brent2

Almost all of the OP's ideas are excellent and would really improve the game.

What about my post is incoherent...? I directly addressed your post above, and you called it nonsense, and I directly addressed the one after it, and you called it nonsense again. This amounts to me making valid points and you sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you!" and calling me names to boot. Maybe you don't agree with my points, but saying "roflmao mental issues" and basically calling me a noob both make you look pretty silly. If you really consider yourself some kind of veteran with more authority on these topics, it seems weird to me that you don't hold your posts to a higher standard than childish name-calling.

What about my post is off-topic? (Even what I said about how you're ruining modern games is relevant, because it's the basis for these sorts of suggestions.) I directly addressed these statements: You're suggesting that keeping tents in the game when players log out detracts from realism... uh, what? Players logging out to begin with detracts from realism, but that's obviously necessary--but how the heck does making a tent which has been placed on the map disappear, too, make anything more realistic? That makes no sense at all. I explained this in my previous post... Anyway, it's already been stated that we could potentially have digging and underground storage of sorts, so this entire idea is silly based on that, too. It sounds like a lot of the player base just wants cookie-cutter nonsense, like every other game on the market today, but that's pretty far removed from DayZ's roots.

Beans given. I think that third person completely undermines the "authentic" nature of DayZ and is probably the only feature worse than bandit headscarves. I see a lot of suggestions that it should be left as it is now--up to individual servers--but in practice this results in nobody playing the first-person servers because they're more difficult. This is not Gears of War--people should be forced to peek their characters around corners instead of going third-person and having an artificial 360-degree view of everything from the safety of cover.

"Logging out" is already "unauthentic" and forgiving, but it's the nature of this as a video game. Extending this unauthentic but necessary feature to the influence which your character has on the world around you makes the game even less realistic, and only for the sake of pandering to people who want this game to be something that it isn't. With all due respect, people like you are the reason why games like DayZ just don't exist anymore. Back when people actually played games like UO, things like severe death penalties combined with open PVP and the ability to track other players down meant that the backbone of gameplay was social interaction. In-game politics meant something, and it lead to an extremely rich, immersive experience. Your enemies and your allies massively shaped your gaming experience. It changed everything about how you behaved in the world. I know of a lot of people who became close friends after meeting and playing together in games like UO, because of the sort of social interaction that that open-endedness facilitates. Nowadays all anyone wants to play is crap like World of Warcraft where when you die, it's, "oh, gosh, I have to walk all the way back!" and "you don't have my permission to attack me, buddy!" Games like that are barely one notch above Facebook games--some people want more than that. I'm pretty sure there are multiple DayZ clones in the works right now, so if you're interested in Hello Kitty: Zombies are Friendship, you may want to look into those instead. There are people like myself who want DayZ to become significantly more difficult and "authentic" (whatever that means :P).

These are great ideas. It should take time to cook meat and eat. Especially cooking meat--it shouldn't be instantaneous like it is now.

This. The fact that your character isn't persistent is forgiving enough as it is. We don't need tents despawning and spawning so that players can pretend this is a typical Carebear Island Adventure MMORPG and not an in-depth survival game with permadeath. Some people actually want the engaging experience--for everyone else, there's XBox.

I think that there should be a second "breed" of zombie, one which is more powerful than "normal" zombies. Players who are killed by zombies should have a chance (say, 10%) to become either a super zed or a normal zed (not under the control of the player), and there should also be naturally-spawning Super Zombies throughout the map. Perhaps players who are bitten could have a chance (1% or less) to slowly turn into one of these as well, adding a sort of social stigma and increasing the need to avoid zombies further. I think that this serves a few purposes: It's somewhat "authentic"--people who get infected might actually become zombies themselves. It could give military-grade weaponry and high-powered rifles a purpose other than turning the game into a PVP deathmatch, and could make conserving ammo for lower-grade weaponry a lot more important. I'm not sure about the specifics, but I think that this would add a fun new dynamic to the game. Player-controlled zombies is also a neat idea in my opinion, since it would give people who enjoy PVP an excuse to hunt other players, and it would present much more of a challenge to other players over even the best AI.

The point of the game is to be an open-ended post-apocalyptic survival game. Hoarding and setting up camp is part of that experience. Controlling a vehicle comes with the inherent cost of everyone wanting to steal it from you (or, hopefully, wanting to team up with you in the standalone), and you instantly become the most conspicuous person for a few kilometers while driving around. Plus, the map is finite, so someone will inevitably find it. Implementing this feature would be catering to the people who should probably just go play Halo or something.

Larger variety across the board, significantly more melee weapons, significantly reduced military weapon spawn, and significantly less ammo spawn across the board. High-powered military rifles like the AS50 should be one of the rarest items in the game by a larger margin than they are currently--I want to play for a hundred hours and not come across one. I'm absolutely okay with people trying to murder me constantly, but I want it to be with Makarovs and lead pipes rather than AS50s and DMRs. In my "perfect" DayZ world, a CZ550 is a high-end find, and an AS50 is almost unheard of.

I think playing as a Zombie ("infected?") would be pretty fun. That, or you can become infected and spread it, which just leads to an inevitable death, at which point your character becomes an AI-controlled zombie like the rest after a given amount of time. (That is, players only have so long to loot your motionless body until it gets up and tries to eat them.)

As crazy as it might sound to some, I like the idea, but I think that it could cause problems for the actual launch and distribution of the game. I know that people get kind of anal about this sort of thing, and something so "brutally real" might upset soccer moms everywhere.

