hatfieldcw

Letting them run indoors would boost difficulty enormously, but just a little lag for the player would give the impression of zombies blinking through walls and teleporting down hallways, which would hurt immersion and cause a lot of crying here. One way I can think of to make them far scarier would be to give them more health. Make headshots mandatory for killing them, so I can't just lay into a horde with my 1911 and drop seven per magazine. Have a leg hit with an 1866 make it a crawler, so you still have to hit it in the skull to finish the job. Spraying zombies with an MP5 should do virtually nothing to them. Make me reload my Makarov just to take one of them out. Another big boost to zombie deadliness might be to let them attack on the run, so you can't just kite them for miles through the woods. Let their run speed be a tiny bit slower than the double-w sprint, but a tiny bit faster than a regular run, so you can dash out of their range and then it'll take maybe fifteen seconds for them to catch back up when your wind runs out. You'd be forced to hop fences, crawl under walls or run through buildings to stay out of their reach, and in some case you'd just have to stand and fight them.

I'm inclined to agree with the flamers here. Once you know the ropes, the zombies in this apocalypse are trivial. I'd say zombies account for fewer than one in ten of my deaths nowadays. They'll only really get me if I'm on tilt after a respawn and just jog unarmed into a building with only one door, or if I alt-tab to look at an out-of-game map and get slooowly eaten while afk. The fact that they can't catch you if you don't stop outside, and the fact that they can be dropped quickly and efficiently indoors, and the fact that they lose line of sight pretty easily all combine to prevent you from ever having more than two or three zombies to deal with at any given time. What happened to you there was a pair of unlucky hits. Zombies double-critted you, which is wildly unlikely. Even so, it's your own dumb fault for stopping in the middle of a foot chase to draw your sidearm. In case you didn't know that weapon transitions stop you, now you do and you'll doubtless remember it.

I dabbled a little bit in the mission editor for ArmaII, and I seem to recall some tools for influencing time of day. I don't know whether pure time dilation is possible, but I know you can have changes to time triggered. I'm not a fan of this idea, though. 2:30 is not enough daytime when you can spend an hour or more just meeting up with a buddy who died, and players who prefer the daytime will be hopping servers or logging out during the short nights you propose. Furthermore, making nighttime more zombie-intensive goes against the current night dynamic, which I enjoy very much. Knowing that I can get past zombies in the dark and raid high-value areas in relative safety is good, especially when balanced against the risk of players spotting my light sources or tracking me with NVG while I do it. Some of my most rewarding and costly experiences have happened right at dawn and dusk, as the shift in available light changes the game dynamics considerably. I think I could get behind a double-time server, or even triple-time, but no faster than that.