bfisher

Congrats on your children. I've had one child born since the zombies overran Chernarus. I dream of a day when perhaps their children will see a finished product. I know the fanboys will continue to scream "it's ALPHA!". But IMHO DayZ not only has a long way to go, it has taken a number of steps backwards: -Zombies are still a buggy, glitchy non-entity. I literally forgot the Mod where firing a "dinner bell" Enfield in the middle of town would attract more zombies than you had bullets. - Loot spawning is very much WIP. I don't think it's a problem that certain buildings will be player magnets because of the loot they spawn - military loot at the military bases, guns, body armor and other police gear at the police stations, axes and rescue equipment at the firehouse, food and goods at the market. That's logical intuitive. But trying to match up guns with ammo with magazines sucks. And sometimes all you find are little girl dresses and hockey sticks. -Does the weather and other environmental stuff even work anymore? Every server I go on is sunny and balmy high noon 24/7, I don't know if the devs turned it off or people only want to play on sunny servers with no weather so all they have to do is run around killing each other. But if the later is the case, then that doesn't bode well for the community IMHO. I like the idea of persistent containers, vehicles and fortifications. But honestly, I don't know how that would work from a gameplay perspective. Does your stuff follow you from server to server? Is it protected when you're offline? or is it like the mod where it's fair game for anyone to come along and take?

Are we? Because the way most players act, I feel like we are the ones infected with the "Trixie" virus from The Crazies that makes people act like raving (but still functional) psychopaths.

It might help of this zombie apocalypse actually had ...you know...zombies. Some threat where it made sense to team up with perfect strangers. Honestly, if 90% of the other players weren't violent psychopaths, this game would just be wandering around the woods picking up stuff. I can go do that at my inlaws house in New Jersey.

Lord no. The idea that there should be "rewards" or "unlocks" or having anything carry over to your next character is really against the fundamental concept of the game. The only "rewards" are you stay alive. The only "unlocks" are whatever loot you find along the way. And the only thing that will carry over to your next character once you die is your rage and maybe some knowledge that will help you not get killed next time. I agree that it does get a bit boring once you're totally geared up. Then again, not wanting to lose all that gear to a sniper or random zombie is sort of what adds tension to the game. Also they need to fine tune the loot and food/drink/temp dynamics. Like I shouldn't have starved to death because I couldn't find any food in the largest city on the map.

Ok, this is probably a bit of a minor nitpick. But everywhere in Cherno uses the same ISO-standard 20' intermodal shipping containers. You see a bunch that fell off the shipwreck (which actually looks more like a bulk carrier than a container ship...another nitpick). All the shipping ports and freight yards are also filled with the same standard containers. So why does the rolling stock on the trains look like circa 1940s boxcars from a Nazi concentration camp? If intermodal shipping containers are coming into and being distributed throughout Cherno, there has to be trains and trucks that can transport them. A Ural will not do the trick. What I'm saying is the devs should model some flatcars or well cars for the trains that can carry the same shipping containers already scattered all over the map.

Specifically, I heard about the DayZ mod on another general message board I frequent. I didn't quite "get it", other than it sounded like some sort of online rollplaying game. Maybe similar to a zombie Everquest or Warcraft Online. I had no idea since there were no images. Later, I heard about how "groundbreaking" it was so I thought I'd check out some YouTube clips. The first clip I came across was of a gang of bandits driving up and down the coast road in a bus in the pitch black of night. They picked up some guy, drove him north into some base in the middle of nowhere and made him fight some other newbie to death with axes in a pit encircled by road flares and barbed wire. I think what sold me was how brutal and immersive the game seemed, in spite of the clunky graphics. Like it wasn't some manic run & gun zombie arcade game. Like you could imagine the frustration of spending hours trying to scrape by with some cans of beans and maybe a pistol, only to have six dudes in Shemagh tactical scarves and Ghillie suits with silenced full auto weapons just toy with you. Anyhow, I bought Arma II and downloaded the Mod the next weekend my GF went home to her parents and just played it for hours. The SAs had some great moments too, but I don't know that it's grabbed me as much as the Mod did when it first came out.

I don't mean to start another "OMG THIS GAME SUCKS IT WILL NEVER RELEASE BLAH BLAH BLAH!!" thread, but was there a recent update that just rendered the game unplayable for people? I've been playing off and on like a couple of hours every odd week or so and, general clunkiness and whatnot aside, I can basically play the game as intended. Not today though. Specifically: Logged in where I last logged off on the top floor of some city hall building in the Northeast. Fine. All my inventory shortcuts are gone. Can't equip my collection of guns and other equipment. I spot a either a zombie or character in the stairwell, but he seems stuck and running in place. Log off since everything is acting flaking. I log back in and I've respawned as a new character. Ok, fine. Maybe that other guy came too and killed me as I was logging off. Try another server just to be sure. Having trouble picking up items. Try another server. I appear to log back in a state I was in about 10 minutes ago (ie my new jacket is missing). Having trouble opening doors.

