting kneecapped while running from zombies is a player murder, not a environmental kill. Large maps and environmental hazards are removed from most deathmatch games because they slow action down enormously. Deathmatch means everyone is trying to kill everyone, and in most areas with most people, that is in fact the goal. I am patient of them, and I think it has potential, or I wouldn't waste time pointing out its flaws and looking at the suggestions. Quest hubs is bad, but I think that you could put a really awesome spin on guard npcs if day Z was on a better engine. Rescuable npc survivors that you can put in your base and give weapons to would very much be in line with "zombie survival simulator" while providing protection for player bases (which I heard a rumor were in the works?) Zombie bosses I see no issue with, in fact there should be a challenge besides other players to get high end loot. Why not have all the best weapons that currently spawn on the ground be spawned on zombies that use them? I fail to see how that would harm the game. PvE servers are a bad idea, but not for the reason you think of. PvE servers would be fucking boring, as there would be nothing to do. Everyone would run to stary sobor and have maxed out loot immediately, and have nothing else to do except shoot endlessly respawning zombies and drive cars around. Day Z doesn't have a soul. It's lack of a soul is why many people are drawn to it. The idea of killing other players while being at a huge advantage is appealing, as is the ability to full-loot. Other people see a zombie survival simulator and want to see what that would be like. Pre-trammel UO, if you played it, was a far better version of Day Z in many, many ways, and very different from every game that came after. Full-loot. Player housing. Stealing from other players. Player killing. It turned into something terrible, but it was probably the most free and fun game that has existed. Currently, this game suits griefers and people who like to pretend to be sociopaths perfectly. It's ill-suited to anything but deathmatch, and that's all that is going to be left if things don't improve. Why exactly should teamwork be so difficult again? Working together and specialization is what took humans to civilization. It is actually the most natural thing we do, having been heavily selected for for thousands and thousands of years. Also, if things worth having are difficult, then why is it so easy to find guns, particularly high powered sniper rifles? This game is so incredibly backward in many ways. Teaming up in an apocalypse would happen. It would happen face to face, and trust would be built. Day Z actively works against that with the complete inablity to customize your appearance, and the fact that everyone has the same skillset. Neither of these are at all realistic. Teaming up in day Z is done outside of the game. People don't form friendships brought on by crisis, because you can't tell friend from foe from far off. People get around this by using teamspeak and similar programs to have the ability to communicate at unrealistic distances, but accidental shootings are easy to do, because everyone looks the same. This is a major, major flaw. Day Z is not well-implimented. The people who would be most successful in a real apocalypse would be those people who rebuild civilization, as a long term goal. Short term, you want to amass weapons and resources and technology to get an edge so you can claim/build a base and then hold it. Day Z you can ONLY destroy, which is a dead-ended strategy. I'm giving it slack because it's an alpha. But many people think those teamwork and cooperative elements aren't important, that the current deathmatch kill on sight is ideal. Where Day Z fails the hardest is because using the tools the game gives you, finding that partner is difficult. Building trust is difficult. Telling it's them when you're scanning a field with a scope is difficult. When you need to go out of the game to do something that should come naturally, the game has failed. "14%. Fourteen in every hundred deaths is a murder. I keep pointing this out. The murder rate is actually going down every day; and it will continue to fall, I expect, as new mechanics are added to support communication, squad identification and cooperative game play. Free-for-all deathmatch? Perhaps the reason you keep reading the same things from me is because I have to respond to the same asinine, baseless claims that get parroted here on the forums every day? Just a thought. Cheers for the post, though. Good read." There are several confounds in the decreasing murder rate. The first is the huge influx of new players as day Z reaches more people. Arma II:CO has been on the top of the steam best selling list for weeks now, the number of new accounts is growing incredibly rapidly. The ability to combat disconnect is also becoming widely known, which doesn't decrease the number of attempted murders, just the number of successful ones. If we take out noobie deaths, and deaths that aren't counted but are directly caused by attempted murder, the number is probably closer to 1 in 3. Given that people actively avoid running into other people most of the time, that is still a pretty high number. Of that high number, how many murders were for a purpose, and not simply because one person had the oppurtunity? Killing on sight happens because it is the only safe choice. You can't tell who someone is from far away, and killing strangers is the most rewarding strategy, and not the most difficult. Especially given they haven't fixed the d/c issue, what's to stop everyone from taking shots at everyone they see, and if the other person survives, not simply d/c and switch servers? The lowest common denominator, the people who server hop for loot and combat d/c, essentially doing their best to make the game as unfun for everyone else as possible, have no reason to change their strategy. It's highly effective and easy to do. Killing noobies for fun with high-tier weapons doesn't cost anything more than the ammo wasted on it. Why would they not do something that turns electro and cherno into a continuous deathmatch? I'm trying to articulate a better thought out version of the concerns that you tire of responding to every day. I hope I've given you a different perspective.

