Melee weapons have been a part of Zombie Massacre since its inception. They’re currently in a reasonable state, but I’ve noticed that many players seem to stray away from them, even when they understand that they can carry two weapons.
Additionally, melee weapons involve being at closer ranges, which with ping, can be quite dangerous when engaging anything stronger than regular zombies and skeletons. This tradeoff may not appear worthwhile to some, despite the fact that melee weapons are among the highest DPS weapons in ZM.
So, as an idea to both incentivize and reward their use, melee weapons could have a higher chance for bonus points to drop from a kill.
Why I suggest bonus point drops, rather than something like bonus points upon kill, has a few reasons that largely boil down to the fact that bonus point drops are tangible items that need to be collected:
- A player will likely still need to go out of their way to collect the reward (particularly if they’re using a melee weapon while retreating from some particularly strong enemies.) This also creates a further element of risk/reward where doubling back, or charging into a group of enemies could easily result in otherwise avoidable damage.
- Bonus points can be collected by anybody, meaning that other players on the team can “”“steal”“” the points, which has the potential for more supportive uses, like having a heavily upgraded player trying to leave a bunch of points lying around for a player who joined mid-game.
- Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I very rarely pay attention to the amount of points earned through killing enemies. So collecting bonus points lying around the map would better demonstrate the increased rewards of using melee weapons compared to having a simple on-kill bonus.
This idea could also be extended to melee weapons having increased drop chance of any item, since melee weapons can be used up in mere seconds with a spat of bad luck resulting in no weapons dropping and thus, stuck using your starting weapon for a while.
In general, I’d love to see further incentivization of melee weapon usage in ZM as while they are rather strong, the risk/reward aspect can be rather thrilling and giving an additional reason to use them might give players a bit more of a nudge to try out more of ZM’s arsenal.
As an aside: perhaps there could be a better indication that players can switch to a second weapon once they pick one up? I’ve seen people who’ve gotten over 1 million XP yet never realized you can carry two weapons. This may also be a reason some players wholly avoid melee weapons.