semipr0

I don't expect base building functionality of any type until beta. We might get tents and/or craftable survival shelters before that. But I really have no expectation of the dev team to get base building and permanent/semi-permanent storage into DayZ for another year at the earliest. Too many other things to focus on first really.

So I was giving some long thought to DayZ in regards to its overall game design and it occurred to me that I'd inadvertantly come across the answer to DayZ's chronic problems with a lack of "direction" and/or "purpose" while watching some shows on Netflix. Sounds a little crazy but I'll just put it out there in quick plain language and then expand on it a bit from that point. (WITH THE EXPLICIT UNDERSTANDING THAT THIS IS ALPHA...BUT ITS A PROBLEM THE MOD NEVER SOLVED EITHER SO ITS A LONG TERM ISSUE.) So...here it is; DayZ is like WoW, minus any sort of progressive evolution. Yes I just heard the record needle of your minds scratch right off the vinyl there so I'd best explain myself a bit more succinctly cause otherwise theres no real point. Its kind of a gigantic stretch to compare DayZ and World of Warcraft....ones about surviving an apocalypse and the other is about diddling night elves in Goldshire (err....that is the point of WoW right? I really haven't spent much time there in the last four years). Anyways that aside whats the one thing about WoW that everyone can generally agree on? The total lack of individuality. You are Ret Pally #163619361379rFWERtQWR15661561 and you've got the same copies of the same gear that so many other people have that it literally needs a 255 character hashID to even be stored in a database. Theres nothing individual about you at all...except maybe what you're telling the night elves in Goldshire...and even thats probably not very original. Now how does that apply in circumstance to DayZ? Well its simple...DayZ has zero individuality whatsoever from character to character. As much as I appreciate the fact that there are three distinctly racial females and males now as opposed to one hacked in female player model that was taken from an Arma 2 NPC model and all that...its still pretty much disposable people. Disposable people with no real identities and no true acquisitions of worth. Everything you have everyone else can get. Now, what is the key component of player investment in an RPG experience? (And sorry if you weren't aware folks but DayZ is classed technically as an RPG). The key component of player investment in an RPG is progressive evolution. People will even stop diddling night elves in Goldshire for a bit to go do something else in WoW if it involves something that achieves this goal. This doesn't just apply to World of Warcraft I just wanted to use it as an example for its stunning lack of player individuality (Which purple haired night elf were you diddling anyways? The purple haired one with the blue skin or the purple haired one with the weird face paint?) but conversely WoW at least offers systems of character evolution. DayZ has never offered this as part of its experience there is nothing to take pride in achieving because its all transitory and worthless to start with. The only skills or individual hallmarks a DayZ player has are the skills they sit at the keyboard and aim a gun with, or vomit racial slurs into Direct VOIP with...whichever tends to suit I suppose. So what DayZ truly needs to evolve beyond the mods conundrum of having no purpose after the intial gear up phase is completed is player evolution. Now lets not approach this with a closed mind, I'm hardly calling for talent trees or skill paths or whatever. I'm simply saying that perhaps part of what DayZ is can somehow reflect on our characters, if played over time, to make these characters "evolve" within the environment in ways that make them special and individual to the player. See its really easy right now to just jump into DayZ and spend a few hours looting around and then get so bored that you're literally willing to commit murder to enterain yourself. And the reason for that is because theres no real incentives or visual feedback that rewards not doing that. Nor anything that penalizes it either. Systemically video games are limited in how to implement the true experience of personal growth and evolution an individual actually experiences and I am not really expecting DayZ to break any new ground in this area, the engine its built in is simply too limited...but there are things this engine can do that can help the scenario of bland, die stamped, disposable people expand into a richer character experience that creates personal identification with a character and thus supports individuality and by association reduces mindless murder by creating a point of actual risk in the possible loss of a character or the repetitive and wanton slaughter of other peoples characters. First up is a couple minor things that aren't really so minor when it comes down to implementation but they're so minor in real life we barely give them much thought.....hair growth, facial hair, eye color, scarring from wounds, broken noses, muscular development, cardiovascular development, mental development....and so on and so forth. Now some of these things are pretty difficult to