Suggestions for the DayZ standalone - thinking outside of the limitations of an Arma 2 mod.

[noobsaibod 2]

In the mod there is an option to put you'r hands behind your head, i would like to see that in the standalone, but when you do that you'r body becomes fully lootable (main, secondary wep slots and main inventory)

[Seiseki 16]

What about each player carrying wallets with their ID, for identification.

I know it's kinda pointless in a post-apocalyptic world to still carry your wallet, but it's also a part of your history and kinda nostalgic.

And it makes it makes sense to identify dead bodies by checking their wallets for credit cards, driver license, ID, etc. There's just no other way to tell someones name, unless every player in DayZ has it a dogtag or a name tag on their clothes ;)

Perhaps collecting these could be interesting for bandits.

Also, to chip in on the bandit discussion.

Killing an unarmed player should result in a larger loss of humanity.

Perhaps you could collect ears as trophies too, as another way to lose humanity on purpose for people who wish to brand themselves as bandits.

Edited August 29, 2012 by Seiseki

[LeYuno (DayZ) 51]

I find it odd that this wasn't suggested yet.

How about audio that actually supports/emphasises the situation you're in, instead of just the looping background audio?

If you're just running through the woods there would be little to no excitement, but as soon as you encounter zeds and you start crouchwalking you hear some kind of suspense music to add to the atmosphere. then when you get hit by zeds or you fire your gun/get shot at, some kind of action music to add tension to what is happening.

[R3cK 8]

the idea with the ID is pretty cool tho.

same as the diary.

should not be a problem to put those things in and both are really nice.

i also hope that the weapons a player is using (primary/secondary) is actually mounted on the body

like pistol near the hip and rifle on the back or something.

so even no weapon is in the hand you know the guy is well armed.

edit:

the guy one post before me with the dynamic audio : +1

Edited August 29, 2012 by R3cK

[ominouspenguin 10]

In games where stealth and situational awareness is key, in-game music just gets turned off by the majority of players.

So while I appreciate some people like it and I'm not opposed to it, I think it should have a low priority.

[unconsciousobjector 69]

Posted in another thread, thought I'd put it here too.

During my weeks of playing DayZ I've been trying to think of a way to add some "oh shit", or I should say more "oh shit" moments.

Why not infected dogs?

Imagine making your way through the forest or a field and hearing a dog (or better yet dogs) howling in the distance. They have picked up your sent, or another's sent? The sounds grow closer as you scan the horizons for movement. A survivor breaks from the forest line followed by an infected dog hot on his(her) heals. Another infected dog and then another are hot on the survivors trail. Clearly the survivor is losing the race. In all four infected dogs are steadily gaining on the doomed soul. You raise your weapon, draw a bead on the damned soul and mercifully take the survivor out before the dogs rip his guts to shreds. Big mistake.

The sound of your weapon alerts the dogs to your presence, they mill around sniffing at the ground and looking your way as they slowly approach your position. The lead dog lets out a howl followed by the rest of the pack. They have YOUR sent.

Do you run? Try to hide? Hope you can take all four out before they're on you? You check your ammo count, 12 rounds, probably not enough. You choose to run. There's a town a click away. Running for your life through the forest the sounds of the infected dogs grows closer, Half a click, you might just make it. More howls come from the left, then more from the right, other infected dogs have heard their infected broithers and answered the call. You exit the forest into a field, you can see the town, so close. Dogs are also breaking from the forest to your left and right, there's 10 of them now. The dogs at your heals are so close you can almost hear their bated, hungry breath.

A shot rings out from the town, someone has taken mercy on you and ended your miserable existence before the dogs have their way. Big mistake.

[Gordon Axeman 191]

My suggestion:

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/82391-training-over-time-character-skilling/

[ukko (DayZ) 5]

Shovel. Melee veapon and perhaps ability to dig small hole on the ground and stash your stuff there. Hole would stay 24h or something and you see its location on the map, if you got one.

(sorry didnt search much. this forum is slow as hell)

[deadlykenny 37]

I have had three ideas about vehicles that i think would be really good to add;

Locking vehicles:

Locking your car etc. would be extremely cool, so people cannot just find your car etc. and be off with it, you can lock it with keys you find in the gear, these keys would be specific to that vehicle, plus the keys would be needed to start the car. (Probably alot of you are going to be moaning about how it would be unfair not to take someone's vehicle, so for those people read down more), the keys, if stored in the inventory would take up one tool-belt slot.

