FalafelCopter

Almost ONE YEAR after this was posted, this fixed my problem. Setting the beta .exe file to run as administrator solved the problem that's kept me from playing dayz for almost the same amount of time. This was the culmination of almost 40 hours of troubleshooting. I don't know if you're still around, but thank you. I can sleep again.

I'd rather have him focus on making the hatchet a little more reliable than add a bunch more melee weapons that will be just as frustrating to use.

I wish people would stop calling themselves retards as an insult. I bet there's tons of people with learning disabilities who are smarter than the people who have these insults aimed at them. :P

Realism this, realism that. If this game were a realistic zombie simulator, almost nobody would intentionally seek out pvp because they would be too scared that the other guy would win and they would be dead forever. Nobody would ever stockpile loot for the next life because there isn't one. People would band together for protection because the best safety is to be found in large numbers. This is a game that is very intentionally and strongly unrealistic. We all realize that, right? What should matter is what allows the game to be as successful and fun as it can be. I feel like there are people in here that get a nice big ego stroke from feeling like they're some kind of hardass zombie survivor who'd be totally fine in a zombie apocalypse because they play a "realistic" game, and that people making it easier will take away the thing that's making themselves feel good about themselves.

Or to put it in another way: You have to take away a couple of people's freedoms or else they will use their freedoms to take away all of everyone else's freedoms, which results in a net loss of freedoms overall. (That actually hurt to type.)

People deal with temperature in vastly different ways. There are guys who can sit in the snow naked and be perfectly fine, and people who get hypothermia in a little bit of rain. Does that mean we shouldn't use temperature in a mechanic? People have different metabolisms and differ in the time they can go without eating, does that mean we shouldn't use hunger in a mechanic? People differ in how long they can run, does that mean everyone in the game should walk? People differ in how much they can withstand pain, does that mean we shouldn't use a pain mechanic? People are vastly different from one another in tons of ways, but that rarely stops game developers from using these traits as game mechanics. I would say that people are probably more similar to each other in how well they deal with loneliness than in how they deal with endurance sprinting. Okay, so you agree that a loneliness mechanic is an okay idea as long as it's fully thought out and other things change to make it work? Great! We agree then. I never said my ideas for how the mechanic could work are the only ideas there could be, I just threw out some random ideas as they came to my head. Of course Rocket would be able to do a far better job with it than my random musings. I'm only brainstorming general directions solutions can come from, not fully fleshed out game mechanics that need to be implemented perfectly or ignored.

One person's feedback is another person's whining. It's all useful. Stop trying to shut people down and let them get their opinion out. Rocket wants to hear the "whining" as well as the praise.

I just don't understand why loneliness is "gamification" and needing to drink every 10 minutes is "perfectly realistic." These are both basic, common, physiological needs. I can't think of any criteria that pain fits that loneliness doesn't, for instance. They're both invisible things that are represented only by a meter and by your character's movements and sounds. I get that you might not like the mechanic for gameplay reasons but the realism/authenticity argument is nonsense.

THIS. "I think my best option for survival is to run to where there's lots of horrible monsters that are killing everyone and are attracted to sound, and then make a ton of noise! Surely this will help somehow!"

Other than how incredibly simplistic this viewpoint is, wouldn't troll be a subset of selfish? Thats why you need to modify the game so that it's within people's self interest to act in a variety of ways and not just the most obvious and simplistic ones. Players are lazy and they'll get themselves stuck in a boring rut unless the game subtly pushes them towards other things. If you just leave players to their own devices in a game where it's easier to ruin fun than to create it, then everyone will ruin each other's fun until nobody is enjoying themselves and everyone is bored. It's like how if you leave a bunch of lobsters in a pond, they will just sit there eating each other until there's one fat lobster that will starve. That type of game design isn't conducive to long term success. The trolls will chase out all the players who want a social experience and then they will just troll each other until they get bored. It's just weird that you would use gamification as something that can even happen to a video game in the first place. This game is chock full of gameified mechanics. Temperature, hunger, thirst, none of them work the way they work in reality. They're tweaked to act in a way that's fun and engaging rather than realistic, and designed with specific goals for player behavior. Blood packs requiring another player is transparent attempt to get us to work together, but it doesn't feel like "gamification" because it fits well within the world. Any other mechanic that gets introduced should be as authentic as that, but you can force pretty much any rule and make it authentic somehow if you think hard enough. None of us want to see the experience cheapened, we want exactly the opposite. The experience feels cheap as it is. Also, wait hold on a second. You think that new mechanics should be introduced in order to allow players to rebuild society, yet you think we shouldn't be requesting new content? What?

