John (DayZ)

NO. NO DREAMING PERMITTED.

They can't actually reset any of your characters, you know. Well, it is theoretically possible, but it would require rolling back some 200,000 characters simultaneously, many of which have died ten, twenty, thirty times in the past twenty-four hours. It would be a massive clusterfuck.

I have nothing to do with this entire situation, but I've been reading it out of curiosity and I'm gonna wedge this in: whether or not some of their administrators are abusing their powers (while the evidence does lead me to believe that somebody with some authority should investigate these claims), you are absolutely harassing them now. I get it, you're frustrated; you think they've done something wrong and nobody's gonna help you, so why not screw with 'em yourself? The problem is that, when we can all see you blatantly being immature and rude about the situation, you are discredited, and your argument is weakened. Not theirs.

What is running sick-sack? Something you'd throw up in, I guess?

I honestly don't know. The game is in Alpha; both it and ArmA II are incredibly finicky. If you found something that works, just go with it. Also, the "stuck on loading" thing is a pretty common problem; probably doesn't have anything to do with anything you've done.

If you installed it through SixUpdater, I can't tell you if it added the proper command line parameters. When it gives me that error message, it's because I ran Operation Arrowhead instead of Combined Operations. When you install it manually to run through Steam, it adds a command line that runs DayZ through Combined Operations. Best idea for you is to follow the video on the download page, install the mod manually, and then try her out.

It's just part of the game. I'll admit I generally kill on sight, but most of the people I do see are far above the "two Makarov bullets and a coyote patrol pack" threshold. I would love to see more teamwork and an incentive to work together in the game, but right now I'm okay with how it is. Yes, I occasionally get murdered at random and lose all my shit, but that's kinda the fun part. When I do get into a shootout it's tense and exciting. Either way, bandits are a part of the game. They're obstacles blocking your ability to survive, just like zombies, dehydration, and starvation. You have to learn how to deal with them and adapt - before I started killing on sight, I avoided all players, and generally lasted quite a while that way. All it took was a bit of care. It became boring, though, so I moved on to what I do now, and it's spiced up the game a bit. Oh, also, I disagree that there aren't enough zombies. I don't know where you go, but nine times out of ten I'm surrounded by at least fifty zombies in any given town. I once accidentally aggro'd one zombie and lead him into a barn to shoot him. I went into that barn with 19 kills. I left with 119. They would not stop fucking coming.

Yes well the minimum specs for that kind of prohibit you from playing any game released after 2007. Oh' date=' wow, yeah. I assumed he meant Bad Company 2, which I figured could limp along with ArmA II. You're definitely going to need a new rig. Battlefield 2 was released in 2005; ArmA II is pretty much one of the most GPU intensive games [i']ever, due to its massive 225 square kilometer map.

Are you sure about that? I swear I remember reading somewhere that ArmA II Free should not work with DayZ. Plus' date=' the benchmarks and optimizing in ArmA II Free are [i']fucking awful (I average 50-60 FPS in single-player, 30-40 in DayZ, and 15-20 in ArmA II Free), and I'm wondering if that might affect how DayZ runs as well. That would be especially bad for him if he already won't get a fantastic framerate, and it's only $10 extra.

1) That should be enough, but just to be on the safe side, check out www.canyourunit.com for a comparison. As for buying a new rig, I'd say go to your nearest computer repair shop - a lot of them will sell pre-assembled computers for a fair price. I bought mine for about $750 with six cores, eight gigs of DDR3 RAM, and a 1 GB GFX card (switching it out for a 5.5 GB once I get paid). 2) Get ArmA II: Combined Operations. It's $30, and has everything you need for DayZ. If you just get ArmA II or Operation Arrowhead (the standalone expansion for ArmA II), you can't run DayZ - and if you buy both separately, you'll spend about $40. 3) Doesn't really matter, as VOIP in-game is touch and go, and you're advised not to use it. It can both lag and crash the server you're on. Just use whatever you feel comfortable with using over a TeamSpeak 3 server - a lot of DayZ servers have their own TS3 servers, but if you hook up with a clan or another player you might be able to hop in their TeamSpeak. Good luck!