What would be the point? It was worthwhile in fallout because it wasn't tied directly to you. In day Z, it doesn't matter.

I'm ok with that too. My issues with the bandit/non-bandit gameplay is mostly related to the fact that being a bandit is easier AND more rewarding. Weapons and ammo should be 1/10th as available as they currently are, and finding sniper rifles and ghillie suits are way, way too easy. So you have a lot of bored, heavily armed bandits, and not much to do with other survivors.

I'd like to have several starting options. As is, crowbar only (hatchet is too incredibly useful, my favorite day z item hands down), etc. Zeds are glitchy, and I like breaking into hospitals to start out with.

So they'd be wasting ammo shooting at corpses. Sounds good to me.

You'd have to survive a very long time to die from that, and in any case, cows are in. Dairy products galore.

*Yawn* You really think that Day Z is the pinnacle of player freedom? UO did it 20 years ago, and better than Day Z is doing it now. The only question is how much will day Z improve, if at all. That would remove any sense of community. Everyone would be a stranger, every time, making it even more a FFA deathmatch.

I saw a czech chest pouch the other day (6 slots, takes up backpack space) and I thought "given we start with an 8 slot backpack, why the fuck is this still in the game?"

Actually, the game just rewards you for shooting on sight and punishes you for not doing the same. What exactly makes you think it asks you to be a good person?