Technically there are no safe zones in eve either. You can be killed anywhere, as long as the pirates brought a large enough group to fight off the security ships. (At least, that's how I remember it.) You're right about one thing though, eve does have an option to be a peaceful player. There are enough tools in place for players to create the type of experience they want, whether it be an aggressive or a peaceful one. Eve is the textbook definition of a well balanced sandbox. There's a reason a game with combat as butt-terrible as Eve's is as successful as it is. Wow, those both sound like really cool ideas... except, that's not what actually happens right now. There's no reason to enslave people or do fancy merchant stuff right now, because generally other players don't have things you need. The people doing the most pvping are the people who need the least things. I've never had someone come after me with a hatchet or a makarov, NEVER. I'd totally understand and be cool with it if a starving player killed me for weapons or supplies, but it's always some guy with NV goggles, a high powered rifle, and a gillie suit. I'd love if this game were a true sandbox and actually allowed for a range of different player experiences, but it's really not that right now. There simply isn't enough depth to allow for it. (With the exception of maybe the metagame doctors who server hop to save injured people. That's great and I think that's one of the most interesting bits of emergent gameplay the game supports. :D) It has the potential to become a sandbox if it's problems are ironed out, though. This was only being argued because people were saying "stop whining, its an alpha." Otherwise nobody would be arguing about what technical name to call the phase the game is in. The thing is, in real life, people get too scared or lonely to go off on their own, even if they have the skills to do it viably. For most people, if they were alone in a zombie apocalypse, they would be incredibly happy to see another human being because they would know the other human would be likely to be as lonely and scared as they are. In this game that's not the case for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed previously. We can argue until we're blue in the face about what would "REALLY HAPPEN FOR REALZ" in a zombie apocalypse, but what really matters is that we both agree that current in game player behavior doesn't represent it. Someone would not walk into the most heavily zed infested town, climb up to a building, and randomly snipe other survivors and then not loot them. It wouldn't happen. More importantly, it doesn't matter whether it would happen or not. All that matters is what kind of gameplay it provides and whether it's good for the health of the game and the playerbase. The whole argument about realism only got brought up in the first place, again, because the bandit/pvp side people have been bringing it up incessantly to attack the people trying to make the game a little bit less deathmatchy. Or they could do it through specializing people to the point where it's worthwhile to group up. Hey wait, that sounds familiar! So, you seem for individual mechanics that facilitate social nonaggressive behavior, yet you seem against the idea of people asking for mechanics for that purpose. It's confusing to me. None of those things are "just like" dayz, or even resemble what happens in it in anything but the most superficial of ways. >_>

I think people should take a look at the walking dead graphic novels. They have the most well thought out and psychological approach to life during a zombie apocalypse that I've seen so far. Yes, there's a lot of banditry there, but almost never on first sight.

Fixing the bugs is a suggestion for how to solve the problem. Period. I don't see what you're confused about here? Some of them would, and it's fine that they would. Any change that completely stops people from doing this would be far too strict a change. The problem is that the game currently doesn't support grouping up with players you meet in the game. You have your players that you met up with in the forums and teamspeak, and everyone else in the game is an enemy that needs to be shot on sight. It all reinforces the idea that anyone you meet in the game that you don't know outside of the game needs to either be killed or escaped with out even the smallest urge to try to communicate with them. Things should not be that black and white. For a mod that tries to be realistic, it veers incredibly far away from realism in some of the places where it matters the most. First of all, quit it with the misogynist slurs, seriously. Yeah, all the people who disagree with you are whiny bitches, right? Game developers who don't make games you like lack balls? Grow up and quit with the aggressive language and discuss the topics at hand. Second, yes, I get it, this game is unique for now. If it's successful enough it'll spawn an entire genre and everyone will probably get what they want. I understand that you'd be frustrated with people providing suggestions that make it slightly less your baby, since there aren't any other games for you to go to if this one starts to go in a direction you don't like. However, nobody in this topic want to remove any of the features you list. (Except, "no rules" is incredibly vague. Combat logging is against the rules, and racism is grounds for serve bans, so there's plenty of rules, but now I'm definitely nitpicking.) Third, I thought for a second you were trying to say that this game didn't have persistence. I see now that you are, but I don't really know if the way you're using it is the way it's generally used in games. The games that have the most persistence as you describe it (having a single character that persists after logging out) are MMOs, which are almost never described using that word. It generally only refers to games where you normally wouldn't keep your progress after a "match", where you don't lose all of that progress. Generally what that means is that you can start with better stuff next time you play. In other words, I would be more likely to describe getting items from your stash after respawning as persistence than simply logging back in to the same character. In a sense, that just means your "match" hasn't ended yet. Anyway, sorry for the misunderstanding there. Fourth: Is the ability to gather loot from your stash after dying counter to the idea of a hardcore permadeath game? Shouldn't death mean having to start over with a flashlight from the coast? Doesn't knowing that you can just wander over and grab yourself a full set of gear again dull the fear and caution you should be having? Isn't that a step away from the hardcore realism that people seem to want out of this game? Or do people only want hardcore realism when it suits them?

