Somepants

I think people come to the game and get a little misled. Currently, the friendly feature is not implemented. It is strictly optimal gameplay to KoS. You lose nothing but a couple bullets, and gain potentially hours of loot. An argument could be made for unifying, but if you wanted to do that you'd join an out-of-game group for it. Wouldn't you? Even then, it's still optimal gameplay to KoS those outside the group. Then again, I suppose this is less of a gameplay argument and more of a moral one.

Yeah, the zombies sometimes glitch and manage to spot you from unreasonable distances. Had a friend spawn in, and while we were chatting about something a zombie ran some 200m down a road and over a hill to kill him on the beach. As for time, I didn't notice a major speed change. If anything, I felt that my ability to crawl at max speed let me progress faster than stop-and-go crouch walking. By bottlenecking I was referring to the equipment/tier bottlenecking. I don't think it's a bad thing in general, but I think the current noob-tier bottleneck is really hampering the social growth. It spurs noobs to fight against bandits, but disables the ability of the noobs to participate in the conflict so they get frustrated and quit. Mostly I worry that new content will only end up serving to fortify such barriers. Stabilizing this situation is currently within our means, but let's say we get together 12 people to obsessively clear Cherno, Elektro and Balota of bandits and use this as a recruiting method to bolster their ranks (because, shit, they don't wanna do this themselves all day. they got vehicles to hunt.) Say they get ten more people doing this. That's already half the server, and I think getting ten noobs on your side would, as you train them, inevitably pay off in terms of actual manpower. So suddenly there's a half-server superpower which everyone else on the server needs to either unify against or most likely crumple under. I think half the server could pretty easily hold the Balota/Komarovo area and have most all the equipment they could ever need. But then that's it. There's no real depth to this, it's a pretty binary situation. It's more or less Red vs Blu: DayZ. They'd be able to take and hold territory, but it's not like resources are limited enough to make territory a real consideration. It would inevitably get old and leaves no room for growth, only splintering and reformation. Perhaps that example is a little extreme, but scaling it back much further ends up leaving us with the current situation: disparate factions of four to eight people who have no particular reason to interact outside of boredom. 10 people don't have the manpower to hold more than one city very securely against any organized force. And having the sort of complicated socio-political interactions that breed a true complexity of conflict would, I argue, require no less than five separate factions. If it were three, one would just become a kingmaker. Were it four, it's probably just a 2v2 (which lets be honest is just a 1v1). Five, though, feels like about the right point for groups of 10 to start backstabbing eachother habitually. But even then, it's what? Ten dudes attempting to obsessively hold on to one single city? It lacks a sense of grandeur, not to mention that two groups deciding to pair up pretty quickly turns it into a 2v2 kingmaker situation. I suppose my point is that even if the situation were stabilized, we don't have much room to work with anyway. I think I'm getting lost in the sweet dreams of the distant future though. Anyway, wilderness zombies would probably go a long way towards forcing bands into competition with eachother right now.

crouching is for shooting, prone is for sneaking. or rather, crouching is for bandits, prone is for zombies.

It's legitimately difficult to sneak around zombies now. If you're at normal city distances and doing anything but being prone, a zombie will see you. If you're crouched and approaching a farm, zombies will see you. Occasionally, a zombie will just decide to see you for no reason and with no provocation. This is the only undesirable glitch resulting from the changes. Otherwise, I'm scared to pop off anything louder than a revolver in town because I know it's going to end in some sort of horrific zombie train. As for PvP and PvE servers, I think the concept is wholly undesirable. The main obstacles to making the current system work as I see them are 1. players per server, as the game is simply way too huge to support more than a quarter of the world experiencing much activity. 2. lack of challenge for equipped players/lack of reason for mobility, as you mentioned. The first problem strikes me as more significant, as even if there was a reason to leave the coast it would just mean that the coast mentality would end up occurring elsewhere, where the higher-tier players establish more bottlenecks to advancement and prevent any real strategic gameplay development. I think there is a critical mass of players that must be obtained in order to create any sort of metagame considerations. Otherwise it's just small tribes callously arguing over plentiful resources, and realistically don't need anywhere but Cherno to fulfill that goal.

I've found that zombies are near-deaf to a revolver. Or a makarov. Or an axe. Or presumably anything quieter than a revolver.

It's almost like the game is designed to encourage stealth gameplay.

Axe secret op. Melee does have its limitations, but an axe is damn good. Remember that most zombies will try to zigzag around to your back before entering their attack routine, and you can whack them while they try to circle around and take no damage.

Would you be crouching in a field if another player was there? Or would you be prone? I and most likely everyone else here agrees, they're still buggy and sometimes do things that are completely unreasonable (walking through walls/objects, aggroing for impossible reasons, etc.), but it's not as if they're 100% broken, or even 30%. You just need to use prone for something besides crawling under walls now. My observations and tips are as follows: if your visibility is below 20 you're safe up to about 10 meters. If it's above 20 (prone on a road), then you're visible from about 10-30 meters away. Around 50 visibility (immobile daylight crouching), something like 50-100 meters. Around 100 (standing still in daylight), you might as well join a night server, light your road flare, and have a dance party in Cherno. Finally, they're going to spot you for bug reasons inevitably. Have a hatchet ready, or at least a revolver.

There's no sound.

Love the new zombie changes. For people complaining, you can't crouch it anymore. If a zombie is within 100 meters and pointed at you, you need to be prone. That said, they've gone back to seeing through terrain/objects sometimes. They've got noticeable kinks right now, but 90% of them can be snuck past. For the others, well...it's really only a problem when you don't have any equipment.