-AoXo-

I can only speak for myself, and I am quite adament on this point, that people who play for the sole purpose of "killing other people" ruin it for me. My friend and I were discussing and he always comes back to "I just want to kill people". I ask him why "That's the point". Is it? It seems like the rest of the game (the zombies, the survival) is negated, why not just play some other shooter? "Because I want to do it in that setting" In my opinion it's that sort of thing that ruins the game for me. I'm not against sniper rifles or bandits, but I'm against the senselessnes of it, or the people who go into it where that's their only goal - to kill others and ruin the game for them. My friends rebuttle is always "learn to play" or some other thing where the shift of blame is put on to me, but no matter how much I scout an area or watch other players or avoid them in a game like Arma being a sniper hidden somewhere is incredibly easy. At that point "realism" usually gets thrown into the argument, but imo holds no water when people are way too flippant in games compared to real life and you can't tell a persons intentions or reason with them just by looking at them. As we all no doubt know even 2 legitimate friendly survivors may open fire on each other just because of how unintuitive communication can be - throw in to the mix a bandit who doesn't care about the sanctity of the experience of the game and all control is lost from the player trying to "write his own story", But whatever. I don't see this issue being fixed. I'm really only here to discuss ideas behind/around the games design because I find it more fun than actually playing it.

How would I check his backpack for items if he's standing a ways off from me?and anyway I said it wasn't the items but the time wasted walking

Would depend on how long I had been playing and what items I had. I would have left the area immediately if I had no gun, but for arguments sake, I'd probably leave the server just because I don't feel like walking for another 20 minutes.Edit: I actually find that kind of sad. I honestly wouldn't be worried about my life, or items. If I was heading somewhere I just wouldn't want to have to re-do the trek (or an even longer trek).

Night is TOO dark for me. I love it in games like STALKER where I can still sort of see and having NV or a flashlight helps tremendously. STALKER also has other light sources. But in DayZ it's just black - no fun.

I usually try to avoid people, but on more than one occasion I've walked right into someone. Since they haven't shot I usually say hi to them. One time this happened to a guy I thought was prone. I nearly shot him but then he asked me for help. He gave me his matches, and I went and chopped some wood and found some meat and I helped him restore his blood and health over about 40 minutes. I gave him some morphine and it was a pretty fun experience. But it was the only time something like that happened. I've had lives where I avoided people for about 20 hours and then some guy uses a hatchet through a wall, or just kills me for no reason despite me a) not having anything particularly useful and b ) clearly posing no threat to them. To answer your questions: 1) I always take pot shots at the zombies and try to help. Usually people end up dead or just run off without even acknowledging me so I probably wouldn't even bother anymore. 2) I kill him. I know he's only going to end up killing me anyway. 3) I take the ride because my parents never taught me any better. :P I ran into a guy where this happened. I figured if he was going to kill me he had the chance already, and if he's going to "kill me later" then it's no skin off my back. He might be sitting there getting his jollies off thinking he's decieved me, but I've become far too detached from my characters to care about death anymore.

I've thought about the bandit issue like this: tl;dr: if banditry is a problem it's something that needs to be dealt with as a game mechanic. Making the game "more difficult" won't stop the mentality because the mentality will exist regardless of the environment. It's not the game. People liked to see DayZ as this big social experiment thing and then put on their faux-high brow caps and monocle and proclaim "It's what would happen for real!" Well, whether that's true or not it has nothing to do with a realistic simulation of social dynamics in a lawless environment. If any of you play FPS regularly, especially on the PC, you may have found yourself sitting around waiting for a game to start (via a warmup round or something else). You may have been on a server where people were doing "melee only" rounds, or to be more broad, you may have been the perpitrator or victim of team killing. Team killing is something that happens a lot, and it has nothing to do with "realistic" situations or scenarios. In the warm up round scenario it's usually players who have weapons and can use them, but the objectives are locked down. In a competitive setting you might kill other players to establish dominance on a map, but when the game is just going to reset in a couple of minutes people kill others out of boredom, because they want to do something. In the melee only setting you eventually find people who will shoot other players because they don't want to play alone (it's almost always obvious that everyone else is using melee weapons only and they feel the need to just ignore that fact). The same can be said for DayZ. Killing other players happens not out of strategy, but boredom, "dickhole syndrome" or some other reason that does not stem from need or game mechanics. If you've become a bandit it's almost never out of necessity. My point is that this sort of lawlessness, the senseless killing happens in all video games, it's just that in other games, eventually, the game calls for it or is moderated. In DayZ neither is true and there's no way around it. If banditry is a true problem, if it is truely detrimental to the experience (and, in my opinion, the way in which we see it happening in DayZ, it's quite a problem) then it needs to be dealt with at the game mechanic level. It's difficult to simulate realism on one side of things if the natural balance from the other side cannot also be simulated (namely the human quality, the visceral detail of a real world environment, human senses, etc)

