Wokky

I'm of the opinion that a lot of gameplay issues I see being complained about stem primarily from survival being too easy, and death becoming relatively inconsequential. Right now, the only thing standing between you and survival in Chernarus... is the threat of death by other players. If you were to take them out of the equation, the likes of Elektrozavodsk and Chernogorsk would simply be risk-free safe havens where food and water are plentiful. Even ignoring the use of tents and vehicle storage, gearing up as a freshly spawned survivor is pretty easy as things stand. Run to Cherno or Elektro, sprint through all the high yield buildings, then head for the hills. Zombies are trivial to escape from, and if you get shot by another survivor you can just try again - it's not terribly difficult to make it out alive, and there's not much at stake by this point. Once you're out of the city, you've basically survived. More food and water is obtained without difficulty, avoiding players becomes easy when you avoid the player hotspots, there is pretty much no challenge to survival at this point. So we create our own challenge by seeking out PvP combat, looking for items that we don't really need but want for the sake of having them, hunting for hoarded vehicles to joyride, and so on. It gets worse when persistent storage is considered - not only is there no challenge to surviving, there's also little consequence to death when you can run back to your/somebody else's camp and rearm yourself with high-end gear. It seems peculiar to me that zombies and survival have become something of an irrelevance in DayZ. I would like to see a considerable increase in the difficulty of dealing with zombies: it should be hard to avoid detection, but it should be even harder to deal with. Currently I can gear up pretty well in Cherno without having to so much as attack a single zombie, so there's not a massive incentive to check out other, lower-yield locations. I'd love to see a scenario where newly spawned players are generally forced to raid smaller villages where lower zombie counts make it easier to avoid aggro, due to the big cities being utter deathtraps unless you're in a group or seriously well-armed. I'd suggest increasing zombie numbers, improving their eyesight and hearing further, reducing the ease of losing aggro, and maybe giving them the ability to hit you while you're sprinting away. Surviving by hunting animals would need to be made harder to avoid being an easy route to survival, this could perhaps be achieved by having random zombie spawns in forests (which would also make travelling between locations more interesting). Admittedly, the awful pathfinding of the zombies as things stand could make dealing with them frustrating for the wrong reasons under those circumstances, but I genuinely think something needs to be done. Right now zombies are only useful for locating other players, and as a replacement for the Respawn button. How human civilisation fell apart as a result of such harmless creatures is beyond me! Hopefully the effect of such changes would make supplies much harder to come by, thereby having an impact on the way people play. I'd love to see players murdering each other out of desperation for supplies, forming fragile alliances to loot cities out of necessity, and working hard for every hour of survival. Right now I generally only kill for the thrill of combat, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it shouldn't be the primary driver of conflict. Kills are more exciting when they have meaning. In keeping with the theme of making DayZ survival more difficult, I would also suggest removing tents and persistent vehicle storage. I know that suggestion will probably lead to a lot of angry responses, but ask yourself, what are they being used for? What purpose do your own tents serve during your character's life? If you ignore duplication exploits, then their only useful purpose is storing excess food/water that you don't want to carry around everywhere, and items such as vehicle parts that you don't need in your backpack until you find one. Finding food and water is so easy that you don't really need a tent for storing them currently, and I believe it should become so hard that you're unlikely to have a surplus. When tent hunting I very rarely find them containing vehicle parts, so what are they being used for? Let's face it, their primary use comes into play after your character has died. Tents are used to enable a new player to acquire high-end gear rapidly, either as a result of their work in a previous life, or somebody else's. In my opinion this runs counter to the premise of DayZ, and goes some way to removing the excitement and tension experienced in dangerous situations. If we want DayZ to be a real challenge to players, and for there to be consequences to our actions, then persistent storage simply needs to be removed. It doesn't add much to gameplay, and so long as it exists players will find a way of using it to dodge the consequences of death. Not only that, it would also drastically reduce the ability to duplicate items and have huge numbers of high-end items proliferate across the player base (I come across so many tents with numerous AS50s now), and might even help discourage vehicle hoarding and get people actually using them. tl;dr: DayZ is too easy, make it brutally unforgiving. This is the apocalypse after all.

The worst thing for me is that the only reason for the disparity in perceived difficulty between veterans and newcomers is that we've learned to game the zombie mechanics. Imagine if the ability to lose aggro was removed, and zombies were able to attack you even while you're sprinting away. Zombies would largely become as challenging to us as they are to newcomers, gear excluded. For both groups the situation becomes "avoid disturbing zombies, but kill them if you do". The issues of item duplication would be mostly solved in one fell swoop by just removing all persistent storage. That's before you even consider the other benefits of such a move, such as making permadeath more permanent.

I'd be content with an interim fix where zombies are not visible beyond spawning range, and that range is increased slightly to 300 or 400 metres. Far from perfect, but it'd stop the silliness that is zombies being used as player proximity indicators, while largely avoiding the lag issue.

Would definitely like to see vehicles being used regularly instead of hoarded, and this would be a great way of achieving it. The most exciting firefights I've been in involved vehicles, and it's a shame players don't often tend to come across them without the tedious work of scouring the map for camps. If this involved the ability to siphon fuel, I could certainly see groups being confronted with some interesting decisions to make when caught up in combat with a fuelled vehicle nearby. Providing cover for a squad mate while they recover your precious fuel would be fun. Also should be good for providing additional important locations on the map beyond the usual player hotspots. Removing persistent storage from vehicles (or at least drastically reducing it) would also go a long way towards removing the incentive to hide them, as well as introducing more difficult decisions on how to make use of backpack space. More food, more ammo, or more fuel?

Precisely. I think tents have become such a well-entrenched part of DayZ that nobody thinks to take a step back and consider what they actually bring to the experience versus what they take away from it. I believe that it's better when you're limited to what you can carry on your person, and forced to make difficult choices about what to take with you. Even if item duplication gets fixed, I still don't think tents offer anything worthwhile to the DayZ experience as persistent storage. It'd be interesting to see them perhaps reworked to fulfil a different role that encourages formation of camps without being centred around storage or vehicle hoarding, although I don't really have any particularly good ideas on how to achieve that. I'm in favour of reducing the number of military grade weaponry in most locations, and introducing more civilian guns. It's a little hard to judge lately given how rampant duplication is, but I suspect that even without it, there are too many high-end weapons around. I think it detracts from the post-apocalyptic atmosphere when over 50% of survivors are running around with military gear and plenty of ammo. Doesn't help that the design of the loot system means rare items are likely to become more prolific as time goes by as a result of loot farming and banditry. Makes me wonder if it'd be worth tracking certain gear via the Hive, and only allowing a set number of each to exist across all servers at any one time.

I think zoom is a practical necessity to counter the low resolution on our monitors as compared to human eyesight. Even with the zoom, you could probably pick out detail at a distance more easily in reality than in game. I'd agree on this if there were more vehicles and bicycles, but otherwise getting around Chernarus is tedious enough as it is. Agreed, making zombies more of challenging to deal with is definitely needed. Unfortunately will be difficult to do well for as long as DayZ remains an ArmA 2 modification.