Weapon Cleaning

[Belmakor 0]

I have a suggestion that might add another layer of realism, unreliability and strategy to combat in DayZ. This is built on a military simulator after all so I am surprised its not in it yet given its importance in real-life.

Before going into combat, all troops clean their weapons. Why do they do this? Well when your shooting any time of weapon, significant carbon begins to build up in the chamber, on the firing pin and down the barrel. Anyone who has fired more than about 60 rounds from a single gun will attest to how filthy it becomes. After you have fired several hundred there becomes a real possibility that you will begin to experience stoppages - particularly with older weaponry.

In a life-or-death situation, a stoppage is a real nightmare that can waste valuable seconds to clear.

Now some games have included stoppages in their combat models and generally it seems quite arbitrary with no increased possibility the longer you have fired the weapon - i.e. the same probability whether it is your 1st or 1000th shot.

I understand it may be a no go to attach variable stats to a weapon, but it could just be another stat similar to ammo count which simply records the number of shots since the last clean with an increasing probability of a stoppage (that would require you to perform the reload animation).

To combat this, you would need to find weapon cleaning kits that could work like matches in that they don't become consumed. Or even better if they were consumed they might limit peoples tendancy to fire on sight (is the build up of another 5 or 6 rounds of carbon -

After every engagement, or perhaps before a planned one you would clean your weapon to avoid stoppages during any coming firefight. Of course this would need to a be a suitably long animation, perhaps probably longer than that for bandages to make it sufficiently difficult to perform mid-fight.

I imagine it might add some consequence to your actions and some danger to your decision to fire. You never truly know whether the rain, mud and carbon build up is going to come back to haunt you! This may even stop bandits killing everything on sight if they didn't think the weapon degradation was worth it!

Would others be receptive to some form of system?

[Sawzall 0]

I like this idea, and you've justified it pretty well, but this has been suggested before here.