MR DELICIOUS

I've been playing the new patch for a while as a lone player. A few things I've noticed are that the sheer zombie to ammunition count for many of the encounters was incredibly precarious. I don't mean "exciting" precarious, I mean "if I had not been carrying 10 clips of Winchester scatter shot ammo and aiming at heads to take down five zombies at a time, I would be dead" precarious. The big problem I also had, was that after one encounter, I would literally be out of ammo for the next encounter. The problem with this is that it entirely removes incentive to actually enter a town. When towns become a place where all your ammo is wasted (for ammo expense of getting and staying there alive), it forces many people into the areas between towns, and into PvP battles and deer stand showdowns. I don't mind this myself, but I found it a bit much having fought my way through Zelenogorsk to not actually take anything away from it. I came out with much less ammo than I went in with to the point that diminishing returns forces you to wander around defenseless for the most part and making the next barn/town/hut even more hard to get into and live, until it becomes impossible (on account of not having any bullets). Now, I'm not proposing to lower the zombie count universally, because I love the new atmosphere and the danger of cities and towns. However, this is what I'd like to see change: 1. Halve the zombie count on barns and very small settlements. In one barn alone I was killing upwards of fifteen to twenty zombies. If I find more than one mag of Winchester ammo, it's been worthwhile, but finding no mags means essentially the trip was worse than a waste of time. Also, unless it was farmhand "bring a friend to work day," it's a bit immersion killing having Farmer Bob and his twenty five cousins all just chilling in the barn. 2. Please increase the respawn time to something akin to fifteen minutes. The amount of times I'd kill fifty zombies (not understatement) in the supermarket, only to go to extract the way I came and find fifty new zombies there within three minutes was really baffling, and drained all of my ammo to the point where I had nothing. 3. Please - and this is the main one - introduce the realistic stopping power to the AK and NATO class weapons. The downside to the hunting weapons should be their small calibre. I should have to fire all of that winnie and enfield ammo that I have, but it greatly frustrates me that my AK doesn't travel through more than one zombie. The problem here is not the that I can't kill the zombies, it's that I waste crucial time having to wait for a dead one to fall down before I can fire again. Introducing a greater stopping power to the better guns would encourage smarter, more tactical play, and give a much greater value to the relatively sparse ammunition count available for these weapons. Similarly, being able to kill two or three zombies all coming in a line would be greatly satisfying and add to the realism and power of the better guns. Similarly, you could give greater stopping power to the G17, revolver and m1911 to give them an extra punch. 4. Please retain the zombie numbers around the deer stands. They contain powerful loot and should be this challenging to clear. 5. Lastly, variety is the spice of life. By having fewer zombies at smaller locations and smaller hamlets, you give a nice, natural wave of tension to the playing experience. If it's always "fifty zombies gonna kill you", then the points of truly blood pumping tension come at the speed and regularity of explosions in a Michael Bay film. Also, please note that I'm no new player. I have a huge amount of zombie kills and have survived for a fair while. I know how to channel the zombies and kill them as I run, but the base problem was simply that I did not have enough ammunition to kill all of them, and with no other means of killing them (or even distracting them as I'd used all my smoke nades) I simply had to D/C.

Like a desert paratrooper dropped into a very green, green eastern European countryside.

Hectizzle I hate not being able to play during daylight on green ping. A US server brings out sadist in me. So much syndrome crammed into such a small place.

I've found a few vehicles in this new update (I think). I've found two ATV's at the end of the mountain trail NW of NWAF. I've found the motorcycle outside Berezino hospital. Found another motorcycle in the middle of Olsha. Riding a motorcycle in DayZ is like a pod racing simulator. Driving downhill through a forest is like throwing spaghetti at fan. Found a jeep at both Stary camp and at Green Mountain. I'll have to get home and check my little notepad of spawn location goodies.

I'm at the point where I consider anywhere south of Zelenogorsk or Dolina to be instant death. Krasnostav to Zelen is where it's at, though the flat lands around the Sobors is instant death in my book. I love the south eastern area around the three valleys and Dolina. The huge wooded valleys and little hamlets make a really good bandit range. As to an answer to the question - they're new players. It feels like 95% of people sign up, log in, go to Chern or Elektro because they believe (based on other games) that you have to go to cities and spend all your time in cities, and then they die 5-10 times and then come on the forums demanding NVGs be removed and a free airline toiletries back for anyone attacked by a bandit. The most brain dead suggestion recently was that if you kill any other player you are marked for an hour on the map so everyone can see where you are. Re-tard-ed.

