Righty-o. Here's my list of demands! (Suggestions, don't worry)
Spawn in cars and trucks ready to go. By this I mean all parts attached, 2 fuel cans and the cars will need 3-4 canteens of water for the radiator as well or you'll blow the engine 500m down the road.
Increase ammo stack quantity slightly. This is a quality of life suggestion and also just to make military worth going to loot. In vanilla settings you'll very often find stacks of ammo that has 1-3 bullets, you might get lucky and find bigger stacks obviously but they are rare as hell. And if you go to any military area you will need at least 20-30 rounds to deal with the zombies unless you go full ninja mode which has gotten harder over the years with how zombies will now draw in more aggro. Larger military areas like NWAF or Tisy you'll probably even need closer to 100 rounds to clear the place and let's face it, that's a loooot of bullets when you keep finding stacks below 10 π
Removed the option to have gear spawning in as "Ruined". Not only is this a massive pain in the ass if you happen to finally find a gun or just an item you really need, but getting rid of this shit will also help ever so slightly with lag. Not saying everything has to spawn in as pristine, just usuable and potentially fixable as 90% of the in game items can somehow be fixed with the right tools as long as they're not fucked up beyond "Badly damaged".
Those are in my opinion the biggest ones. Now a couple less important ones.
Code in a trader. Obviously someone will have to run this once server gets busy, it'll be a pain in the ass to do, but it does also help players out and can draw more people to the server. You'll have to work out a price list of some sort and have some kind of currency unless you just do straight up trades for stuff. Also make sure to put in the rules that anyone who raids the trader will be instabanned.
Shorter nights. Honestly this is more for the potentially new players to dayz. I think night time is about 1 hour on vanilla and running around in pitch darkness for that long with zombies and all kinds of shit around you WILL fuck those newer players over and lead to a lot of deaths and rage.
Toxic zones. Get rid of the dynamic ones, they are nothing but a pain in the ass and they do also cause a bit of lag. I'm fine with having the 2 constant ones on the map as you will still have a use for NBC gear if you do and some players will obviously want to experience everything dayz has to offer.
Remove canopy tents completely and if found either destroy them outright by putting them in a backpack and destroying the backpack and let it despawn, or if you do have a trader let people collect them and take them to trader in exchange for currency, gear or something else.
Lastly, storage. Unless you plan on running around with fuck all except what you can carry, you'll need storage. Eventually I expect most players on here will want to build a base so they can (somewhat) safely store some of their shit. Tents, barrels and sea chests are hard to find and most of these will not respawn if someone has found them and placed them somewhere I think, so every so often it might be an idea to increase the quantity of which these items spawn in on the map just so anyone new joining the server will actually be able to find storage. This isn't really important to do early on, but something to keep in mind down the road. I'd also strongly suggest turning container damage off. This means tents and barrels cannot be destroyed. This will prevent griefing as no one can sit outside your base shooting into it to destroy your tents and eventually make any gear you have stored in there despawn. Doing this will also mean you need to add a rule about no "unraidable bases". By that I mean blocking off all entrances to your base with tents. There has to be a way for a potential raider to get in still.
I think that's everything? If I come up with anything else I'll make another post π