It's not that survivors have a harder time hoarding loot than bandits, it's that once you've hoarded all that loot, there's not much left to do besides become a bandit. The worst bandits are the ones who manipulated the game via server hopping and other cheesy mechanics so that they can get back faster to their cherno deathmatch. If you make it harder for them to do that, the random sniping will lessen. If you think that loneliness isn't tangible, then you've never had to be by yourself for an extended period of time. If you want to get really technical, loneliness is as physical as being in pain is. (In fact, some of the same parts of the brain are involved.) A game is never going to be able to cause you to have emotions anything like what you would experience if you were in a situation like that, especially to the people who are just screwing around and playing call of duty cherno edition. A subtle mechanic could nudge them a little bit back into being immersed in the world. Grouping up with other players (NOT IN TEAMSPEAK) represents a danger because you never know when your new friend might decide to shoot you in the back. Shooting on sight or running away is far safer, always. Isn't stockpiling loot for your next life a form of persistence?

I actually kind of like your suggestion at the end there because I think it would also help a bit. The problem right now is that permadeath sucks far less for the bandits, which is why they're just sitting there randomly sniping people running around with no weapons and a flashlight. If the bandits were actually trying to survive instead of screwing around and putting themselves into the most dangerous situations possible, the game would be a far better place for survivors. 1. What do you think about the blood bag mechanic? That forces people to play together too, right? 2. I don't understand why you think this mechanic is more gamey than the heat mechanic or the pain mechanic. Is it just because you've gotten used to the other ones? 3. Nobody would be forced to do anything. I added the alcohol mechanic for a reason. (Morphine and maybe certain plants could also help with this.) Solo players have an extra resource to worry about to balance out the danger grouping up with other players represents. The problem is that the worst and most irritating bandits are the ones using non-legit means to get their stuff. Removing the ability to server hop to get tons of free loot or escape pvp will force a lot of bandits to actually start trying to survive again, with a net effect of improving the game for everyone. I know these bugs will be fixed some day, but that doesn't mean we can't brainstorm stopgap measures in the meanwhile. Tell me about another zombie game with a loneliness mechanic and maybe making a comment like this won't make you look stupid.

Who ever said anything about getting rid of the trolls? Nobody wants this who wants this game to be financially successful. Trolls have money! What we want is to do is gather and retain as many players interested in a complex/social/realistic sort of experience without driving away the trolls. The thing is, it's IMPOSSIBLE to drive them away. They will go out of their way to continue what they're doing no matter what restrictions or punishments are put forward. That's good though! Not only are the trolls buying the game, they're also providing a tense experience for the survivors/pacifists. Being a pacifist has no value if there aren't people who aren't! We want to change the game so as to properly utilize the trolls as part of the game world so they become an asset and not a detriment to it's continued success. What we should do is figure out how to make the game more tolerable for the people who do not want to shoot on sight, because the game is currently FAR less friendly to that playstyle. (And, amusingly enough, making the game MORE realistic would do this, and not the other way around, like many people in this thread seem to think!) This can be done without harming bandits, and in fact would actually help them, as more players opting for a pacifistic shoot second sort of playstyle are easier prey for the bandits. This shouldn't be an us vs. them battle. Everyone here should be rooting for making this game as good as possible for release for everyone involved, if at all possible.