I'd like to see at least a handful of high-end servers with high population caps run by the development team or some independent company. At least that way, I know some goofball "clan" isn't manipulating their personally-owned server in some unfair way. No matter how many safeguards are in place, player-operated servers are a surefire way to enable cheating for the owners. Plus, if there were an official expert-mode server, someone else might actually play on it!

Personally, I'd also like to see a use for high-powered rifles other than just sniping players. I don't want PVP to become harder or impossible, necessarily--but it would be nice if cooperative play had an incentive. Maybe some sort of super zombie with above-average strength, speed, size, and so on, which a sniper rifle was most effective on. And I think it'd be nice if the actual act of acquiring a sniper rifle was incredibly difficult without some kind of group cooperation. At the very least, this would encourage clusters of bandits, and I'd rather have clans of bandits roaming about, who have work to survive just like everyone else, than solo players who do almost nothing but PVP, if only to add to the immersive, "authentic" experience. Having scary bad guys try to murder me is actually a lot of fun, but when it becomes the predominant theme of the game, it takes away from the overall potential experience.

I'm an adult in my 20's, and there aren't a lot of non-casual games which still appeal to me. When I first started playing the mod, back when it was newer, I felt about as immersed in a post-apocalyptic environment as any video game up to that point could have made me feel. Zombies were scary as hell, shambling along the countryside (or maybe it was just the threat of zombie attack, rather than the actual zombies themselves). I was paranoid... military crawling around the countryside, crouch-running from building to building during the rare occasions when I had the stomach to run through a village, heart pounding, etc. Finding beans or a Makarov was an accomplishment. The experience was sort-of like if the movie "I Am Legend" were made into really good video game--it was awesome. But as time passed, I slowly learned that I could simply sprint through cities to major loot spawns, sprint out, and use whatever I obtained to loot the "best" loot spawns on the map... and not just if I got lucky, but almost every single time. I think that the way that I was playing originally was how the game/mod is meant to be experienced, and the way that I eventually came to play was a result of the shortcomings of the game mechanics. The experience essentially evolved from post-apocalyptic survival to a slow-motion Call of Duty deathmatch. I feel that this can be fixed in a few ways: Loot spawns should be dynamic rather than static locations. I mean, there should be some variability in where various types of items are found, rather than having them in the same exact spots every time. I don't think that there should be a 100% chance of finding an AK-74 if I visit the same circuit of places, which is the current case. Static loot spawns help turn the game into a slow-motion Call of Duty deathmatch, wherein the "load-out" menu is replaced with brainless grinding, and the map is a little bigger. Make zombies a significant threat, more so than other players. If zombies are the primary violent threat, it should force the kind of stealthy, careful behavior that I utilized early-on. It might even make group play more sensible than solo play. Make large cities like Cherno have ten times the zombie concentration that the small villages and countryside tend to have. This fits in with the "lore" of the game due to probable population density before the "infection" hit, and it would balance out the current high reward for sprinting through big cities. Make food and ammunition rare instead of common, and make matches and matchboxes finite and hard to come by. Before I stopped playing, I was consistently finding more food than I could even carry. The fact that carrying an alternative primary gun in one's backpack is common really speaks to how unbalanced the "survival" aspects of the mod/game are right now. Remove bandit headscarves. I know DayZ does not necessarily strive to be "realistic", but bandit headwraps are about as far from "authentic" as you can get. Just too synthetic for my tastes, even if I don't play as a bandit. Make characters gain strength, stamina, and resistance to illness as time goes on. This will discourage Call of Duty gameplay and will reinforce the importance of permadeath. Perhaps vaccines could be implemented which have a one-time use and are limited to a single "life". I know all of this has been suggested many times before, but I felt the need to bring it up again anyway. Maybe the more that these things are heard, the higher the chance they have to catch on as implemented features. It may be in bad taste for me to say this, but I think that while DayZ has a lot of potential, it's best kept a niche game which should appeal to the kinds of people who enjoy its "authentic" roots as a post-apocalyptic survival game, rather than pandering to the sort of people who want to pretend that it's Call of Duty: Slow-Mo Edition. Depending on how the standalone turns out, it could very well be either one of my favorite games of all time, something I spent hundreds of hours on over the course of the next few years, or a huge let-down, something I pass up completely. Not very many games could go either way like that, so I'd like to see something come of it. Edited over 3,000 times for clarity :)

I like this idea, OP. I think that if the "humanity" concept is kept in the standalone, which would be unfortunate, then this surrendering feature should have an impact on how it works.

I agree here. Military ammo should be quite rare, especially for high-powered rifles. I want finding a sustainable supply of ammo for even the lowly Makarov to be an accomplishment--finding an overabundance of AK ammo on a constant basis is just nonsense.

Could not agree more with the OP. Zombies ("infected", or whatever you'd like to call them) need to be the primary threat, not other players. As long as zombies are simple obstacles which can be easily avoided or otherwise dealt with, and food is so insanely common, and guns and ammo are almost as common as food, the game will remain a slow-motion Call of Duty deathmatch.

Bumped for agreement.

Bandit head scarves are too synthetic. The game doesn't need to be hyper-realistic, but having a magical, non-removable headscarf which comes and goes based on your moral or immoral actions isn't true to the "authentic" nature of the game. This is the only by-design flaw which I dislike in DayZ. I don't even play as a bandit, I just don't like the feature.

Bumped for agreement. I also think that ammo. and especially guns, should be significantly more rare, too. Maybe cut the spawn rates by 50% and 90%, respectively. I want finding a Makarov to be a noteworthy event, rather than, "ugh, just another Makarov...".

I figured as much, but I wanted to post anyway. You never know if popular support will lead to some implementation of this in the future. :)