implement though they are things I've seen people ask for...simple facts are that scalable meshes and variable diffuse/normal maps that could effectively deal with something like hair growth or scarring and/or bone structure changes due to injury are pretty intensive systems to develop...you don't see them in most games not because no ones thought about it...its because the technology just isn't up to the task, nor are there enough artists assigned to any one project to produce enough resources to support that kind of functionality in anything but the most basic and generic of levels. But some of these things aren't specifically impossible to implement into DayZ in fact they are inherently possible within the current systems dynamics that are in the alpha. You don't really need a talent tree/skill tree in DayZ...you just need to get a little better at everything you do just cause you're doing it regularly and over long term stretches. Lets take the last three things I mentioned and turn them into game elements. Muscular Development: [(MAC - pi x TSF)2/4 pi] - 10 (6.5 for females)...see easy. Okay not so easy. But regardless there is well established math behind the measurment of muscle mass, its called anthropometrics. And it basically governs the understanding of repetitive muscle use to overall strength and muscle growth. This can be easily harnessed as a game mechanic which gives people a baseline aggregate gain in conjunction with cardiovascular development which can be measured and increased numerically over a period of time. Cardiovascular Development: Used in conjunction with Muscular Development, you can create an cross line equation between Cardiovascular Development and Muscular Development and based on gains and/or losses (from injury) you can set a persistent daily growth of a certain percentage in capability. This would effectively do very basic but useful things in the long term character play of achieving slightly longer sprinting durations before exhaustion, being able to carry more weight by expanding inventory space by one gear slot per worn item per percentage of development achieved and an increase in the overall general resistance of illness as well as increasing the capability of the player to recover from minor injury with faster recovery times than the baseline. Two very simple human developmental systems which can be harnessed by DayZ as game elements to incentivize longer term existences, without really having to do much more than the system is already doing. And in very simple english it means the longer you live the slightly better you become. Mental Development: This is a much ignored portion of human development in games it doesn't really appear often but its also a key factor in the DayZ experience which I feel could be easily harnessed as a mechanic which engenders a feeling of player evolution and daily gains. Mental development can best be described in game system application as the ability to discern the overall use of an object in conjunction with another object. Lets take a camp stove and a gas cannister for example. Now me...being a Boy Scout/Ex-Military type..I know exactly what these two things are and how to use them. That is mental development based on exposure. If you were to hand both these items to my fiancee with no documentation and no explanation as to what their functions were...she would not immediately understand their purpose. And shes a lawyer, so...shes not stupid, shes just had no exposure to these kinds of systems over her lifetime and thus lacks the mental development to make the immediate connection. Let face it, somethings are slightly more complex than a game likes to make them...such as the operation and maintenance of an M4A1Carbine Assault Rifle. Part of mental development could be tied into the direct ability to understand the usage of certain weapon attachments. Given as you're not really plaguing us with the need for understanding the actual weapon systems and/or having to break down and clean one which is even more complex, the mental development it takes to actually understand how to, perhaps, simply remove a stock from a weapon might take a little time for your average non-military civilian. So perhaps one application of mental development would be percentile gain in understanding of interactive systems via timed exposure...it simply makes no sense that everyone that just landed on the beach knows how to break down an assault carbine...when in reality a good sized portion of the population can't even figure where the safety on a hand gun is. Another application of systemic understandings in mental development would be how competent you are at surviving at all. Ergo the more mental development you get over time, the better you are at sustaining critical intakes of protein and hydration and you get a greater benefit from them due to your greater understanding of balancing your diet to the needs of an extreme environment. Cause again lets face it, if you took someone that was used to eating at Taco Bell and threw them into the Brazilian jungle for a week with nothing but a flashlight, chances are pretty good that they wouldn't be coming back out again, even in a situation of access to civilization and its creature comforts such as food in can