Why do people keep saying this when there have been at least 5 actual solutions posted so far that nobody actually discussed? Are people just not reading? Here's a list of them: 1. If you get killed and NOT looted within a certain timeframe, you spawn with your items. This solution is good because it takes a bit of the sting out of being killed by a random jerk with a sniper rifle who has absolutely no need for your stuff. This does NOT harm the playstyle for the snipers(!) because there is absolutely no punishment for them. This does help the survivors just a tad because they will be slightly protected from the most obnoxious subfaction of players. These players are playing the game like it's a deathmatch shooter, but in a real zombie apocalypse, NOBODY would do this. Why? Do you really have to ask why sitting around in a city full of zombies firing off high powered rifles when you already have a ton of supplies and ammo is a dumb idea? These guys would be the very VERY first people to die off. The real bandits would be holding people up at gunpoint and taking their stuff so they can continue to survive. This solution won't work by itself as currently written, however, because of combat logging. If that gets ironed out, it might be okay. 2. A loneliness mechanic where you get a subtle negative effect from spending long periods of time by yourself. (Alchohol could temporarily remove the effect, just like real life!) This is good because it would make people think twice about randomly murdering an unarmed stranger on a beach "just in case". It would be a very strong step towards realism because human beings are very social creatures and we tend to become mentally ill rather quickly if we have to be by ourselves for long periods of time. (See: solitary confinement.) When dogs are added later, these could also help, too. :D I honestly can't think of a downside to this one if it were implemented well. 3. Make it just a tad harder to stockpile giant piles of loot. Currently there is no disincentive for most bandits to be randomly killing people for fun because they know if they die they can just walk over to their tent and be fully equipped again immediately. This comes from problems with scripting weapons, server hopping, etc. With how easy it is to cheat and get yourself a bunch of items with no threat of death, combined with the ability to combat log if you get into even a tiny bit of trouble, a bunch of people are playing the game like they're a grizzled hardass when normally they would not be capable of doing this. There is no one solution to this problem, all the bugs that make loot easier to gather and death easier to avoid need to be ironed out one by one. Anyway, I'd prefer it if people can stop saying that no suggestions have been made in this thread, because that's most definitely not the case. There haven't been a whole lot, but there have been some.

Regardless of Rocket's original intentions, DayZ is going to eventually be released as a standalone title that will require payment. Thus, it is a game and needs to be judged as one.

Don't you love when you swing 8 times to a zombie's face and it just ignores you and continues to slap you?

I don't think we necessarily need to "gamify" things too much in order to cut down on KoS behavior. There are many ways that player behavior can be modified in a way that feels authentic to the world. (In other worlds, that doesn't "feel" like a game mechanic.) For instance, the fact that you need another player to give you a blood transfusion is a game mechanic with the very specific goal of making people work together in groups more. Nobody objects to that mechanic even though it makes the game far more difficult for solo players because it feels like part of the world. In a way, that game mechanic is a step towards realism and not away from it, yet it has a very specific and intentional effect on player behavior. I think something like this could be done to slightly nudge players towards a slightly more social or "realistic" experience without making the game feel more "gamey". Here's another example off the top of my head: Humans are intensely social creatures and almost all of us suffer very powerful negative effects from being alone for extended periods of time. What if there was a loneliness mechanic where our character was punished ever so slightly for spending extended periods by themselves? It would need to be very subtle so that lone wolf play wouldn't feel too punishing if that's your preferred playstyle, but tangible enough that you would think twice before gunning down the first survivor you run across. Maybe a subtle shiver in the aim? Having the character sometimes mutter to themselves and give away their poisition? (like the cough?) Maybe alcohol could be added as a way to temporarily combat loneliness, just like in real life! A mechanic like this would be a step TOWARDS realism, and would actually make the game more and not less difficult. Complaints? Suggestions?

This is one of the most obnoxious and snide things an individual can do in a forum. Don't be like this guy.

