Yup and the vast majority of those crimes were probably people who were already scum. If I was in the same situation I wouldn't start killing and raping people.

I wouldn't rape anyone either but it would be me and my son against everyone else and I would do what I had to. I wouldn't just kill random people.

I think it would be much more like 'The Road' where food is very scarce, especially after time and people will kill for a tin of beans.

I'll agree that there probably are more players just shooting everything that moves than is likely realistic, but I haven't found that too be too much of an issue yet. Lots of teamwork and other stuff still happens, but you need to form groups you can trust. It just keeps things interesting (for me at least)and they're generally pretty predictable, hanging out in the same areas. Adding more zombies with better hearing would probably be the way to reduce random shootings a bit, not face masks and humanity points (which so far can't work with the complex self defense situations and take some of the fun out of finding out who's a trigger happy nut, while letting the survivors randomly murder what may be good or bad guys, just because they have the mask). Right now once you become a bandit, even if by self defense, you're pretty much forced to shoot everyone you encounter after that as everyone will be trying to kill you.

In my experience hardcore bandits are probably like 1/5th of the players, there are a lot of nice players and most players falling in some shade of grey. Just having that bit of uncertainty as to where they fall on the trigger happy nut spectrum keeps things tense.

Once you have a decent sized group and move away from the coast, bandit loners aren't that big of an issue as long as you keep away from obvious hang outs for them.

I'd also say New Orleans post-Katrina might not be the best comparison, it seems like it's been the zombie apocalypse for a while with a shortage of supplies and small numbers of equipped survivors. Maybe Somalia at it's worst or some other country that had been without government, food, and basic necessities for some time, but has lots of guns might be a closer example.

You know this is the only game/mod that people really torn over the moralistic aspects of it and has made to definite 'camps' of survivors and bandits.

Yeah for me that's one of the beauties of DayZ, and the lack of bandit skins won't change how I approach strangers anyhow, since right now "survivors" skinned people can still shoot a couple of innocents before they get the bandit skin anyhow, and often the tricky bastards use that to their advantage.

I will do the same thing I do now, watch and observe from a distance how they treat other they run into, if they are friendly to others then they are probably ok, if you see them kill others, then you know they are bandits whatever the skin.

One other thing I love about the mod is how it has made me explore and appreciate the scenery, it is nice that there are goods in every town, along with the Zeds, and I'm now getting to know each of the towns and areas which I've been playing on for a long time in Arma2 online MP, but never bothered to explore once the AO was cleared and I had to wait for transport to the next AO.

I would like it if we could choose what civilian clothes we wear before spawning. That way if you saw someone murder another player you would still be able to recognise them later on. At the moment they would just blend in with every other generic survivor.

did you get it from steam? have you tried starting up both arma2 and arma2 oa before installing the dayzmod?

maybe this will help:

1.5.8 is not out yet (hopefully tomorrow?) but he did post the change log sofar

*edit* nevermind,I give up

*edit2* Never give up

I had the Steam version of Arma 2 and the retail of OA.
The video of how to install DayZ would not work with my set-up but after a bit of fresh thinking I finally got it working.

Good to hear you got it working mate. Hope you enjoy it.