John (DayZ)

You're in shock. It'll go away eventually. Nothing to be done. As for how dark it is, ArmA II - and, therefore, DayZ - follows the moon cycle in-game. Right now, the moon is in its waxing crescent phase - something like 10% full. Within a week it will be half full, which means you should be able to see pretty well in-game. Until then, use your flashlight or flares (though both will attract zombies and other players, on larger servers) or play on daytime servers. Plenty of American servers are set up on a reverse time cycle, which means the dead of night in their corner of the world is broad daylight in the server. It kind of amazes me that nobody else could tell you any of this shit, frankly. I don't understand why people post in topics like these when they don't know how the game works.

Do any of you run the game through Steam? I seem to remember hearing something about Six Updater/Launcher causing horrible network issues. Not that I have the teeny tiniest idea why it would, but I mean, hey, worth lookin' into.

Much appreciated, IMB.

No kidding. Hell, I've one shotted other players who were dead sprinting with a Winchester. Hey, I know it's the gun that won the west, and all, but it's pretty piss poor for PvP - and I still managed to destroy another player, who had an AKM, whilst he was moving at top speed. No excuses.

You have to right click once. Holding it only zooms your mouse in. If I can make a suggestion: play the tutorial for the game. No offense, but you obviously don't know much about ArmA II - I'm guessing you bought the game specifically for DayZ - and it would behoove you to learn your way around guns a bit more. Besides, the crosshairs are fairly inaccurate; going ironsights is the only way to shoot, bud.

I don't feel that zombies are too strong. I just feel that their ungodly eyesight and absurd numbers is unfair. I've aggro'd zombies whilst crawling through brush. They were fine before 1.7.1, but I've heard nothing but complaints since the update. Certain functions implemented to limit their destruction (not being able to see through objects, poor hearing, etc.) are spotty, at best, or just generally don't work. It's very frustrating.

Screwing around with old, single player games is a whole different ball park from cheating in a multiplayer game and screwing with other peoples' livelihood in said game. Frankly, I am being an adult: I'm observing and obeying rules that are in place to make the game more enjoyable as a whole, and he didn't. If you say so. Either way, you broke a very important, large, and obvious rule - in fact it is one of the only rules of the game. Don't hack, don't be malicious to other users. Pretty simple stuff, bub. Sleuth your way back into the game if you want, none of us can stop you - just keep in mind that you don't deserve to be playing anymore.

Really? I mean, theoretically, a new copy - and therefore a new ID - should allow them to rejoin. As far as I know, the key that comes with your game is what they ban. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way, let's be honest: you knowingly broke the rules and ruined other peoples' experience - hell, you might have turned a few people off of the mod entirely. I know I've been dissuaded, several times, from even bothering with the game when a slew of hackers repeatedly murders every player in the server (though, if I'm being honest, having a payload of jet missiles dropped on me or having an APC shell me on a hillside were both pretty hilarious events). So what makes you think you deserve to play this game anymore?

Hackers. Nothing to be done.

No problem! Just don't forget that that flashlight makes you a pretty big target, even from a distance - so any bandits nearby won't hesitate to shoot the source of it.

95208 has completely ruined my frame rate, from 40-60 down to about 10-15. I love how BI manages to break their game every other patch.

A bit unrelated, but has anybody else's frame rate been completely, violently destroyed by the new beta patch? Seems to happen to me every few beta patches (and the beta patches that don't ruin my frame rate break the game in some other terrifying, horrible way, because, despite making the game, BI seems to have absolutely no idea what they're doing). Oh, also: the night is so dark either because a) The server you're in (like all servers) follow the cycle of the moon, which means new moon week = pitch black darkness. We are currently in the very early stage of the moon cycle; by the 24th or the 25th, it should be fairly bright outside again. b) The moon is out and about, but there's cloud coverage - whether raining or not, clouds in-game can block out the moon and its light. Nifty, huh? And as for a question asked some time ago, but that still has not been answered: flashlights do not attract zombies. Well, they don't aggro them, at least - they may or may not attract zombies in the way that a flare does. They didn't the last time I used one, but that may have been changed.