I'm really tired of you posting the same shit in every single post you make. It's a tired, terrible arguement that could be seen through by your 85 IQ child. (Unless your wife is a genius, which I highly doubt.) I'll deal with your empty advice line by line. "If you want to penalize someone for shooting at you, return fire. Don't run crying to the designer and ask him to fight your battles for you. Man up and get it done." In a game with sniper rifles and semi-realistic bullet damage, the aggressor is overwhelmingly successful. If the person who shoots first has any skill, they won't reveal themselves until they're assured of the kill. If you have time to fire back, it means the other person was a scrub. Not valuable except against noobie bandits who mostly sit at the coast where their sniper is only up against noobies with maks and loud enfields. This advice is terrible, stop giving it. "The game is not a "deathmatch." No deathmatch game permits survival for an hour let alone 40 days." Classic strawman arguement. No deathmatch game has anywhere near this large a map, and the reason is that it would last just as long. Trite, and worthless point. "If it feels like a deathmatch to you, it's likely because you're standing in the wrong sorts of places. My suggestion: move. If it still feels like a deathmatch, keep moving." Around 80% of the server's best loot is in 3 locations. If you decide you don't need good gear, just food, water, and hunting supplies, your ability to survive is nearly limitless. Stick to worthless areas of the map, and be bored out of your mind, because there is nothing to do if you decide you just want to live. No challenge, just tedium. Why play that game when you can just stare at a wall in real life? There are two major types of players: 1) Those trying to get end-game loot but haven't learned how to do it effectively yet without getting killed. 2) Those who have gotten end-game loot and now realize they have nothing to do, so they just kill other players for fun. "We're only in alpha and yet you have every tool at your disposal to create a survivor haven already. Start a clan - advertise the server you are on and the services you provide. Tell people to approach unarmed or face consequences. Dole out medical supplies, food, water and transportation to needy survivors. Defend them against bandits. You can do all of this already, you're just too lazy to do it so you want the designer to come along and build a bunch of unecessary UI and blinking lights and colored buttons and arrows pointing "Go here!"" You can get a group of people together, but you can't actually build a goddamn thing. You can't clear an area of zeds. Tent forests will get looted because there's no one to watch it, and you don't need a tent full of loot for anything except staring at a tree and eating/drinking when an indicator starts blinking. You can rebuild vehicles, but for what purpose? You can't take a helicopter off the map and escape the infected areas, which would be a win scenario if this was a single player game. There are no islands that have things of value on them, and it's safer just to walk or run everywhere else, and a whole lot less work than fixing a car or a truck. You could make them to have them, but it's an expenditure of time and effort for no real benefit. "If you want something to happen, make it happen. If you want something to stop, put a stop to it. Stop asking the designer to do your work for you, you lazy, slack-jawed ne'er-do-wells." I want the game to have less mindless PvP. So do members of the community. I pictured a game that was similar to UO in the wilderness, where you had to keep your eye on blues who might turn on you or steal from you, but spontaneous teamwork, which is human nature, would be supported. Day Z artificially punishes the natural tendency to team up by having everyone look exactly the same (no ability to recognize friends vs foes from far off), having NO specialization, removing as much interdependency as possible, and making the only plentiful resource be weapons. It's a game that is far more realistic in encouraging killing others, going out of it's way to make working togather difficult. The ONLY person with the ability to cause real change in that area is rocket, and he either doesn't know how to, or doesn't want to. Shooting on sight is the best, easiest, and most rewarding personal strategy. High-tier gear is easy to get to, and there is nothing in this game besides gear acquisition. Player interaction unless you form a clan is overwhelmingly negative, and zombies are ignorable at best and simply irritating at worst. Individual players can't affect that this game has become a deathmatch on a massive map. Cooperation is a losing strategy because real life aspects of cooperation aren't supported, and nothing of value can be gotten through cooperation. There is no worthwhile endevor that requires multiple people, you can't customize your character at all, so it's really easy to kill allies who can only be found and worked with due to teamspeak/skype, which are external programs. I, like many other players, have played the game extensively for a few weeks before realizing how incredibly empty it is once you look at a loot map and at the game mechanics. You're 100% wrong when you say this game isn't a free-for-all deathmatch. The map is bigger and gearing up is more difficult at first because of the learning curve, but that's all it is currently. There's nothing else to do. Survival is easy and boring if you're not trying to get top tier loot. Top tier loot is only useful for either getting more top tier loot and killing players. This game has potential, which is why I keep an eye on it. But currently with everything mechanically stacked towards deathmatch, that's all it's going to be. Telling people it's not or that they can change it is is either wrong (if you're not smart enough to see it for what it is) or a lie. Stop Ctrl + V'ing your same terrible advice in every single "this mindless PvP sucks" thread. You make a lot of really great points here, and I've had many of the same thoughts regarding game theory. Bandit skins were poorly implimented, but that's because dying reset the skin, instead of tying it to the account, like UO did. Death isn't any more meaningful in Day Z than it was in UO, in fact, it's even easier to get high-tier gear. rocket clearly had no idea how to impliment bandit skins effectively, and because he did so poorly, and then removed them, made things even worse. For this game to not be a deathmatch, there needs to be 1) Rewarding goals that can only be achieved via cooperation. -Completely missing 2) Character customization so it's easier to tell friend from foe (this is a problem stone age people solved) -Completely missing, and ghillie suits are common enough that it wouldn't matter. 3) More end-game things to do. Zombies are completely static enemies unless they do something surprising due to a bug. Gear can be gotten in an hour. Food and water are plentiful. Vehicles, which take a lot of time to get repaired and fueled, are easy to destroy and don't really provide any benefit other than storage.

