Wellseh

Agreed. IMO the only zombie-killing weapons in the current build of DayZ are: Melee weapons - IMO the hatchet is currently the most effective zombie killer, as it is a 1 hit kill, silent and has no need for ammo, major downsides are that it's close quarters, opening you up to being attacked, and buggy as hell to use. All sidearms - They won't attract every zombie in the vicinity as noise is fairly low. Their major downsides are their short effective range (30m for makarov, 50m for everything else), small magazine, their low damage (meaning you need to score headshots unless you want to run out of ammo very quickly), and the fact that they can be heard by other survivors, instantly making you a target to bandits. Exception to the rule is the M9 SD, which is a brilliant sidearm, but very rare and ammo is very hard to come across. Crossbow - Terrible. Inaccurate at anything further than spitting range, each shot requires one inventory slot, slow to reload, iron sights are useless. Silence is its only upside. Winchester - Used to be a brilliant good zombie killer when its audible range was lower. Now it seems to attract every zombie within a 300m radius when fired. Also capable of holding its own in PvP, although obviously not as good as pure PvP weapons like Lee Enfield (entry level PvP gun), all assault rifles, all snipers. The De Lisle would fill the niche that the Winchester used to have - I would envisage that its max effective range would be about 150-200m, it would require 2 body shots or 1 headshot to kill a Z, and it would be practically inaudible to zombies an other players outside of a 30m radius.

I really want to see the De Lisle Carbine introduced into DayZ or the standalone version as a weapon that can be found in farm and civilian buildings (possibly as a replacement for the double barreled shotty, as I'd rather keep my hatchet than use that piece of s**t). As things stand, survivors are really lacking an accurate, quiet, medium ranged weapon for use against the zombie hordes, especially since the Winchester got turned into a goddamn zombie siren. Right now, there's no reason to use anything but the hatchet as a primary weapon against Zed. All other primary weapons are PvP weapons, crossbow is nigh-on useless. http://en.wikipedia....e_Lisle_carbine This gun should be relatively rare (compared to the Lee Enfield, Winchester etc), however one of the great things about it is that it uses the same .45 ACP ammo as the M1911 and Revolver, so finding bullets should never be a problem.

This is what a suppressed pistol sounds like even when using supersonic ammunition - the firing of the weapon is quiet, but the supersonic bullet makes a distinct 'crack' as it breaks the sound barrier.

THANK YOU. This is exactly what I was looking for when I first posted and it's taken this long to get it :) I lost count of how many times I got sniped near that power plant when I first started playing this game It seems to me that there are differing opinions about snipers in this thread, and about PvP in general. The permadeath issue is an interesting one, and I am personally in favour of permadeath. For me, permadeath is a huge part of what DayZ represents - the only realistic zombie apocalypse survival simulator out there. The idea of DayZ as a freeform zombie survival simulator is really the crux of the issue here: I count myself as one of the many people who play DayZ for the survival simulation aspect of it. For me, player interactions, PvP and permadeath play a big part in that. The other camp of people are the ones who treat it as a first person shooter first and foremost, where the fun in DayZ is found in killing other players. I do think it's possible for the two groups to play alongside one another, but I also think that the sniper situation has resulted in a metagame that favours the shooters and discourages survivors from playing. Eventually you snipers will run out of noobs to shoot because you'll have scared them all away from DayZ! The reason I posted this thread in the first place is because I want to even the score a bit. For a while, I toyed with the idea of whether sniper rifles should be removed from the game completely or not for the standalone. I don't think they should. They do have a role to play, although currently, that role is greatly overexaggerated by the overabundance of AS50s, a problem (and it IS a problem) that I sincerely hope will be rectified in the standalone. In the standalone, I would also like to see sniper vantage points in the main cities being much more limited. By that I mean there should not be one vantage point that allows someone to snipe anyone running around any part of the city at will. The other thing I would like to see would be for sniping to be made more difficult. Yes, ArmA 2 sniping is much more realistic than CoD sniping where the bullet always lands where your crosshairs are, but IMO it's still too easy to score a headshot from distance. The game is a realistic zombie survival sim, and in a real life scenario, the vast, vast majority of people are going to be lay folk with no military sniper training. This should be reflected in the game mechanics somehow, by making sniper rifles sway more, by reducing accuracy at range, something like that, becuase in my book, DayZ is still too much of an arcade shooter to be a truly realistic zombie survival sim. tl;dr THE LEVEL OF SNIPING IN THS GAME IS TOO DAMN HIGH