Okay, so I think enough has been said to get a pretty good read on the two opposing sides here and what they want and don't want. I want to take a whack at this from a game design perspective. I'm not a game designer but I try to read everything I can and I feel like I have an okay grasp of it. Some small points before I get started. 1. I get that this isn't supposed to be a "game" in the sense that it's very different from other games. However, if you get down to the basic definition of a game, that is, a set of rules that govern interactions with each other in a competitive scenario, then it still very much counts. An anti-game is still a game the same way an anti-hero is still a hero. That is, the anti refers to going about the same thing in a different way or for different reasons rather than doing a completely different thing. 2. Rocket may SAY that he's just an architect and he wants to see what players do in the world, and that the players should create the game. However, that's completely impossible. Why? Because human behavior is and has always been malleable. Tiny changes to game mechanics have massive reverberating effects on the behavior of players. Even if Rocket does not know it or do it intentionally, he is dictating a playstyle to his user base through the elements of his game. I would argue that almost all of the alleged problems with the community discussed in this thread are directly traceable to game mechanics. What this means is that a request to modify mechanics in order to modify player behavior is entirely reasonable because every single change in mechanics rocket has ever made or will make will have the effect of modifying player behavior. Even if rocket says he has no opinion on what kinds of interactions players have, he does. He wants banditry to happen and we know it because he hasn't removed friendly fire. He wants teamwork to happen and we know this because we can't give ourselves blood transfusions. What's really important are these three questions: What kind of player interactions do we want this game to have? How often do we want specific interactions to take place? And what mechanical changes would need to take place to suit the first two questions? Now that we've gotten that out of the way, lets take a look at what the two factions seem to want: The bandits want a world that feels as authentic as possible. Notice that I said authentic and not realistic. This is really important. Dayz is not even remotely realistic. There are realistic arma2 mods and they're incredibly boring. You have police running around "arresting" people who "break rules" and other people who are working dull jobs as a game while escaping from their real life dull jobs. In a sense, DayZ is exactly as unrealistic as any arena fps game, or more importantly, as minecraft. Minecraft is actually an incredibly similar game to DayZ. It's quite possibly the closest comparison possible in modern gaming! In both DayZ and Minecraft here are no enforced goals other than survival, it's very easy to die, and the main thrust of pve content is simply to gather supplies in order to survive longer and then screw around. The way DayZ and MC differ is that DayZ feels incredibly authentic and real. Everything about the way the world looks and sounds and acts makes it easy to suspend disbelief and feel like the world might be real. That's authenticity. Think about the difference between modern warfare and team fortress. They're mechanically very similar, but modern warfare is more authentic. The bandits (At least the ones we should be listening to) are worried that if Rocket listens to the people in this thread, the game will lose some or a lot of that authenticity. Of course some want the opportunity to be as trollish as possible, but I think a lot of them are really enjoying the immersion a game with very few rules can bring. They like to be deep into the role play perspective of an individual surviving as well as they can in a cruel and broken world and succumbing to the need to revert to a predator and prey mentality. A lot of the suggestions put forth in this thread so far have been very "gamey", in that they feel more like video game rules imposed from outside of the game world, rather than an aspect of the game world itself. The bandit skins did not feel authentic because in real life (and in most games!) our actions do not magically change our clothes for us. The mechanic put forth earlier in this thread where a letter is inscribed in one's forehead does not feel authentic because that situation would be the least of a bandit's worries in real life. A captured bandit would be happy to escape a failed attempt at banditry with their lives intact, especially if their only punishment were a small easily hidden scar. The survivors also want a world as authentic as possible! To a survivor, the way PVP takes place in this game is absolutely immersion breakingly antisocial. Real life humans would not act the way they are currently acting in any real life cataclysm , rules or no rules. Not only are we just not wired to act that way, but a world of danger and scarcity simply wouldn't allow it to occur! Why? Banditry (as understood in this game) is incredibly dangerous and resource intensive. Think about how much high caliber sniper ammo that a real life individual would be able to gather in a zombie apocalypse, Now imagine you're an entirely sociopathic individual who happens to have a sniper rifle. Do you go into Cherno (a place packed with the highest concentrations of zeds around) and shoot all the other humans in the area, thus attracting the crowd of the undead to your sniper perch? That sniper is now in mortal danger from both the zeds and any angry survivors who want to fight back. Even if he manages it, he's either going to run out of ammunition or be killed, making the problem take care of itself. The only reason it happens in game the way it does is because ammo is absurdly plentiful, and our lives mean absolutely nothing, because we will immediately respawn. Don't get me wrong, people would still kill other humans in a real zombie apocalypse, but they would do it rarely and carefully. No one would ever kill someone who had no food/weapons/supplies with a high powered rifle in a zombie apocalypse for fear of wasting precious ammunition, being killed by their prey, or being killed by the zeds the astonishingly loud noise would surely attract. The few who might do that would quickly die. A real life bandit encounter would probably more closely resemble a real life mugging, where the prey is threatened at gunpoint, disarmed, robbed, and only generally killed if the victim fights back. Even then, they would be killed quietly with a knife, but more likely they would just be left to fend for themselves in the wasteland. (It should be noted that this closely resembles the typical encounter with a pirate in Eve, a VERY successful MMO.) This is safer and more efficient for the bandit, and allows them some degree of rationalization that they aren't an evil person. (Such rationalizations are very helpful in keeping one's resolve, and most villains in fiction make them. Even Hannibal Lecter though he was performing a selfless service for society.) Furthermore, leaving victims alive means that the bandit may run into him again and be able rob him for a second batch of freshly looted things! In a worst case scenario, the bandit would eat them. Queue the "WE ARE THE UNDEAD!" philosophical moment that comes up often in zombie stories. Essentially, what we have in this topic is a conflict of authenticity. The most important question, I think, is this: Is it possible to modify the game so as to improve the authenticity for the survivors without harming the authenticity for the bandits? I think that such a thing is possible, although I worry it might be beyond the scope of a single developer like Rocket to implement. I think though, he is likely to make the attempt as the project moves forward, because it will become a commercially funded project that will need a large enough playerbase to support it. Our job as alpha testers is to try and work together to come up with solutions that satisfy as many of us as possible, not to bicker pointlessly among each other and call each other names. Are we mature enough to accomplish that and ensure this potential game we all love is as amazing and genre defining, even genre creating, as we know it can be? I hope so! That said, I'm not sure what exactly the mechanical change would look like. I think the idea put forth earlier that if survivors are killed and not looted that our items will remain when we respawn is a start, as it wouldn't hurt the immersion for the bandits in any way. (They wouldn't even see a difference, as they would be looting the most dangerous survivors anyway.) However, it would take a bit of the sting out of being pointlessly and randomly sniped in cherno. Of course, the mechanic would be gamed horribly, with people combat logging to make looting impossible, so the game would need to be modified further to make it actually function, but I think it's going in the right direction. What do you think? -edit- Another aspect of that particular idea is that it would offer antsy survivor groups a middle ground between being friendly with a stranger and screwing them over. You could kill someone who makes you nervous and be sure that you're safe while knowing that you haven't screwed the player over entirely.