Stealing vehicles:

Ok so if the keys are implemented there has to be a way to take a vehicle without them (obviously you could just kill the driver and loot the keys off him/her), Ok so basically you would have the option to smash the window of the vehicle so that you can open the door from the inside (this would also make you loose blood, say 200-300 due to you using your fist/elbow to smash the window, also you would have to use new piece glass to repair the window), once inside you would have to hotwire the car to make it start (maybe have a chance that you will fail to hotwire the car and you will have to start again) the process would take some time to do, so this would also be a minus, but this would balance out the fact that you don't have the keys and would make the keys more precious, I.e. being quicker and doesn't make you loose blood.

Closing doors on aircraft:

Ok so say the huey is in the stand alone or something like it with the guns hanging out the side and doors, well i think that the pilot should have the ability to close them so that passengers in the back are less likely to be shot, this would obviously take away the ability for gunners and with the huey, if the doors were to close you could not fit anyone in the gap that remains, so it would decrease the amount of players it can hold (if it was like the Chinook for example closing the door would do noting to the carrying capacity unless the Chinook has a MG on the back which would become obsolete due to the door being closed).

EDIT:The doors would only be able to be closed when no-one is sitting in the gunner positions

I would like to know thoughts on my ideas, any more features suggested i can add to this making the post more tidy :3

Edited August 29, 2012 by kenny29

[iisilentjokerii 14]

u should make some colony's where people can stay and be safe but they only could stay there for a couple of minutes for example if i go to a colony i could either get medical help, eat food and that's all and to be safe when you leave if there's a survivor out the colony it gives him a minute to get out of the area or else he gets killed

[nabehobby 13]

watch Warz copy exactly each suggestion in this post.. <_<

Edited August 30, 2012 by CaptainBingo

[Paddy0610 278]

Dont know i postet here already:

Rocket talked about in some Interviews

Durability on Weapons / Switching Parts, Splitting Weapons

1. It would be nice to have the Weapon split into diffrent Parts each got his own "Durability"

Note: each one who ever had a Weapon in hands knows you can easily split it into Parts and set it together.

2. So if Spezific Parts are Damaged (No breaking option like rocket said) it gives you certain Disadvatages in Fighting - like Jamming the Weapon , the Aim gets worser, less Accurary at Range etc.

3. So if you find a Weapon on the same Type you can Split it into Parts and Repair or Switch your Damaged Parts with the ones you got out of the found Weapon. (So it would be usefull to find weapons you already have, and Harder to have the High Tier weapons over a longer time since they are much rarer then the common ones)

To make this Working you should be able to look at the Durability of each Part of the Weapon.

Kit to Clean Weapon

There should be a tool to clean your Weapon so it wont get your Parts damged so much if you Clean Mainentance them over Time.

If you dont got it your Weapon Parts will Damage a bit faster as with the Kit.

Character Progress (for the one´s who likes things like it)

Splitting and Setting Weapons together will take Time lets say as an example 60 Seconds, as in Real life if your character done it over and over in the future it will take less time to perform these Actions.

Short Version:

Weapons made of Parts (Able to look at the Durability of each), Ability to Split a Weapon to them and Switch them if they got a better Durability.

Weapon Cleaning Kit to make the Durability go down slower and Mainentance your Weapons.

Character will get faster over Time when he Performs the action like Splitting and Settings Weapons together.

Edited August 30, 2012 by Paddy0610

[unconsciousobjector 69]

Probably been said before but, what the hell.

How about becoming the "infected"?

Similar to the current sickness mechanic, it would be a great addition if one could actually become the infected. Maybe some limited form of the radar could be used as a infected "ability" along with some of the obvious limitations. Human players that have become one of the infected would add a degree of realism that no AI could ever hope to match. It would also familiarize players with the abilities and limitations of the infected and allow that knowledge to be applied to the next go at survivor.

What an impact infected players would add to the DayZ world! I also think that the possible addition of infected stages or slow loss of abilities due to the virus eventually destroying the host completely would offer the infected player a "out" returning them to the land of the living, both literally and figuratively.

[R3cK 8]

a flare gun would be nice. read about this some days ago and its quite a cool idea.

if you want to find someone he could shoot a flare into the sky

risky of course because it could be seen from everyone.

but thats a cool thing

Edited August 30, 2012 by R3cK

[slartibartfast (DayZ) 77]

Shopping Malls could be 'Instanced' - no way to get in, or out, without being in a co-op group. But there might be more than one group in there. You really never can tell.

dead players should attract a small herd of zeds for a long time. That body is gonna be warm and bloody for a while - this would get rid of the need to turn players into zombies - sorry infected.

