After several weeks of not touching DayZ because, simply put, me and my friends had "Beaten" it, I decided to come back to the game today and try and make it more interesting. Before I discuss that, however, let's address something. When I say that I've "Beaten" DayZ, I mean that it is trivial to attain food, (Matches, Axe, Knife, and plentiful livestock) water(water bottles and a nearby source), and shelter(tent/nearby warehouse/several cars). As well, the chance of player interaction is so abysmally slim, that it is, realistically speaking, nonexistent. For obvious reasons, my friends and I had no interest for logging in just to go hunting and take a drink of water. It isn't exciting. So, we won. We rebuild society, GG guys. Which brings me to the main point, here. DayZ is way, way too easy. From a games perspective, from an anti-game perspective, and from an authenticity perspective. Much of what I'm going to say here is going to be repeats of ideas that have already been stated, to varying degrees, and definitely issues that have been brought up before. Try to bear with me. I understand entirely how much of a nuisance it is to re-read material, but the fact is that it clearly has yet to be noted by Rocket, since he seems to be a bit too busy on his Media tour. Point 1) Zombies are pathetic. This one seems pretty obvious. The zombies in this game are almost never a threat, unless you don't have a weapon, and even then you can still easily evade them. This is a huge issue, as it completely breaks immersion and the authenticity of the game, while also just making it too easy to acquire loot. Point 2) Survival is too easy Again, pretty obvious but I guess it could be missed if you're a newer/casual player. When I play, I usually play for 4-5 hours or so, and at the end of each session, I have all the materials needed to survive forever, and then some. That fact alone isn't too awful, but I usually attain these materials literally by just running from zombies and casually ignoring any threats. Point 3) "But players make it hard!" Not really. If I ever make the mistake of running into a player, I can usually kill them, bandage myself, and devour a cow. Bam, all set. This point is usually very disputed, but almost always, I can either just avoid them by laying near a bush, or kill them, if I really need to. I only bring this up in anticipation of a counter-argument, and thought I'd just put it to rest early. Now that the main issues have been laid out (there are others, but in my opinion they are either subsets of these, or unimportant) it's high time I actually got to the suggesting part of thing increasingly long topic. ---------SUGGESTIONS START HERE; IF TL;DR, JUST READ BELOW------------ Suggestion 1) More authentic combat This would start by introducing enhanced zombie attacks without making it "gamey". Zombies will be able to 'tackle' (player is forced to the prone position), which would allow for zombies to be considered a much greater threat. This mechanic would have a reach slightly longer than their standard attack, and would be usable even if the player is running from the zombie. Making zombies a greater threat brings back the feeling you might remember when you first started playing- the respect for your own life, and how to keep it. Suggestion 2) Survival I'm just going to combine a few basic steps here to try and alleviate the ease of survival that currently exists. This is an apocalypse. Authentically, it's not exactly EASY to survive in that kind of situation. Obviously, we have no true 'apocalypse' to base this off of, but the terrible events that have already happened on smaller scales can be learned from. The purification of water, for example, would be a very important part of living in a post-apocalyptic world. There could be two methods- boiling water, using a fire and a water bottle, or purification tablets that could be found and used once per item. Ideally, they would be stackable in the inventory, but since we have no evidence of that kind of item being possible in the mod, just one will do. Furthermore, the acquisition of food is too simple and easy. In my opinion, meat should be changed to take two inventory spaces, and matches should have a random (1 in 100) chance of being destroyed when they're used, but players should also be able to hold more than one box of matches. Obviously an entire box of matches won't just vanish, but it's meant as a way to simulate the number of matches in the box. Again, the ideal situation would just be a stack of them that you can keep track of and use, but if this isn't possible, it isn't possible. Diseases are a small nuisance as of now, but if they were buffed, and given more types and variations (Infection, Sickness(of varying extremes), Poisoned), it would make having shelter a much more important part of the game, resulting in more player interaction and desperation if you aren't set up. Suggestion 3) Weapons As of right now, unless you just get bored and decide to go player hunting, there is no reason to use guns. "What?" all the new players say! Yes, it's true. The hatchet is your best friend. If you ever need to kill a zombie, find a doorway/staircase, and swing away to your hearts content without taking any damage, and being completely silent. I'm not going to suggest that hatchets be made useless, but instead changed to three body shots to kill (random chance to find a vital organ simulated) and one headshot to kill. The crowbar should be 4 body shots to kill, and one headshot, but have slightly longer range and faster swing speed. All this goes along with drastically decreasing the spawn rates of items (food, drink, ammo), so as to pressure players to constantly be on the move. Thoughts? Thanks for reading! If you didn't, screw you. D:< Edit/Update: Hey guys, this topic is a bit old but I feel it still illustrates the same bloody issues that are in the game to this day. So I figured I'd just go ahead and leave a video recording me and a friend made to try and show comprehensively what the issues are. Hopefully it gets the point across. Many parts are VERY VERY boring, because it's DayZ and that's just how it is. Feel free to skip around/skim. We also had some video issues at many parts. Try to bear with us. Part 1: Part 2: I guess it partially doubles as a 'How-to' guide on playing DayZ lol We almost always find cars with little-to-no damage or deaths within a few hours. Thoughts? I really think this should make the issues quite clear.

