Dryke

Heh. I gotta be honest...I don't see any need to make a use for them in game other than the obvious (IE replacement footwear). While it's true that in a world of limited resources it would be possible to devise some use for old shoes, but in the world of PZ there are so many other abandoned resources available to fulfill those roles that it doesn't seem like a good use of developer time to explore the world of repurposed shoes

It's an interesting idea, but one has to wonder just how prevalent 'serial killers' are in any given society. I'd hazard the guess that they are a vanishingly small segment of the population. With respect to how someone gains a skill, you are absolutely correct that 'on the job training' is not the only way to gain a skill, and as you pointed out in your anecdotal example sometimes someone outside a particular profession can actually be better at a given skill (or ability) than someone in a profession that uses that particular skill (or ability). On balance, though, it's safe to guess that most police officers will be more skilled with firearms than most of the general population - which makes it valid for purposes of identifying a profession based skill in this game To take your example further, though, how that would play out 'in game' would be if you had a player who chose the 'Police Officer' profession and got marksman as a result - but then spent most of his time whacking zombies with an axe. He might have a level 3 in blades, but still be at level 0 in aiming and reloading. He's got marksman so he's not hopeless with his gun - but neither is he very good with it. You, on the other hand, choose construction worker - and although you start with no firearm related skill, you find enough guns and bullets to get in a ton of practice and you end up with aiming 5 and reloading 3. Now you shoot better and reload faster than your police officer buddy despite his profession based advantage

I like the 'fatguy' comment Troblin...but it's not actually terribly accurate, unless the fence is already a fair way towards falling down anyway, in which case a skinny guy might knock it down too Think of it this way: If you are THAT fat, you probably didn't survive the apocalypse because the first zombie that wanted to eat you could catch you easily. Rule #1, you know?

Honestly I don't think they need to change anything. Chances are that you WILL die. Most people do. As predictions go it's almost entirely accurate, and there is no need for it to be absolutely accurate. At a certain point there is nothing realistic they can do to make sure that you die since it's an undisputed fact that all of human history so far demonstrates we can survive every condition that exists on the planet. The only 'unrealistic' element that exists so far is the presence of zombies, so if it is possible to survive them then it is possible to survive period. Outside of that the only thing they can do is introduce some new unrealistic element, which probably wouldn't be conducive to fun gameplay.

I really don't think they should 'make sure' we die at any point regardless of how much time has passed. Throughout history people have survived conditions nearly as bad as it might be during a zombie apocalypse. Lack of social organization (IE anarchy)? Check. Roving bands of marauders willing to take everything you have and kill for fun? Check. Bad year for growing crops? Check. Heck, Western Europe had all that in spades during the dark ages. Granted, while many a modern person would have to learn some skills that have vanished over time in the majority of society due to specialization (such as farming, hunting, etc) modern people also have several huge advantages over their ancestors. For one, a modern person immediately post-apocalypse will have access to a large store of food and supplies left behind by their newly zombified neighbors. Second, and not to be disregarded, is that while a modern person might not know how to do a thing (such as 'how to turn an animal pelt into something I can wear'), they at least know that such a thing can be done; this gives them the confidence to search for some source of detailed instructions, or possibly even to simply attempt the task by trial-and-error. To all of the various ways and means a person can die, we have added one (admittedly significant) thing: Zombies. So...to be honest, if a player can figure out a reasonable way to avoid 'death by zombie' then every other challenge that might be presented should also be presented with an in-game solution...which means that it is possible someone could survive indefinitely. It's even possible that communities could form and grow. So in the end it all comes down to whether or not Zombies are so fearsome that 'death by zombie' is inevitable; and if you're playing with 'canon' zombies, then that just isn't going to be the case.

Well, for all the realism buffs out there that keep bringing this up - Getting wet (even soaked/drenched) doesn't make you get sick in the game. What it does is increase the CHANCE that you will get sick. So, within the limited scope of potential medical problems that currently exist within the game this is a fairly accurate mechanic. You can go out and get completely drenched many times without ever having anything happen to you, but every once in awhile you get sick as a result. Given that, again, the game isn't yet modeling all the very real things that should be happening to you in a zombie apocalypse if your immune system was weakened, I think 'severe cold' is a very generous way of dealing with it until they are able to implement a more robust model

As long as we aren't talking about an absolute outcome of people getting bored -> getting depressed -> dying. Could that happen in the real world? Sure...but it would be exceedingly rare, and if the mechanic automatically follows that pathway it becomes commonplace within the game world. Instead I'd suggest consequences like a loss of alertness, with perhaps a very small chance that the boredom could turn into depression (and then open up whatever consequences are decided upon for depression).

