TrangleC

I'm German and I'm 34 (just mentioning that in case I'm too old for you to play with). Thanks for the offer, I'd like to play with new people. Unfortunately I don't get to play very often. I had intended to play yesterday for example, but didn't find the time. Also I have no idea about how to set up audio communication with other players. Do people use Skype or is there a audio chat function in GameSpy? When I still played Operation Flashpoint we only talked by typing and I haven't played any multiplayer games since then. Um... I didn't say anything about having a new PC. And if I would have, what difference would that have made? The zombies actually only were a problem when I played DaiZy, that singleplayer mod. Because I was the only player in the game, it "assigned" the apparently maximum number of zombies (41) per player to me every time I came close enough to a village, or even only a few houses. That was a bit too much. When I played the normal mutliplayer mod and the zombies had other people to deal with and I didn't have to deal with over 40 zombies everywhere I went, it wasn't so hard anymore, especially since I didn't find any loot or supplies in the singleplayer game. To be honest, I only complained about the zombies so much because I didn't want to open a thread in which I only complained about having bad luck but wanted to give others something more substantial to discuss. I'm sorry for exagerating my frustration with the zombies. It just all blurred together after a very long and frustrating day of gaming in which nothing went right. Again, coming back to Operation Flashpoint, that game was much harder than at least what little I have seen of Operation Arrowhead. People made jokes about Operation Flashpoint being an Eastern European revenge fantasy and the game designers must have been angry about all the movies in which American heroes easily defeated Russian villains, hehehe. Although you played an American soldier in that game. you were the underdog most of the time and the American side got their asses handed to them so often in the game. For example in the very first mission of the campaign you and your unit have to free a little village of a few Sovjet soldiers. That isn't much of a problem but all of a sudden the enemy gets heavy reinforcements, including 3 Main Battle Tanks and your unit doesn't have anti tank weapons, so you have to run for the hills. The second mission starts where the first one ended. You got separated from your unit and have to meet up at a evacuation point while being chased by Red Army soldiers. The third mission is the same. The helicopter that was supposed to rescue you got delayed and you have to find a new pick up point, again running through the woods alone, just that this time you get chased by Speznaz special forces. That game basically made you feel like nothing more than cannonfodder, hehehe. And it plays in the 80s, so you don't have rifles with night vision optics and lasers and all that stuff, just a basic M16 with iron sights like they used it in Vietnam, 4 to 6 magazines and a few handgrenades. The good thing was that unlike in Arma 2, you could enter most houses and most of them had second floors with open windows that gave you good firing positions. Of course you still had to constantly change your position.

Thanks for all the replies, especially the encouragig ones. Unfortunately I can't really play the game with my real life friends because the few of them who are into gaming have too different working schedules from mine. The problem with finding other people to play with online is that I'm just not very good in general. I basically haven't played any computer games in the last 7 to 8 years. I had played the original Operation Flashpoint a lot when it came out (was still a student back then), so when I only recently discovered that there was a sort of sequel to it in 2009, I wanted to try that out and this is how I got into playing DayZ. I still remember spending all those hours running away from Russian Speznaz who chased me through a forest or having day long sniper duels with other players in Operation Flashpoint, so I think I still have the right mindset for playing DayZ and it still felt quite natural and familiar, but I still doubt that it would be easy to team up with people who don't know me at all. Also my English pronounciation is probably pretty horrible, hehe. Well, however, thanks for the encouragement and the advise.

I played DayZ for the first time today and although I like the game in general and in theory, it was a horrible experience. First of all I needed the whole day to get it to run. I apparently encountered every single error message that is addressed in any troubleshooting guide and tutorial I could find. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. Finally I got it to run and because I thought it might be better for me as a newbee to try the game without more experienced players hunting for me, I first tried the DaiZy singleplayer mod. That was a mistake. I didn't know that the fact that I'm the only human on the map would mean that I would encounter 41 (that seems to be the maximum allocation per player character) Zombies everytime I came near a spawning point. Even worse was that I found absolutely no supplies or weapons, not even in the stores, pubs or on towers. I tried it 5 times and basically all my characters died of thirst and starvation. (A combination of endless running from zombies and no available water.) 5 games without finding anything but empty tin cans. That must have been some kind of bug. I just don't get why the cans spawned but nothing else. I have watched Youtube videos of people playing DayZ but when I played it myself was the first time that I saw absolutely empty grocery stores. Not a single thing spawned in there, not even cans or a single bandage. I realized that playing against humans can't possibly be worse and I tried the normal mod. The first time I somehow managed to spawn within a house and when I say within a house, I don't mean in a room, i mean inside the walls and floor of a house. After a few minutes of trying to get out of the wall I suddely took damage and died. Then I was stuck in the "You Are Dead" screen. Everytime I tried to open the menue and restart the game, another death got added to my statistics till I finally used the task manager to shut down the game. Then, after restarting the game, finally I spawned in the open and could actually play the game. I got killed by a sniper only a few steps away from my spawning point, but although I don't get why somebody would kill an unarmed beginner without any loot, that was still yet the best game I had played so far. At least I didn't suffer any bugs and actually was playing the game. The next and final game started well enough. I had a decent spawning point near Otmel and I went into the hills to go to that barn near the dam. (Yes, I checked a map in my browser.) It took me a while to get there because I was careful and for the first time I actually found something useful! A hatched! Halleluja! For the first time today something went right and my spirits returned. And before I could get up from the point where I had found the hatched, my connection to the server got cut. I tried to get back into the game and later into others, but with no success. I'm not just writing that to vent and to whine and not to bore you, but I'd like to know, is this normal? Is this what I can expect from this game? Besides all the bugs I encountered, aren't the zombies a bit too sensitive and tenacious to still allow for a fun gaming experience? Is it really neccessary that they are able to follow you from one end of the map to the other? At times this game felt like one of those deliberately ridiculously hard FLASH jump and run games that aren't supposed to be fun but only to boost the ego of weirdos without a life who spend weeks memorizing their patterns. I like a challenge in a game as much as the next (normal) guy, but when in a game like this sneaking and stealth becomes next to useless because the zombies can see you from hundreds of yards away and there are so many of them that it becomes impossible to evade them, then what is the point?