BTW - if you camouflaged your long wheel base like that in my squad then you would be on stag for the entire night.

[R3cK 8]

i have no idea if something like a shopping mall should be an instance.

it should be tried out i guess.

but you own underground base should be indeed a instance

rocket said something about new map parts you could enter through the underground

so it might be like

Chernarus--> underground --> map2/map3/map4

you could probably "craft" or rebuild an underground entrence somewhere on the maps.

in the fact that the base is an instance that should not be a problem.

for example you dig have a hole with a ladder (craft) or more realistic you have a sewer you can climb down (rebuild or always available entrence)

camera is fixed so you see how your charakter disappears underground

then he get teleported into your personal underground base/hideout instance.

maybe this is a very small corner of the canalisation in the beginning, where you just can store some cans and a gun and take a rest. and you can upgrade the space and so on.

examples for underground exit/entry:

sewer holes in citys (ninja turtle style)

huge waste water pipes at the coast

cellar of a building

craft examples::

digging a hole (takes long) + ladder or rope

or blast a hole (loud but quick) + ladder or rope

repair/climb down a water well

I dont know how it fits into the game, having a personal instance that cant be robbed or something. but for that we got the beta i guess :)

Edited August 30, 2012 by R3cK

[Jaoai 16]

Suggestion:

Being able to put cow blood or mud/dirt (when it's raining) on your clothes as a cheap type of camo blend.

[deadlykenny 37]

Probably been said before but, what the hell.

How about becoming the "infected"?

Similar to the current sickness mechanic, it would be a great addition if one could actually become the infected. Maybe some limited form of the radar could be used as a infected "ability" along with some of the obvious limitations. Human players that have become one of the infected would add a degree of realism that no AI could ever hope to match. It would also familiarize players with the abilities and limitations of the infected and allow that knowledge to be applied to the next go at survivor.

What an impact infected players would add to the DayZ world! I also think that the possible addition of infected stages or slow loss of abilities due to the virus eventually destroying the host completely would offer the infected player a "out" returning them to the land of the living, both literally and figuratively.

Yes its been suggested 1,000,000 times before and the answer is always no, this is because you would have people trying to become zombies to troll new-spawns on the coast, secondly in my opinion its not very realistic, in all infected zombie like games/movies/fiction the infected loose the human part of their mind and so become savage etc. so becoming one and being able to control it would be extremely unrealistic, although if when you were killed by a zombie perhaps you turn into one but its an AI and then anyone wishing to loot you would have to kill the zombie first.

[Jaoai 16]

Suggestion:

This base idea comes from WarZ as far as i know, or atleast this is what they said.

The details is just me rambling.

You can find diaries in doorways to barns or secluded houses, when you press read, a voice starts reading it out loud and at the same time the game loads an Instance in the background, when the letter is finished (maybe as an intro not telling the whole tale) you get the play the scenario of the diary as the people who wrote it, how they barricaded the house, while zombs trying to get in and fending with their last breaths.

If you survive (this will be frigging difficult to achieve!) there will be some really nice loot spawned in at the inner room (where you couldn't get to before reading it)

If you die, the house owners, probably a family, will spawn in behind you in the doorway and you just have to fight your way out.. the prize for this is to simply stay alive.

Should be able to group with friends in this instance.

Diaries are very rare spawns.

[R3cK 8]

na the underground base idea is already official by rocket

[unconsciousobjector 69]

Yes its been suggested 1,000,000 times before and the answer is always no, this is because you would have people trying to become zombies to troll new-spawns on the coast, secondly in my opinion its not very realistic, in all infected zombie like games/movies/fiction the infected loose the human part of their mind and so become savage etc. so becoming one and being able to control it would be extremely unrealistic, although if when you were killed by a zombie perhaps you turn into one but its an AI and then anyone wishing to loot you would have to kill the zombie first.

If as a infected your need to feed was greatly accelerated your time as a infected would be short, not to mention survivors have weapons. Hunger would drive the "savage" and if you dont feed quickly and often you die then I dont see it being a problem at all. It certainly would add some VERY dramatic but, short, momments in the game.

[LoksVassago 5]

Hi all, registered an account here just now to leave this stuff:

Brief history of me - I played DayZ the mod for many uncounted hours, though I stopped playing about 3 months ago. I was pretty darn successful, both learning to survive, and then after that playing around like it was a PvP sandbox. I guess that's to say that I'm "qualified" in existing DayZ content, as I'll be basing my suggestions here primarily off of what already exists.