Zeds are inconsistent. I get that and I understand your advice on how to deal with them. It makes sense to treat them all as if they're the one zombie that's going to aggro you from 50 miles away. Here's what I have to ask though: Is it good game design for zombies to act this way? I would have to argue that it isn't. Part of what makes players respond positively to a difficult challenge is if that challenge is consistent enough that a player with enough skill can deal with it. When the player is randomly punished for reacting in a way that seems very much like it would solve an earlier problem, it's very difficult to still care about putting yourself into that situation, especially as a new player. I don't mind zeds running really fast or erratically or having the potential to kill me with a single slap, as long as the reason this situation occurred is the same every time. As it its, a lot of the time it seems like you did everything right and the game just decided to screw you over. (Especially with zeds spawning directly behind you.) Part of the allure of the zombie/infected apocalypse is that the enemy are all exactly the same, and even though they are deadly and numerous, they're a predictable. When people die in zombie/infected movies it is always directly traceable to a mistake they personally made, which allows the audience to believe that they might do better. If zombies aggroing from 50 miles away is appropriate, then they should all do that so that players are immediately fed the information they need to survive and don't have to throw themselves into the meat grinder over and over again to figure out what's going on. The UI is partially to blame, though. It really needs to accurately reflect how visible and audible we are. The way it is now, the bars lead players into a false sense of security. If it's night time and I have 0 bars of visibility and 0 bars of sound, I should not be attacked by zombies, period. If I am going to be, the bars should reflect that so that a new player can plan accordingly. (And don't give me a realism argument here, because in real life we would not have bars like that at all.)

So, I'm a new player an I don't really know how it was before, but I feel like if its night time and I have 0 bars of visibility and 0-1 bar of sound, I shouldn't get aggro at all unless I get right next to a zombie. (Basically, holding shift to walk slowly, or crawling around.) I tried twice to sneak around in a town to gather supplies, and both times a zombie either spawned on top of me or ran up behind me from really far away, because I was looking behind me a lot. I was holding shift the entire time. What's extra strange is that the flashlight doesn't seem to affect how visible I am to the zombies. I can shine it directly into one's eyes and it just keeps shambling around, but I can crawl around in prone with it off and be aggroed by a crawler that came from who knows where. As it is, it seems really inconsistent and random when a zombie is going to aggro me, and I don't feel like I can predict it well enough to work around it. At one point, I snuck up behind a zombie (0 visibility bars and 0 sound bars the entire time) with the intention of killing it with a hatchet. It was ignoring me until the moment before I swung when it instantly flipped around to face me (It didn't turn, it just was suddenly facing me) Smacked me once, then teleported behind me, smacked me again, and my character passed out immediately. I feel like the sound and sight bars are a little bit deceptive right now. 0 bars of sound should mean that I'm not making any sound, shouldn't it?