I think it's important to keep in mind that what we should all be really looking at is NOT the 'average joe' that goes to Starbucks every morning before going to the office. We should be thinking about the 'average joe' that has just found himself in the zombie apocalypse. That distinction is crucial to the atmosphere of this game. Your average 'starbucks' joe would have neither any idea nor any motivation to learn how to reload bullets or turn some kind of metal scrap into a weapon or figure out how to build some type of rudimentary body armor to protect himself from some lunatic trying to bite him. Your average 'zombie apocalypse' joe would be VERY motivated to figure out how to do all of these things - right alongside trying to learn how to hunt, or fish, or grow crops, or build shelter. So getting back to what the OP was trying to point out: It is completely inadequate to cite 'average joe' as the sole reason that an idea is not feasible. First and foremost, because as I pointed out average joe himself is going to undergo a radical change once the dead start getting up and attacking people. Secondly, because the game itself has already deviated from 'average joe' in a number of important and significant ways (such as master carpenters building their own homes and furniture) that it at least validates the idea of suggesting further changes without having those changes dismissed with a blanket 'average joe' argument that isn't really supportable by the evidence. Lest there are those who think I support EVERY conceivable anti-zombie-apocalypse survival skill: Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. Realism is not and cannot be the only factor in determining whether or not something makes it into the game. It has to be something that can be balanced and is feasible to code without detracting (or distracting) from the vision of the game that the devs are trying to produce. Maybe as we move forward we can agree that we aren't really bound to average joe any more. What we're really bound to is something that is realistically possible - both in a 'put it in the game' sense as well as a 'if this were really happening' sense - in a zombie apocalypse setting (in rural Kentucky).

...MafiaPuppet! Just...wow. It's not often that I believe I have been truly educated by a post on a forum. In this case I think I might even be a little bit smarter now too

I'm of the opinion that the less authority the client has, the better the game will be for multiplayer. The client should really be nothing more than the portal through which the player interacts with the server - which, granted, puts a considerable load on the server; however it also prevents people from running many of the easy client side hacks and cheats. Porting characters from one server to another should never be up to the player; rather it should be up to the server admins to decide if they want to accept character files from an outside source, or not. IMO, of course. I'm just hoping that the current state of affairs for PZ MP is due to it being an early beta version rather than because it's the actual plan.

You're welcome - and welcome to the community!

Happily, this is something that is coming in build 29: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/10536-upcoming-build-29/

They have talked about adding Louisville, which is a city of approximately 600,000 people and is in geographic proximity to the areas modeled by the current map.

While it is realistic that a person would sometimes trip, it really doesn't happen all that often - in fact it's exceedingly rare unless the person in question is exceptionally clumsy. A better mechanic for this IMO is the current 'exhaustion' mechanic. Perhaps at some point they can revisit the issue and impose even more severe movement penalties if you continue to run while exhausted; at some point you could even be reduced to 'crawling' speed which, if you are surrounded by zombies, would mean certain death...but I'm not sure making someone actually fall over is the way to go. As an edit, since this post appeared after Viceroy's....I'd have to agree with his point about walking backwards, though. That does result in people stumbling quite often, particularly when they are doing it under stress.

This was on a MP server so that probably has something to do with it; however whenever any existing character tried to connect to the server after the update, it would hang for a long time and then when they got through the character existed, but with absolutely no skills. It also occasionally would hang on an error indicating some problem with an item in their inventory, and then when they finally connected most (and in some cases all) of their inventory was also wiped. This happened to pretty much every player on the server.

Will the changes in character skill necessitate a character wipe? I lost all my characters skills in the last update as well and I'm just wondering if it's worth working so hard to replace them if they are just going to go away again Soon

The server is up an running on 28 - get in and get some! There is a dedicated TS server at ts.krautfleet.net and forums at forums.krautfleet.net for those so inclined

The odd thing is...for my first ever trip to the mall (about a week ago, if you can believe it...I generally stay in Muldraugh so I've never been to the mall before) I came loaded for bear. An axe, some wood glue (for when the axe wore out), a shotgun and 4 boxes of ammo, and a ton of food (in case I got cornered somewhere). The outside of the mall did not disappoint - there were so many zombies that it was hard to actually make progress towards the mall. Then I got inside, and I found two zombies in the entire mall. It was almost completely empty - and it was also totally unlooted; I was the first person there on my server. Interesting...

