bazbake

So we all know the obvious answers here. 1) Throw out camping tents. Boom, gone forever. Now everyone who dies loses everything, period. Unless your friends feel like guarding your dead body out in the open in the place where you were just killed. The rest of these talk about the arcade-ization of weaponry in a game that purports to be realistic, and I think this is the heart of the problem with the scramble for and hoarding of guns. 2) Military weapons need to be nerfed back down to realistic stopping powers because right now they're just stupid fake. 5.45 NATO is NOT a scary caliber. It's a caliber designed for less recoil and to wound enemies instead of kiling them. Half of the military weapons in this game use STANAG NATO caliber, which is designed to slow enemies down and take them off the front line, not to kill them. Hell, most of those sniper rifles are chambered in similar calibers to the AKM and AK-47. They shouldn't be doing as much damage as they currently do. According to some tables, they should do maybe 2/3rds of their current damage while the STANAG round guns should do about 1/3rd to half of their current damage in relation to the .45s. The non-.45 ACP pistols should actually do a lot more damage than damage tables I've seen. Technically, you should probably swap the damage of STANAG weapons with the damage of all of the non-.45 pistols to be closer to the effect they have if they were to enter your body. Seriously, these are decent-caliber weapons with very lethal potential at close range, as opposed to the long series of NATO caliber incapacitating weapons that people keep charging military bases to loot. Yes, they have burst fire and auto-fire, but they're not as deadly as your sidearm in close quarters on semi-automatic. The advantage to getting military style weapons should be the automatic and burst fire capabilities, the range, and the handling improvements of what is usually a smaller caliber weapon. Once you move into high caliber rifles, we should be talking about VERY LOUD weapons with BIG RECOIL. One and done/bug out and run weapons that are useless unless you're lying on your stomach or crouching. Absolutely useless between shots. So basically, damage should be closer to this: STANAG weapons/AK-74/M249 < < < AKM/AK-47/Dragunov/DMR weapons/M24 caliber sniper rifles/FN FAL/M240/ < < CZ550 < Lee Enfield < Every pistol + PDW except ... < Revolver/M1911 < < M107/AS50 < < < < SHOTGUNS!!!!! But...that's not quite how damage works in this game. For some reason ALL of the military weapons have more powerful rounds than guns you find at home. If this game were realistic, then a CZ550 would be more dangerous than most of the military sniper rifles people are raiding NWAF for. Those machine guns would be dangerous, of course, but not more dangerous than a pistol in a crowded room. The winchester, M1014, and double-barrel shotguns would be death on a stick in a realistic version of this game. STANAG M4's and M16s would be scary but manageable in a shootout unless you took one to the dome. But it's really the pistols you need to freak out about. Rebalancing the weapons so that they were more realistic would be interesting because it would mean bandits wouldn't have drastic advantages over new players. It means everyone would have a chance at finding a decent weapon. And it would also unclutter the hoarding from airstrip runs since a M14 would actually be less dangerous than a Lee Enfield. On a further note, do you think bandits would be so casual about sniping newspawns if their M24 was actually a less dangerous weapon than a CZ550 someone found in a barn? Imagine if that newspawn survived, hit a barn half a kilometer away, and then snuck up right behind that camper with the damage advantage? Furthermore, if it took four or five M16 rounds to put someone down, that auto-fire would suddenly seem a little less daunting. Especially if it only took two or three of your big fat ACP rounds to take your opponent out. Just saying, the key to rebalancing things and making the game more competitive is not to remove the military weapons, it's to bump them back down to the bottom of the damage charts *where they belong* and to treat the semi-automatic and bolt-action showstoppers, like the winchester and the M1014 and the CZ550 and the .45 ACP, like the true beasts they are. 3) I mentioned this elsewhere, but guns should attract a lot more zombies. And they shouldn't go away as long as you keep shooting. I've run around in an ATC and attracted zombies climbing up ladders. But I've seen video of people firing rifles and not attracting any attention at all. Sorry, guns should be the ultimate zombie magnet. Even more than flares. P.S. The hatchet should be the most ridiculous weapon in the game that doesn't explode in your face. It's a hatchet. Do you know what hatchets do to people? Seriously, the damage for the hatchet needs to be increased even more, those things lop off body parts and disembowel people and sever heads off their shoulders.

Put a muzzle flare on that gun, add twice as many zombies, make the gunfire audible from as far away as the gunshot is, and send a horde of zombies running in the sniper's direction. See how much fun that bandit would have sniping newspawns.

For people so desperate to play a realistic zombie simulator, they're really afraid of weapons doing the damage they do in real life....

Would you disable teamkilling in squads or would this just be another technical lure to scalping players with the promise of kinship?