Everyone's done it before, either in SA or in the mod. Log in to a server, good ping, lots of fun. Play for a couple hours then night hits. Log out of that server and into a different one where it's daytime. They've added a minor time delay to switching servers, but that isn't really ideal. If noone is going to actually play it, then why would nighttime be in the game? My proposal? Timelock. If you leave a server, you can only join a server with that same character in which the servers time of day is the same as when you logged out with a minor variance of 1 hour, so it isn't ridiculously hard to find one that matches. This stops players from being able to just hop about to the daytime servers and loot, carefree, and makes nighttime something people have to actually deal with, unless I've missing something.

Once private hives come along DayZ SA will go the same path the damned mod did, with 99% of the servers being casual "spawn with 90 cars and all the guns" servers, and the 1% that are hardcore, no 3rd person servers will be completely empty because there's noone to play with. The same people that are playing on these casual servers would play on the hardcore servers and have just as much fun, they're just too stupid to realize it and wind up ruining it for the rest of us in the process. Server owners are slaves to the most common player. The most common player doesn't want nighttime, or any difficulty. So server owners will flock to that instead... And then you won't have anyone in those nighttime servers to stand next to without knowing it. :\ If they were in some sort of danger when logged out, maybe this would be relevant, but as is we can only assume they mystically vanish when in danger. It's the same thing as combat logging.

I've been here before with the same suggestion- a long while ago. Waited awhile once the first breeze of 'infection' came rolling in, in the hopes that the game would move towards a more challenging environment. It took some decent steps and I was kind of hoping for more in that direction but it seems we're getting 'aesthetics' patches in place of that ideal. I'm not irritated at anyone- the devs do this for free, and have make marked improvements from where the game has stood for a long while, but this post is just a plea for a reorganization of priorities. This goes for both the mod (which I understand will be developed indefinitely) and the Standalone itself. However, this is primarily targeted to the mod as we don't particularly know enough about the standalone yet, but... regardless. Infection was a good step. Zombies are still a complete and utter joke. They hit gently, move slowly, think poorly, and overall aren't a threat whatsoever. One of these 'detriments' are fine. They're zombies, after all. Slow, but deadly. Stupid, but predatory. Weak, but fast. Any of those would be acceptable, but... all of them leads to filler noise-generators. I've gone over this before and, honestly, if you want more detail you can just check some of my old topics. The end result is different, now. Is this really where the devs want the game to be, in terms of challenge rating? If it is, then...fine. I guess. That's..fine. It's just not the game for me. Maybe some people are happy with it, that's fine for them- I just want an answer. If it's where Rocket wants the game to be sitting at... Well, I guess SA isn't the game for me, either. I'd like to know.