Things I'd like to see changed about DayZ the mod in an official DayZ standalone game -

• All the bugs (my first death after about 15 hours of play was glitching through a rock and breaking my everything instantly because it wasn't properly clipped against players walking through it), hacks, exploits, griefing, etc. etc. you've heard this before.
  
• Some way to prevent the game from turning into a PvP sandbox that happens to have some zombies in it (NOT to prevent PvP entirely, just to reduce it from how it was around the time I stopped playing; I felt it was just too much). My feelings here is that it was some combination of the zombies being too "easy" (predictable, kite-able, whatever; also it meant you didn't need to rely on other people to protect you from the zombies as much), players acting as a sort of gear filter/aggregator (players will only carry the best gear they come across, which means you save a lot of time if you harvest gear from players instead of spawn points since players won't be carrying tin cans around), and a lack of cooperation-based end-game activities (once you had a vehicle, a DMR, ghillie suit, and nightvision that was basically it - you had won DayZ, so now all there was left to do was to hunt people for sport).
  

That's basically it for basic changes to the mod that I'd like to see in a standalone version. They're obviously two very broad categories, so here's some more specifics:

Bugs, hacks, exploits, etc. I can't comment on. I'm no coder so I have no clue which end's even up for that. However, ways to address the reasons I think the game turned too easily into PvP Sandbox Which Happens to Have Zombies...

The zombies are too easy, which means you don't NEED to work together with everyone you find. Ways I'd improve zombies to make them more of a threat to help fix that problem would be to have more of them (this was experimented with during the mod itself, primarily through respawn time tweaks), make them less predictable (lots of random triggers would help here: zombies randomly not paying attention to you, for instance) especially by placing them in locations they don't presently inhabit (the middle of nowhere) and by giving them a bit more initiative (essentially keeping zombies spawned for longer and having them roam the map of their own volition). Of course also the issue of "zombies can't run and attack at the same time" being fixed by making every zombie usain bolt should probably be addressed, too, since that's what makes them sort of a pain to hit while simultaneously making them easy to kite regardless. Another way to improve the difficulty of zombies is not just by improving the zombies themselves, but also by lowering the resources players have access to. If you have an M4 then three or four zombies doesn't seem so bad, but if you have a double-barrel shotgun you're going to need to reload in the middle - or worse yet, if you only have a fireaxe then only ONE zombie might be a threat!

Basically: the existing zombies don't necessarily START easy in DayZ the mod, but they GET easy, which encourages you to ignore the zombies as a valid threat.

Players acting as a loot filter/aggregator I'm not entirely sure what to do about. This just sort of seems like a normal thing that will happen, as players will obviously bring along their best gear whenever they go somewhere that will put their (virtual) lives in danger. Even having reliable bases wouldn't really do too much, since you're not going to stash your AK-47 in favor of a makarov assuming you have the ammo for both and it's up in the air as to which you bring along. However, one solution I can think of for making killing people for their loot less reliable would be that you might damage some of their gear in the process. This is a trick I commonly see employed in tabletop RPGs of all things, because commonly you will want to loot your enemies (after all, they tried to kill you, it's only fair!) Essentially maybe your bullets hit some of the magazines on their assault vest, so now the magazines are all bent out of shape and are useless, or you hit their water bottle so now you'd need to fix it or it would leak, stuff like that. This might be kind of pie-in-the-sky to model accurately, though, because I imagine it'd take a lot of processing power to damage gear in a player's inventory using hit location modelling, so more realistically it might potentially involve simple random gear damage/destruction. Damaged gear leads, obviously, to the proposition that there be wear and tear on your gear. This is something that the STALKER games did in a very simplistic way (I mention this because the level of detailed that's ultimately used for this feature could be relatively simple and still have a good effect), such that as you used a gun more it'd jam more often, or as your armor became more used it'd be less protective from the damage it took before, stuff like that. Repairing this wear and tear might be an important feature as well, or gear could simply become worn and ultimately useless and need to be discarded, which could lead to an interesting resultant economy of its own (but would probably require that things spawned infinitely, rather than there being a fixed amount of DMRs in the world, or else the DMR as a gun would go extinct - just as an example).