Seems to be arbitrarily kicking people and then locking the server. What's the deal? Nobody decided to explain this to the players. If it's server maintenance or whatever, cool, that's great, but don't be a jackass and boot twenty-five people without telling them why. Jesus, some of the server hosts around here.

You're misusing the term "griefers." There is no real griefing in DayZ - unless somebody blocks a door you're trying to get through. Then you can just shoot him. I guess you could call it griefing if somebody sprints into a room with a horde of angry zombies and lets them aggro on you - which I have done. Then I shot him with my Lee Enfield and stole all his gear. It was hilarious. At any rate, PvP is basically the biggest part of this game. Trust me, once you get good enough to get an ALICE pack, a decent primary, a respectable sidearm, all the tools you need to survive, and a metric ton of food/water/soda, you're gonna get bored. I did. That's when I turned to other players for my amusement. For me, this game inspires an actual sense of terror when I'm in a firefight; afterwards, I find my hands shaking from the legitimate adrenaline rush I received. It's amazing, and it's fun as hell. At this point, for me, given my mastery of zombie evasion and my ability to survive, the only challenge I have left is other players. Seriously though, PvP gets fun. Yesterday I bested an M16 with my Makarov, and had a guy that I was trying to kill pull a motherfucking crossbow on me. Seriously. It was hysterical. He actually hit me twice in the torso before I could put him down with the Makarov, and it was so intense it's almost frightening.

So many loves.

Yeah' date=' he did owe me an explanation. He booted a few dozen people from his server and locked it without [i']any explanation to anyone (contrary to what he may have said) - presumably to faff about with his pals. While I now know the reason, I did not before. Just because you pay the bills on the server doesn't mean I don't have a right to be miffed when you force me to spend another Goddamn half hour looking for a functional server to play in with no warning, all right.

I didn't know any of this was going on anyway, but let me say this: while I did enjoy the single-player scenario written with DayZ's code (generally only two or three times, to practice with a new weapon I had acquired against zombies, or to learn some mechanic of the game such as repairing a vehicle), I would have to side with you on this. This is your mod and it is yours to share with others; when you share the foundations and tools of this mod with others and they betray your trust, you have every right to revoke that privilege. At any rate, I don't think any of us will be losing sleep over the lack of a DayZ single-player scenario, and after a while all of this childish horse shit about who said what because they did this to them and this happened because of his whatever will dissipate and we can get back to killin' some motherfuckin' zombies.

The simple fact is that, yes, sometimes somebody will get the drop on you and you will die and lose all of your hard earned gear. It isn't a big deal: I die, I can get an ALICE pack, a decent primary, a secondary, and a metric ton of survival gear by the end of the day. Hell, sometimes I've done it inside of an hour. After that, I start surviving again - sometimes for a week, sometimes for an hour. That's what keeps me coming back: death is semi-permanent, and as such, every single moment is tense, every single conflict leaves your hands shaking from real adrenaline rushes - hell, I've had a gunfight with a man that was using a crossbow, and another where I managed to outmaneuver another player with an M16 with my Makarov. It can be tough, but it gets easier as you keep going. You wanna talk about unfair, though? I had a DMR, all the tools, an ALICE pack, so on and so forth - and when I was navigating through the jungle at night I slipped into a pond and was instantly treading water. I couldn't get my bearings, spent maybe eight seconds in the water, and lost everything. Because I got careless and sloppy for one second. No joke. That's how it works in this game. If you want something a bit more user friendly, by all means, we don't want to waste your time with a game that does nothing but piss you off. If you want to stick around and meet the challenge, though, go for it. It can be very fun.

