MR DELICIOUS

I'm more of a Rosie O'Donnell fan myself. Incredible comedy, she'd keep me warm and company, and I could survive on her for days if it came to it.

It's also a high risk game in which hours or days of played that contained several moments of good fortune and unreplicable situations can be lost in a single moment by some hacking mouth breather. Sure, it's an Alpha, but my 2500 zombie kills, my legitimately acquired silenced M4 and M24 that I'm carrying around with my legitimately acquired NVGs in my legitimately acquired coyote elite are sure worth more to me than the sleep I'll lose (none) if these guys get banned.

Previously, I would kill about 60-140 zombies in about twenty minutes in Gorka, after doing a victory lap of the town followed by my little zombie cheer squad. In all, I'd say that things haven't changed.

Beginning every game like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan is really stressing me out. Dying of thirst and starving to death and having to do the 100m dash makes this more of a Somalia/Ethiopia simulator than zombie one. I spawned yesterday and began my sprint, only to check my six and find some gimp bandit with a Makarov chasing me. My silenced M4 won.

Yeah, see that's the problem with the Internet. It democratizes everything, and much of the time in a really tedious way. With our whole "liberty and equality" politically correct progressive mindset people often believe that opinion is equal no matter the source. Knowledge and wisdom are often thrown out in general consensus for something funny, or passionately expressed (no matter how wrong) or just the usual sycophantic drawl. The big problem with this is that it destroys creativity. If the majority of people think something is a good idea, or a bad idea, then you're pooling opinions that have already been accepted - they've already been done. Creativity inherently involves risk because in its very nature, the idea is untested. That's the secret to Rockets success, and his vision is also what has made this mod incredible. The big problem I have is that people don't often look at the problem as a means of "what can we expand" or "what can we deepen", they look at in terms of "what can we change" or "what can we balance". This pisses me off because you've already bought into an idea that is vastly enjoyable and immeasurably successful. When you ask for murdering to be disallowed, you're assuming it's a mistake on Rockets behalf, like an error that needs fixing. So instead of asking to deepen or widen the gaming experience, you're trying to hamper and restrict the vision and freedom of what bought you here in the first place. The reality is the mod has come this far already, all of rockets doing. His ability to resist the money grab should be evidence enough that he cares more about the vision than anything else, and that he of all people know where this is going, he's jut interested to see what people would like deepened or expanded on. So yeah, this is not a democracy. It may look like one, but we're really ruled by a benevolent dictator. That is a good thing, because as YouTube comments have proven - there are a lot of morons in the world, and just because a lot of morons agree with them, doesn't make it any less moronic.

"Special school takes a trip to the end of the world."

They deserve to be liquidated if they're presented with an opportunity to advertise - for free - their product to their demographic utilizing one of the best pop culture zombie apocalypse references of recent years. You would have to be brain dead to even have to think about it.

Myself, MR DELIGHTFUL, MR DELECTABLE and MR DELICATE have decided to set up a book club at 9 PM on Wednesday, East Coast Australian time on Dallas 4. It'll go for an hour and during that time we'll plumb the depths of James Joyce's seminary work "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." We'll take some time out from the sociopathy each week to feed not only our hunger for sardines, but also for a greater depth of character and understanding of the human condition. The following week will be the first book of the Ghormenghast trilogy, so get ready for that! Our book club ownz the black lake/blunt rocks area, which is quite out of the way so the only thing we'll be disturbed by is the disquieting of the fragility of our human nature. EDIT: MR DELIGHTFUL has offered to drive the Book Club Bus around as we have our book club so we're nice and cosy.