they'd still be challenged to maintain a healthy diet and get the most out of it....which to be honest even some of the most health conscious people still have trouble with due to immediate or non-immediate access to proper dietary intake for their physical needs. So effectively you could use mental development as a way of giving a percentile increase over time in how much water benefits a player when its consumed. Right now I can sit at well and spam that thing til my stomach is going to explode and I don't really get much out of that except the nebulous concept of "Well if you do this right and theres some food involved too the correct balance of both may produce an overall effect of healing over time"...thats nice, perhaps maybe mental development would make these two things cost less of the base resources it takes to achieve that state based on the mental understanding of how to balance dietary intake? And another critical application of mental development is stability. The ability to deal with stress and/or rationalize difficult decisions and scenarios. Faced with situation of starvation or murder, your average human being is going to probably initially make quick decisions to their own benefit without feeling any cost from the scenario itself...but faced with these situations over time, depending on how you deal with them, you either become far more stable and rational in regards to them, or you tend to lose your grip slowly but surely and end up somewhere on the other side of PTSD and in some worst cases total insanity. Sanity and stability are two figures which could also be affected by mental development, both of which would be affected by character actions. To use the classical hero/bandit approach only really makes a tacit attempt at giving these truly human experiences a number...no true effects, just a number, perhaps in the cases of some mods of the mod that number might have mattered, but in the SA I think this needs more than a number..it needs direct benefits/deficiets that associate with it. Mental health is often reflected by physical health, taking mental development in association with and in aggregate accumulation of player choices and actions can lead DayZ down a road of slightly more realistic control of the internets rather sociopathic tendency to not give a fuck about what they do in relation to other people cause all that matters is that they win in the end. Add a little thing like depression as a statistical debuff to the consistent pursuit of wanton murder and you may actually be on a track to make people think about how their actions are going to affect them...you could even go as far as to add insanity, client side rendering of zombies that simply aren't there..causing the player to react to them as if they were real threats and compromising their location/wasting their ammunition is a simple application of "insanity" which could be used as an end system deficiet for being a cold blooded killer. (Not to say that everyone goes insane from killing other people but..lets just use it as a baseline cause this is a game after all). Whereas conversely the judicious use of force only when required could be incentivized by simply giving a player a better capability of dealing with the stress of random life threatening situations as a daily course of events without creating a deficiet to their physical and/or mental well being. So...in simple terms, heroes can kill more often because they don't kill more often, whereas bandits might end up in a situation where they cannot perform at physical peaks due to mental deficiets accrued from their chosen pattern of behavior and thus while killing more they cannot do as much as efficiently....and I totally think the insanity thing is a definite area of possibility using client sided rendering because...I'm already kinda freaked out by zombie rabbits, and thats not even intentional, imagine what could be done...just with that unintentional side effect if applied with a little creative thought? Now what in the name of hell did this long winded post have to do with Netflix? Well in relative terms, why did we care about The Walking Dead, to name one of the most relevant examples? It certainly wasn't for the gratuitous amount of dismembering zombies that occurred, nor was it particularly about the ridiculous amount of action and explosions going on because those weren't as typical as you might assume...but it was all about the characters, who they were, who they became...why they became that person in the first place. So...in short....DayZ needs to support who you are in relation to who you have chosen to be, to give some level of meaning to the experience and to give the player a sense of ownership and responsibility within the world they're sharing with others. Cause DayZ never has...and because it never has, its never really been much more than a death match game with a rather large map. And the way to start supporting that is to start quantifying the human experience of living in the world DayZ presents into mathematically measurable and applicable systems that can benefit and define the player beyond their gear or the shirt they're wearing. Anyways...just some very long winded thoughts, if you made this far into the post, I appreciate your time.