Patches to the mod are approved by Rocket, as far as I know. Has this changed?

That's precisely what I'm saying. It's a balancing mechanic that makes players either be equipped to fight zombies, or fight players. Now if only Zombies were a threat- then it might do something.

I feel that the current form supports a player being PVP OR PVZ. Letting them go in secondary would allow players to be both at the same time, which would just make the game even easier, and even more in favor of PVP gameplay.

This is a game attempting to recreate the scenario of an apocalypse. Much of what you say is silly, (and accurate), but in the universe they have constructed infection IS apparently super-dangerous. If that is the case, then wouldn't you wager anti-biotics would be as rare as weapons, if not moreso, since as you say zombies aren't the threat, infection is... therefore most of them have been used up already in the rush to try and stay alive at the beginning? The teleporting zombies is a bug. Welcome to game development. Do you want them to cripple the game for you while they sort that out? Taking ten bullets to the head doesn't actually happen. As far as I know, any zombie will die from 1 bullet to the head. If they do not, it is server lag (try and pick one with less ping), FPS (I have no business telling you to upgrade your computer. That's a lot of money.), or a misunderstanding of the zombie hitbox.

As with the others, I recommend you try and improve your playstyle rather than asking for the game to be made easier. Those of us that want the real DayZ already want a more difficult experience than this. We can't 'learn' to be worse. You can learn to be better. It's the apocalypse. Time to start acting like it is.

And yet you can run forever at full speed with no detrimental effects. Attracting a few harmless zombies is a small price to pay for firing a gun.

Guns are loud, man. That's the one thing that really shouldn't be reduced.

90% sure that's false. Very likely, you just didn't see them, or you're exaggerating. Or both.

Ahaha.,.. you're funny.

????

I phrased it oddly, so sorry about that. What I mean is that due to the tick-based Zombie AI, it seems like there are many instances where they are, for all purposes, just not paying attention, and for others they seem acutely aware of the entire planet. Which isn't really a problem since they don't pose too much of a threat anyways, but imo it's just not the right balance.

Any chance of decreasing the general sound sensitivity that Zombies have at the moment, and maybe increasing their eyesight while making them lose players they've already found less often? Due to the way that sound detection works, it's very random and takes control of the game away from the player. This kind of mechanic is fine in small amounts, but I feel that by implementing this suggestion, you could keep Zombies as dangerous as they are now while also giving players more control over their character and gameworld. This encourages a stealthy kind of playstyle and a caution that I think might be a good idea to pursue. Zetal

Imo people who like it need to be screwed over for them to really enjoy the game. They just don't know any better. ;)

DayZ aims to be as authentic as possible. He makes a good point, albeit a very sarcastic one.

It was funny the first time cuz he was clearly joking, but I'm worried you might actually be serious?

I lol'd.

Agreed. I hope for 1.7.7.2 they make it harder to be initially detected, but easier for zombies to track you after you've been spotted. This would place more control into the players hands and make the game more realistic in the process. The above of course does not take precedent over fixing the bug where zombies deal no damage.

Jeebus man, just buckle down and wait it out. I'm just as unhappy with this patch as you, but pressuring and badgering them won't do any good. Just let them work.

Afaik there is no code in the game that causes clothing to affect Zed aggro.

A) Rocket said multiple times at E3 that he wants zombies to be dangerous, and that's reflected in how the SA played during those demo's. They catch players, and tackled them. B) Zombies that can actually kill people "destroys any hope for an authentic feel at all" for you? Infection rate was not 90%. Not even close. Also, Zombies are not undead.

Those are immersion breaking bugs, but the immersion created by having difficult zombies was far greater. So, fine. Now, the bugs are fixed. Let's make zombies hard again. Any suggestions?