thomas.scriven@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Try and find the chopper and destroy/steal it? It adds adversity and therefore long term goals. It's cool.

From the thread you posted: So...don't hold your breath.

This is the fundamental problem. Hiding is the only decent counter-measure against zombies that also has the benefit of being fun. Trying to headshot them should be fun but until they're fixed it's pointless. They also wouldn't work as a metaphor if they're too hard. The only real way you can die in this game is through doing something stupid or getting killed by another player. The idea that zombies aren't the real threat but humans are is kinda the point of zombie stories. Well, until they started running...

Well that's sort of your fault tbh...why put it north of Stary? That's the first place I'd go if I was going tent robbing. The very edges of the map are the only places to put things you actually care about.

I'd guess a shoot-out between two heavily armed gangs (why steal from them if you've got everything you need?) or some strangers ran into one another with everyone shooting everyone else and then bleeding out. The latter has happened to me plenty.

I didn't take the poll because the options are too broad - they're easy in some ways but hard in another. I think a headshot should be the only way of one-shotting them with most guns, but for that to be possible they need their pathfinding sorted. I'm fine with running and think it makes them challenging, and although they should mainly spawn around built up areas it should also be possible to meet isolated ones wandering forests/roads/etc. Although it's fairly easy to lose them now I'm fine with this. If you were actually being chased by zombies you'd improvise a weapon from stuff lying around a house or the ground - sticks, rocks, etc, and would also have the option to push them away or attack them with your hands and feet. The engine doesn't support this, and because of that being chased by zombies at the beginning of the game is exceptional tedious and adds no challenge at all. Ducking into a building and hiding is a fun challenge (almost mini-game) which was impossible back with the super-zombies.

I heard that the Taliban kept alt-f4ing.

The point of the game is as much about contending with other people's play styles as it is about enjoying your own. I play co-op with some friends, where once we're geared up we go exploring and deliberately look for encounters - be they firefights, near misses, getting buzzed by a helicopter, getting sniped, or having a friendly (cautious) chat with some passersby...there would be a boring uniformity of experience if we were being chanelled into one style of play. Where's the fun in approaching a stranger if you know for sure that since you're on a deathmatch server they're going to shoot you, or if you're on a co-op server they're going to be really friendly?

Not in its current form.

What everyone else said. Also, armed like that (and with a Coyote, right?) you're a massive threat, what do you expect?

I've only had one hacker experience. He made everyone on the server start dancing. Later on that night he found us being swarmed in Berezino, picked us up in a big green truck, drove along the south coast picking up everyone he met, dropped us off in Stary and then flew a helicopter into a hill.

The implications of this are quite severe though. If you're gonna ban third party comms then surely you'd also have to ban people chatting face to face about where their characters are going to meet up or what town they're going to raid, or what stuff they have that they can swap, etc etc. Are server admins gonna bug people's houses? Yeah, fine. Knowing the map and the roads and knowing which cities are which in Russian is a massive advantage...as is knowing the best spawn points and so on. So you've used a bit of artistic license in explaining that away, but why not just do that in the scenario in the original post? Why not just imagine that the other two guys realised that the third person wasn't following them and so went back to the last location s/he was? Why not imagine that they co-ordinate using whistling sounds and hand signals, or that they met in the pub one night and said "hey, if the dead ever walk the earth, we should meet at that hill north of Stary Sobor"? The uber-realism interpretation of the game doesn't cut it for me. If this were a true anti-game you'd spawn on the beach on your very first playthrough, run towards Cherno not having a clue what you're doing, get killed...and then never be allowed to play again because you're dead. The game (as it stands) is wholly unrealistic in almost every aspect. If the next update includes a function where we have to have a shit every six hours, then maybe we can talk about it being realistic.