Hi all and Rocket. I've done a lot of work on game design and flow in the past, and I really appreciate what you've done here. I've been playing the game in a number of different roles and really trying to get my head around the end game as well as the beginning. The answers to these problems are all ones that tweak or add features, but don't interfere with player choices (the biggest problem with the bandit skin). 1. Give greater risk/reward on NATO weapon spawns. The current problem in the search for weaponry is that the size of the guns in the back pack, plus the ammunition sizes and scarcity means that receiving a weapon that will be good for more than thirty minutes is incredibly low. I'm not suggesting a drastic increase in spawn rates etc, but I am suggesting that you remove rubbish and underpowered spawns from spawn chances in militarised zones. Similarly, add a single military spawn, with military zombies, to some of the humvee wrecks and other military apparatus that can be found around the map. Give the higher end weaponry a chance to land into the hands of random players, while assuring that those who treck to the airfield will be able to find something worth their time (and usually life). Perhaps two mags per gun spawn would be generous enough. Simply, the amount of times I've sat at NE airfield for two hours waiting around while empty G17's and single mag AKM's spawn amongst a great deal of rubbish and whiskey bottles has lead me to question the viability of end game. Reasonably, there is no reason I should ever, at present, forgo my Winchester or my CZ for any NATO or automatic weapon. The stopping power is often not as good, the ammo count ridiculous in scarcity and I have a high likely hood of dying when trying to obtain it. 2. Diversify endgame content with survival tool spawns. At the moment, you're really trapped to catering for a few basic player wants in terms of rewards. In order to increase map travel it would be wise to have certain items spawn only in some parts of the map. For instance, the only camping shops in Chernarus might be located in Dubrovka and Petrovka. Within them would be three generic supply spawns and two focused spawns that yield the respective drop chances: tent 20%/GPS 30%/map 5%/compass 5%/binoculars 5%/NVG 15%/cross bow 20%. Simply adding those two new shops would diversify player travel across the map to a large degree, giving them a sense of direction, but also of danger. It would also increase party tensions, as a rare NVG spawn might force betrayals in the group. I must also add that the respawns should occur only every thirty minutes or so in order to add tension to the enterprise, and ensure they're not easily obtainable. 3. Reward exploration, intuition and memory in placing several reliable garages around the map. On the above note, I think it's prudent to suggest the increase in spawns for vehicle related components in the rare gas stations around the map. The south is well suited, but the north has few vehicle depots. It would be wise to limit the better vehicle spawns the further north you go in order to balance the map out and take PvPers away from the coast. Placing bike/car/bus spawns at a few choice garages (while keeping the random ones we have at the moment), you're rewarding player memory and intuition and encouraging a great deal of travel. If you would like me to assess each town individually as to what and where vehicle componentry/type of vehicles should spawn, I'd be very happy to go through it. In any case, by doing this you'll be lengthening the flow of play through the entire map. New players will want to try to survive the cities to get a few quick supplies, while Bandits and experienced players will want to head north to secure different vehicles and survival equipment. Again, it's another way of allowing different interested parties to control resources. It's essentially a high risk puzzle that is completed quicker with friends. 4. Greater reliance on water. Greatly lower the amount of soft drinks available in the wild. Force the player to find their own water. It's an elegant system with the bottles, but it's also under used due to the high availability of soda. 5. Resource denial. To this degree, allow players with a raw meat in their pack to have the choice to poison a water source (effective for five game hours). It adds a huge new dimension to survival, and player morality choices. It also presents the interesting tactical use of water as a method to cripple your enemies and to discourage people from following you. Poison effects should be curable by painkillers (and perhaps morphine if you've been poisoned for a while). It should be a threat. Would also give extra dimension of functionality to raw meat. 6. Extend value of water and potential gadgetry. Allow players to boil water over a fire in order to purify it. Would give extra functionality to matches. 7. Increase the reward for random exploration of the middle towns and settlements. Create instances of single or double NATO spawns near humvees or military wrecks near towns or on the roads. I'd be happy to draw up a detailed spawn flow of Chernarus that will balance the map (in terms of not having some places be completely redundant). 8. Give the ability to identify as friendly, to signal, or to mislead. Adding a military whistle item pickup would be really useful for a player to directionally signal over a large area (perhaps 2-300 meters and fading to silent at 500) in a certain sequence or to attract zombies. 9. Lower the risks in anti-bandit teamwork via short wave radio. Add CB radios as an item, allowing you to communicate directionally over 1 km or so. It would allow for random players to more effectively coordinate a bandit hunt without having to implicitly trust each other, as well as allow for some great roleplaying or entrapment. Attempting to locate the origin of a broadcast could be very tense and satisfying. I would have the strength of signal die out at 1km-1250 being silent. 10. Allow for more universal signalling. Being able to fire flares into the sky would be a great addition in allowing you to see the landscape around you, as well as signal your position to friends (and of course enemies). 11. Differentiate damage taken. Please add some dramatic bloody claw or fracture marks on the screen to denote zombie swipes. At the moment, it is hard to know exactly what is damaging you, especially due to the weird hit radii of the zombies. The white flash is also a bit insipid for a zombie attack. 12. Increase sound ambience and tactics when approaching a town. Add noise makers to different areas in the town. It could be quite cool to turn a factory loudspeaker on to an old Soviet song in order to draw the zombies out of the town (without using ammunition). It would also be very creepy to be in a town by yourself and suddenly hear the old working song come on in the factory on the hill. (The power source for the factory or whatever would be justified as an old generator.) You could have an individual song for different locations on the map as an easter egg for the player to find. I'm sure you can see the millions of ways a player might use this to his advantage, or have it used against him to his disadvantage. It would also add ambience to the general soundscape of the game. 13. Allow players to revive recently fatally wounded players. Taking a leaf out of Project Reality's book, it might be nice to have a give up or hold out option for dead players. A solo player might just respawn, while a player in a group might be revived, given a transfusion, morphine, pain killers and a bandage in order to bring them back to full health. Basically, having major medical surgery in the field with the right supplies. I'm sure you can imagine the interesting scenarios and sacrifices/decisions a group of players might have to make in order to preserve their team. While it would be preferable that the player's stats remain on revival, the death would still need to count as a stat start-over, and as a murder or bandit kill on the gunman's debug monitor. 14. Allow intuitive and natural bandit tracking through victim's corpses. On inspecting corpses of players, it would be good to have a feedback such as "Still warm." "Blood is still running from the wound." "Cold." "Rigor Mortis." Still warm would mean the player has been dead for ten to fifteen minutes, still bleeding would mean they are revivable with defibrillators (sustaining) or an epipen (one time use) and have been dead for anywhere up to five minutes, and so on. It would also be apt to have the cause of death in the readout as well. "Eaten" or "Murdered" would be equally apt. I'm sure you can imagine the story that will tell itself should a player stumble across a player's corpse that bears the wounds of murder, and is also relatively fresh. It will certainly influence their decisions in how they treat anyone they immediately encounter. Essentially, my fixes aren't about inhibiting the player, but diversifying player attention away from only acquiring weapons. I think these fixes shouldn't be too difficult to implement (most requiring fiddling the numbers and spawn locations), and I also hope that they go some way to mitigating the banditry on the south coast and giving people effective ways to deal with bandits. I also believe that it will greatly increase the depth and richness of the player story and experience, and the use of team work.