A lack of cooperation based end-game activities is basically what it says on the tin. Getting a vehicle functioning again, especially a helicopter, is really accelerated with teamwork much beyond how much teamwork helps you scavenge for beans. This is a great example of AN end-game activity, but DayZ the mod really only had this one. Once had a vehicle that was it for cooperative endgame activities. The proposition of "base building" is a great solution to this, however, as building a base is much more complex than building a vehicle, and having a fleet of bases is much more useful than having a fleet of vehicles (because you can position your bases both near important locations to guard them, and far from important locations to be kept secret, so having many bases in many different locations is very important). In addition, base building is incredibly important as it affects the world itself. However, and this brings us back to zombies, bases in dayz mod as it stands currently wouldn't make a lot of sense. The only way they'd be overrun is by other players, since zombies don't roam. An archetypical situation in zombie lore is the survivor base attracting a giant shambling hoard of zombies, so that definitely needs to be in there!

Some other cooperative end-game activities that I can think of are events, like those mentioned by other people. People mentioned things like "convoys", though I don't think that would work well with NPCs like in most traditional MMO games, since that doesn't seem to be the kind of thing DayZ is all about, mod or standalone or otherwise. Rather to enact events like that, I think you'd probably need to have a core of people who either volunteer or are on payroll to act out situations like that for other people to stumble across. It's kind of staged, so that's not necessarily very "DayZ" in principle, but unannounced "improvised" events in the game like that by some sort of staff members would be really cool to liven things up, because if they get killed they didn't just spend 20 hours scavenging the gear necessary to enact that sort of cooperative cinematic event moment in the game world.

Finally, I have some general suggestions that don't really fit into any of the above categories. DayZ seems like a more simulationist game than most (probably because it uses ARMA as its base), and while the gunplay is pretty realistic by nature, I'd love to see all of the other stuff be that way, too. Imagine if repairing a car in DayZ was like a simple version of repairing a car in real life? The game would make it easier but the real info would still be there to learn about. DayZ taught me a lot about actually navigating real places using a map and compass (and also about the importance of roads and power lines as landmarks!), and some years ago there was an article about somebody responding to a real emergency using what they learned from the America's Army game's medic tutorial. This game seems like a prime opportunity to "do the research", as it were, and to keep things as realistic as possible (although at the same time, this runs the extreme risk of being too daunting and shutting people out, so it would take a lot of work). The obvious benefit is that this would aid immersion, assuming you could keep intrusive menus out of the way. The secondary benefit is that it might actually teach people a thing or two. I see a lot of existing suggestions for extremely realistic inventory management, but I did spot some mistakes in the suggestions for very realistic injury models, so obviously a big problem here, besides being hard to avoid lots of menus and clunky UI and overcomplicating things, is making sure that the research is right. Not the top of my list, I'd rather have a good game that makes some abstractions than a bad game that's really realistic, but I think the game is in a unique position to take advantage of that.

Some sort of group affiliation system seems like an important idea. If you're going to have a base, you're going to want to know who's allowed in that base and who's not. This takes a cue from EVE, where probably the most excellent part of that game is the system of alliances and no-holds-barred power politics. Some existing suggestions make mention of groups fighting over a gas station in order to control the diesel that powers their generators, but without what amounts to a "clan system" that seems hard to pull off. Also, since EVE is notorious for backstabbing, that seems like it'd fit strongly in to the "late game" of DayZ. At the same time, it's also important that these features not get carried so far away that people have essentially rebuilt modern civilization, just now there's a few zombies running around - it is meant to be an anarchic apocalypse after all, and organization should be hard.

Entirely enterable buildings seem like a must, so that it's not quite as fake feeling as seeing "oh there's that one building model that I know is enterable, time to head over there and ignore the other 95% of these buildings".

My final suggestion is basically a word of warning about suggestions (ironic, I guess). The design space in DayZ needs to be kept properly organized. I learned a lot about game design across disciplines, first from music, then from tabletop RPGs, then from video games, and all three have very similar rules about space. Film does, too, actually, but I'm not really as much of an expert on that. In music you have three dimensions within which to place elements: volume (loudness), frequency (pitch/tone), and panning (audio field). If you have any two elements occupying all three of the same locations in these spaces (say, "loud", "high pitched", and "panned left") at the same time, they're going to blur together and form a sort of amorphous blob, which is bad. Sort of like in film, if you place one actor behind another relative to the camera, the first actor will block the second from view, so he may as well not even be there. Games work the same work, so if you have too many fiddly bits for the same purpose, it starts to get really weird. The ultimate analogy, though, is that a game's set of features is a lot like a song's volume: once you hit +- 0dB you're done, and anything else you add is going to make it horrible. You need to strip things out in some places to make room for things in others. Basically, DayZ is a pretty niche concept: post-apocalyptic zombie survival, with an emphasis on relative anarchy and anomie. This means that there's a short list of things you should be focusing on, that fits within this archetype. Weapons, obviously, is one of them. What you can carry on your back is another. The things that can hurt you is a third, and comradery, or a lack thereof, is a big fourth. There may be more, I haven't thought too long about it, but some suggestions (perhaps even my own, and my personal bias prevents me from seeing it) can start to creep outside of the original archetype of the game. This is commonly known as "feature bloat", something I'm sure Rocket is aware of being in the business of game design, and I'd personally quite like to avoid it in any future DayZ Standalone game.