Yeah, I know it's an effective escape from zombies still, but I left it like that to allow the true accidental disconnects some clemency. However, thinking about it, it might be good to make the player bleed and in pain should they accidentally disconnect. As in, they come back into the game after their net dropping or an intentional D/C, and they're bleeding and shaking from pain. It could double as a kind of "coward's curse", but also reflect a "near escape" from the zombies, in terms of immersion. In this way: * Intentional D/Cers can be still killed by other players for a time. * Accidental D/Cers will be safe should they disconnect amongst or being chased by zombies. * People escaping zombies through D/C must make the decision as to whether or not they want to be in pain and have to patch themselves. Essentially, logging out with the bedroll is the only way to "safely" log out. If someone was to intentionally D/C inside a building that was being guarded on another server (with the intention of negating their defenses), or to loot a location across every server really quickly, they'd suffer a loss of bandages and painkillers, and also be hampered by the time it'd take to bandage.

MR DELIGHTFUL (a padre) is the more sociopathic bandit in our little family and he's made a sport, an art of kneecapping people. Basically, shoot a man through the legs progressively until he runs out of morphine, and then leave him to prone away. Follow him, and wait until he calls for help, then gun down anyone who comes to assist him. The trick is to never actually kill the guy with the broken legs. He likes to call the game "sneaky slug."

Please search the forums before posting. There are five threads on this. It's been reset since the new website was launched. It's gathering data at the moment, which is why the lifespan is so short.

Yeah I think this is one of those things that needs to be addressed quite quickly after the infrastructure of the servers.

Rocket has already said a while back that this will be in the game, and that you'll be able to turn petrol pumps on and off.

I find it somewhat quaint that you're peddling pandora charms to the DayZ player base. I wasn't aware there was such a market, though I suppose my bracelet could do with one more!

You have this thread, and then you have fifty threads complaining about how people need to "nerf the NVG bandits" with CZs who camp the shoreline and coastal cities. The reason you are well kitted is because you went into the hellhole that is Chern. Your reward is a relatively short time to get some essentials back. But decreasing ammo is going to make this game more than impossible (unless you want to play 99% of the time like Splinter Cell). Try going to any city with your new gear and see how easy it is once you've fire a shot. I guarantee you're going to be trying to find a lot more ammo in the future.

A few things on the website are broken. Leaderboards, the life expectancy count and the fact that "scavenge" is spelt "scavange".

Haha the inventory system is perhaps the most unintuitive thing in the entire game. It really is a pile of crap. Can you imagine someone kneeling down and trying to work out if they've taken something from the ground, if it's in their backpack, if it's in their pocket, and then having to move it around a bit so they can remember whether or not it's still in the backpack, or if when they were putting it in, the painkillers fell out, and then what "1" means, and whether or not that "1" relates to backpack, the ground, the dead zombie or their pockets. They really need to find a better model. Hell, I'd prefer the WoW model. Have a slot for chest backs, slot for leg packs, slot for backpack, slot to represent your vanilla clothing pockets, and then character slots for equipment and binocs and what have you. In any case, a million games have done it better. That said, it's up to Bohemia to fix this, not DayZ.

I read these threads every time the pop up (and we already have a PvP thread at the top of the page) and am baffled. I've been alive for something like 24 hours. I have 1300 or so zombie kills, I have a lot of good gear and I highly value my life. And guess what? The better gear and more kills I have, the more I value my life. And guess what? I don't die, because I take more and more precautions. In fact, in this entire characters life, I've only been attacked once and managed to fend off that attacker because of his inexperience. I haven't once been sniped or gunned down. Now, I don't say this to big myself up, blow my own horn etc, I say it because it's proof that you can survive a very long time, very successfully without other player interference - UNLESS YOU SEEK THAT. This is the thing - all the anger is directed at CZ snipers on the coast. What you want to "fix" is a problem caused by your own actions, or inactions, as opposed to the bandits style of play. There is no surprise that bandits are there to kill players. They know there are retards who endlessly spawn and run along the shoreline for them to kill. The problem I have with this type of thread, however, is that what you want to "fix" will have far reaching consequences for all PvP in the entire map, and also on the coast. It also highlights a lack of responsibility. WHY do you think the coast should be safe? Every single thing about it makes it a PvP dangerzone and a nightmare. WHY should you be able to happily roam around the coast and be completely safe? What gives you that right? Why do you deserve that right? Taking it further, why the hell would you want to roam around the coast? It has long been clear right from the start of this game that the coast is the most dangerous place in the game (along with NWAF and Stary). It's fantastic - the game devs didn't actively decide to make it a dangerzone, it evolved like that based on the internal logic of the gamescape, which is dictated by player actions. This is fantastic, natural evolution of lore within a game. You don't need an NPC to say some contrived shit like "the coast is a dangerous place". All you need to do is read the forums or discover from other players in the game, or from experience that "the coast is dangerous as shit". Let me make this clear. There are many ways of escaping the coast and living for a very long time (zombies permitting). The coast is the most dangerous place in the game as it contains the sociopathic "xbox" players of DayZ, as well as easy loot (Chern and Elektro being within a km of most spawns) as well as it being a flat, narrow corridor that can be seen from high ground all the way along. The style of play that needs to change is YOUR style of play. Chern and Elektro aren't the essential capital cities of the game. You do not need to be there. It is not a question of someone camping your "quest giver" or some incredibly important, compulsory step to the next stage of the game. And guess what, if you have just spawned on the coast, and you die, you get to respawn. And guess what? You will respawn with the same shit you always do, pretty much meaning that you have lost nothing but time. So please, go north. The sociopathic retard bandits can sit in the capital cities or on the shorelines, and they'll occasionally get a kill, but if you spawn and run directly north as soon as your feet hit the sand of the beach, you're not going to die nearly as quickly. In any case, complaining about bandits on the shoreline or around Chern or Elektro really reminds me of this:

