t0bias

I think the only true solution to banditry being way too preferable a playstyle is to increase danger. If you shoot one player, no matter where, you better damn well have enough ammo for the 20-30 zombies who heard that gunshot and are coming for you. Increase zombie pathfinding, increase the danger in the environment so you need to work together in order to survive. You can still kill others and take their stuff if you want to, but it's not something you can just spontaneously decide to do with no repercussions.

So how the fuck are you supposed to trust anyone now? Playing as a Friendly was feasible, before. If someone wasn't a bandit, you could try to team up with them and have awesome bro-op times and have like a 10% chance of them being a bandit who just hasn't killed anyone yet. One of the biggest problems with this game is there is NO INCENTIVE TO PLAY FRIENDLY, at all. Not only that, but MURDERING EVERYONE ON SIGHT OFTEN GETS YOU MUCH BETTER REWARDS THEN PLAYING CO-OPERATIVELY. These are both PROBLEMS with the game design. Player killing needs to have a penalty, it needs to have a downside, or it ruins the survivor dynamics. Neither playstyle should be infeasible, both should have balanced advantages and disadvantages. You have effectively made playing Friendly completely infeasible. GG, guess I'm going to have to just murder folks now if I ever want to keep any loot I've found. You never have to kill other survivors to survive, unless you're a cunt. I played for a lot of the time that 1.5.7 was live, and I never shot another survivor, even when the fucking direct voice wasn't working I could use the salute emote to state Friendly to other survivors I saw and I teamed up with a few, others just ran off. Now that there is no way to tell the difference between bandits and survivors, you are FORCED into assuming that every single person you see will try to kill you, either for loot or just for fun.

I think these kind of zombie numbers are a major boon to the survival elements of the game, and those are the elements that make this the zombie game people have been wanting. This game is almost the multiplayer S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that people have always been dreaming of, but it needs more hostile environments. Firing a gun in a formerly populated area should result in 20-30 zombies running at you. There should be a serious deterrent to "going loud" and not being careful. To put it simply, the zombies should be MORE of a threat then the other players / bandits, this would encourage teamwork while still making banditry feasible. As it is, banditry is not only feasible, it's the generally preferred option to just shoot someone rather then hope they don't shoot you. If firing your weapon ALWAYS meant aggroing a shitstorm of zombies that you have to then deal with, this would make co-operation the easier way of dealing with things without restricting the sandbox gameplay in the way that a simple friendly fire off server flag would. Also, I want to see zombies roaming around in the forests and highways. Obviously smaller groups, but they should be there. The idea that you are basically never safe, ever, is one that would add a lot to immersion. Other things like increasing the chance of random areas and small towns producing weapons, ammo, medicine, and food/drink would be a great way to reduce banditry without making it any less of a viable playstyle. As it is, killing some random guy you came across in the middle of nowhere offers a significantly higher chance of getting good gear then actually going looting and searching spawns, because outside of cherno or airfields all you find is empty cans and junk. That's just my thoughts on the subject.

This is something that really caused problems for me and my buddy trying to co op in this mod for the past few days. Started on the second day of playing, we were looting around chernogorsk and the server experienced failure or something and when we logged back in my friend was badly wounded and there was another survivor around who we shot because we realized he was stealing blood packs from my incapacitated friend's backpack and we were confused as hell because neither of us appeared to be able to hear each other through the in game direct voice chat thing. This has persisted over the past two days, it's still completely non functional. When I hit push to talk, I still see "direct communication" in the bottom left screen, but my friend can't hear me, and it's the same in reverse. Haven't been able to get a response from ANYONE when I ask in side chat if anyone else is experiencing the same problem, but this is really causing issues with our attempts to work together.