Back to topic: I understand that for a lot of people, the fun of this game lies in the thrill of PvP. But as far as I'm concerned, there's no thrill in being insta-killed by a ghillied-up sniper in the hills. I hate that sniper rifles are so easy to use and so damn effective in this game (I recently obtained a DMR and after spending only 30 minutes learning the ropes, I could lead a headshot on a sprinting zombie from 300m away - it simply should not be that easy), and that, thanks to hackers, the AS50 is so damn common on servers. For me, PvP is about someone in the distance who's after your equipment opening fire on you with an automatic weapon, you running and diving for the nearest cover, possibly wounded and making a snap decision - do I shoot back, or do I run and hide? For me, that's the essence of a survival game. I remember my days as a newbie, running around the coast looking for supplies. At first, my main cause of death was zombies as I didn't know how to deal with them, but after that, sniper bullets became my leading cause of death. Some of my most intense and fun showdowns with hordes of zombies and other players were abruptly ended by a sniper shot to the face. Someone sees you having fun and decides you don't deserve to have fun, so they shoot you. In my book, that's griefing. Yes, it did ruin my game experience for a while. I suspect that many new players still shake their heads as to why they keep getting instakilled on the south coast. Also, I don't consider 'ghosting' a cheat. It's an abuse of game mechanics, and a complete dick move, but it's not a cheat. As for playing on low pop servers, it's a necessity with all the snipers around.

I wouldn't even think of going after these so-called 'elites,' I've seen videos of these sorts of players on youtube, guys who operate in groups with one player acting as spotter. The idiots, on the other hand, DayZ would benefit from less of these 'leet' CoD-kiddies hopping from server to server trying to up their K/D ratio. Also, I've just seen your 'Operation Overwatch' video on youtube of you doing exactly what I described. Your voice reminds me of Gaz from CoD 4 :D

They might think they're the bees knees, but at least they're setting out to make the DayZ game experience less brutal for those just starting out.

I haven't tried this yet, but I suspect the best bets for finding a vehicle would be: 1) The forests within a 2km radius of NW airfield. Presumably people keep camps and vehicles there so they can quickly loot the airfield for awesome military loot. 2) The Northern and Western edges of the map 3) On an island, teleported there by a hacker. In that case, you can only destroy the vehicle and wait for it to respawn on server restart. All that said, I have found vehicles on the south coast before - a couple of old bikes in and around the towns, a fully-repaired motorcycle that was abandoned because its previous owner got it stuck in a fence (knocked the fence down with a hatchet and rode off into the sunset), and a couple of heavily damaged ATVs sitting in Kamorovo. Not once have I found a vehicle at a vehicle spawn point, despite searching those extensively. I've also never found anything larger than an ATV, presumably cars, buses, lorries and helis are hoarded in hard to reach places by groups and clans.

Me and my buddies have been playing Day-Z for a while now, and we learned pretty quickly that to get away from the Southern coast is to survive. Our rules of engagement are as follows - shoot bandits on sight, but don't engage other players until fired upon first. Two of us have hero skins (my humanity is currently at 20,000, admittedly mainly through healing my group). Now I want to go back down to the south of the map, the place where I first learned the ropes of this game, and actually try to live up to the hero-skin I have. I want to kill those camping sniper-griefers on the hills and tall buildings of Cherno and Elektro, the ones who are terrorising noobs and ruining their game experiences. Is there anyone else who does this? Does anyone have any tips on finding the usual camping grounds of these snipers, preferably with rough map coordinates? What's the best way to engage them - long ranged countersniping, or sneaking up with an automatic weapon and emptying some rounds?