Here is the biggest tip in my quest to hit the 2000 zombie kill mark. Stand up when you engage zombies, never ever crouch. Then, once standing up, run backwards as they chase you. There can be 1 - 1000 zombies chasing you and this always works. As you run, you'll notice they all catch up to be in the same place as one another. After about ten seconds of running backwards, you'll see that they all stop in a certain range and all do their attack animation. As they do their attack animation, move back a bit more and fire twice or three times, then begin moving back again. Even on a veteran server, you're going to hit at least one of the five zombies immediately behind you. In about thirty seconds I can annihilate fifty zombies chasing me without getting hit once or going in a building. All you need is ammo and preferably a gun that kills in one shot to the torso. The biggest problem for me right now is that it's rarely worth going to any town once you've got all the prescribed survival gear. It's not a survival thing, it's just an immersion, game-feel kind of thing. I just loot barns and sheds for more Winchester rounds. Also, I carry an M24 with four-five mags in my backpack. I swap to this when I'm away from zombies so that I'm ready if PvP arises. In terms of PvP, I really just play with the training that I took from PR BF2 and PR ARMA 2. I spin constantly and am always looking at everything suspicious. 95% of the time I am the first to see the other player (to the point where some guy was happily walking along five meters from me in a field north of NWAF). Other players seem to have a very, very low sense of self awareness. Remember, you have to FIND danger, not let danger find you. As soon as you play with the mentality of a hunter, the control on your situations becomes much more palpable. I'm not saying kill people, but play as though you are looking for other players as you walk, and you'll never be sniped or taken by surprise. Also, in terms of encounters, I generally set a mental stop watch and never spend more than ten minutes somewhere after firing a shot. It's also important in this new patch to be even quicker in the looting. I always try and empty out anything I know I can easily replace, or I consume food or drink. Bending over for three seconds is better than the thirty second head shot happy game of "musical bags" that most players seem to do. Finally, remember that the majority of loot for survival (food and water) can be found on dead zombies. You can be in the middle of the forest, and the zombies you kill will have a couple of tins of Heinz or a Pepsi on them.

This game is not about balance. It's not meant to be balanced. In a zombie apocalypse, not everyone would begin with the even amount of survival gear. That's the only balancing in this game. Some people are predators, some people are benevolent. Hell, half the time I see and often kill or avoid somebody first in broad daylight because I play like a paranoid schizophrenic - spinning none-stop to check all my surroundings. You need to think of the well geared players as bosses to be defeated, and not expect some kind of strange game democracy where everything is some large paper scissors rock game and you stand a chance against everything. You need to think of the well geared, experienced and long time survived players as even harder bosses. And essentially, you want to become a boss.

I can give you a big finnicky list of things to do different, but really as it stands, towns are lethal or incredibly draining to a well geared person. As a solo noob, the best way you're going to survive is to go north and look for the little wooden watch towers and kill the military zombies who guard them. Once you kill those zombies, loot the tower and hopefully get a gun from it. Otherwise, try to loot barns or sheds for enfield or winchester ammo. A winchester will allow you to survive. Pick up all the ammo you can. They're going to need to lower the zombies or make it town specific for the big spawns. At the moment the ammunition is too scarce to make any settlement a worthwhile raid target.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying to nerf either of those guns (enfield/winnie), I'm simply saying give the AK and NATO class weapons a boost to bring them closer to reality and make ammo conservation easier in light of how scarce it is.

This was suggested in the suggested area, but I'd like to reiterate. A player (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.