From about 1:01 onwards is why that map would be terrible. It looks great if you're up in the sky flying around in a helicopter (the map is from that helicopter game Bohemia did), but the stuff on the ground lacks no detail. DayZ needs a map designed for DayZ, not an Arma map, not a TOH map, not a remade-Arma map (what DayZ will ship with). It needs a proper map designed from the ground up for DayZ.

>and then you shoot them in the face, which is exactly why people need to act hostile. by your logic (semantics really) you don't need to do a lot of stuff in DayZ, but defending yourself to survive is one of them and this isn't the kind of game where defense comes after being attacked. Either you attack first or you die. There is a lot of conjecture on his end. When someone says "a game has been in development" that can mean lots of things. That doesn't mean that it was a working video game with finished assets. "In development" can mean the earliest of early concept phases - it can mean a bunch of business or development heads sitting around going "should we do a zombie game?" for six months. So yes, WarZ could very easily have been in development for 2 years, or longer (fuck, people have ideas from 20 years that are worked on but don't seriously come to light until a few years from actual release). He also ranted about it using assets from their previous title. Well we know that DayZ will be doing the same thing for a start, so he's just being a prick there, but he's also ignoring the fact that MANY video games not only use place holder assets during production, but that they often reuse assets in the final game. (Many of Valve games share assets such as sounds). He also bitched about website and twitter accounts not being created until recently - well video games don't always have names early on. I know with book publishing the title authors suggest don't always get chosen, so it'd be ridiculous if an author went around making websites for a book called "Thunderpussy" if the publishers decided (and have every right to if it's in the contract) to change the name. They'd have to go and recreate the website and everything. I can't remember many other details as I watched the video yesterday, but he spent a good amount of time saying he wasn't a fanboy and then proceeded to rip on a game for a bunch of issues that is complete conjecture on his part. Even if he's correct the practice isn't knew to creative design and he's acting like a child because something he likes is "being copied" (welcome to the real world buddy). This guy is just a self-contradicting dickbag ranting for the sake of it without presenting a fair argument.

It depends on what "dangerous" means. Having super fast 1-hit killer zombies isn't on the same level of difficulty as having a huge horde of weak slow moving zombies who could wear you down over time. I'm curious to see how they are made to be more of a threat and if they can be threatening enough to cause a shake up in the way players interact.