Most hackers who get banned will just keep buying another CD key online from a Russian website for something like $2. I hope you can speak Russian.

I went outside today to buy some beans, but it's just not as exciting when the people I walk past on the street aren't trying to eat my brains.

For the most part, I agree with you. The thing is, hacking isn't any more rewarding now than it was 2 months ago, yet it seems to be so much more widespread now. 2 months ago, I might get killed by a hacker once in a week if I'm unlucky. Now, I consider it a good day if a hacker only kills every player on the server I'm on once,

So here's my crazy conspiracy theory about why hacking is so widespread in this game. Sure, there are a lot of bored 13 year olds who get a power trip from nuking entire servers, but maybe there's something more sinister going on. I mean, the new Call of Duty game is due for release in November. Maybe some of these hackers are in fact Activision employees, trying to ruin the DayZ experience so that people will come crawling back to CoD. They can't have ignored how popular DayZ has become. Or I'm just a complete conspiracy nut.

So here's my hacker story. I'm playing on a German server (DE 1447) with about 15 players on it last night, I'm in a pretty secluded area in the North-East of the map as I'm just regaining my bearings after being lost for a bit, I'm very low on blood (thanks to a prior server-wide teleporting hacker attack a few hours earlier) and trying to find my tent full of meat. I notice that players are being killed at a greater frequency than normal. I stay on my guard but I don't think much of it. Suddenly, a player appears about 30m away from me, from out of nowhere, and I hear what sounds like a rapid-firing grenade launcher, followed by a series of explosions around me. At the first sign of trouble, I immediately hit alt-f4 but apparently not quickly enough to avoid sudden death. Fine. I've been killed by hackers before. I was pissed off, but this is Dayz and hacker attacks are part of every day life. The advantage to being killed by hackers rather than bandits is that usually they don't bother to loot your corpse, just teleport to the next griefing victim. So 10 min later I relogged and made a beeline to where I died, picking up some essentials along the way. While I was walking, I noticed a number of places where I could hear flies, but no corpses were around. Fine, I though, until the same thing happened where I died. Flies, but no corpse, it had just disappeared. I went to where my tent was. Turns out the tent had disappeared too. Disheartened, I logged off and waited until today, hoping all would be rectified by a server restart. Now, my tent had reappeared, but empty, suggesting it was destroyed. I haven't ruled out the possibility that someone stumbled across it and destroyed it for a laugh, but given the situation it seems much, much more likely that the same griefing hacker who killed everyone on the server decided to also destroy all corpses and tents (and presumably vehicles) after their work was done. The thing I want to know is, why do some people go to all this effort just to grief? Are some of these script kiddies like the Joker from The Dark Knight, men who only want to watch the world burn?

A lot of people on this thread are saying that they have either never come across a hacker, or only come across hacks once in the whole time they've been playing, and I was in the same camp until today. Today, I got hacked, twice. The first time, my friend spontaneously started dancing. I thought he'd mispressed a button, but about 5 minutes later, both of our characters started dancing at the same time. We deduced that there was a hacker on the server and promptly disconnected. On another server, my friend and I were in the middle of a forest on a fairly empty server (about 10 players) when we were both spontaneously killed by a large explosion, powerful enough to instakill both of us despite being 20m apart from each other. At first, my friend thought I had hit a landmine, which caused both of us to die, but a) no landmine is powerful enough to kill two people 20m apart from each other, and B) landmines don't even exist in dayz. I eventually stumbled across a youtube video where another player experienced something similar, being instagibbed by an artillery shell. I came to the conclusion that this must be a hack. So that's two confirmed hacks in one day. I also came across a website where I assume most of these hacking w*nkers congregate: http://www.***.net/forum/624-dayz-hacks/