You know, if you calmed down a little bit, you probably would have been able to actually hit them. I mean, I get where you're coming from - firefights in this game definitely get my heart pumping, but if you make any effort at all to control that shit, you can usually stomp all over other players' nuts while they're freaking out. Also, why the fuck does everybody keep insisting that he knew the grenades would dupe? Any idiot can tell that he's as surprised as anybody else when the counter stops going down. Sheesh.

They unpassworded the new beta patch, after about 6-7 hours, and once installed it completely fucks your (or at least my) FPS. So that's nice!

Especially since Bohemia manages to break the Goddamn game twice as often as Rocket, who is one man fiddling around with a mish-mosh of unstable coding - whereas BI is, presumably, an entire ensemble of scripters. I just realized there was a new beta patch, and as soon as I go to get it, lo and behold there's a password on the thing. I mean, what the hell? There are no words in the English language that can express my compounding frustration at BI.

I use both; I switch back and forth between 3rd person and 1st person servers when I get tired of one. It's a pretty simple process; just join a Veteran server with 3rd person disabled. Nobody can switch out of 1st then.

The loot table says a lot of shit. Frankly, since about 1.6.0, I haven't found loot even slightly resembling good outside of the absolute most dangerous spawn zones.

By the way, you should have drug him outside and dropped him off the roof once your friend had gotten ahold of his body.

Haha, wow. This made me laugh - that's just another player broadcasting a sound over direct chat; the sound is from a really great Source mod called The Hidden, where an invisible, knife-wielding experiment hunts down and kills a team of Special Forces commandos deployed to detain him. It's a very good mod, though the developers abandoned it years ago, so it will, sadly, never be finished.

I don't know, I don't find 3rd person to be a crutch as much as a preference. Sure, it gives you a wider field of vision, but that's about it. The camera isn't far back enough to see anybody sneaking up on you (unless they're trying to ninja loot your pack, which would be absolutely stupid anyway). I play on both 3rd person enabled and 3rd person disabled servers, because I enjoy a bit of both - sometimes I get tired of the claustrophobic feel of 1st person, and sometimes I get tired of folks scoping me out over an eight foot brick wall with 3rd person. So I just alternate. I do agree with crosshairs and nametags, though. I've noticed that, nine times out of ten, if a player can't scout you out by scanning a ridge for a nametag, or kill you without having to use his sights, he's completely unable to do anything to you. It's kind of hilarious how many people will play a milsim that can't utilize any urban warfare tactics at all. I do think that tags should be left on at like, one foot, though. It's nice to know which of my team mates I'm looking at, and it'd be damned challenging to abuse a 1-5 foot tag radius. Oh, here's a good question: servers that are veteran but leave 3rd person, crosshairs, and nametags on. What in the hell makes them veteran? Do you take more damage from NPCs/gunshots? What's up?

Also, why is nobody bringing up the obvious fact that the social make-up of society very drastically changes during apocalyptic events - or, presumably? There have been a thousand novels, television shows, films, and comic books about this very subject. Do the laws of society apply when society collapses? Do morality and immorality mean anything in the "jungle"? What is it, exactly, that makes us human? We cannot presume to conjecture what a human would or would not feel in a purely hypothetical situation. Sure, you might feel bad about murdering another human being - or maybe you felt it was the only way to keep yourself alive. Survival is a very, very powerful coping mechanism. Many people will do awful things in the wild, only to lament them upon their return to society - but what happens when there is no return to society? No time to think about what you've done? Our characters are in an almost perpetually kinetic state. They have no time for philosophy or moral debate. It's kill or be killed. Another point: I believe Rocket mentioned, somewhere, that the mod is "set" post-apocalypse - like, quite a while after the apocalypse. Who's to say our characters didn't grow up in this environment? Humans are very flexible; they adapt and change to survive in their surroundings. In a world where "should I murder somebody?" is answered with the question "are they a threat to me?", what's good and what's bad slowly break down and decay. That's right. Gettin' philosophical in this motherfucker.

Wouldn't that just make you a bandit? Also, you're all mistaken about zombie/player killing side effects. When you hold right click, your character holds his breath; if you hold it long enough, he'll eventually let it out in one quick exhalation, and be winded for a moment. If you're in a firefight and moving about, cover to cover, your character becomes winded. Shooting another player or a zombie does not affect your character at all right now.

If you're getting stuck at Waiting for Host, downgrade your beta version to the second most recent (whatever was before 94945).