My thoughts and suggestions.

[mikkrish 0]

It will be long post, ill try to make it interesting. Sorry for my not perfect english, ill try to make it as clean and short as possible.

First of all that must be said, great, great, GREAT mod. I played ARMA 2 for 2 years and im a big fan of it. Modded some things, scripted too. Made load of missions but still my work is nothing to compare. I admire you for your work as it is astonishing!

Im 23 years old, i work as IT specialist. I live in Poland and im big fan of Post-apo, STALKER (dont like fallout tho..), Metro 2033 book and simulation/sandbox games.

First time when i launched DayZ and got sucked in the game and immersion was ass-kicking. Zombies have satisfying AI (I bow to you for that), i discovered a lot of new things and it was very rewarding. Lots of options, crossbow, refilling water (when my friend found that you can refill water at well i was like "Holy ****. thats awsome"), some hunting content. I played 50+ hrs with 5 of my friends. I played solo, and in group. I meet strangers, killers, good guyz and bad ones. My foot was nearly at every city, i pew pew from lots of guns. So now it's time to share my thoughts but before i do it first i must say something.

I dont want to force my gameplay into noone as player priorities may differ from another. My approach to DayZ world was like it was few years after apocalypse and remaining survivors must make they way to survive. I take the pleasure in the 'road' to survive as there is no 'goal' and no 'end' in the mod. To me goal is the road that i take, and i want it to be infinite and challenging.

I do know its alpha, and even now its good as hell. And i will not include player-behaviour aspect as it will evolve with time and game changes.

But now i will share my and my firends (5 of them) thoughts from the experience we had. Take note that we all are experienced with ARMA 2 and we have good knowlage of surroudings of Chernorus and all weapons.

For us ALL weapons are lethal if used in proper way.

I write at time of the 1.52 ver is up.

The first time when i played solo it was so immersive and huge content that i took pleasure by only exploring. But with the time and experience acquired, some of the things changed. It bacome too easy to survive, where word SURVIVE was a key word to this game. Survive is the way of solving problems, so if there is no problems then there is no need to use word survive. We had absolutely no problem in fiding water or food, we have our belly full all the time. There was no grim thoughts about the starvation. We are not picky about the weapons, our goal is to survive so we take the most suitable weapon to do the job. One that is effective, have planty of ammo and is easy to use. Winchester... For bad guys Lee E. or CZ500. We dont need RPG or M4 (thou we had it as it was not SO hard to aqquire...and we didnt server jump as we didn't want to take fun of the game. Just kill the guy that does it :P More fun less work!).

The weapon was too common in our opinion, WAY too common. In the apocalypse world that i thought of there is more weaponless peaple that need protection, and in advance they trade for protection with other valuable items. Its ok for me when everyone have weapons but there is no problem to find one, it's true that some of them are more rare, but we are pragmatics so we dont need RPG to kill a zombie if winchester will do and its easy to use. I myself use crossbow, so we dont alarm whole city when we need to kill one zombie, but i throw can too. To survive is to challange with problems, and there is none again.

Meaby when travel would be more hard then it would be harder to scavange for new items as the time between places would be longer. But there is no need to be carefull when there are no buildings around (beside other players). So when the time to choose arrives, when we see lone player with good weapon that can be dangerous for our group in the future (wich can be near as we can travel fast), we have plenty ammo to spend and our belly's are full... We choose what all pragmatics would choose... Or bored peaple... The funny thing is that the zombies protect the player as we dont want to start zombie ruckus. The world is persistent and long term but I solo got a good tier equip in 2-3 hrs, in team in 1-2 hrs. And then we cant find any reason to move on. We can make car or helicopter but as it was told we are pragmatics, there is no other factor besides time for travel. And it's safer to not have a loud transport. Heli would be cool as it is quite safe up above.

There is quite outraage for player killers, but with so much ammo and loads of food and water I can understand their motivation.

From my personall dislikes that should be not taken in credit are some weapons (like M4, G17) that FOR ME are immersion breaking. NV take from me some fun of light menegment, i know that i can throw it away but im a goddam pragmatic and it's not in my nature to throw infinite night light source...I find enough ammo for M4 or AK that is good weapon to use it. Normally i wouldnt take it if the ammo would be more rare...

In my opinion those items should be so rare that only enthusiast would use.

Now suggestions, i do understand of capabilieties of ARMA 2 scripting so i will try to point out what i belive is possible. I do not know if it was already pointed out.

Random NPC spawn that you can exchange items wandering where zombies dosn't spawn. It could be hostile to bandit players (if you choose to remain the 'bandit' state.)

The posibility to turn on some electric generators and manage it so we can have light in cieties.

To have a possibilyty to take over a town for a about 1 hour so zombies wouldnt spawn. But it does need a good idea and is hard to script without bugs so i wouldnt persist on it. Just a random whim.

I saw other ideas that i liked on other people posts so i wont duplicate them.

Now things that i did read and personally i do not approve of it.

Giving restrictions to players killing other. I do like to encourage to not do so, and give some other in game penatlies but no restrictions... Meaby some GUI with PK board or something but no fire block or something like that...

No weapon damage modifications or player levels. Bullet is a bullet, human is a human.

I do not criticize the mod becouse i know it is in alpha. For me its BEST mod for the game, and i will play it for a long time with my friends as i see that dev's work hard with improvements and content.

Again,

THANKS FOR AWSOME MOD!

[mikkrish 0]

After another few hours of playing i came to a new idea.

When playing i see that there is no official neutral ground beside forum for peaple to unite. 100% of terrain is hostile. So i thought of 2-3 NPC guarded bases spread on the map (AI can be mortal but i think it would be a magnet for griefers, so i wouldnt mind immortal npc.)

The place can't be placed in towns as the loot spawn and zombie spawn would have to be changed. I think of some custom made base with AI guards that could kill on sight bandits.. Players could trade in that place and form some new groups. Meaby if there will be some trading system for NPC it would be good place too. It would be official safe zone from zombies and such, no zombies around so AI wouldnt use server sources for lag.

Then if there would be zombies in forests and there would be slower movement between towns, it would nice if drop were more rare so people can actually trade between themselfs. Vehicles would have more value too.

If towns could be conquered by players for not big amount of time as if you change server you can be in some not good situation, players actually could trade other as defenders of town cant go and scavange for food and other items.

I know that in reality it wont work that perfectly but i think that is worth some thought.