That's the big problem: people want fear of permadeath without permadeath...
Take the risk versus the reward. Doing anything aside from the south coast takes hours of travel. If you work a fulltime job and have limited time in the evenings to play, do you want to spend 2 hours just crouchwalking to where you actually want to play? And if you happen to attract zombies, you're almost certainly going to have to kill them because as far as I can understand they will never stop chasing you, ever, unless you have a smoke bomb or someone else for them to eat?
It just seems like too much risk to me, kind of like the Nether in Minecraft (at least before they added some new things to it), without much of a reward. Finding a sniper rifle might be a nice reward, but it's just something else to increase your chances of death from both humans and zombies, and if you found it in the north, it means you have to walk hours to get anywhere close again once you die.
To describe it another way, it feels too grindy to me. It's like Nethack in that you carefully go through dungeon crawling levels to get loot...except you don't get abilities, level ups, stat improvements, or much loot in a lot of places.
Or maybe like an MMO where you spend a couple of hours grinding through some valley to get loot or levels, but there's no reward for it unless you enjoy the grinding process and accumulating as many weapons as possible, since the risk would hardly seem to go down. Even in Nethack, a VERY punishing game, you can wear an amulet of life-saving.
I wish permadeath is this was more permanent than hitting respawn and being back in the game. A lot of you complain that you want to just play, but with a mod like this that's actually turning a lot of the results into a sort of social experiment, I say let em try it, make it tougher, make your one life more valuable.
I guess I don't want generic 'fun' - I want tense environments, I want to come out of it feeling like I had an experience over an 'enjoyable time' - and the more meaningful your life is, the more interesting things come up.
But this is neither very compatible with people who have limited playing time, nor very appropriate since the game is such a crapshoot. Is your life truly valuable or meaningful if the game just HAPPENS to spawn 20 zombies near you rather than 2? Is it rewarding for you to walk 2 hours to an airfield and die in one shot from a sniper (assuming snipers are one shot, since I haven't actually been hit by one).
In terms of life being valuable if you have social interaction with other players, yes it can lead to good experiences, but the game seems to hinder such things.