My issue with DayZ from very early on is that you quickly - extremely quickly - realise that survival in DayZ is not difficult. In fact, surviving isn't really an issue. "What's the goal of DayZ" - to survive. Well, it's either to survive or "to build a helicopter (and get NVG then go on the forums telling everyone else you have them)" - so I'm not really sure what the focus of the game is. All I know is that survival isn't the main goal - not unless you consider Quake a survival game too (but I'll get to this in a bit). See, DayZ for me has never been about survival. I've been able to make character and survive easily. Heading off into the safety of the woods isn't my problem. Me "playing the game wrong" isn't the problem. The reason the woods isn't the problem is because it has to be assumed that *somewhere* is safe. And since we can't "make" safe areas (barricading homes, clearing towns, etc) the wilderness has become this default safe zone, mostly free of zombies - who, ironically, were merely an annoying side effect of the setting (and any setting or back drop has its drawbacks). Saturating the game world with enemies is artifical difficulty. Giving the player "overwhelming" hurdles doesn't make the game more difficult - it makes it cheap. And how could I possibly be playing the game wrong? It's an open world zombisurciivnhabbadabbadoo game so I am allowed to do what I want (I hope this comment doesn't bite me in the ass) - therefore no matter what I do it can't be considered wrong. However - to reiterate the point of this thread - I can survive easily; which means either the game is easy, or I'm playing on easy mode. Which brings up the question: what makes this game difficult? It's certainly not the lack of supplies. From Day 1 I've been disappointed with the way items spawn. That's a huge issue that needs overhauling. It;s too much for me to comment on my own. But it's one of the issues - everything is plentiful - which partly makes it so annoying that we have people killing without the intention of stealing items. At least in that case I could be happy to say "I would do the same if I was starving". But I am never starving, and neither is the guy playing as a "bandit" (murderer - a bandit would actually steal something). Now, I could chalk it up to Arma, or to "Alpha" or something like that - but it's been reiterated time and time again that "the point" of DayZ, that the "real threat" of DayZ is other players. So, zombies aren't a threat, and surviving isn't a threat. It's just other players, right? Is that what I'm to understand? And, if this is a correct assumption then doesn't that mean that DayZ is essentially just a drawn out (sometimes very drawn out) deathmatch? I don't want to be TOO cynical is saying this next bit - but if I describe a game in which you spawn, look for weapons, and kill other players you would probbaly think I was talking about some arena style shooter. In older shooters the map itself may have had lava pits or some other environmental danger so that it wasn't just "other players" you had to look out for. It seems as if the laval pit has been replaced with zombies, and rocket jumping replaced with "survival elements". But again, I don't want to be too cynical with that point, because eventually any game is going to come down to "spawn, look for weapons (items), and kill other players" - but ... wait. Why don't we change that up? From my stand point (and I'm sure many disagree) weapons aren't the issue, but for me having a saturation of weapons causing the game to be reduced to the elements of an arena style death match. Why don't we make the environment the focus, and weapons incidental? A true survival game would reduce the goals of survival to that of... well, the Sims (which may or may not be your cup of tea depending on your tastes). I understand it's in a post-soviet era state, but I find the whole pretense of "zombie survival" to be absolutly moot. These don't seem like "alpha" issues, or particularly to be "Arma" issues. I don't feel that if I "have patience and faith in Rocket or the Arma 2.5 or 3 engine (whatever he's using)" that these underlying issues will be fixed. It seems quite clear that weapon spawn rates could be lowered drastically, that food and other essential items could be rarer. I'm not sure if it's just me and my personal taste or not. Maybe this is "clearly what people want" - but I just don't see the "survival" aspect interplaying with the "zombie" aspect. I don't see my survival being tied to anything but my gun and how I use it against other players. But whatever. I haven't even played the game for several months now, so there's no point in telling me to stop playing. I'm merely trying to understand what the community likes about this game, what is inherent to DayZ and what is incidental.

1) Choices and freedom is fantastic, as long as there's a balance. At the moment there's no balance and the "play peacefully" choice doesn't exist because you're forced to play in a defensive, often hostile, manner due to the overall tone of the playerbase. 2) Who cares what WarZ is doing and how it's doing it. "Originality" has never been a sacred concept in creation let alone business. The question is whether it can add to the industry/genre and do some stuff better than DayZ. The Crysis-style on the fly weapon modifications for example are fantastic. They may be a blatent rip-off and they could stand to go over a visual overhaul to differentiate from Crysis, but they are visually intuitive and the system itself is very handy to have as a game mechanic. No other game has this sort of thing (that I know of) so why not use what works and apply it to a different game? Did they invent it? No. Did Crysis invent the first person shooter? No. Did Microsoft create the windows style interface for operating systems? No. There are plenty of popular titles out there that are essentially "rip offs" but it's how you set them apart. WarZ may have a far more intuitive and user firendly environment. It might offer everything DayZ does, but just be more accessable. What's wrong with that?