If they were hitting DayZ they'd have said something about it. You're dealing with people that are reveling in their own infamy right now, its not like they're going to neglect to mention what they're doing because the entire point of it is "for the lulz" but in reality the entire point of it is for the attention. Perhaps whoever is behind it all thinks they'll get a book deal after they do their prison time, Who knows...don't really care either. The unfortunate truth of the world is nobody cared about these guys when they were taking down GMod RP servers. It just wasn't worth anyones time because there wasn't enough money behind the potential damages to incite criminal investigation. Over the last week and a half they've stepped up to spitting in the eyes of EA, Microsoft, Internap, Black Lotus, Cloudflare, LMN and a good sized number of other very large net entities...DERP can DERP, but they are running on extremely borrowed time at this point. Lulzsec couldn't get caught either...they were "smarter" than the feds too. Seems they weren't smarter for long enough though. So in the end, I'm not even sure I entirely disagree with this DERP groups philosophy to a certain extent...but they aren't targetting DayZ cause if they were they'd have said so....free publicity is free publicity after all.

There are no instances of mention of DayZ going all the way back to their original launch of this twitter site. They are not targetting DayZ, currently they appear to be targetting XBL...if that somehow is affecting DayZ, then we have a larger conspiracy than a bunch of guys with USB drives wandering around botting unsecured hardware to create hostile networks, to figure out.

This DERP group hasn't targeted DayZ. Its mostly throughout its history been focused on GMod communities and Cloudflare/LMN services, its only just recently stepped up to Internap level and has been hitting much bigger targets...but they haven't launched a direct attack at DayZ itself. Its possible that they've hit something thats directly affecting the primary hive host though, but its collateral damage of something else they're doing. And yeah that "leaked personal info" is definitely not their information, otherwise they wouldn't have acknowledged it.

Atypical responses were made in regards to similar concerns forwarded about the mod. And people did look to themselves and it required mods of the mod to actually achieve any form of actual growth for the experience. My boredom is not from my lack of ability to engage myself in creative story telling for the purposes of filling the time. But if the true content of a game must come from its players in the form of adaptive story telling and player created mods simply to fill in obvious game systems gaps....then the game isn't really doing much of a job of not being boring on its own. I've walked from one end of Chernarus to the other over the last couple years more times than I can count, there were great fights, great retreats, great losses, great bases, great group tactical work with my boys, lots of little bits of self made fun. All I'm asking the actual DayZ game to do is actually take a stab at being a game...and not the framework for someone else to make a real game out of. Not even Bethesda is guilty of that kind of half measure design. Regardless of pretty much everything they make requiring user created fixes and improvements they do at least release a fully featured game. Is it really asking DayZ so much to actually have some features to engage the player beyond depending on the players imagination? If you ask that question about the mod, I'd say its probably asking a lot, cause...the mod was free, and we got a lot out of it for not having to pay anything (relatively at least). We paid for this, I'm kind of hoping that means that the end result will be a fully featured game.

Did you not read the first part of the original post? Far as quantifying the subjective, we quantify the subjective on a daily basis. You are quantifying the subjective by forming opinions about a post you read on a forum from your own point of view. Mental health can be quantified if you're completely adverse to the idea of anyone quantifying mental health you need to speak to the people at the APPI cause they've been quantifying it now for over 60 years. The associated mental conditions related to extreme stress are not as subjective as you seem to think. Health conditions based on lifestyle are not as subjective as you may think.

Its about giving the game a shape at all. Not just the way I want it to be but a way. Tell me what shape this game has. A big piece of terrain with guns scattered around and occasional AI hazards? People killing each other for lack of anything else to do? Thats a hell of a feature set for a game thats been as popular as DayZ has been since its inception. Right now we're playing the game the way Dean wants it played...we're playing it his way or we're going to be "punished" ergo, don't fucking eat and drink and you're going to fucking die. Is that an imposition on your sensibilities? Cause if not then why would a system that simply adds complexity and depth to what Dean is already doing and benefits you for managing it well...regardless of what you do....killing people or not, be an imposition on your way of playing the game? I'm not proposing anything more than an expansion of what you're already dealing with, just giving a meaning to everything beyond a food and water, a meaning to your actions, a goal to achieve, something to value in your experience in the game, something to truly be sad to lose if you lose it, as compared to now where I kinda like dying cause it gives me an excuse to keep playing at the moment...which in and of itself is an direct indication that something is seriously wrong with the current dynamics, when dying is more fun than living....you haven't achieved a survival simulation.

That is English. I realize I'm a wordy bastard and I can lik tolly say thins wit way less ltrs...but its just not how I think so what you get is what comes out of my brain. I don't think in sound bytes...I think in novella. Sorry if that offends or causes cerebral hemorrhage.