What the title states. The purpose of spawning on the coast is to not make spawn zones where bandits just sit, but many people just suicide until they find themselves on the part of the beach where they want to be, and it makes starting out needlessly confusing for new players. Here's what I propose: Divide the coast into several sections. For the purposes of this example, let's say 5. Section 1 is the west-most, section 5 is the east-most. If I choose to spawn in section 1, it spawns me randomly somewhere along the westmost 20% of the coast. The number 1 reason why this would be helpful is because it would save everyone time that currently is just wasted. -People can more easily spawn near the same location if they want to group up without having to suicide repeatedly. -People can pick up allies from the coast with a rough RZ without having to suicide repeatedly. -Noobs can choose to keep spawning in roughly the same spot so they can learn the area over their first couple lives before moving on. -Players can easily decide whether to head east, west, or just straight north without having to suicide or run along a coast that isn't dangerous at all. Thoughts? I'm really not seeing a downside to this idea.

What an amazingly moronic logic People rage about zombies breaking their legs because in any other version you could sustain a decent amount of hits before actually breaking them In 1.7.1.5 even on full blood a single zombie hit can break them' date=' which makes no sense at all OMG IT'S TOTALLY RELATED TO COOP FUN TIME THEY ARE JUST MAD BECAUSE THEY CAN'T HAVE COOP FUN TIME Bloody moron....oh and good luck trying to get DayZ to actively prevent people from communicating and coordinating Might as well write a virus that shuts down every 3rd party VOIP active on the system....same thing So does DayZ have mechanics to ACTIVELY support playing with friends? What you're saying makes no sense I'm not sure which part of the current leg breaking mechanic I like less, the ease at which pathetic zombie slaps accomplishes it or that morphine would permanently fix it. Most of the time, breaking your leg is just another way to die.

The issue isn't that people are coordinating with friends, which is completely impossible to stop, by the way, it's that finding actual friendly players is impossible due to the game mechanics and high player turnover from server to server, which means coordinating through external means is 1) the best way to survive and 2) the only way to group. Nothing is impossible to stop. But, that's not the discussion here. I don't know how many times I need to stress this.... what happens in the current system cannot be carried over to a hypothetical system that doesn't exist. You say people aren't friendly. That's great, it's true. But, it cannot be assumed that if we removed outside groups form the game, it would remain the same. It might, it might not. Assuming it would is just that, an assumption. I understand what you're saying, it's just irrelevant. Actually, people coordinating in game is completely impossible to stop. There are too many ways to communicate and coordinate. The only way to prevent external programs from working is by making day z actively try to shut them down, which would make many antivirus programs flare up. Even then, how many people have smartphones that can do the same damn thing, and wouldn't even be detectable? You can't remove outside groups, so discussing the ramifications is a moot point. HOWEVER, even if we're talking in hypothetical scenarios, there's still no reason to work with strangers instead of killing them or avoiding them. There's more risk for less reward. Increasing the reward for working with others is the only way things are going to change. There are a number of actually possible ways to do this, that don't involve an impossible suggestion like "prevent people from grouping using other means". Even if we could do this, how would it possibly make things better?

This game is largely a prisoner's dilemma. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma ), except every second you could kill someone is another round. Unless you actually know the person, there is no reason not to rat them out, which in this game is pk.

The issue isn't that people are coordinating with friends, which is completely impossible to stop, by the way, it's that finding actual friendly players is impossible due to the game mechanics and high player turnover from server to server, which means coordinating through external means is 1) the best way to survive and 2) the only way to group.

Honestly hygiene the way you describe it would be borderline stupid in day z. You'd want to smell like dirt and zombie, not washed clean so your natural BO can float on the wind. You'd wash your hands and possibly your ass (not in that order of course), but the rest you'd actually want dirty. Also, RNG is generally bad for games. It shouldn't be introduced anywhere it isn't directly improving the game.