Okay, I've got a handle on the zombie numbers now and me and the rest of the family will set up some DayZ Tower Defense around NE AF tomorrow. I'll update this thread with the server we did it on at some point, with video and screens to follow.

I wait for people to reveal their location and destination on night time servers, and then drive around in my little car with no lights on, with my NVGs on, running them over in the field while playing yakety sax through direct chat. Everything in this game is better with music.

I wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy and then spend the rest of the day answering questions in side chat about why going to Chern or Elektro is a bad idea. Occasionally me and my girlies will pile into a little red car we fixed up and go for a cruise with the window down and our favourite tune blaring. I only ever really murder people by running them over at night in my car. I drive with NVGs and no headlights so they can't see me coming. I then flash them at the last second before I put grill to crotch. Fishtailing around NWAF runway at 2 am with Celine playing is pretty atmospheric. Tried to cruise around on a bike a few times. As I've said before, driving downhill through trees on that thing is like throwing a ripe peach at a wall.

There is a great deal of hate going around for the insta d/c tactic many players take as a method of self preservation. I've seen a lot of half-hearted ideas that have been thrown around ala WoW and co in terms of a timed logout. The player tkgwheeler suggested this a while back, and I'd like to expand on it. It got a lot of good feedback in another thread, and I think this would really end 95% of the d/c bitching. Essentially, tkgwheeler had the idea to have a "bedroll logout." Essentially, you have to spend fifteen seconds laying out a bedroll in order to log out. Failing to do so will leave you suspended in the server for one minute unprotected. I think this idea is really nice. It's got a really neat, naturalistic feel to it, and the animation wouldn't be hard to nick from the "making fire" one. You should also only be able to log out in the places where you're able to make a fire. It would stop server scrolling for loot through the back room of NWAF barracks, or people sealing off a building with barbed wire only to have someone server scroll into the top floor and circumvent their defences. Thus far, tkgwheeler's idea has been the most elegant and in keeping with the game feel. I'd like to add that ten seconds is enough time for a player to be killed if they decide to set it up in a stupid place, yet not unrealistically long when a quick logout is required. Similarly, if someone force disconnects or alt-f4s, their character should remain persistent in the server for a good thirty seconds. Although some would argue that thirty seconds is not enough, I'd say that you should have a very big opportunity to kill them in that time. Lastly, I would say that if a player disconnects, or the server registers a cutoff (alt-f4), the player should remain static on the server, but their zombie aggro should be entirely removed. As such, this PvP d/c issue would be fixed, but wouldn't disadvantage people with genuine disconnection issues whilst facing zombies, or in zombie infested areas.

