bfisher

Really? People can't find some bush a half mile from the nearest town to log out in? I like having the 30 second timer on screen so you can abort if you are threatened. But if you just unplug your computer, your character should still sit there for 30 seconds. How do you know if someone is server hopping or they just happened to log in for the first time today right on top of you? You can't. How frequently does that happen anyway? It's not perfect, but it should be enough to make it somewhat inconvenient to just hop from server to server or eject from the game when you get into trouble.

Basic physics tells us that making a small bullet that travels faster gives you more bang than making a bullet larger. F=m*v^2 and all that. That said, I'm looking forward to seeing more variety of weapons. AKs, other M16 and AR15 variants, weapons from other militaries, civilian hunting rifles, shotguns, pistols, etc. More variety will also mean you have to scavenge more. Right now every military spawn is an M4 shop. It would be different if you had to mix in AK calibers and parts with your M4. IMHO, the military bases should spawn former Soviet or NATO weapons, but what about having rare-ish spawns in houses for more exotic weapons? Like you came across some gun nut's stash? Force people to really explore all around the map if they want to find the good stuff.

Wait...you saw a zombie?!

Generally, I'd be happy if they brought over most of the stuff from the mod (vehicles, animals, campfires, tents or equivalent, road flares, chem lights, etc), fixed everything so it worked as advertised, added more zombies, fixed the whole day/night thing, added weather, plus a bit more variety with the weapons and clothes. But generally I do like the direction Rocket is taking it. My thought is that as a survival game, it should be about having to make horrible horrible choices. Like having to eat rotten fruit vs starving. Or running 3 miles in the freezing rain with nothing but a t-shirt and catching pneumonia vs lighting a fire that attracts every bandit for miles. Or killing some sucker for his food vs calling down a hundred zombies on your ass. Also, check out my other thread about "iconic DayZ mod moments".

No pants

It's not an unreasonable complaint. An open-release alpha is fairly uncommon. It means that nearly everyone who has been waiting for the game has already purchased it. And those people purchased it at $20 when many of them would have paid $60. So what has to happen is that the game has to continue generating enough interest for new players to keep funding the game for the next year or two while Rocket and his team go through various builds, beta and production releases.

The OP's concerns are not unreasonable. I also manage software development for a living (not games though) and a public release Alpha is a bit odd. Basically you are releasing a buggy, semi-tested, unfinished application out into the wild for public scrutiny. A disclaimer pop-up doesn't change public perception. It just defers legal responsibility for delivering a potentially crappy product. Not to mention you're also leaving a lot of money on the table from people would would have paid $60 for a finished game, rather than $20 for an "alpha". From a pure business standpoint, the number of people who buy the game will drop over time and the funding Rocket and his team receive to continue developing builds will slow. At some point it simply won't make economic sense to continue work. Remember most people already paid their $20. Bohemia doesn't get any more money the longer you play. The question is will what build will this happen at and will it be during alpha, beta, or production. Or will DayZ be like one of the bullshit Kickstarter games that look really cool but then release some crappy alpha and run out of money? Or maybe Rocket himself gets bored. He's been doing this for a few years now. Of course, fanboyZ freak out any the very thought that Rocket won't be chained to his workstation for the rest of his life constantly perfecting this game.

I feel like there are a lot of iconic moments people experience in the Mod that need to eventually be recreated in the Standalone. Off the top of my head: Firing a "dinner bell" rifle in a city and agroing every zombie to you. The first time you approach the factory near Kamarova and crawl for 2 clicks to sneak past the zombies. Killing and eating an entire cow to regain health. Nearly killing yourself by driving a bicycle off a cliff. Finding some idiot's fully-stocked hidden car. The first time you see a helicopter overhead and it scares the crap out of you. Accidentally trapping yourself in with dozens of zombies in an ATC tower. Road flares. Picking up new spawns on the coast, driving them to the middle of nowhere and robbing and/or killing them. Axing a ghillie-suited sniper in the back of the head on Sniper Hill. Crawling miles to a hospital to fix a broken leg. Bandit camps Bus tours of Chernarus. Helicopter assault on Cherno. Opening a Mountain Dew at Green Mountain.

My new character. The last one met with an unfortunate...accident. screengrab

You must be new. The spirit of the DayZ mod was that Cherno was a dangerous place, even if you never saw another player, you had a pretty good chance of getting killed by dozens of zombies, starving to death, dying of thirst or even getting your legs broken by a door or random rock (ok those last two aren't so great). It made it harder to gear up since any place with good gear was also overrun with zombies. And it also made players team up to take out those zombies (only to turn on each other when someone got a better weapon). Later, when you could actually get infected by zombies, it actually created a whole new sense of urgency. Once infected, you only had about an hour to find extraordinarily rare antibiotics before you died. In some offshoots of the mod, you had to worry about weather and cold as well. Without any of that, it's just wandering a giant-ass map of Eastern European countryside that's Call of Duty on the coast and I Am Legend without monsters throughout the rest. Personally, I find it tough to get into the alpha for more than an hour or so. I'll probably just keep tabs on it until it's more developed.

