SpaceMonkey

So what are you saying about exploits now Nya? The dev view about exploits and cheating seems pretty clear in this statement: "This IS considered an exploit therefor you will be punished for it.". I'd suggest rethinking your stance about exploits in the context of DayZ: they're not welcome here and I'm glad that it's the case. Using exploits add nothing to a mod which is trying to create an immersive experience, it will just diminish the experience.

One way to make the zombies far more dangerous and unpredictable would be to let players chose to sometime spawn as zombies, especially the fast running type. There's nothing as unpredictable as another player. The zombie would have the ability to shout and alert the whole caravan of AI zombies (or create a new spawn point for zeds) when he spots a player (along with a couple of other abilities maybe). With that, crawling in the midst of zombies would become fare more scary. Camping as a sniper bandit would too, as a zombie player might ambush him while he's absorbed by his task of tracking other humans. Just my 2 cents. Obviously a lot of work needed, and therefore probably not going to happen (but something potentially fun to make these zombie encounters stories a bit more unique).

Yep, the concepts of natural selection displayed by some here are indeed really strange, and sort of worrying. Someone even went as far as declaring that all females would have disappeared because of natural selection, them being weak... Well, if you kill all the females, the only thing you've achieved is that you've selected yourself (and everyone else) out, good job and welcome to natural selection!

Coming soon to DayZ: "Side Channel: who's shooting in Berezino?" is the new "Side Channel: who's shooting in Cherno?"

I agree with Doktor, this data is going to be really hard to interpret without controlling a few things better. An effect of population size is almost granted, as it increases density which in turn increases the probability of players encounters and therefore the raw number of murders (assuming that the probability to murder/encounter stays constant). Since we know that the players population has recently been increasing sharply, this is an issue in your stats.

Not to mention publishers who think that we won't notice how they prevent us from modding games, and then try to tell us it's because we're better off without mods or that modders can't cope with nowadays complexity - these publishers should open their eyes - I indeed used to like BF 1942, but Dice has lost me with the new iterations of BF. In the simulation market, we also saw the same thing happening with Microsoft and their new game Flight, for which we were told that they were doing us a favour by not releasing a SDK, not allowing third parties to develop for it, and not allowing freeware modding - all supposedly because it would dilute good content in a mass of crap - the truth is that now only crap, 1rd party payware DLC crap, remains... Systematically replacing mods by 1st party DLC was a very wrong turn for game development and innovation, and it's about time gamers send a message to publishers to make them stop that.

It seems a bit difficult to organise, knowing that you would need a critical mass of people (say at least 5-6 at any time) holding the base non stop 24h/24h. Even with this pre requisite fulfilled, running it successfully for any significant period of time would be quite a challenge. Your organised group can fall into chaos just by being overwhelmed by a mass of "friendly" survivors who you don't know and can't control because there are more of them than the people you know. Same applies with swarms of bandits - sure they're probably not going to be organised, but if they start hitting from every side at the same time independently, things can go downhill really quick. And that's without metagaming problems. It also seems to me that any organised trading post, survivor hq would probably survive better away from a major loot+PVP place, somewhere better hidden and more defend-able, where goods would flow rather than spawn. But since we all play across different servers, at different time zones etc, I still think anything like that will be very short lived. In DayZ Chernarus, anything that is not mobile seems doomed to a very short life. I'd be curious to see what would happen though, but I'd be hidden in a bush and looking at that with binoculars for a while before I'd get anywhere near it.

Same here, last time before logging in I was crawling somewhere in the middle of the map, surviving with almost no blood. I found myself in the same state but crawling near Cherno - not a nice place to weakly crawl around :p R.I.P.

It's not all deathmatch even now, I interact with a lot of players willing to cooperate. It might also depend on the servers. I play on Australian server and the atmosphere is very cooperative there. And regarding the player population, things will change a lot when the hype settles down a bit and the mod matures. People that really only see the mod as a deathmatch and do not care about the survival experience will get bored very quick.

Raise the army, the beacons of Gondor have been lit!

That's timely, I was just chatting with that with my partner yesterday when she watched my playing and she asked whether there were any female skins at all. I agree with you Rocket, in a situation like anyone would wear similarly looking clothes, male or female, and I don't think anything fancy is needed in terms of changing the body mesh a lot, new faces are what are needed the most. It's also funny that some think that everyone would become a female just to optimize some stats. Geez, it's not an excel sheet, it's a game where immersion and emergent stories are supposed to be at the centre of the focus (this reminds of some D&D video games, where people would say: don't mix that class with this class because your stats will be slightly worse - heck, where had gone the Roleplaying in RPG?). No one ever wins anyway, soon or later a character will die, and personally I don't care so much about how long it takes for it to happen as long as the story is great. And story wise, I think it's great to depict a world with male and female survivors.

I don't think there would be any way to enforce banning on this in a fair way, but it's also very clear that people who disconnect on purpose to avoid a fight ruin the gameplay. This is a sandbox experiment where a lot of the emergent gameplay holds only if people do not start exploiting loopholes like this. Server hopping to find loot is along the same vein, although less damaging. The game is supposed to be hard, unforgiving and realistic in some ways. How is it realistic to be able to magically disappear after someone didn't aim properly at the first shot? If the person initiating the attack is really bad at aiming, then why is the player disconnecting freaking out? Shouldn't he counter attack, unless he's even worse at aiming himself, with no other surviving skill than hitting alt F4. *sigh* Having said that, if someone comes up with a log that shows that some idiot proudly claimed to have exploited the game by doing this repeatedly, I wouldn't be surprised if Rocket would consider this as a perfectly valid reason for a ban. The only reason why it was considered difficult to take action against these types of players comes from the difficulty to prove that it's not simply due to a network problem - but a chat log with claims from the player proving that it was otherwise has no such ambiguity.

I personally think that they're great like that. It makes any attack on the zombies a really dangerous choice where things can turn really bad quickly. Some of my best memories of some DayZ characters come from those scenes where everything went to hell in a matter of seconds, and next thing you know you're running like a madman in the countryside with a horde of zeds on your tail, not knowing where your buddies went if they ever survived = priceless. Now, if they would walk only it would ruin any sense of risk associated with the zombies, you'd know in advance that you would only need to run to get out of trouble. I really prefer it the way it is now (as long as the zeds don't glitch, but it's only alpha).

I don't like the feature in its current state, I think it does affect the rhythm of the game in a bad way, but some of the things suggested here as a realistic depiction of a temperature system would not make sense. As others have mentioned it, alcohol does not raise your body temperature, and indirectly causes the opposite quite often. Well, running can also make the problem worse: hypothermia is really a frequent problem for runners in cold temperature. Basically, even though your muscles produce heat during the effort, if the temperature is sufficiently cold your body might easily struggle balance the thermal outcome, adjust its temperature and see it drop to dangerous levels - it's not a trivial balance, and therefore one might expect that if you go around running in bad conditions your body temperature will not increase. Maybe that's already what Rocket did implement, but in any case that's how a realistic relation between body temperature and running works too. Just my 2 cents. Having said that, it seems to me that currently our virtual bodies in DayZ are doing a particularly bad job at being the homeothermic machines they're supposed tobe, I feel like a reptile struggling to find a patch of warmth.

Just give a good old bicycle and off I'll be for the Tour de Chernarus, on the flat country, downhill, working hard uphill and... oh no, sniped right at the top of climb, no yellow shirt for me. Seriously though, I know that motorcycles are in, but are there any bicycles anywhere?