[DayZ] Good concept, needs polish

I've been playing Day Z on and off for the past few days, but once the initial "Ohhh shiny..." phase of a new game began to wear off some of its glaring flaws began to appear. Don't get me wrong, the game was worth getting ARMA 2 on sale for and I don't regret the time I put in, but as I play I feel like there are some lingering issues that diminish the fun. Below I detail a few of the changes/additions I think Rocket should consider adding before the stand-alone release; both for quality of life and entertainment value.

[DayZ] Day 1, or, "Eaten by zombie Jamie Hyneman!"

Day Z is one of those games where no player's first experience is the same, where the interesting stories emerge precisely because no one plays it or experiences it in the exact same way. Games like WoW don't much have this anymore because everything is very much on rails, a guided, tour experience. Not to say WoW is "bad" but it doesn't fill that niche. Even Mass Effect has become a 2-option path where many of the experiences are similar for each playthrough (everyone gets to punch Khalisah al-Jilani...). In Day Z, what happened to you the first time you found the Balota airfield or came across Rog Por castle are different. One of my first memories so far is watching some player run across a field with about 10 zombies giving chase...part of me wondered if it was Simon Pegg filming an in-game version of Shaun of the Dead. So in keeping with the growing blogger "tradition" of sharing your early experiences, here are mine...and in the interest of full disclosure, I omitted some of my first few lives where I was more or less learning the controls/engine....

 "I walked into a town and summarily got mobbed by zombies," hardly makes an interesting story anyways.

[WoW] Why tier iLevel jumps are so large...

This post came as the result of a thought experiment after a discussion my friends and I have frequently had. Why is it that, knowing that players are gear-hungry sorts, Blizzard repeatedly shoots itself in the foot and lets scaling go out of control by releasing such large jumps in item level. This kind of behavior has had serious affects in each expansion...things like...

[WoW] Attunements: All for one, and one for him/herself.

As the blogosphere buzzes about Attunements I feel compelled to add my two cents, but instead of just throwing out a "Yay!" or "Nay!" I think it is important to examine attunements contextually. Attunements often became an issue because they required a collaborative, group effort, for something that would benefit a single individual...or even just a single character.

Getting tired of Diablo 3, or, "Trying to earn enough on the RMAH to buy Torchlight 2"

The horse is basically a pool of red goo at this point, but I find I personally have just hit "that" point when I have more or less stopped booting up Diablo 3 for lack of interest in playing. In the interest of full disclosure: My highest character is 52, I have played every class through Normal at least once, and I have yet to hit a "bump" at which point my keyboard nearly found itself embedded in the drywall. That all said, Diablo 3 is failing to interest me lately....I play it with friends at their request but I do not play it on my own or jump to suggest it. This got me thinking...why did the successor to one of the most beloved games in history only keep my attention (barely) for a matter of weeks and within a year will likely be forgotten.

"Professionalism" in gaming Part 2, or, "How intensely do you play?"

A week or so ago when I first thought to write this entry and claimed I would I had some ideas in mind about how each player is devoting a different level of time to the game and views their responsibility towards other players differently. Then the other night I was reading a thread on the World of Tanks forum about XVM (a mod that displays player stats in game, letting you see who on your team has a high win rate and a calculated "efficiency rating") and spotted a comment in there about playing to win. It dawned upon me that in a sense everyone (with few exceptions) IS in fact playing to win, but their criteria for winning and the INTENSITY in which they try to win differs and is one of the prime causes of friction between players of differing levels.