I don't know how you put up with their voices for 4 hours. I was practically cheering when you shot them until I realized they still didn't shut up.

Honestly, why not let people choose from several equally shitty loadouts? I'd love to have a crowbar to start with, and would forget the rest, because I like to break into hospitals without having to fire a gun or throw tin cans at the glass until it breaks. I don't want to have to ditch a single zombie that managed to aggro me through the wall while I was prone and not moving, I want to have the option to bash his head in and not have to grab other loot and double back. Can you really say that the choice of: 1) pack, bandage, and painkillers 2) pack and crowbar 3) pack and hunting knife 4) pack and compass would be a bad thing?

Given that riding a bike is a dinner bell to players and zeds alike, people who are saying that they want bikes to be rare are 100% wrong. Put a bike in every city. It's a damn noob trap anyway.

It's more like "there's so many players, hopping from server to server, that everyone you don't know in real life you're not likely to ever meet again", which means that shooting someone and taking their stuff if they aren't a real-life buddy is by far the best strategy. Avoiding them is better if you can't kill them, and being friendly is only going to be a losing strategy.

Honestly, server-side location and gear would fix two of the main issues with the game: server hopping for loot, and using other servers to effectively teleport to a more advantageous position. We don't need a city with no zeds as much as we need zeds to not continuously respawn. If I clear a city, zeds shouldn't spawn for a while. What would be really cool, would be if there were generators in buildings known to be valuable, that require fuel to operate. When you put fuel in them, quality loot begins to spawn in, but zombies also continuously spawn in (think left for dead finales). This would be too difficult Suddenly, people have a reason to actually kill zombies en masse, and a reason to not just server hop for loot. Make some new items that only spawn through this method, or simply remove high-end items that currently spawn normally, or both. People will have a reason to do something that would require a moderately armed group to invest time, or a heavily armed group to allow efficient resource collection. If you could get great gear only by grouping up (or by killing people who had) more people would do it. The ability to clear a city by killing 30-50 zeds would be a reasonable goal for fresh spawns if they worked together in groups of 2-6, and would give time to really comb through the loot effectively. Initiating finales by powering a generator would give well-equipped groups the ability to get large amounts or high quality gear, but be too difficult for people solo. Suddenly, two different tiers of people have a reason to work together. This game needs more goals that require a group effort, especially for fresher spawns. Zombies also need to be less of an irritation (and their ability to break legs makes them extremely irritating) and more of an actual challenge (as currently you can simply run away with no risk). Not having server-side positions and loot is also a problem, and would make people server hop less, which allows players to get to know each other. Trust could actually be built. You throw a lot of pretty phrases around, but most of this post is either short-sighted or meaningless. This game needs to be improved relentlessly, which is what rocket is doing. It absolutely nails the harshness, the chaos, and the destruction that occurs in an apocalypse. What it is currently lacking is the ability to create anything. You can't create trust because there is no static community. You can't tell friend from foe because there is little to no character customization. You can repair vehicles, but you can't build a base or anything worth defending. Yet. I believe rocket is working hard on fixing things and making this game deeper. We have the tools to break and maim, and can fix some things, but many people want to do the far harder task of creating.

I agree with most of this, but the idea of "dedicated roles" is pretty lacking in day z. You choose whether to have a sniper rife or an assault rife, and you COULD have one person be a pack mule for medical supplies, but when everyone can do everything equally well, everyone is just another gun, which again, is either going to be a sniper or an assault rifle. Shotguns are useful because you can load slugs and turn them into poor man's rifles, which are a poor man's sniper rifles. I'd really like to see more actual versatility, but with developed characters being able to carry every single tool, there's no actual dedication to a role. Other than your weapon and what gear you happen to have on you, you are exactly the same as everyone else. Which is why killing for gear is so valuable, because there's only one item in the entire game that actively promotes teamwork.