BC_Hawke

This is a huge exaggeration. I play vanilla mod a lot and I've never had to do this to survive. What you're probably doing is neglecting your character until you're blinking from hunger and thirst, then having to eat several pieces of meat to get it back up to full. I'll kill a cow or a copule goats/sheep, cook the meat, and be good for a day or two of playing (unless I'm refueling a plane or heli which uses a lot of energy). Once your hunger/thirst is full, all you have to do is eat a can of food or two in each town you pass through and take a couple drinks from each well you travel nearby. It's really not that bad at all. People that describe it as you do are typically the people that want to spawn at the coast then put a weight on their keyboard to sprint all the way from Cherno to NWAF. If you sprint long distances without eating/drinking then yeah, you're going to have a bad time. Stop for the occasional can of food and soda or drink from a well and you'll be fine.

In-game browser is working just fine for me. Cucu, type "1.8.4.1" into the filter and it should get rid of all the other mods. Then sort by player count or ping or whatever. Personally I use Gametracker as I can filter 1.8.4.1 and then sort by server rank, region, or name. https://www.gametracker.com/search/dayzmod/

Just a reminder for people giving their thoughts on the new temp system: be sure you put a fair amount of hours of gameplay in at different times of day. The temp loss is based on various factors. I've played in the middle of the night at times when I had hardly any temp loss at all. I've also played during the daytime when the sun was out and my temp was dropping rapidly (not that I have a problem with this, it can be absolutely frigid in the fall in places like the Czech Republic even when the sun is shining). I've experienced the opposite of this and everything in between. Just be sure you're not reporting after jumping in a server and playing for 20 minutes as it will not be an accurate reflection of the system as a whole.

You have to take new players and fresh spawns into consideration. I personally LOVE the challenge, but new players are dropping like flies because they do not understand the ins and outs like we do having played for a long time and reading up on all the factors here. They're literally dying of infection before they can find their way to Stary. Most new players can't navigate straight to the nearest enterable building, they spend a lot of time wandering through the woods. Fresh spawns have only pre-lit fire barrels and POI building fires as an option to warm up. Staying inside only mitigates temp loss, you have to be next to a fire to actually raise your body temp. Also, if you're thinking of spending any significant time in the Northern areas away from towns, you have to stock up on a lot of matches. With only 5 per box and the fact that having different quantity boxes in your tool belt can cause one to disappear, you're using up a lot of backpack space just to keep warm. It's a great mechanic and I love the challenge, it just needs to be dialed back a bit. I think players should be able to actually warm up inside buildings and maybe very *slowly* warm up while running. I like the necessity to find shelter when it's raining. My friend Smurf and I were on US434 last night and each found a respective deer stand to wait out a storm so we could then meet up without freezing to death on the way to meet each other. The rain subsided after 3-4 minutes, it was great just digging in and waiting out the worst of it as it didn't take much time but made us think about and plan our traveling.

It's a design choice that I think made perfect sense before the change in temp effects. I really like the idea of stoking the fire with fresh firewood, but with the current necessity of making campfires every 20 minutes to survive (because, let's be honest, a majority of time in DayZ mod is spent outdoors traveling from town to town), I think allowing players to re-light a campfire within 20 minutes or so of it going out without penalizing them with losing a match would be a nice addition. I think it would be good for the game because though the environmental conditions should be harsh, you do still want players moving around rather than digging in for the storm. If players had the option to relight, they could ration their matches, light a campfire outside some key towns they want to loot (most notable would be Stary/Kabanino/NWAF/Vybor), and return to the campfire and relight it after looting each town. This way they're playing against harsh conditions but can also move around the map without rapidly going through matches. Either way thanks for taking it into consideration and the continual work on all the complicated dynamics of the game. I've been having a lot of fun playing it lately!