Why does it seem so difficult for you (and others) to consider that we're just discussing the very core aspects that make up DayZ? It's not strictly about the technical aspects of the mod, or Arma, but about the core ideas presented in this mod. Arguing "what would really happen" is a moot point, and we've done enough of that in this thread. "what would really happen" was just a way for me to try and justify the game mechanics as they are/could be, and all discussion on that front is pure conjecture (though it seems quite a few people seem to be selfish and have so little faith in their fellow man that it's no wonder such terrible things happen in this world). The point I was trying to get across in all of that discussion was that people do actually want to work together in peaceful means, but have been forced to, due to the actions of others, to reject such gameplay. It nagates the comments that DayZ is "what you want it to be" because clearly the game is being run by a specific mentality, and due to core game mechanics there's no way to really get around that without sacrificing a lot of gameplay and probably several characters for 1 good gameplay experience. Your statement would have little bearing if the same discussion could be had for the stand alone product, if you're suggesting a mod can't have substantial quality. The fact is these exact same issues are going to repeat themselves in the stand alone, but it's really up to people to change the tone of the game: unfortunately I and others don't see that happening which causes other elements of the game to become background motifs while combat and pvp take the foreground, which not everyone wants. the game certainly provides the means for the former playstyle, but it's over ruled by the overall mentality of the player base. It's certainly something worth dicusssing, but if you don't see the point or you're not interested then fuck off. Why are you in the thread or on the forums?

1) Can you elaborate on what "whatever you want it to be" actually means? DayZ has a lack of features which means it's not what I want it to be (in fact my post pretty much makes it clear DayZ isn't what I want it to be and is severely lacking in tha department). 2) You might want to actually research "that place in the US that got flooded" and figure out what really happened - most of it was sensationalised due to panic and misinformation. 3) Your answer was incredibly stupid.

I've never factored skill into DayZ. It's never been about the skill of other players, but rather what they are doing.

It's not particularly simple to switch servers and do all that nonsense. What items exactly are you doing all of this for that you can't find yourself?

That is WAY too much effort for anything availabe in the game. Would prefer to just go find it myself. do people really go to that much effort?

How would you know if you didn't read, let alone understand my point? I can tell you right now that the mentality that is a part of national identity would be incredibly important to how a society reacts to various events. I can tell you, as an Australian, that we would help other people - helping our neighbours and those in need is part of what makes up the Australian identity. Not everyone would help of course (I'm not that naive), but to suggest it would decend into murderous chaos is ridiculous. As I said (if you had read that far) societies in the past have been far more barbaric than us and yet remained far more civil than you are implying. Why you bothered replying at all is beyond me.

You have to remember context and group mentality. People have been inherently treating DayZ as "something more" when you can pretty much sum it up as being free roam death matching. If you really wanted to you could apply similar discussions to any other shooter out there, but most other games don't call for it because that's not the focus of the community. That doesn;t make those games any more shallow than DayZ, or DayZ any more deep. It's just what the communities want, and as I said, the DayZ community seems to inherently treat DayZ with a sense of grandiuer that it doesn't really deserve yet.I'd like to explain the above by saying this: if you put a bunch of players into any FPS map with guns guess what's going to happen. Yeah they'll shoot each other. Whether it's TF2, DoDS, CSS, CoD, Halo, Borderlands, Red Orchestra; it doesn't matter. Remove the rules from the system, people will eventually get bored and shoot each othe because that's what the tools they've been given do. If you gave them paint brushes they might paint a pretty picture instead, who knows. My point is that DayZ did something stupidly simple, something other games already do: it just removed the objectives and called it free roam instead of death match. The large map and these "get bored= kill" mechanics are completely incidental to the DayZ experience.

