echo38

I'm pleased to announce that, after a few days of playing here, I've concluded that TheGeeks Chernarus is very much good enough for me. It almost exactly matches my specifications (the only exception being the vehicle count, and, hey, one can't have everything, right?), and I'm quite happy to be here.

I've got quite a few legitimate deaths to zombies, but I've never once been legitimately killed by a player. About half of my non-zombie deaths are due to bugs (e.g. breaking my legs on a vertice error), and the rest are due to hack-users. My play style is "careful zombie hunter;" I'm like an avoidant survivor, except that I actively hunt zombies and kill as many of them as I can without overly endangering myself to passing players. It's harder than bandit and avoidant survivor, but not as difficult as bandit hunter and medic.

[shakes head] All a bandit needs is a gun, and these can be found in secluded barns. Everything else, he can get with his gun, and that's much safer than entering a city. Like I said, bandits think they're badass, but they're just taking the easy way.

Normally, bicycles and motorcycles self-repair when damaged; the wiki says that this is normal, and is due to them having a different database or something (which doesn't really explain why, but okay). And, of course, other vehicles than those normally do not self-repair when damaged. However, I've observed on a number of servers, both public and private-hive, discrepancies to this rule. One time, I had a bicycle (public server) which would not self-repair like the others. And just today, I found an automobile (private server) which does self-repair (unlike the other autos on that server don't). What's the story?

A careful bandit is the easiest type of play style. You simply hold all the cards if you stay in the wilderness, shoot everyone you see, and never have to enter a town for supplies. You pick your battles, so you virtually always will have the drop on your victim. : / Being a bandit is the broad-and-easy road, so to speak. They think they're badass because they kill players, but, really, it doesn't take much skill to set up an effective ambush. It takes much more to be a survivor with some human decency.

Yep, as Erizid pointed out, I'm talking about the phenomenon where you dismount a damaged bicycle, then get back on, and it's repaired. It normally only occurs on bicylces and motorcycles.

How the heck did you see my headshot rate? o O

There's a server with the following title in the server list: Hacker's Paradise | BattleEye Off | No one gets banned, ever!

Given that they welcome hackers, I doubt they're much interested in the rules, so they may be hosting an official one and disregarding the rule about Battleye. In short, investigation is warranted, I think.

I'm afraid I can't get Day Z working with the A2:CO beta patch, Kerbouchard. I've wasted hours trying over the last two days; I've done nothing for the last two hours but work on it, and I read all the forum threads and wiki. It doesn't matter which instructions I follow, or what I try; I simply can't get it to work. I think I'm going to have to give up and stay at the stable version of A2:CO.

Of course, dropping something at all risks losing it, loot pile or not. If you drop something, and the server or your Internet connection goes down for a while, your item may not be there when you reconnect. So, for this reason, you should always drop the lowest priority items, then move your higher priority items into or out of your backpack, and then pick up the other items. Be sure that you have sufficient room in your inventory and backpack when moving things, or you can lose things permanently this way also. Sometimes it throws things out onto the ground if you try to move it somewhere where there isn't room, but sometimes it simply disappears forever.

That wasn't what I wrote. I don't object to a server restarting every day or two, but I do object to a server restarting in a manner that loses vehicles every day or two. A daily restart is fine, but if every third restart loses all my stuff, then that's a no-go. Basically, I'm looking for the same thing that most legitimate Day Z players are looking for, only I have the added requirement of Expert (a.k.a. Mercenary) difficulty. Happily, it looks like Kerbouchard's server fits my bill, but it uses the beta version of A2:CO. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the the Steam version of the A2:CO beta to recognize Day Z. As soon as I get it sorted out, I'll check out his server. : )

Maybe it's some sort of bizarre attempt at reverse psychology.

It appears to be completely empty, and I'm guessing it always is. Hack-users get their jollies from griefing legitimate players, so there's really no reason I can see for anyone to go there; legit players won't join a server that advertises "hackers welcome," and hack-users have little reason to join a server with no legitimate players to grief. All the same, the server should be reported. ("No one gets banned, ever," hey? We'll see about that, won't we?)

I simply want to play Expert difficulty Day Z without any cheating, without additional modification, without the server eating my stuff every other day. I really don't think that's too much to ask, and if I were able to host, I'd already have my own server which offered this.

This much I know from my thousands of hours in Arma 2, but I also know that server restarts aren't supposed to permanently destroy tents & vehicles, even in the present Alpha version of Day Z. Some of the servers I've frequented eat vehicles more than others. Capital! I'll join as soon as I figure out how to get Day Z to work with the beta version. (Bloody Steam ...)

Thanks, but there's a reason I put the Expert part first. ; )

The day before yesterday, there was a server restart which was so complete that everyone's character was killed. At least, everyone I spoke to suffered it. Anyway, only a few hours after this reset of everyone's characters, I was ambushed on the road by a player with five (by his own admission in the chatlog) satchel charges. Now, it isn't technically impossible for him to have gotten 5 satchel charges and NV legitimately in less than 12 hours after his character was killed by the reset, but I think it extremely improbable. I've been visiting the barracks every day for over a week, and yet I've never seen either a satchel charge or NV goggles once in my entire time playing Day Z. He buried my corpse after the attack, so that there was nothing there for me after I completed my 40-minute jog back; this is the action of a griefer, which is also a trait of those who use hacked items. Which doesn't mean that griefers = cheaters, of course, but it does make it less unlikely that he was cheating. The final point in the list of indicators that he is a cheater occurred when I asked him in side chat where he got the satchel charges; he replied that it was the NW AF, and, upon my commenting that I'd never seen any there in a week of playing, he replied with an implication that he'd picked them up over a manner of months on various servers. This being a private hive, he can't have legitimately brought any items to this server from another, and his character on this server was only a few hours old! Is there some sort of log that can be checked to see if he spawned these items using a hack script, or if he legitimately picked them up? At this point, even if just for my peace of mind, but if he is yet another cheater, he should of course be reported for GUID banning. His name was "Mr. Anderson," or some slight variation of that (I don't remember for sure if there was a period and space, but the spelling is exact).

I don't recognize the PDW; it isn't an Uzi, MP9, Steyr TMP, nor a Mac. I ran a few searches on Google Image with various keywords and strings, but I'm not seeing anything that looks like it. The closest is the Uzi, but there are large differences. Anyone know what it is? Is it an Uzi with an inaccurate model that was done from memory, or is it an actual gun?

Good call; it is indeed a micro-Uzi with the folding stock removed and a few modelling errors. I was looking at, and referring to, the full-size Uzi, earlier; I forgot that there were a couple of a smaller variants. Thank you, all.

I've examined the information for "Bliss," and the installation & configruation process is hopelessly confusing for me, as well as requiring a large number of third-party software downloads. Are there other options for hosting private servers?

[duplicate post, please delete]

Thank you. That is helpful.

Why is there absolutely no information about this on the wiki, nor on any FAQ or sticky threads here? In fact, I cannot find a straight-forward, thorough explanation of how this all works, anywhere, no matter how hard I search. At most, I can find dodgy links to Youtube videos, from back when all the private hosts were slinking around in the shadows, because it was officially disallowed at the time. Some of the downloads suggested on Google searches are looking rather suspicious, and I have no way of knowing which are legitimate mission files and server programs, and which are infected with malware. Again, there is (and I welcome any correction) absolutely no clear & full explanation of this private hosting stuff anywhere on the Day Z site or even the wiki, nor even a half-hearted attempt at such. It's as if everyone thinks that it still needs to be kept hush-hush. : /

Isn't that Bliss thing only one of the options for a private hive host?