rn_max

Coast? North? Mid map is where it's at :P

Other games and mods over the last decade or two have existed just fine without the need for servers that have special perks for the renters. What do all of us who do rent or have rented a game server look for? The use of the damn box the game is installed on and support to keep it running. To have a server you get to call the shots on with friends. To gain presence or popularity by running a server that is enjoyable for many people and the resulting social kudos. Is the culture of SELF-SELF-SELF so ingrained now? What makes a DayZ server renter so special that this isn't enough? Do people want to buy an instant win? Why waste the money? That can be set up on a second hand machine on an average broadband connection. Are Balota Buddies and their ilk are in the server admin game for buy-to-win? I doubt it, they run a community enjoyed by many and are more than likely happy with the kudos of their player base. But I digress ... at the end of the day, with bad admin experience, the answer is simple ... move on.

Sorry ... lolwut? If items have a relative value in precious metal, then by implication they have a value relative to each other! There is no burden on DayZ's limited inventory system with an ethereal set of values either ... or grinding to collect, melt and swap metal. Each to their own I guess.

Wireframe Quake FTW ... wait, the nineties are long gone? Damn.

I'm still scavenging for a decent nurse's uniform with stilettos and an enema kit.

I've had no problem with tents recently, but then if I qualify that comment with "on vanilla public hive servers" it actually becomes relevant. Hint.

As much as it has seemed interesting to discuss on the forum and novel on its introduction in 1.8, I had already came to the obvious conclusion that as a player, crafting is pretty much pointless in DayZ in its current state, from a survival and loot storage aspect. The game can be played without any detriment as if crafting didn't exist from an item need perspective. Everything essential, nay primarily useful even, can be found ready made. Collecting crafting loot is an unwanted burden that clogs up inventory and storage space far too quickly. Why on earth would I want to lug around all the components for an item that takes the space of several ready made ones, which are plentiful anyway? For crafting to even begin to have a point and not to be an inventory killing chore, identical crafting components should be stackable in single item slots, or have an "ammo count" of uses, not one piece per inventory slot. Recipies need to be toned down from the implausible amounts of some items required. I'm known for my dislike of contrived game mechanisms and making players collect tons of crap WoW style to artificially restrict an item doesn't wash on the plausibility front either. For example, why the hell would anything smaller than an elephant's raincoat take anywhere near a whole roll of duct tape to make, let alone several rolls? Duct tape should have an ammo count per roll. At the other end of the scale, why can't something as simple as an empty tin or bottle be used to drink directly from pumps, wells and ponds? Though more of an action menu addition than crafting, as it is a single component solution, the idea is in the same vein of consideration, in terms of plausibility and usefulness to players. Sorry to sound harsh, but this isn't difficult territory I'm venturing into here and it doesn't take a think tank to come up with the reasoning. Crafting in DayZ must have been one of those projects that causes a bad case of tunnel vision on the ideas front, because stepping back into the cold light of release reveals much fundamental room for improvement, with relevance, plausibility and transparency found wanting. WoWZ? No thanks.

The UAZ has four extra phantom wheels for some strange reason, though like others have said, they don't affect vehicle performance. The ATV has two extra invisible wheels as well. It also has horrible stability problems over certain collision mesh junctions, but that's another story.

Why the hell would anyone trade in precious metal bars, let alone lug around briefcases (?!) full of them? They would be all but worthless for post apocalyptic survival. Food, drink, weapons, ammo, tools and parts I can understand, but why the need for a clumsy currency mechanism that rubs against the very grain of the scenario? WoWZ?

The whole blood bag scenario is a dreadfully silly mechanism used to include health packs of a sort. The game would only benefit from their removal. The proposed 1.8.1 blood bag parts (or transfusion kit) scenario seems to be a much better balance of symbolism against plausibility, as the blood has to be produced from a player, not found on a derelict hospital floor or in a cardboard box. As long as the donor also loses the equivalent amount of blood health into the bag and has to regain it again, I can't envisage any reasonable objections to the new proposal. Putting an expiry timer onto every bag produced might not be workable, but that's for those more familiar with the current data burden in the hive to decide.

From the start of vanilla DayZ to date: NVG - 3 pairs from crash sites GPS - 2 from red brick houses, 1 from church, 1 from Stary Sobor military tents. Rangefinder - 1 from supermarket, 1 from barracks. The rest of mine have rarely come from corpses and more often freely donated by other players. We found that map hackers were specifically raiding tents with these items in, especially rangefinders. We tested out the theory at the great expense of some bait items. They went straight for the RF, GPS and NVG, ignoring all other tents with loot, including exotic guns and antibiotics. This was in 1.8 with the tents placed in crazy places on opposite sides of the map. All of them were raided in one evening. In our case it was likely the same twerps who fell for the Lonely Island helicopter trap, as they were banned and curiously enough, no more precision raiding has happened since.

The fact is that this is being delivered with a popular game utility to an audience from which a large proportion has a fair probability of "falling for it". Why not be honest and make DZC openly supported by advertising, without resorting to social engineering of the install process to prey on the unwary? It is underhand and tarnishes an otherwise well-earned good reputation.

There has been a lot of underdeveloped genitalia waved about thus far, which would underline the mental deficiency and desperate need to be perceived as alpha male by the deadly killers in this topic. Talking smack across the web about pretending to deliver violence to others in a computer game just doesn't cut it on that front and is agonisingly uncool ... but then I guess the same could be said for acne, a girl voice and tiny hairless boy parts. Time to sound the teen e-peen alarm.

