Gremlin (DayZ)

Happened to me too, today. Of course, I immediately got careless and fired the Lee Enfield I was carrying at a zombie. To the guy who was running around with the flare: I hope you enjoy my stuff. If you survived that mob, you earned it.

I'd like to see a functioning power grid (make it hard to keep functional, of course). It would add another layer of system to the environment of the map. Most of DayZ effectively gives new meaning to content you'd otherwise overlook in another game mode--tiny lakes mean something here, for example. Having power be another layer, with a different environment when you get the lights on, would be interesting.

Not saying that anything in the game is actively unbalanced, just that it isn't about balance in the same way that Counterstrike is--its about a different kind of balance, if you prefer.

I'm just having trouble figuring out why balance would be important on this issue, and not on the dozens of deliberately unbalanced, unfair things already in the game. Balance and DayZ don't exactly go hand-in-hand skipping across the hilltops (they'd be spotted that way). For DayZ to suddenly balance this one aspect would be wildly out of character. That said, Rocket has clearly put thought into this already.

Scary is sneaking through town not sure if you're going to get spotted and attacked. Scary is bandits assaulting you out of nowhere. Zombies (like everything) lose the shock-horror through exposure. Things that can kill or hurt you but you can't stop? Still scary. Since I still have trouble hitting fast zombies, I'm still scared of them, or at least wary. That said, a mix of threats is a good thing for the experience. Don't want them all to be predictably fast now, do we?

I'm not not sure what balanced shooting games you're talking about. This is the DayZ forum.

Mine works fine. I took some screenshots in 1.5.8.2 last night, as a matter of fact.

I've seen a couple of suggestions. The big one is to be patched up to 1.5.8.2, not just 1.5.8. If you are running 1.5.8.2, try submitting a bug report: http://dayzmod.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=6.

Near as I can tell, that map leaves a lot of stuff out. If you're just hitting those spots, you'll miss a lot.

My understanding is that visibility has always been server-enforced. This patch just updated the distance to further out because people were complaining about the fog.

Personally, I've never had much trouble finding my way around, and I've yet to encounter a compass in-game. Of course, this is partially because I'm not trying to do a precision sweep across the map and I have fairly good orienteering skills. Someone who is less skilled with reading a map or is in more of a hurry to get to a particular spot might have more difficulty. But as it stands, I think things are fine.

People who sabotage their own fun have already received their reward. That said, the server-hopping, quitting exploits are the current biggest design problem with the whole system. This is a problem that will need to be resolved in design, sooner or later.

The big gameplay challenge right now revolves around the way that the character is persistent across all servers. This has introduced a number of exploits and weird edge cases. "Save on Demand", while clearly pitched with good intentions, doesn't look deep enough at what's going on with the system; it's a patch on top of the current alpha behavior. Characters persisting across shards is a new paradigm, and I don't think anyone (not even rocket) have quite grasped the full implications of this. We're going to be discovering weirdness for some time to come. "Save on demand" would change the game into one of managing the save-system rather than playing the game. There are already a bunch of exploits that operate because of the save system's architecture, so the last thing we need is to make it explicit. And since the main upside to on-demand saving is to work around problems in Alpha (server crashes, etc.) I'm unable to support this proposal.

I think that having the spawn point be random significantly adds to the feel. Can you quickly figure out where you are if you know what you are doing? Sure. But that lack of control over your initial starting conditions is a big part of the randomization that makes the early game work. Now, more experienced players spend less time in the early establishment phase and more time in the mid-game. This is pretty much inevitable, as a result of players getting more skilled. But that doesn't make the early game less fun on its own, even if many people get used to the mid-game and want to skip to it when they respawn. Despawning and respawning to get to a desired location is an issue, but I'm not sure that the right fix is to chose the location. I'd personally lean more towards a penalty for rapid respawning, but there are a number of ways to fix this (including removing the location indicator) that keep things tense. Having effective ways to group up with friends would be nice, but given the goals of the game and the current state of the alpha (getting everybody on the same server is a challenge with the current overcrowding) I personally don't think it's a priority.

Speak for yourself. Even with the fog I was using a scope to pinpoint activity before approaching a town.