Do a lot of other people not get that the OP meant no server restarts AFTER loot and zombie respawning has been fixed? I think the Mod had to restart servers to clean up bodies, etc, clear memory leaks and whatnot. But yeah, it would be nice if everything respawned / cleaned up naturally without a maintenance restart every few hours.

Grand Theft Auto series Far Cry 2

I don't know if loot needs to be more "rare". Maybe just more variety of loot and loot spawns. Like to find a gun, you'd need to search a bunch of houses for an odd pistol or shotgun. Of course it makes sense to have the military weapons at the army bases. Look, everyone is going to get a gun eventually so stop your bitchin! Once there are actually significant numbers of zombies, that's when you'll really need them.

I like the idea that they should be slower than a loot-less new spawn player, but a bit faster than a fully armed player with a full pack. That would put players in the awkward position of having to toss their Mountain backpack full of canned fruit so as not to get eaten by zombies.

The "spirit" of the game is that you are supposed to wander the vast environment, surviving one bullet or can of beans at a time, avoiding zombies and dealing with other players. Running to Balota on a low pop server, then hopping across other low pop servers until you fast track to full commando gear sort of defeats the entire purpose of the game.

If there were hundreds of zombies, it would make sense. When you come across one, then it's just some crazy homeless lady on crack.

'Sup.. The helmet is for safety! And the red nose Payday mask is to appear more approachable!

I'm not really clear why you character wears a T shirt over an undershirt

Or hear a helicopter overhead with it's searchlight. I miss the road flares and chem lights of the Mod. They really did lend an air of creepiness.

I'm a big believer in the game having no story beyond "you just washed up on shore with nothing, no idea as to how you got there or why". It lets you fill in the rest yourself. That's sort of the whole point to the game IMHO. No end game. No rescue. No mystery to solve or cure to find. Just stay alive as long as you can. The only reason I would even justify the flashlight is simply you can't play on a night server without it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't have to sleep in your clothes for weeks at a time like a hobo.

He is excited that he found a weapon. And apparently he wants to use it to become a big man.

Fuck it. It's $20.

Why do people think that a game like DayZ doesn't require "balance"? Balance doesn't necessarily mean that everything is "rock/paper/M4A1" where every "weapon" or "class" has a counter. It means finding the right combination of difficulty and fun. Did people like it in the Mod when every jerkoff hacker had an AS-50? No. One long range sniper creates an interesting challenge. EVERYONE having an anti-material rifle (except for clueless new spawns) changes the game dynamic to a constant sniper duel. It's not balanced because it only allows one style of play in what is supposed to be an open-world sandbox. People may disagree, but I think the 24 day/night cycle is also bad game balance. It's "realistic", but I'm not freakin playing this game for days at a stretch. Why do I need the game to follow the same cycle as in real life? GTA, Far Cry, Fallout, Minecraft and nearly every other open-world environment game out there manages to create an accelerated day night that "feels" realistic in the gameplay world. "Balanced" doesn't mean creating a Call of Duty or Battlefield style "Rock / Paper / M4A1 / Airstrike". "Balanced" means the game supports a wide variety of play styles. If the game is flooded with AS-50 anti-material rifles (like the Mod was at one point), that's not balanced. It turns the game into a massive sniper duel at a thousand yards. Balance would be if you want to play with an AS-50, you can (if you find one), but you also have to suffer the drawbacks. You have to lug a 35 lb weapon around, requiring you to eat and drink more. You make a shit ton of noise when you fire it, attracting every zombie for a mile. Stuff like that. I want "realistic" in that thinks are intuitive. Falling off a barn roof hurts. Eating spoiled fruit makes you sick. Getting shot fucks your shit up bad. It takes time to heal. Not eating, drinking or staying warm makes you weaker and eventually kills you. Running long distances makes you tired. I don't want realistic in that everything is in real time. Otherwise it would take a month of real game time to starve and nearly every injury would be fatal.

Depends what you mean by "fun". If new players want to just jump into the shit and start killing zombies and players, this isn't the game. If you want to wake up on a beach with no idea where you are, sneak around a barren wilderness/towns for hours like you are the last man on Earth and experience the sheer terror of not knowing if those three dots in the distance is going to shoot you or chase you down and eat you, this is more your speed.