Guess it was just a bad day, server-wise. Too bad about the character, but I kind of felt a need to start fresh anyway.

I kind of stopped following DayZ for awhile, so maybe I'm wrong about this. But I feel like with the Mod, you hand Frankie & Jackfrags, the Cherno Journal guy doing mock interviews of players, plus a huge assortment of random clips and uploads. It just created more of a sense of a DayZ community IMHO. The last video I watched about the SA from jackfrags (I think), he was saying how he was basically sick of DayZ and stopped playing because it became a COD KOS fest.

Don't you have a GED exam you should be preparing to fail for the third time?

Exactly! I always sneak up behind someone and ask "are you friendly, or should I just blow your head off with my shotgun?" 9/10 times they turn out to be friendly! Also, don't just run up to other players. I know you're just trying to give me a hug, but I need my personal space.

1) I'm pretty sure no one asked you. But thanks for your positive contribution. 2) I'm pretty sure the high priority stuff like broken zombies, broken loot, broken this that and the other thing and too much/too little PvP have been covered already.

Sort of defeats the purpose of using intermodal shipping containers if you are going to unpack and repack them when you change shipping modes.

I don't understand that either. I remember when I first heard about the Mod, I googled a few YouTube videos. One of the first ones I came across was a video of some guys picking up some new spawns in a bus, driving them in the dark to the middle of nowhere and making them fight to the death inside a circle of barbwire, campfires and road flares. I like that even on a full server, it still has an I Am Legend feel to it as if you are wandering around as possibly the last man on Earth. IMHO, between the elements, starving, dying of thirst or getting sick, simply surviving DayZ should be a challenge. Then you throw in killer 28 Days Later rage zombies everywhere. Oh and by the way, there are other players you'll encounter from time to time and they all behave like they are infected with the virus from The Crazies that turns everyone into murderous psychopaths.

I don't see why they are mutually exclusive. Back in the Mod, I killed players because I desperately needed food or antibiotics or whatever. In the SA, people just kill because there isn't much else to do. That's the great thing about DayZ. You want to build a farm off in some far-flung corner of the map, you can do that. You want to survive by killing players for their canned goods, that's an option. Hell, you want to patrol the coast road eating people, you can do that now. I don't know. Personally I think the game works fine. Sure the zombies need to be polished up and the loot balanced and bugs fixed and whatnot. But this is the essence of the game. Long hours of tedious boredom, punctuated by terror, followed by either rage or euphoria.

I feel like people bitch too much in this game. It's not supposed to be Dead Rising where you can slice through a thousand zombies with a beach umbrella. Still, they can't make more zombies, make them super hard to kill AND make finding a firearm impossible. Ideally there should be a balance between finding guns and being forced to use them on zombies instead of other players. Or use them on other players. I don't care!

Fortunately the SA doesn't have DMRs or .50 cal A-50s and Barrett M98s like the Mod, picking people off from a 1000 yards away.

I did that awhile back. Walked right along the coast road from Cherno to Benzo. Funny thing. People generally run around so fast and are so used to catching the movement of other players running just as fast from a mile away, they often don't notice someone just walking. You do need to scan around more often though as you're far more likely to get overtaken by someone from behind than blunder into them in front.

Personally I don't see what the big deal is. Unless you die near a spawn point, it can take 30 minutes or longer to run back to your body. And that's even assuming you can find it.

That's not a bad idea. Just lock players out of their own bodies so you can't loot your own corpse. Or lock the items until at least one other player has put them in their inventory. Of course groups will always have the advantage, but maybe that will help encourage teamwork a bit more anyway. IMHO, player corpses were a key part of creating the tense atmosphere of the Mod. You heard those flies buzzing and came across a dead player and immediately you start looking anxiously around for whatever it was that killed him/her. Or sometimes you come across a half dozen fully armed corpses and are like "what the hell went down here"? Maybe that's all part of "persistence", but I think it would be great if there was more stuff like dead bodies, dead zombies, boarded up buildings, tents, old fire pits, discarded cans and whatnot that indicated players had been there.

I bashed some whiny kid in the back of the head with a baseball bat. Hey, my partner who was holding him at gunpoint thought it was nice.

I like the id of being able to check a players ID (living or dead). Couple of suggestions: 1) It should be "check ID" rather than "check pulse". 2) You shouldn't be able to check the ID of a living player whose face is concealed by a helmet or balaclava or whatever. Actually make a non-cosmetic purpose to having masks.

Only 120 hours since the SA was released. I was bored. Then I discovered your can eat people.

Wait...in the game or real life?

It's a pretty big space. Lots of floors and cells and courtyards where someone might hide. But I did manage to come away with a fully loaded AK and pump action shotgun. So I have that going for me. Personally, I hope they make more little islands and add boats as vehicles