Yeah, my buds and I found a UAZ, loaded it down with gear, and a hacker mowed us down. I know the hacks he used to do it, too, because I've seen the video on YouTube - spawned a silenced M4A3 CCO silenced, as best I could tell, upended a clip of unlimited ammo into me at our campfire, and then speed hacked/teleport hacked about two klicks south and killed my guys driving the UAZ at top speed through a forest in the dead of night with their lights off. It would have been literally impossible to kill them if he had been right in front of them, without even factoring in that the fucker killed me just moments before. It's getting old. I play the game because it's a challenge - hacks would erase that challenge. Why would it be any fun? Sadly, this is a BattleEye/ArmA II issue - even vanilla ArmA II was plagued with hackers for years - so I doubt Rocket can do much about it himself. It's up to the individual server owners to start banning IPs if they catch hackers in the act, but, let's face it: with a 225 square kilometer map and 220,000 people playing DayZ, it ain't gonna happen.

In their defense, taking shots out of a bird moving a hundred and fifty at another one doing the same isn't the easiest. Personally, I'm a damn good shot, but I can't pilot the helicopters in this game for shit.

Honestly, this really isn't worth worrying over. As you play the game more you'll become accustomed to what you will and won't find - and, frankly, I wasn't even aware that this was a problem. I have never seen a player with a weapon he shouldn't have - even hackers seem to use legit guns (albeit with infinite ammo and an aimbot). If you pick up a gun that seems peculiar, eyeball the weapons section of the DayZ Wiki - simple as, really. There are quite a few handy guns in-game, though, so it's not as though any gun that isn't a piece of shit is hacked into the game. I've had DMRs, Barrets, M4A3 CCOs, naked M16s, Colts, G17s, M9s, etc., etc., etc.

As for the boat plan, protein: fish! You're on the ocean, son, get your rod out and cast.

I would suggest the neighborhood of $20, with a minor price reduction (say $5 less) for players that have been around since a certain Alpha build. Like he says in the interview, we - the community - are helping to build and propel this mod. I only think it's fair that those of us that have been playing it, helping out in the community, and sticking with the mod since its inception should not have to pay another $30 for the standalone when I bought ArmA II solely for DayZ. I'd be fine with $15-$20.

If you have the space to keep both, go for it. The silenced Bizon is a very good weapon, though not as silent, accurate, or common as the silenced submachine gun - so frankly, I'd drop that fucker. The DMR will serve you damn well in PvP.

YES, I want to spawn with no supplies at all. There's a challenge.

I know, but I suppose it depends on your perspective. Rangers are trained by diving into twelve to fifteen feet ponds in absolute darkness with at least sixty pounds of gear in their ruck, plus their M4A1s and other assorted gear on their vestments. I imagine it makes sense if we're assuming that my character has absolutely zero military training - but, then, how would he be able to use a high caliber rifle in the first place? Or set up an intravenous blood transfusion? Or any of the other multitude of things that he can do. It just doesn't make a lot of sense, from any perspective - in the singleplayer campaign you play trained soldiers. They would have no trouble navigating out of even water that they can tread in with near a hundred pounds of kit on them.

Like other users have said: crank your gamma and brightness up or try to find a daytime server. Keep in mind that these servers follow the moon cycle - no joke. The moon is currently a waning crescent, and - combined with a lot of cloud coverage in some servers - it is virtually impossible to see. The gamma/brightness trick only works if there's light to play off of. I would also warn against flares unless you're very, very far north in a low population server. They are incredibly dangerous. Don't think you're alone. The other day I had a DMR and an ALICE pack, among other lovely goodies, and whilst navigating through that pitch blackness (and doing a fair job of it - I managed to get from Berezino to about a klick east of Elektro in the absolute, unseeing darkness), I managed to fall into what was apparently the deepest pond known to man. I started treading water with absolutely no warning, and try as I might, could not orient myself to swim out of the pond before my gear (all of it) vanished. DMR, DMR mags, Colt mags, ALICE pack with all my supplies. Without a flare or chemlight, I couldn't see to try and pick up my gear. If I tried to find a server with better lighting, obviously my gear would not be there. If I went to go find chemlights/flares, I would never find this spot again. Basically, I got screwed out of my DMR and ALICE pack because the game engine is mildly retarded. You get over that shit, though, and after a week of playing you get obsessed with the game - I've currently logged enough hours in the past two weeks on ArmA II that it could be considered a full-time job for me.