No...its not. Its how you've chosen to understand it. It was a simple and black and white example. You got hung up on that and decided the entire post was about it. Thats not my problem...its yours. The root of the idea is to play the game to a complex set of parameters that yield variant and beneficial and in some cases negative results depending on how you manage them. Suffice it to say I will never use such a cut and dried and easily understandable parallel of play styles such as Hero/Bandit in my explanations here again given as single minded individuals seem to be able to discern my "sekret agenduh" simply by reading those code words.

From a certain point of view...achieving a game design that has a parallel to heroin is kind of the holy grail of game design in general.

Right the first 520+ words are fine, and a choice few in the other 300 are not. Can we just get past that and understand my explanation that I'm not simply talking in complete black and whites here? Its just as possible for a hero to lose their marbles in a scenario where they are not meeting other key critical health concerns as it would be for any other style of player. Its not about reward A/punish B..its about layered depths of achievement and challenge all of which work together in a complex web of interconnected variables that all have direct affect on the player and each other. The associated effects of which are variable depending on how they are managed. Think of it as SimPerson....SimPerson with a Gun™. So aside from the daily routine of wandering around looking at the scenery and occasionally dodging bullets or throwing lead at other people, you are also managing this internal system of needs which begin to define you as a person over time.

I believe it will give people a moment to pause and evaluate the risks. Of course this doesn't apply to everyone..some people just want to watch the world burn after all. But we don't shoot people for fun and profit in real life because there are associated risks with doing so. Loss of freedom being one of the more generally known ones, but there is the risk of your own death occurring in the process as an unintentional side effect of having decided to go on a murder spree. We don't engage in these kinds of behaviors generally because the risks are too imposing. We have too much to lose. We can rationalize it around morality and that kind of thing if we really want to pick nits...but in general, people refrain from murdering other people not because of morality but because of fear of loss. Thats kind of the sad state of the human condition because as you may have noticed people that have nothing to lose, or have no fear of reprisal are far more content to butcher other human beings than most of the rest of us...and its because we have that fear...not because we have morality. A generic killer in DayZ has no fear because they have nothing to lose. I don't like to use the term "bandit" specifically because a bandit is actually someone who puts some effort into taking what you have beyond shooting you in the face from a nice safe distance. But your general killer in DayZ...someone who's just going to pop you because you're there will do so because there is no fear whatosever. Anything they lose should things not go their way...is replacable within minutes or at worst an hour. Life has to have value to fear losing it. I believe the same can be applied in a game environment if done in a well implemented manner.

Again its not about punishing bandits...punishing bandits should be done by people with guns thats kind of the point. You can read the above to get a better idea of what I mean. People need to stop getting hung up on small points and understand the larger systemic intentions here. I used that as a baseline example..I even say that its a baseline. Its not complex. Its not full feature presented...its an idea that evolves...kind of like how I'd like to see people evolve.

No what basically happened is you ran aground of a point you disagreed with then discounted everything else. Which is fine, you're welcome to disagree with it...but I don't think addressing the validity of behavioral choices affecting character outcomes is something that should be so shallowly discounted either. What I'm describing is not an indepth system, its a simple, if wordy, explanation of what a more complex system could be...and in all fairness the system could be even more complex than my simple description of it. So don't immediately assume just because I painted that out as an example that I completely believe that good guys should get rewarded and bad guys should be punished, I'm simply using it as an example system which could be implemented to help give the experience depth. Now does that mean I think bandits should get the shaft and heroes should get the night elves? No...not entirely, I think there should be a lot of factors figured into the overall conditional mental health of all players regardless of their chosen style of combat...its just really too complex to plot it out in a simple idea forwarding forum post. All factors should be considered in regards to the evolution or retardation of a characters development...and negative and positive benefits should not be wholly and totally in the corner of one playstyle or the other, but a combination of all relevant factors leading to various individual results end up doing something slightly interesting...ergo, your toon kinda ends up with a personality based on what your own personality has molded into it. So again...its a little more complex than you've painted it, but in fairness its a lot more complex than I've painted it as well.

Life is a sandbox, the choices you make define who you are and what you achieve. DayZ is a sandbox, the choices you make determine absolutely nothing...there is nothing to achieve because...there is nothing to achieve. That is not a sandbox, that is using "sandbox" as an excuse for not having slightly more complex game dynamics. So in truth, self "professed" sandbox would be a far more accurate description. The last true "sandbox" game was SWG...but that is a subject for another forum entirely.

