Diary

[hoffa (DayZ) 71]

You find a pen, you find a notebook... now, I don't know if this would be easy or hard for the devs to implement, but my idea was this: When you have the two items in your inventory, the game automatically writes a diary for you. You could also write things down yourself, but the automatic part would be in for a purpose. 

It would maybe mark items you've looted and the town/village/anything where you got it. This way, new players would have a way of getting some in-game info about where things may be found.
But more importantly - it would mark encounters with other players. Let's say you find a person in Berezino and you help him out. The diary could then automatically write down things like "I encountered another survivor in Berezino. I applied morphine on him/opened a can of beans and dropped it" Really anything that you do in a vicinity of another player (I know there were some servers on the mod where you couldn't disconnect if you were near zombies, or in combat with another player, so I imagine it shouldn't be hard to mark everything you do in those situations.
Also, if you kill a player, the diary takes the note of that, and says something like "I killed a player in Chernogorsk, I was shot 2 times" - so a person who finds this diary can have a general idea about how this fight went down. (If person didn't get shot at all, there's a big chance they were sniping or killing on sight).

 

Now, why this should be automatically written in the diary is beacause people could just not write who they've killed or helped. I don't think KoS players, or campers would be affected by this, but some people who kill cause they're afraid of being shot could maybe see a pattern of killing mostly friendly people and decide to be a little less trigger happy.
I know some of you won't like the idea of the game "forcing" you to write everything down, but that's why you should combine pen and paper if you want to enable the auto-writting. And it wouldn't matter if someone reads your diary cause the only way they can do that is if they loot your dead body. And if you encounter them again with a new character, well they won't know it's you again.

 

This idea should obviously be improved, but I'd like to see something like that.

[JKS-Alex 79]

If you need a diary write one, i don't like automated sistem, that's not realistic, i'm IRL writing on a notebook near the pc things like how many dayZ i'm alive with the same character, how many KOSer i've killed, the name of friendly players we've meet (very few :P), the blood type of all the members in my squad and others similar things  ;)

 

oh and obviously i've always pen and paper with me on my char. i use them to write notes and leave them around, i would like to make also some drawing

Edited March 27, 2014 by JKS-Alex

[matejkvassay 13]

If you need a diary write one, i don't like automated sistem, that's not realistic, i'm IRL writing on a notebook near the pc things like how many dayZ i'm alive with the same character, how many KOSer i've killed, the name of friendly players we've meet (very few :P), the blood type of all the members in my squad and others similar things  ;)

 

oh and obviously i've always pen and paper with me on my char. i use them to write notes and leave them around, i would like to make also some drawing

 

I need some diary too so other player can read it if he kills me. Something like DAY 1: bla bla bla DAY 2: bbla bla - it's easy to implement and it would be great for roleplay players ! Of course not automated but written by myself.

[AnyoneInCherno? 187]

While this topic has been a suggestion since the mod, i still agree with it.

[blunce 991]

I would definitely like to see a persistant journal (which I wouldn't doubt we would actually see come time for persistent objects), but I disagree with anything automated. If you wanted to record things such as encounters, loot spots, etc, it should be the players responsibility to do so. Nothing automated. It seems what OP is essentially suggesting is an event log.

[matejkvassay 13]

I think developers should implement us some diary to write where have we been, what have we do every day in the game and statistics how long we are alive so we can try to stay alive as long as we can :)

[Damnyourdeadman 1045]

I made a relevant suggestion like yours in the past.

If we had notebooks,then you can have your diary,but imo,

rather than beign an automated proccess,players should take their time writting down whatever they please.

http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/174236-notebooks/