Stuff like bases, or clan systems, or whatever are probably important to reducing the amount of PvP gunbattles in the "end game" of DayZ, that may be true. What's also true, though, is that giving players that power to organize and fortify reduces the sort of "transient wanderer in a wasteland" archetype that DayZ the mod is famous for. I'm not sure if that's "ok" with the vision of DayZ, but I still think it'd be cool, so I suggested that sort of stuff, but as my closing words I would ask Rocket to pay close attention to what is, and is not, DayZ - and no matter how cool a feature sounds, to absolutely under no condition implement it if it is not about what DayZ is meant to be about.

I had a lot to say, so I'll leave it at that. Cheers to Rocket for the fun game I played those few months ago and I look greatly forward to what DayZ standalone might bring!

Edited August 30, 2012 by LoksVassago

[deadlykenny 37]

If as a infected your need to feed was greatly accelerated your time as a infected would be short, not to mention survivors have weapons. Hunger would drive the "savage" and if you dont feed quickly and often you die then I dont see it being a problem at all. It certainly would add some VERY dramatic but, short, momments in the game.

Yeah, still though as hard as it would be to be a zombie, it would still be quite unrealistic, plus we don't want dayz ending up like Left 4 dead versus mode where hoards of zombies are controlled by players.

Edited August 30, 2012 by kenny29

[flimsypremise 94]

Basically, DayZ is a pretty niche concept: post-apocalyptic zombie survival, with an emphasis on relative anarchy and anomie. This means that there's a short list of things you should be focusing on, that fits within this archetype. Weapons, obviously, is one of them. What you can carry on your back is another. The things that can hurt you is a third, and comradery, or a lack thereof, is a big fourth. There may be more, I haven't thought too long about it, but some suggestions (perhaps even my own, and my personal bias prevents me from seeing it) can start to creep outside of the original archetype of the game. This is commonly known as "feature bloat", something I'm sure Rocket is aware of being in the business of game design, and I'd personally quite like to avoid it in any future DayZ Standalone game.

I think this is probably the most important single thing to keep in mind when considering the standalone. Fixing the existing bugs and tweaking the current mechanics should probably be 99% of what gets focussed on.

[unconsciousobjector 69]

Hi all, registered an account here just now to leave this stuff:

Brief history of me - I played DayZ the mod for many uncounted hours, though I stopped playing about 3 months ago. I was pretty darn successful, both learning to survive, and then after that playing around like it was a PvP sandbox. I guess that's to say that I'm "qualified" in existing DayZ content, as I'll be basing my suggestions here primarily off of what already exists.

Things I'd like to see changed about DayZ the mod in an official DayZ standalone game -

• All the bugs (my first death after about 15 hours of play was glitching through a rock and breaking my everything instantly because it wasn't properly clipped against players walking through it), hacks, exploits, griefing, etc. etc. you've heard this before.
  
• Some way to prevent the game from turning into a PvP sandbox that happens to have some zombies in it (NOT to prevent PvP entirely, just to reduce it from how it was around the time I stopped playing; I felt it was just too much). My feelings here is that it was some combination of the zombies being too "easy" (predictable, kite-able, whatever; also it meant you didn't need to rely on other people to protect you from the zombies as much), players acting as a sort of gear filter/aggregator (players will only carry the best gear they come across, which means you save a lot of time if you harvest gear from players instead of spawn points since players won't be carrying tin cans around), and a lack of cooperation-based end-game activities (once you had a vehicle, a DMR, ghillie suit, and nightvision that was basically it - you had won DayZ, so now all there was left to do was to hunt people for sport).
  

That's basically it for basic changes to the mod that I'd like to see in a standalone version. They're obviously two very broad categories, so here's some more specifics:

Bugs, hacks, exploits, etc. I can't comment on. I'm no coder so I have no clue which end's even up for that. However, ways to address the reasons I think the game turned too easily into PvP Sandbox Which Happens to Have Zombies...