Make: Less firearms ... far less firearms. Want to re-focus back to survival? Take away the means to stage gunfight at the Cherno Corral. This is the apocalypse, most of the ammo would have been expended in a futile attempt to stop the hordes of infected, so it's back to the dark ages duking it out with table legs and kitchen knives. Now they'll have to get up close and personal to deliver violence, deliberate rather than convenient. Harsh rarity levels for military weapons and equipment, with hard set numeric limits rather than chance-to-spawn, otherwise players will loot farm until they get what they want. Valuable gear should be a reward for scavenging or robbery, not de-facto confetti sprinkled around. Break: Leaving ArmA 2's full arsenal in play, epic fail.

Well all those anecdotes of clever players are nice, but like I said before, the server is too low pop and the time frame way too fast when heli's disappear and specific tents are raided for only one type of item. As an epitaph, a honey trap was set in cooperation with the admin recently and the bait was taken. The MI-17 was flown out and parked on Lonely Island, you know the one, over 25km out from the coast and can't be spawned on. Later on in the day, the trap was checked and the MH6 was out there in its place. After a browse through the logs, the ban hammer fell on a pair of GUID's ... goodbye and good riddance. Its not just the cheating, its the sorry ass fact that stupid, lazy people can just buy their way into hackville, without even understanding how the hell what they are using works.

If the goofy flaws in the game environment stop killing me, which account for most of my deaths, I'll accept not being able to loot my corpse. Like many I just see it as rectifying the bug. I've never recovered gear after being killed, but then I can count those occasions in single digits.

Vehicle theft and tent raiding by cheating to find the location happens on moderately populated servers in the public hive as well, without any admins having third party tools. There are "apps" out there that intercept the necessary information and provide "ESP" (formerly known as map hacking) capability. Whether the server is spoofed to obtain information from the hive, or the information is milked from the server, who is to say but those who know where the vulnerability lies and how to query it. The regulars on our server have done some discrete experiments and used all manner of locations for stashes and vehicles. Without fail they are all located and raided by cheating to determine their location, within a day or so of being placed. There simply isn't enough time in the day to legitimately search the entire map grid by grid and there isn't enough player traffic to make it all by chance discovery EVERY time. A tent was completely concealed in a group of pine trees, in a forest way off the beaten track in the middle of the map. Only certain items were placed in that tent and it was completely untouched. Then at some expense, rangefinders, GPS's or NVG's were added to the contents. As if by magic, each time only those items disappeared and the rest of the contents were left, including military weapons such as a Bizon SD and an M240. Not only are the sticky-fingered cheats map-hackers, they are so choosy that their visits are blatantly obvious. Even worse, they abandon the aircraft within a day or two or crash them anyway. The rub? The only way to determine their identity, other than to have 24 hour admin cover (never happen of course, its only a game) would be to audit the logs and find out who is regularly collecting these rare items and aircraft.

Why on earth would there be no infected threat when that was fundamental to the original premise of the game? That's a bit like removing the Combine from Half-Life 2. There is a game that pretty much does that to DayZ already, it's well known enough not to bother naming it.

The zeds are pretty good (relative to what will ever achieved with them) in 1.8 and the changes don't appear to be that drastic. My reservations with zeds would be regarding their animation rather than statistical output - ensuring that zeds don't out-reach melee weapons, a curious phenomenon that may be performance related rather than the actual reach. Similar to the delayed zed death animations where they hang in the air before falling to the floor, it may be that zeds are closer than actually seen by the player at the moment of striking. - melee weapons remain accurate without any significant deviation, hitting where they are aimed. I've noticed what looks like alarmingly large deviation when aiming at the same spot over several swings, but that is only when fighting zeds. I'll have to do some dedicated object bashing to look into it further. It may be related to zeds allegedly having super long reach and hanging in the air before collapsing.

I strayed unwittingly into a private hive server once, as it had vanilla credentials in the name, DE 4319. I posted about it ages ago in a topic about a script hack ... http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/126529-why-you-no-love-me-anymore-error/#entry1256456 After being spawned in the sky and inevitably going splat on the floor, I noticed ArmA 2 squad icons in the HUD and an objective icon over 20km away, on what I could only assume was Lonely Island. I persevered and spawned back in to recover my gear (which I eventually managed to do). Basically a player with no skin was somehow running around following me. The shadow on the ground and floating weapon (when brandished) kind of gave the game away. Once I had my gear back I logged out with sigh of relief.

Some of the vanilla DE servers are populated during their night hours. However, since the 1.8 update, some of them either forgot to set the server clocks to local time again or deliberately shifted daylight into local evenings ... full of fail.

I definitely prefer the modern era viral infection scenario to the old and quite cardboard story of the dead resurrecting themselves. Definitely more 28 Days Later or World War Z to George Romero's B-movies.

It was Hatchet all the way ... but now there needs to be a change for me to like any non-firearm. Survivor arms plus melee weapon equals plenty longer reach than infected (same base species) arms without weapon ... so why can zeds in 1.8 routinely out-reach players? This wasn't an issue before the latest update, so it can't be that hard to figure out what has been broken. Can it? It's a shame ... there is always some negative change left in every time that is significant enough to undo the rest of the good work. Melee combat was preferable to this with super infection in 1.7.7.1

Blood bags are nonsense and would all have gone off anyway, with no electricity ... no refrigeration. There should be a two player transfusion kit instead and it should take AGES. Even as a lone wolf, it only takes far less than an hour to eat your way back to rude health from fainting, with cooked meat or MRE's. I've done it enough times and even survived four days infected using nothing but animal steaks, though it was a ruinously bad game experience doing nothing but chase livestock.

Sounds that good it should make its way to the suggestions forum. The only potential stopper I could see is how the engine would handle effectively trying to put a vehicle into an inventory.