Okay I finally got a chance to play this weekend and take notes on temperature. I'm playing on US434 which currently labels temperature as "disabled" (which means the override is NOT turned on if I'm reading Razor's post on it correctly). I have had different results at all times of day and night, meaning that factors like wind and rain must have a significant impact. When I was being affected the most (meaning it must have been really cold outside), here are the times I recorded: At a starting temp of 42 degrees I went prone and it took approx 5 minutes to get down to 32 degrees (thermometer nearly empty, character shivering)I lit a campfire and it took me approx 3 minutes to get back up to 42 degreesI then constantly ran for approx 5 minutes with virtually no temperature loss, just one degree I believeI warmed back up to 42 degrees at a fire, then proceeded with normal gameplay (running from town to town, stopping to loot/eat/drink, etc). It took approx 15 minutes to go down from 42 degrees to 36 degrees.At this point I decided to play slow, creeping and hiding in trees, like you would while looting NWAF. Within an additional 5 minutes I was down from 36 degrees to 32 degrees, making for a grand total of 20 minutes to go from 42 down to 32 with varied gameplay (running, looting, sneaking) This may not have been during the harshest conditions, as one or two times while playing I've noticed that my temp was dropping even while running. One thing I noticed is that when it was cold out I could never get my body temp to go up by walking, running, or sprinting. It only served to stave off temp loss. There have been much less harsh conditions during day and night where we didn't even have to worry about body temp at all. It's hard to see the factors that affect body temp at work in-game until you notice your body temp dropping. My personal opinion on all this: I like the challenge a lot, but I think it's just too harsh for the average new player and for fresh spawns that don't have matches. We've only been able to survive the colder nights by looting several boxes of matches and building campfires every 20 minutes or so. I personally can hack it and really like the distraction (never getting bored when there's not PvP happening now...constantly maintaining body temp and health). However, it's just too challenging for new players and fresh spawns. New players don't know where to find matches or pre-lit fires throughout the map. They're dying off really fast as soon as they leave the coast (lots of comments about it in side chat). We find carrying antibiotics and/or a camping tent vital to survival, but a fresh spawn without a backpack may not be able to haul a tent around and will have a hard time finding antibiotics before dying of infection from hypothermia. I think that with some tweaks there could be a really good middle ground. Making it necessary to warm up at a fire every 45 minutes or so rather than every 20 minutes would be good (I know there's not a slider setting for how often you need to warm up, I'm just recommending tweaking the settings so that is the end result). It would also be really neat if some cold weather skins (coats/hats/something) were added that had a positive impact on how the player reacts to cold weather, but I think it would be essential to make bandit versions of these skins so that you can't just mask being a bandit by putting warm weather clothing on. Upping the spawn rate of heatpacks and matches might be one way to ease the challenge as well. As a side note, I think you should be able to reignite campfires after they've gone out without the penalty of losing another match. It makes sense to have to add more firewood, but it's easy to relight campfires in real life with remaining embers. This could create a cool mechanic of setting up a temporary campsite in the woods near places you want to loot like Stary/NWAF and returning back to that campfire to relight it and warm back up without losing a match. Even better, if a timer could be added to that so that you could only relight it for say 20 minutes after the fire goes out then if someone else passes by and notices that it can be relit, they'll know that someone has been in the area recently. I definitely like the direction of the more harsh temperature mechanic, but people are already leaving the mod because it's becoming "too hard". I think dialing it back a little bit and/or making it easier for fresh spawns to find ways to warm up would be a good thing.

I heard people say temp loss was still a big problem tonight, but I was out so I didn't get a chance to log in. I'll try to play this weekend and come back with some feedback.

I agree, the new temp system is working great except for movement not keeping you warm. Unfortunately I also agree with the sentiment that this bug, if not fixed ASAP, could be the death blow to the mod. Population has been dwindling on popular servers, and this bug really is a game breaker (I know that term is thrown around a lot...but it seriously does prevent you from being able to do something as simple as running from one town to the next without getting cold enough to get infected). That issue aside, the new patch is FANTASTIC! The new 300m zed spawn radius is a game changer! Didn't think it would affect it that much but I was wrong. Zombies are already spread out around the town by the time you walk up. If there's any trees or hills obstructing your view of a town it can be extremely difficult to predict whether or not another player is in the area from the zombie presence. Blood bagging is fixed!! YAY!!! Exhaustion (and gun sway) seems to take too long to recover (about 45 seconds like in 1.8.1), but you do NOT get exhausted very easily like you did in 1.8.1 which is right. You have to actually jog a fair distance, sprint, or jump to get exhausted which is how it should be, so that is definitely fixed. The 45 second time to recover seems harsh though. Back in 1.7 and earlier days it would only take about 15 seconds or so to recover from exhaustion. I do have to critique zombie speed and hit range again though. I can literally jog backwards away from zombies in a straight line and they will never hit me. They behave the same way they did back in 1.8.2 (35sec in you'll see me running backwards without being hit). Unfortunately I feel that zombies will never be a real antagonist as long as you can simply press "w" and never get receive any damage. Still craving the 1.8.1 experience where you actually had to avoid aggroing, because multiple zombies could chase you down, hit you, and knock you over. All in all, aside from the temp issue, it's an awesome patch from what I've been able to test. Can't wait to find a mosin and find tranq darts for a crossbow!!! :D

So drastically increasing the size (explorable area) of the map while having a 40 player limit (less than the mod) has no effect on player interaction across the map? Really?