The zombies are too easy, which means you don't NEED to work together with everyone you find. Ways I'd improve zombies to make them more of a threat to help fix that problem would be to have more of them (this was experimented with during the mod itself, primarily through respawn time tweaks), make them less predictable (lots of random triggers would help here: zombies randomly not paying attention to you, for instance) especially by placing them in locations they don't presently inhabit (the middle of nowhere) and by giving them a bit more initiative (essentially keeping zombies spawned for longer and having them roam the map of their own volition). Of course also the issue of "zombies can't run and attack at the same time" being fixed by making every zombie usain bolt should probably be addressed, too, since that's what makes them sort of a pain to hit while simultaneously making them easy to kite regardless. Another way to improve the difficulty of zombies is not just by improving the zombies themselves, but also by lowering the resources players have access to. If you have an M4 then three or four zombies doesn't seem so bad, but if you have a double-barrel shotgun you're going to need to reload in the middle - or worse yet, if you only have a fireaxe then only ONE zombie might be a threat!

Basically: the existing zombies don't necessarily START easy in DayZ the mod, but they GET easy, which encourages you to ignore the zombies as a valid threat.

Players acting as a loot filter/aggregator I'm not entirely sure what to do about. This just sort of seems like a normal thing that will happen, as players will obviously bring along their best gear whenever they go somewhere that will put their (virtual) lives in danger. Even having reliable bases wouldn't really do too much, since you're not going to stash your AK-47 in favor of a makarov assuming you have the ammo for both and it's up in the air as to which you bring along. However, one solution I can think of for making killing people for their loot less reliable would be that you might damage some of their gear in the process. This is a trick I commonly see employed in tabletop RPGs of all things, because commonly you will want to loot your enemies (after all, they tried to kill you, it's only fair!) Essentially maybe your bullets hit some of the magazines on their assault vest, so now the magazines are all bent out of shape and are useless, or you hit their water bottle so now you'd need to fix it or it would leak, stuff like that. This might be kind of pie-in-the-sky to model accurately, though, because I imagine it'd take a lot of processing power to damage gear in a player's inventory using hit location modelling, so more realistically it might potentially involve simple random gear damage/destruction. Damaged gear leads, obviously, to the proposition that there be wear and tear on your gear. This is something that the STALKER games did in a very simplistic way (I mention this because the level of detailed that's ultimately used for this feature could be relatively simple and still have a good effect), such that as you used a gun more it'd jam more often, or as your armor became more used it'd be less protective from the damage it took before, stuff like that. Repairing this wear and tear might be an important feature as well, or gear could simply become worn and ultimately useless and need to be discarded, which could lead to an interesting resultant economy of its own (but would probably require that things spawned infinitely, rather than there being a fixed amount of DMRs in the world, or else the DMR as a gun would go extinct - just as an example).

A lack of cooperation based end-game activities is basically what it says on the tin. Getting a vehicle functioning again, especially a helicopter, is really accelerated with teamwork much beyond how much teamwork helps you scavenge for beans. This is a great example of AN end-game activity, but DayZ the mod really only had this one. Once had a vehicle that was it for cooperative endgame activities. The proposition of "base building" is a great solution to this, however, as building a base is much more complex than building a vehicle, and having a fleet of bases is much more useful than having a fleet of vehicles (because you can position your bases both near important locations to guard them, and far from important locations to be kept secret, so having many bases in many different locations is very important). In addition, base building is incredibly important as it affects the world itself. However, and this brings us back to zombies, bases in dayz mod as it stands currently wouldn't make a lot of sense. The only way they'd be overrun is by other players, since zombies don't roam. An archetypical situation in zombie lore is the survivor base attracting a giant shambling hoard of zombies, so that definitely needs to be in there!

Some other cooperative end-game activities that I can think of are events, like those mentioned by other people. People mentioned things like "convoys", though I don't think that would work well with NPCs like in most traditional MMO games, since that doesn't seem to be the kind of thing DayZ is all about, mod or standalone or otherwise. Rather to enact events like that, I think you'd probably need to have a core of people who either volunteer or are on payroll to act out situations like that for other people to stumble across. It's kind of staged, so that's not necessarily very "DayZ" in principle, but unannounced "improvised" events in the game like that by some sort of staff members would be really cool to liven things up, because if they get killed they didn't just spend 20 hours scavenging the gear necessary to enact that sort of cooperative cinematic event moment in the game world.