I'm a base builder, so I'm generally in favor of anything that increases the variety and complexity of the base building process; for that reason I am generally in support of this idea The only caveat I would havefer is that things like coal and sulfur mines are regional resources and not likely to appear in any given small town; to a lesser extent the same is true of a dairy farm. It's even less likely to find both (mine and dairy farm) together

So be it. This would be modeled perfectly by player behavior: If the player thinks the armor makes them invulnerable and they do something that gets them killed, that's on them. Alternately if they are smart enough not to get caught thinking like that, there would be no need to penalize them for a behavior choice that they did not make. Sure it is. YOU, personally, IRL could make a crude suit of chain mail with the materials and equipment you could find by scavenging a small town. Laborious and tedious? Absolutely. Worth it? That's up to the individual to decide, provided both the effort necessary and the potential reward (or lack thereof, if someone made a completely ineffective suit) were modeled correctly. Again, so be it. Exactly how much noise it made could be determined by skill level, and there is already a mechanism in game to address both noise and overheating - once again reducing it to a matter of individual player choice to assess risk/cost vs reward. To go back to something I said in my original post, I think we also need to keep remembering that while the OP specifically mentioned chainmail we don't have to think of this as 'chainmail only'. I'd have to agree with most of the posters who think it's unlikely anyone could find a useful set of chainmail in the Knox County area, and it's also unlikely someone could learn to make a professional level suit of it. But for those who reject the idea that it could even be done IRL...unfortunately all of human history refutes that position. Historically, people could (and did) make armor with far less resources and equipment than a survivor could find in the ruins of a modern American town. There is no realism based argument that can be made to rule out the possibility of survivors crafting SOME type of armor. The only debate of consequence is whether or not introducing armor into the game is practical from a coding sense and workable from the perspective of game balance.

To be fair to the concept of professions, there is nothing about the profession system that requires anyone to identify what their profession is to anyone else - nor is there any implication that your character is limited by their profession. It's simply a way to introduce a skill that you otherwise could not choose. As realism goes, it's a pretty solid concept; some professions would lead to training and practice that might result in a practical skill for someone trying to survive the apocalypse. That's not to say that EVERY trait related to a profession is super realistic, but the idea is sound. If you don't like classing, you can always select 'none' for profession - but then that is in itself a 'class' if you think about it: You choose to be a shiftless layabout who never bothered to get a consistent job anywhere prior to the apocalypse, OR you got a job that didn't impart any useful skill ("Would you like fries with that, sir?"). Alternately, a suggestion might be that if you do not choose one of the predefined professions, you get an extra 2 or 4 trait points to spend instead.

I like the idea of a double axe, if for no other reason than the variety. I'm not terribly sure though that the way to get there is to duct tape two regular axes together. I don't see that working out very well

How does it make it harder to get away? I'm not sure I see how a zombie gets a better grip on a true suit of chainmail than it could on, say, a sweater that you are wearing. Or a jacket. Or any other loose clothing. On top of this I can't imagine a person so grabbed would be exactly passive about it; the idea being that while the zombie is trying in vain to chew its way through tight metal links, you have an excellent opportunity to calmly plunge your screwdriver into its head and then go about your business no worse for the wear. This would even apply to a poorly crafted suit of chain; I can't see it being any worse than regular street clothes, and it at least affords you some protection. I honestly don't see 'grab hazard' outweighing the defense factor. To repeat, though, I'm not taking a position on the game balance issue. That seems like a tougher nut to crack.

I can't agree that a suit of chainmail would prevent you from escaping a canon-lore zombie. You can practically walk away from them, and the suit is not so heavy that a few minutes of use would exhaust a person with any reasonable degree of fitness. Several hours, perhaps - less for the unfit, more for the athletic - but not a few minutes. Remember, after all, that there were people who used to wear such suits into combat where they would likely have to undertake other strenuous forms of activity as well - such as swinging a sword or firing a crossbow or shooting a bow, or perhaps dodging the same...on top of marching or perhaps even running

This may again simply boil down to gameplay. If we're going to have the 'average joe' discussion (which has clearly been hashed out many times before), that can easily be countered by the fact that there ARE instruction manuals out there regarding how to reload ammunition. Typically, it's found in close proximity to the place where things such as the equipment to do reloads are found. If you can read books to become a MASTER farmer, or cook, or fisherman, or carpenter...then there is no sufficient argument that would eliminate the possibility of becoming a basic reloader. But...if the wholesale availability of bullets due to player reloading would break the game economy, then I can see a valid argument for not implementing it despite its realism. That would make it a good and workable suggestion based on realism, but an untenable suggestion based on gameplay.