Having played quite a bit on Eliakoh's server on the initial MP public test release, and since on a private persistent server as well thought I'd drop in a few idea's and a bit of feedback. Server resets on public servers at this stage are definitely required primarily in my opinion due to the zombie count, over any loot access. With enough people on the server (a handful will do) it's quite easy to police up plenty of shotgun ammo to easily take on a large number of zombies, usually dying in the process. This results in a depletion of not only the ammo which IMO is no bad thing (having had several incidents where our safe-house was attacked without warning people being a bit more cautious with ammo would be nice). But the large numbers of zombies leave exploration pretty bland and unexciting. To combat this at this early stage of development it would be perhaps be nice to have some more admin tools along the line of a games master/director to spawn in swarms, this could also tie in nicely with proposed player run story-lines and events. Such as directing all players to defend a safe-house that's been setup over a few days by the players. Spawning is an obvious issue as everyone starts in the same spot with nothing on hand with the surrounding area picked clean, obviously as versions progress it will become more random so much less likely to spawn in the death-zone mess and clutter of abandoned items and dead bodies. Perhaps a simple co-ordinate based start point adjustable by the server in config files would be a good temporary, and later as an optional method of servers altering spawn points to distribute players more evenly across the map. Later on this would be useful for private servers allowing players to set say a safe house location as the spawn point so dying players could easily resume play with friends without the penalty of traversing from Muldragh to the farm off to the west etc. Supplies are obviously an issue with players picking clean areas of importance especially in the starter town very quickly, these are often wasted or lost in abandoned safe houses and dead bodies indistinguishable from zombie bodies. A small feature/effect that could be interesting is players to spill their inventories on death, simulating them dropping equipment or items falling from pockets, with most players using backpacks it shouldn't cause too much clutter. Other options would be nice to include with the helicopter fly over sounds could be air drop packages, dropping fresh food and medical supplies randomly into the game world that attract both players and zombies alike with the noise, this would be an easy way of supplying fresh food such as meat without requiring the implementation of hunting and instead just spawning boxes in predefined or random areas. These could also be used by server admins to drop them on request to create more 'events' for their players. Obviously many features are things that would come into play later with NPC events, but I would propose incorporating a few earlier that could be admin or randomly occurring that would allow public servers to maintain player interest for longer. Preventing the need for resetting the game world due to the current build limitations of zombie migration and infection growth/spread. We might not quite be at the stage where you could run a public server permanently, but it would be a very interesting test scenario to see how things did play out with the current build so I'd love to see it attempted outside of a private environment. Or at least trying it for a week and seeing how long it takes for the farming bug exploits to overrun the streets back to mother nature
