Wareve

I think as it stands, the issue that comes up is that night time encourages people to switch servers to avoid the massive number of issues that night time brings up for starting characters. I mean, lets be honest, without a good weapon and night vision goggles, night time becomes a significantly harder experience then day time. And when there is no penalty for switching servers to a day time one (besides perhaps a loss of vehicles should you be so lucky) there is very little reason not to just jump off. Now, I do like how intense it is, and I approve of taking it seriously, but I see this as an issue that should be looked at.

I think the problem might stem from having, what is effectively, an inverted difficulty curve. The time between being on the beach chased by a zombie with no weapons, and finding an axe and going to town on those zombies, is arguably some of the most difficult in the game. That being said, once that time is up, the game arguably gets progressively easier as new players realize that they can take on entire towns full of zombies as long as they engage them correctly. (This, of course, is barring an encounter with a ill-tempered survivor holding a sniper rifle) So while new players might find it hard to not start out with a weapon, if they did put it in, it would become much less engaging for veteran players. So no, I don't think that there should be a beginning weapon. Perhaps a way to shove down a zombie that is hitting you for a bit, but besides that I don't think it should be easier to start out. After all, that feeling of intensity when you first start out is one of the major reasons not to die once you have that hatchet.

I think a more realistic model would be to have a very slow, constant, health regeneration. Items such as meat and other food would up the rate of regeneration, with various foods restoring at various rates. It would also be intresting if they made a hot-food/cold-food mechanic, where food that had been recently cooked restored health faster then food that had been sitting around for a while. Blood packs would pretty much be the opposite of bleeding, as apposed to an animation and then instantly being back from the dead.