And what is the benefit? Here's my experience with other players: 1) Bigger groups means startling zombies more often; which leads to: 2) Less ammo for the group and individuals, but more people that now need guns and self defense 3) If you care about the integrity of the group you need to consider the needs of other players including medical supplies, food, drink, ammunition etc Well organised teams have less of an issue with these things, but I've found that playing on my own, only needing to worry about myself, makes for a much easier game and I also get noticed a lot less. Working together to achieve these goals also isn't an answer. If I can do them on my own then I probably don't need a team, do I? And then, I usually need to team to rectify the issues it causes by being in the first place. i.e. playing solo is easier than playing in a team because team play causes more issues. Other than that I don't know what players do together. I've come across a few people and helpedn them out when they were nearly dead. That's as far as I could go to "work together" with them. I'm being quite sincere when I ask what benefit playing with others is.

Perhaps.There are also places you could go right now and be given free stuff for doing nothing more than being an obnoxious, loud-mouthed, parasite and blight to humanity (see: every celebrity ever). What exactly is your point? It seems like you are in some fictional reality where you get to pick and choose what rules exist in a given scenario. In your reality everything is modelled on war-torn Africa or some other god forsaken place, run by militia and terrorists - and while many other areas of the world may decend into that sort of chaos, the level seen in DayZ simply wouldn't exist in a civilised society. The reason for this is that history has shown us that over thousands of years regardless of the assholes of the universe, good people exist and are often punished and often become collateral to these assholes. And believe me, most civilisations of the past were FAR less civilised than we are today and yet more civilised than we see in DayZ, so I don't see why you believe we would decend into less civilised beings. But this is all conjecture and neither here nor there. The pertinent facts are these: there are a shit tonne of people (many on these forums) who would like to actually play as survivors, but because of bandits, and because of pre-emptive attacks made by other survivors, end up dead; and it cascades into what we have now where everyone shoots everyone because no one trusts no one. In a real situation these sorts of things wouldn't happen quite so quickly. You'd be able to hide a lot more easily from people, you could tell "by the look" of others what their intentions were. That's simply not the case in DayZ. Another often overlooked feature of DayZ vs real life is *skills*. A doctor is likely not going to be killed because his skills would be invaluable. In DayZ where everybody is a doctor, chef, survivalist, "cop, soldier, office clerk, waitress, lumber jack, race car driver, rocket scientist and unicorn" there's simply no need, or repercussion, to not keeping someone alive. When I speak of "realistic" aspects I simply mean those that justify in-game mechanics; and DayZ seems to have an incredibly unrealistic platform and I don;t particularly see it being fixed unless restrictions or repurcussions are imposed on people who choose to simply PvP rather than work together. And even then rocket has actually supported meta-gaming, meaning groups of bandits can work together in ways that gives them even more power to prevent survivors from working together to achieve ... well there's not much to achieve is there? Edit: Another facet of my discussion is this: many players believe that there is actually goals to achieve in DayZ and that working together is an important part of these goals. Can someone enlighten me? Working in a group hasn't worked for me, and people seem to only be able to say "it changes the game" without saying how. Besides working together to find missing parts for vehicles I don't know what team work can accomplish, nor what purpose getting a vehicle has. By the time you get one up and running you're probbaly already well stocked, and with an infinite suply of food and ammo it's not like you're heading for "somewhere better". That's beside the point though: what exactly can players achieve and achieve "together"? /incoherent rant