Finally, I have some general suggestions that don't really fit into any of the above categories. DayZ seems like a more simulationist game than most (probably because it uses ARMA as its base), and while the gunplay is pretty realistic by nature, I'd love to see all of the other stuff be that way, too. Imagine if repairing a car in DayZ was like a simple version of repairing a car in real life? The game would make it easier but the real info would still be there to learn about. DayZ taught me a lot about actually navigating real places using a map and compass (and also about the importance of roads and power lines as landmarks!), and some years ago there was an article about somebody responding to a real emergency using what they learned from the America's Army game's medic tutorial. This game seems like a prime opportunity to "do the research", as it were, and to keep things as realistic as possible (although at the same time, this runs the extreme risk of being too daunting and shutting people out, so it would take a lot of work). The obvious benefit is that this would aid immersion, assuming you could keep intrusive menus out of the way. The secondary benefit is that it might actually teach people a thing or two. I see a lot of existing suggestions for extremely realistic inventory management, but I did spot some mistakes in the suggestions for very realistic injury models, so obviously a big problem here, besides being hard to avoid lots of menus and clunky UI and overcomplicating things, is making sure that the research is right. Not the top of my list, I'd rather have a good game that makes some abstractions than a bad game that's really realistic, but I think the game is in a unique position to take advantage of that.

Some sort of group affiliation system seems like an important idea. If you're going to have a base, you're going to want to know who's allowed in that base and who's not. This takes a cue from EVE, where probably the most excellent part of that game is the system of alliances and no-holds-barred power politics. Some existing suggestions make mention of groups fighting over a gas station in order to control the diesel that powers their generators, but without what amounts to a "clan system" that seems hard to pull off. Also, since EVE is notorious for backstabbing, that seems like it'd fit strongly in to the "late game" of DayZ. At the same time, it's also important that these features not get carried so far away that people have essentially rebuilt modern civilization, just now there's a few zombies running around - it is meant to be an anarchic apocalypse after all, and organization should be hard.

Entirely enterable buildings seem like a must, so that it's not quite as fake feeling as seeing "oh there's that one building model that I know is enterable, time to head over there and ignore the other 95% of these buildings".

My final suggestion is basically a word of warning about suggestions (ironic, I guess). The design space in DayZ needs to be kept properly organized. I learned a lot about game design across disciplines, first from music, then from tabletop RPGs, then from video games, and all three have very similar rules about space. Film does, too, actually, but I'm not really as much of an expert on that. In music you have three dimensions within which to place elements: volume (loudness), frequency (pitch/tone), and panning (audio field). If you have any two elements occupying all three of the same locations in these spaces (say, "loud", "high pitched", and "panned left") at the same time, they're going to blur together and form a sort of amorphous blob, which is bad. Sort of like in film, if you place one actor behind another relative to the camera, the first actor will block the second from view, so he may as well not even be there. Games work the same work, so if you have too many fiddly bits for the same purpose, it starts to get really weird. The ultimate analogy, though, is that a game's set of features is a lot like a song's volume: once you hit +- 0dB you're done, and anything else you add is going to make it horrible. You need to strip things out in some places to make room for things in others. Basically, DayZ is a pretty niche concept: post-apocalyptic zombie survival, with an emphasis on relative anarchy and anomie. This means that there's a short list of things you should be focusing on, that fits within this archetype. Weapons, obviously, is one of them. What you can carry on your back is another. The things that can hurt you is a third, and comradery, or a lack thereof, is a big fourth. There may be more, I haven't thought too long about it, but some suggestions (perhaps even my own, and my personal bias prevents me from seeing it) can start to creep outside of the original archetype of the game. This is commonly known as "feature bloat", something I'm sure Rocket is aware of being in the business of game design, and I'd personally quite like to avoid it in any future DayZ Standalone game.

Stuff like bases, or clan systems, or whatever are probably important to reducing the amount of PvP gunbattles in the "end game" of DayZ, that may be true. What's also true, though, is that giving players that power to organize and fortify reduces the sort of "transient wanderer in a wasteland" archetype that DayZ the mod is famous for. I'm not sure if that's "ok" with the vision of DayZ, but I still think it'd be cool, so I suggested that sort of stuff, but as my closing words I would ask Rocket to pay close attention to what is, and is not, DayZ - and no matter how cool a feature sounds, to absolutely under no condition implement it if it is not about what DayZ is meant to be about.

I had a lot to say, so I'll leave it at that. Cheers to Rocket for the fun game I played those few months ago and I look greatly forward to what DayZ standalone might bring!

Now this is how a suggestion should be written. You sir, have my beans.