I don't think this will ever be a deterrent because it never was a deterrent. If you played the mod especially in the later versions previous to the SA's release, on Veteran or Expert difficulty servers...the entire "dinner bell" situation of firing off an Enfield in a populated area was only, at best, a minor annoyance for experienced players. I have no faith in AI, especially not Arma AI...zombies aren't going to get more complex..they're not going to start "thinking" and will likely opt for the old methods of simply substituting quality for quantity in that regard...I.E. total numbers of zombies being increased, total damage per hit being increased..but again these are not problems for experienced players of the game beyond...perhaps, a very dark night where they can't see at all and they have no weapons. So...again, 10 - 20 zombies aren't going to make me think about much other than when I have to move out of their way and how far I have to go to lose them all..which frankly won't be that far...cause you can hardly implement AI that will chase a player all the way across the map without annoying the shit out of people...so that'll never happen, so...again, zombies are not a deterrent nor are they an obstacle...and largely they add nothing definitive to the experience at all except to qualify it as a Zombie Horror Survival game....and the emphasis is pretty heavy on survival and not so much on Zombie or Horror.

Again I'm not inherently opposed to DayZ having guns in it....what the problem is for me is regardless of how many guns there are, there is no purpose, there is no depth and thus the experience becomes bland and boring and lacks any challenge whatsoever in a rather short amount of time....it always has. I've always played DayZ in spurts. About 45 days at a stretch, off and on, then I stop..cause its boring. The prevalence of guns or even a lack of them would not change the shallow nature of the simulated experience. To change that, you must add tangible benefits for having invested the time.

I think you're kind of focused solely on the fact that I used KOS in the title and you're not fully understanding what I'm suggesting or why. While what I suggest could benefit the situation of "KOS" its main thrust in theory is to provide definition, direction and purpose for the experience. The reduction in KOS mentality is only a possible happy side effect of what I'm proposing. I find the key issues which are a lack of direction and purpose are the root cause of that problem..and other problems the DayZ experience has always had.

This is very true but this can be said of any game experience wherein there are very few controlling systems in of which to define a path outside of that. The ideas behind this post are essentially rooted in attempting to add a structure to the experience which is somewhat unobtrusive to the sandbox nature of the game. Again I'm saying lets make it a bit more like real life to give that simple structure. You don't do/or do things in your life depending on the weight of the negative to positive benefits you achieve from either choice. You don't eat an entire pizza by yourself because to do so is inviting yourself to the cardiac ward at some point down the line, and/or you do eat a whole pizza by yourself because you really like pizza and you are unconcerned with the need for angioplasty at some point in your future. The point of the above example is both choices have benefits and deficiets, and every choice has these benefits and deficiets, even such simple choices as...watching pornography or watching a documentary....meaningless choice in practicality but in the same general vein, you either gain or lose something from either experience. Its an invisible structure of personal development....we all live in it daily so we don't even really notice it. Some people may not notice it at all as its literally just instinctual and below the need for thought to them...or in some unfortunate cases they may be incapable of complex self awareness in any regard whatsoever. So yeah, what you say is true...but what DayZ can be is more than just what the players make of it. Its all in how the experience is defined. Right now beyond geography, retro-architecture, basic human survival and ballistics...DayZ doesn't really have any definition at all. So without an definition of experience, the experience is simply what is made of it at any given time.

Obviously you'd find a Coleman camp cooking kit in a residential house, or something of its equivalent nature cause obviously theres one in my house right now sitting in the closet and its been sitting there for years and its never been used. And I don't quite understand a logical mentality which doesn't express a certain level of forward planning in regards to having an emergency bag somewhere in your home. It kind of belies a certain assumption that you're never going to get displaced by freak weather events or from the other end, stuck in your own home with no access to supplies due to a major power outage, both of these things have happened to me just in the last ten years alone, not exactly a daily thing but at least once every 3 to 5 years I've been in a scenario where being prepared was a good thing. Course I was also a Boy Scout and I'm a military veteran so maybe I think a little differently than other people but I really don't think so. Compare Chernarus to say, in US standards at least, a state like Montana...kinda similar, a couple big towns then a whole state of little villages clustered around and away from each other. Hunting and living outdoors in these kinds of regions is a matter of course, its something people just do because its part of the land they live in. Chernarus is very similar to Montana in its overall spread of civilized area nestled between a lot of open country. So my overall impression would be that finding camping equipment would be almost as common house to house as there would be standard household items. Regardless thats neither here nor there, the point of the post is overdesign of certain elements of the game...in of which I agree certain elements are heavily overdesigned to no distinct purpose that I can discern at this time other than to be overdesigned.

