First thoughts, impressions, first bits of gameplay and trends etc.

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Tl;dr: Are helicopter fly bys in both rural and urban/military areas the norm? Is server hopping a big problem? There seem to be a lot of hackers, has this number been decreasing or increasing (proportionately speaking)?

OK, I didn't really know where to write this but since I'm quite a new player I think it should go here.

Disclaimer at the top: despite any complaining it may sound like I'm doing later on in this post, I don't think that anything needs to be done to pkers, griefers or bandits generally (only hackers), as I see it, frustration is part of the game and I should just learn from my mistakes :) Also I've really been enjoying it so far as well.

Anyway, so yeah, took me a little bit of time to get used to it, it doesn't play out too much like most other games I play/have played but I wouldn't say the learning curve was high. Had a bit of getting used to the controls (not in a customisable sense but just what was contextual what wasn't, trying to find out how exactly to do everything), I haven't figured it all out but I'm more or less used to it.

Had my panic moments, and my incredibly tedious moments - in a fit of stupidity I trekked quite far away from the nearest hospital without even thinking about picking up morphine, in fact I didn't even know that I would need these. I didn't really read the wiki or anything because in a game like this I think it's better to figure things out as you go. Anyway you can guess how that ended up, a two hour trek in prone position back to the closest hospital. I don't mind, it's all character building and learning, not anything I would care to repeat if I could help it though. This was in vain though because about 30 minutes from this point I got blown up in what seemed to be a random fly by chopper. They didn't stop, didn't slow down and caught me whilst I was hiding prone underneath a tree (I don't trust any vehicle noises at this point!). This leads to my first question I guess, is this kind of thing common? I mean I was out in the middle of no where, up a little bit south of black lake in woodland. There was no reason for a chopper to be there really, it's not exactly prime location as far as I could tell, though I may not know enough to judge that. Anyway, I know it's common for snipers to camp out near frequently visited areas and that a lot of players are generally hostile even if they're not bandits but I didn't read anything about this. So was I just unlucky?

The next thing I wanted to ask, is server hopping a common problem? It seems to be too easy to do on here at the moment if you're looking for some good loot it just takes a couple of minutes of loading and bam, you can pretty much get what you're looking for.

Obviously there are loads of things I would like to see improved already, being able to fortify buildings/towns - but without wiping out Zs as someone suggested, this would certainly help with the "survivor" side actually trying to form a new community from the wreckage of humanity, foraging flora even so far as to make farm land potentially arable, something like water purification (when something has turned almost everyone into Zs I think it would probably be a safe bet that the water would NOT be drinkable), better and more realistic first aid (my god, not another 2 hour crawl), I also think that certain vehicles should be really prohibitive to use, I mean seriously, 99.999999% of people are not going to be able to fly a chopper just because they repaired (hell, why can just anyone repair a chopper anyway? It should be harder than it is) it, raw meat should spoil as should cooked meat, day light times should mimic actual real world seasonal times not be fixed (though I think it was already stated this wouldn't change). Too many things, most of which have almost certainly been mentioned (at a quick glance over the suggestions thread, I'm really impressed by some of the stuff on there), but having a game marketed as realistic opens it up to all sorts of nitpicking and pedantry.

Some things can't be changed (like the general dickishness of human nature when there's lots of anonymity and no emotional attachment or real emotional consequence to your actions) which is a shame as this is supposed to be realistic... but as this is partial social experiment, I think maybe you wouldn't want to change it even if you had the means.

OK that was a very rambling selection of thoughts and in reality only a few questions.

Edited August 21, 2012 by philulz