Idea to encourage trust and coop (Salute!)

[deepfried 95]

OK so the way I see it the biggest barrier to spontaneous coop between survivors is bandits playing wolf in sheep's clothing, or in other words pretending to be friendly then shooting you in the back at an opportune moment.

We need a way to enable a certain amount of trust between survivors whilst at the same time not preventing bandits from doing anything.

Here is my suggestion:

You are a survivor, you meet another survivor/bandit who appears to be friendly but you're not sure you can trust them... so you both get close and salute each other.

The mutual salute will mark (invisibly) you both as friendly to each other, now if one of you shoots the other they will get a massive humanity loss, much more than an ordinary murder.

This enables people to optionally "befriend" each other and have a disincentive to backstab.

Of course that wont necessarily stop a bandit from backstabbing "friends" but they wont be able to do it more than once without the heartbeat mechanic marking them as a bandit (with very low humanity).