Guys are usually friendly although they are highly cautious. Perhaps trying to rebuild law and order to some degree. Military, soldiers stranded on the Island (map) by whatever caused the apocalypse. Dynamically spawning Bandit AI wandering the map out for blood. Dynamic / intermittently spawning "Holdouts" (Bandit style fortified villages) For players to assault for their supplies. Decorated with the classic 'KEEP OUT' and other graffiti roughly spray painted over any place that allow it. Holdouts, rickety looking structures, usually loosely fortified villages or parts of town using rusted metal, wooden planks, burnt out cars, anything to These guys will shoot anything that moves and leave nothing to waste, not even the meat on your bones. Bandits made up of ex-military, survivors, anyone who wants to take their supplies by force instead of searching for them themselves. Well I would love to see AI, maybe three factions: Where two players meet and the question pops up immediately, friend or foe? I also however really enjoy just chilling out by going with a but tonne of ammo and shredding down the zeds for resources or even just for a laugh. I love the thrill of the hunt, or of being hunted, or even just spontaneous and sudden player contact.
A gunshot that without any PVE contact may not have been fired in the first place, that and it makes the supplies/loot more difficult to obtain if there is an absence of player activity in the area. A gunshot sounds in the distance and surrounding players move to investigate. Players could easily avoid others on purpose or by accident, forcing player interaction (In epoch's case, mainly by fighting over resources) is needed and again is great gameplay. Thirdly, and this one really depends on server player limits, but the map areas are usually quite large on ARMA 3. Secondly there are a lot of players out there, with many different play styles, some people want nothing but PVP, others enjoy PVE content more, some/most a mixture of the two. PVE is something that results in bringing players together, whether that be for special loot drops or Co-op looting runs it makes the game more exiting and fundamentally it is gameplay, removing it would lessen the experience in my mind. I for one am all for no zombies in the ARMA 3 version, and can entirely understand why it would be better to remove them but I still think some variant of PVE is necessary in/around most loot spawning areas. So I have heard multiple people talking about how ARMA 3 will not have zombies anymore, this concept excites some people, and concerns many others.