I don't think this would be too hard to implement, and doing so would add a huge amount of value to the game. It would also fix the discussion going on at the moment to prevent server scrolling.

I'm glad to hear rocket talk about server hopping. It's a bit unprecedented to have this level of direct contact with the developer. Personally, I like your analysis tarantyco, however I feel that due to the technical reasons of server transience and being stuck on a server with certain clans as the admins a single server policy will cause many more problems than it solves. Ultimately, it appears to me that people gravitate to one or two servers. I play Dallas 9 if I want daylight at night, and AU Arma 1 or 2 normally. To me, it seems like server hopping itself isn't the problem, the problem is 1 the ability to server scroll through the back room of the barracks and 2 the ability to evade all forms of defenses a clan might have set up by logging out behind them. Essentially, it seems to me that the merry go round matrix we've got going can be stopped mechanically (you're not allowed to rejoin a server for ten or fifteen minutes after logout - or something more refined than that) or it can be controlled by a game mechanic (forcing people to "safe" logout somewhere secluded, in the same place you can build a campfire for instance). In either of those ways, play isn't limited by exterior means (server admins, server being down, server changes hands etc) and the problems each get their fix. Also, imagine being forced to play on one of the spam-clan servers for the rest of your surviving life.

After reading that skins are going to be able to be found in the game, I wanted to just make a suggestion. Can we please not just have a gradient of Ash Ketchum survivor to Ken Goes to War Action Man looking skins. Sure, all the people with names like "hawk", "shadow" and "ghost" will want to look like Solid Snake, but I'd much prefer to wear a pair of short jorts with a Mickey mouse tee riding up to expose my shining pot belly. Myself and the rest of the Mr's would really get down in some dresses and kids clothing, maybe even a backless dress if it wasn't too windy and the mood is right. Also, I don't want to make the skins a joke, but I think it's much more unsettling if you have Buffalo Bill as his family hunting you instead of the protagonist from Time Crisis. Add in cannibalism and the ability to butcher and cook human flesh and this will be twice the horror game and four times the barbecue.

The only field hospital I'm aware of is the one south of Balota airstrip. I wouldn't be surprised if Rocket has them on rotation now.

I'm not trolling. This would in no way ruin the image of the mod. I don't want every single person rocking a Buffalo Bill getup, I'd like it to be really, really rare. It's called "personality" and it would spice the entire thing up. At the moment it's a bit vanilla on the personality front. I'm sure that 95% of people would like to look like G.I. Joe, but I'd prefer to get my Mad Max on. Insanity is all part of the zombie apocalypse show bag. I'd love to cannibalise people in an amusement park and then hunt down any survivors in an eighteen wheeler while playing Shania Twain through speakers made of human skin.

Ultimately I feel that the width of the spawn locations, and the possible encounters between them or at them really keeps the game diverse. Familiarity is great to a degree. Rewards for knowledge of the game and the map are manifest in knowing where you can find a ride and repair it. At the moment, the biggest thing that could lead to familiarity killing the game is when all the inmates of Chern and Elektro realise that the NWAF barracks are the ONLY place in the game to get the best loot. As it stands, having the barracks as the only spawn confine much of the "end game" loot content to two sheds within 300 meters of each other. Of course, a lot more content needs to be added, but I don't quite understand the logic in confining the best gear (m107's, silenced assault rifles, the SAW, NVGs etc) to one single place. I can easily imagine that should this not change, all that will happen is large groups will run between the two buildings endlessly. I and everybody else have/has a million suggestions to fix the game of musical barracks, and I think it's just a wait until Rocket gets around to redistributing or introducing more spawn locations. I'd really like the spawns to be possible at any military base, but much lower in most locations (0.02%) and more common in a few (3.0%). Similarly, I'd love a barracks to be placed in the heart of Berezino or some other northern city. The zombie pull would be crazy (military zombies at current strength) but the rewards would be palpable. It would also encourage street to street fighting.

MOUSE you cheeky boy I know it's you.

In that case, I'd also like to be able to set barricaded buildings on fire.

I would love to get a map of all the deaths plotted across Chernarus. I'd be interested to know where the most deadly places in the game are.

Put this in the suggestions forum yo.