The entire north is being redesigned. There are foundational placements for at least two more cities and 8 smaller towns and some associated small military and/or industrial points. Check out Guba Bay. Theres already some of the town that will be there in place. Looks like a nice little place. There are some barn and small industrial placements spread across the northern part of the map and I've also found a small military base up there thats not entirely finished. Overall there is a lot of redesign going into that part of the map to utilize more of it and I definitely approve of that.

Restarts are part of the game because Arma server processes chew through memory like LOL. I miss the good old days when you only restarted a game server because you needed to update it or there was some kind of unforseen technical issue. These days server restarts are a necessity because the unforseen technical issue is the goddamn software the server is running. This isn't just isolated to the Arma engine games though its pretty common in most next gen FPS titles as well. Its just slightly more problematic for the DayZ experience because it interrupts persistance and thus screws with immersion.

The compass is not a problem of overdesign its simply an indicator of overdesign. The medical system is a serious case of overdesign. The cooking system (which doesn't work) is a serious case of overdesign. I mean...seriously, thanks for the camping stoves but I'm not sure why I can't just remove the paper wrappers from tin cans and heat a can of beans without the need for a four slot cooking pot...which will only take rice and water anyways. I mean I dunno how much actual survival you've done but in general heating something directly in a tin can is not infeasible. Whats more the whole idea of having camp stoves but cooking pots that take up a ridiculous amount of space is overdesigned and under thought. I have an "oh shit" bag in the back of my closet, Theres not just a water bladder and 6 days of food in it but theres also a way to cook that food and they're both small enough to fit in the side pouches of the backpack leaving me plenty of room for warm clothing, batteries, my medical supplies, compass and maps, magnesium fire starter, water proof matches and two boxes of 9mm ammunition and 2 boxes of .22 LR. And this is just a Northface day pack its not even a high end Survival ACU and I've got enough in it to survive a week because I know how to pack and I know whats required to get certain critical things done. Point being is my cooking kit is Coleman survival kit with not just one pot but 5 seperate usable pieces all sitting inside of each other and it takes up less space than the water I'm carrying but when it comes down to it I'm only carrying that cause I'm not carrying canned foods (too heavy) I'm carrying MRE's, which of course require a little hot water to make them slightly more edible and less like cold food flavored snot. There are plenty of little evidences of overdesign in the SA, but I wouldn't really put the compass up there as a direct overdesign as much as it is evidence of an inordinate amount of overdesign and even some design that makes no sense whatsoever.

This situation is very simply fixed....you simply drop everyone to main menu when they log out of a server, rather than the server select screen. Then use SQL record timestamps for charID/serverID to keep a running record of log in/log out times and a running record of say..the last 10 servers joined. Then simply use a quick hive check when loading the main menu which sends a string to client based on the following very loose statement if (timestamp) <= (timevariable) set charIDLockout to (locktimevariable); You can guess what charIDLockout is....its a big red delay timer over your character and no access to the Play or Change Server buttons for that period of time. The more a person switches servers over a period of time, the longer the lockout timer becomes. This kills server hopping dead in its tracks. Without penalizing natural server migration during normal play. It can also be used in conjunction with combat logging with some adaptation because all you have to do is check for health damage of >= a certain expected amount for combat damage (say...2500 for example..or one 5.56 round) within a short period of time prior to logout. If all conditions are present....same deal...lock out timer. And same approach for timed penalities. This is all very easily achieved with the systems currently in play in the alpha and I'll be very surprised if the development team doesn't already have something like this on the fire.