Everyone wants to make life harder for newspawns. I don't think zombies should be able to run inside buildings (particularly since the game has some seriously screwed up animations when you pass through some doors that force you to stand up automatically), but I do think something needs to be done about the difficulty curve once guns are earned. Want to know why the game's too easy? Zombies don't react realistically to sound. Oh, sure, you have four zombies wandering around a warehouse and they'll be slightly interested if you fire your pistol. But zombies don't really care about people firing guns in this game. They care about people firing rifles while standing up at the end of the block. I have a few suggestions. 1) Change silencers from movie physics to real physics. A silencer should lower the audible profile of a rifle to that of a pistol at best. None of this "walk up behind a zombie and put a bullet in the back of his head unseen" BS. 2) Zombies should hear a gunshot from at least halfway across town. I've seen zombies drop everything they're doing and head for a friggin' flare from four blocks away. Gunshots should do the exact same thing. Actually, gunshots should be even more enticing. 3) For this to work, you don't need tougher zombies. You just need more zombies. Cities should have three to four times as many zombies per square area as towns, but right now they're pretty similar. It makes no sense that five zombies spawn near a barn and five zombies spawn at a supermarket. Seriously, yo. 3a) Actually, maybe if you fire a gun in the city limits, zombies should spawn within a certain radius of where the gun was fired just to make things more interesting. This way solo newspawn and groups have an equal shot at getting to the loot in a town filled with zombies. And if you want to start a firefight, you better have a back exit or you'll soon be surrounded by zombies.

NO on leveling. Maybe on classes. I'm not really convinced they're useful in this game, though.

The more people you murder, the higher your zombie aggro. That's really cool... Zombies spawn as players enter a location, right? What if the number of zombies that spawned when your player entered a location was modified by your humanity? So the lower your humanity, the more likely you are to spawn zombies when you enter a location reflecting the fact that the only thing keeping the zombies at bay is the survivors you keep killing. This is a direct consequence of your actions. Survivors kill zombies. You kill survivors. Zombies don't get killed. Therefore, zombies spawn in greater numbers because no one else is there to kill them.

King of the slippery hill. Bandits get better loot which help them kill newbies more easily. And since they're murderers, they don't hesitate to kill people who are already less well-armed than they are. While it's nice that players can be nice to each other, murderers are always at an advantage. There's also an interesting element of disengagement here. In real life, killing people isn't something people do for fun. It's a psychological condition. In the game world, the lack of risk encourages some outright sociopathic behavior. So it's interesting to see people defend the realism of the game on one hand and then turn around and ignore the gravity of such a situation on the other. We already keep track of murders in the game and there used to be a humanity meter in the original version. There should be something to keep track of how much of a monster the character you play in the game world has become because, in the game world, that's who you are -- a monster. You're not a dude sitting behind your keyboard tallying up scores in the debug monitor, you're a plague on society, a member of the greatest threat to civilization. It'd be interesting if bandits were constantly surrounded by the buzzing of flies, though. But not actual flies, just flies in their heads while they experience mental snapping and go insane from their crazed killing sprees.

Flag PVP characters with PVP only access. Flag PVE characters with PVE only access. Require a server restart to change from PVE to PVP. Make both games identical. Anyone saying anything different just wants to keep sniping carebears on the coast because they're being bullied at school by the fat kid who keeps taking their lunch money, bullied at work by the guy with mustard on his tie who tells too many long-winded jokes, or unemployed alcoholics who hate their dead-end lives. Once you get over the hurdle of tagging character creation with PVE or PVP only, there's no more work to be done at all. The complaints are coming from people who will now be surrounded by characters who are READY for them and who they can't exploit by pretending to be nice. Now all of the lunatics will be locked in the asylum with the guards. Personally, I play my FPS's hardcore with friendly fire, so I'm not particularly concerned. But it's funny listening to the bandits whine that they won't be able to fake innocence and then hatchet players in the face anymore because everyone will be just as ready for combat as they are. Which brings up an interesting point...hm...

This is a great idea. I don't even use my gun for zombies, it's mostly just there to stop bandits and to scare other players. But I'd like to have a gun in hand to spook people and keep them guessing. Maybe the guns, instead of causing blood loss, would just have a high rate of causing pain and unconsciousness for maybe 30 seconds to a minute. That way if you pop around the corner and accidentally pop someone who looks scary, you don't get a murder tag. On the other hand, zombies would completely ignore rubber bullets so you'd have to make a hard choice of whether you want to keep your murder count low or if you want a guaranteed chance of dropping zombies. Another useful one would be a taser in the shape of a gun that would incap someone at up to 10 meters.

Technically, to mimic real-world vision, screen bob would decrease the further from the center of the screen so bobbing would swing around a fulcrum with the center of the screen having no bob and the edges of the screen having larger bob. I've always wondered why game animators haven't figured out how this works yet, but I figure they just have the camera bounce to save time. In reality, the camera should find a point in the distance as far away as possible (the very center of the screen) and keep that motionless at all times. Mirror's Edge tried to solve this problem by putting a dot in the center of the screen with no head bob, and it was effective but not perfect. If you want to split the difference 1) the very center of the screen stays nearly still, 2) the edges of the screen bob.

60 rounds of ammo, four sodas, water bottle, can of pasta, an empty village near fresh water, plenty of hiding places and shelter. Drew a map and called it "Shangri-La." Pressed z to crouch down and take a shot at some zombies to harvest them for food and ammo... Inexplicably, the game took over my controls, walked me forward four steps, and then dumped me into a four story drop that instantly killed me. So, yeah, that was memorable...