Yes and no: to both of you. The confusion is my fault.What I was trying to say was that PvP should be an almost end-game thing and in fact, PvP shouldn't even be about combat - and there should be a way to somehow control how and when this happens or the effects of it. If players have no goal they seek to disrupt others. We know this, we've seen the way DayZ has become "without rules" - the real world is governed by rules. Societies form. Groups form. Human morality plays a massive part - even in the animal kingdom animals don't go around NEEDLESSLY murdering other animals. If not for food now, food later, defense of territories, etc. Animals don't just go around killing. Humans don't either. You think "laws" and "prison" is what holds back out murderous impulses? No, it's that we don't have them to begin with unless we're deranged psychopaths. How do we get this into a video game? I don't know. I don't pretend to know. I think sitting down for a month and looking at a realistic approach to what people would do in these situations certainly would help. One of the main things in a real life scenario would be conscience and inhibition. I've never been in a disaster situation so I don't know what I would do, but I don't think my instinct in a plane crash, or car accident is "lets go knife everyone and steal their jewelery" - certainly many people might, but most people wouldn't. In times of disaster people almost always band together to help each other. The problem with this line of thinking is that a video game contains none of these inhibitons and the sanctity of life does not exist. My only conclusion at this point is that if players are going to play this way and (more than likely) mruin the "zombie survival" setting for others then there's not a lot we can do if we don't want to impose rules and punishment for players. To me, it seems like an idea that's just not going to work. Even with considerable updates to the zombie survival mechanics, we've seen that people are more interested in killing each other.

It seems the major focus is PvP - even if I take into consideration the major overhauls that Inception mentioned the focus on PvP is TOO strong to make any other aspects of any real importance. Starvation, broken limbs, hunting, catching a cold, or disease from human waste, splints, broken ribs, if all of that serves to fuel the PvP battles that goes on then it basically reduces DayZ to something else other than a zombie survival game.I guess I'm just having great difficulty trying to understand why everything I do is fueling a part of the game I'm not interested in - negating the "what you want it to be" comments. The thing I'm finding is it lacks the traditional zombie drama - if you've played or seen The Walking Dead, or any other zombie movie, you'll know what I mean. It's that singular or group effort to "make do" to survive, not only against the undead, but against each other. DayZ takes a sort of L4D approach and goes "fuck all that - go kill each other". i.e. there's nothing inherently in place to encourage team work or less destructive (dare I say, creative and good-willed) tendendies. The "good samaritan" is a fabled character in DayZ - and that's simply not what would happen. Everyone is freaking out with guns because they want instant gratification - scratch that; they want GRATIFICATION. They just want to go in and kill. I've not come across individuals or groups in the last few months (before I stopped playing) who were welcoming or intrested in team play. I've helped strangers only to be shot in the back. Warned groups and individuals of my presense and aid I can give them only to be murdered. Why such the focus on PvP from all groups of players?

Difficulty doesn't mean anything though. Making zombies 1-hit-insta nuke the world and ban your character for 80 years is a pretty challenging game. Will the focus of the game turn to "zombie survival" or will it still be "zombies and everything else is harder, but you still have to worry about everyone deathmatching"? I find it ironic everyone here bitches about Call of Duty, but DayZ has been reduced to kill-on-sight tactics, no matter the context. It's been a shallow experience for me. Thanks for being useless.

I want a much more refined experience. Note: refined doesn't mean "dumbed down" or "consolised". I want to be able to open doors, climb ladders, switch weapons and use tools (hatchets and flashlights) with the press of a button instead of a ridiculous menu. I want a map with unique towns with unique (fully enrterable) buildings, each of which can have barricaded doors and windows with both wood, sandbags and barbed wire. I would like to see many more items floating around that can act as melee weapons. Old pipes, oars, sporting equipment, and then even "crafted" weapons, using the aforementoned examples, but combining them with barbed wire, nails, duct taped grips, etc. I want movement to remain "realistic" but not so light and flakey and clunky as in Arma. I would also like to see much bigger urban settings, not just a collection of small towns ands villages. Even Cherno is a small town. I want to come across a town or city and feel like I am in GTAIV's Liberty City where there is so many buildings, tunnels and alleyways AND I still want to see wilderness. I want more focus on player interaction. The way DayZ is now with no interaction between players, with an emphasis on meta-gaming and "anything goes" it just won't work. You don't have to baby people, but promoting all out death matches where everyone plays the role of a bandit just doesn't work. Basically I want it to be much more purposely designed instead of just dropping players, loot and zombies into a generic all-purpose map.

Unfortunately for me the areas that have it are important areas such as towns and airfields. I have found that lowering my 3D resolution below my screen resolution helps but then the game just ends up blurry.