This has my vote too. The ***LAST*** thing the mod needs right now with people quitting left and right because of glitched blood bags and the added difficulty of hunger/thirst since 1.8.1 is a bunch of people quitting because they freeze to death constantly. I think it would be the final tipping point that would possibly kill the mod off. At the very least it would take a long time for people to come back for the next patch. Note: my comments above are by no means meant as any sort of negative commentary on the state of the game. I think that since 1.8.1 the mod has truly become the game DayZ should have always been, but added difficulty plus game changing bugs equals dying population.

Exactly. IMO they should have added interiors to most of the existing buildings, added some cool POIs and expanded some towns and cities a bit, and spent a GREAT deal of time on really cool details to reinforce the apocalyptic feel. Instead we got a bunch of new towns and cities, drastically reduced forests, 100s if not 1,000s of copy/pasted rooms and houses, and only a few details like blood smears and wrecked cars to make it look like an apocalypse happened.

Hello! Sorry about that. I was trying to reinforce something I had already stated several times, as some of the people responding to this thread apparently have very low reading comprehension skills. I will refrain from doing it in the future.

Please, go find where I said that I think DayZ should be about "constant player interaction" for me. I don't recall ever saying that.

Well, the majority of the people being vocal are either using straw man fallacies or misquoting what I'm saying, so I felt it necessary to express my viewpoint again in a way that it can be seen more clearly. =P That's fine and good until it goes so far as to create a scenario in which you never really see anybody outside of cities near spawn points. I mean, like I said before, I'll literally spend hours and hours traveling to places like NWAF, Veresnik, and other high loot areas across the map and not see a single soul. I'm with you, I want to explore too, but putting too many redundant copy/paste structures on the map has had a negative impact on player movement and really isn't as interesting as people make it out to be. If the world had some real variety to it then maybe, yes, it would be exciting, but you'd still have the problem of player movement across the map being stunted. I agree they shouldn't "force" interactions, but it's vital to create a landscape that's conducive to people actually using it and meeting other players. They've failed in that area in my opinion. And making the entire map open to fresh spawns is the absolute worst thing they could do. Yes, DayZ is a sandbox game, but one of the best things about the mod (and SA to a degree) is that there was a sense of linear progression. You had one experience on the coast, a vastly different experience in the woods, towns, and villages while traveling North, and yet another experience once you reached areas like Stary, NWAF, NEAF, Vybor, etc. It was a journey into the heart of darkness. You spawned amongst chaos on the coast and had go get initial gear and GTFO. You then could breathe a little bit as you left Cherno/Elektro/Berezino, but the began the journey into the far more dangerous areas of the map. There were extremely dangerous hot zones where you would often get into gunfights and squad battles around the high level military loot spawn areas. If you chose, you could be the hermit who gets a simple gun like a hunting rifle and survive in the outskirts of the map, looting heli crashes for the high end gear rather than risking a journey to NWAF. All along the way you potentially ran into survivors, bandits, and heroes. When you died, you started again at the coast with nothing. Nobody was being "forced" to play a certain way, but there was just more of a variety of experiences that were more entertaining. I find that linear progression essential to DayZ even though it's a sandbox game. Well, it's my opinion that they'll never be able to optimize the game enough to fill it with 1,000s of zombies and 100+ players (don't forget vehicles, aircraft, bicycles, boats, etc) which is really what is needed to fill all the areas they've added to the game. BI has a very poor track record on optimizing games and one of the devs expressed doubt when I asked him if the servers would ever be able to handle enough zombies to replicate the hordes that you see in the mod.

Isn't that backwards? As I understand it, the current lack of properly respawning loot actually pushes people out of towns (or to be more accurate, pushes people to low pop servers as Bororm pointed out). When loot is respawning properly, people will hang out even longer in coastal cities to get their loot. The changes will only amplify the problem I'm pointing out. This may not be the case in persistent servers where there's giant piles of loot in every building, but that's an entirely different conversation.

Your two responses in this post are based on a broken WIP mechanic of loot spawning in which loot doesn't respawn.

Don't know what else to say then. If you cannot comprehend how drastically increasing the amount of explorable square footage of the map leads to a more spread out player population and less interaction inland from the coast then it's pointless continuing this conversation. Increasing the player count may make up for it, but I'd prefer a MIDDLE GROUND between mod and SA as far as cities and enterable buildings are concerned and a more moderate player count. That way there's a lot of empty and remote forest areas on the map but you have a likely chance of running into other players at hot loot spots. The SA devs seem to be trying to cram as many cities, buildings, rooms, and objects as they can into the map with hope that someday they may be able to populate it with 1,000's of zombies and over 100 players. I sincerely doubt they will be able to achieve this considering BI's track record on optimization.

Yes, but if you read my posts, my complaint is that there is very little player interaction outside of coastal cities. I played SA for a few months and only ran into a handful of people outside of coastal cities.

Haha, wow, talk about flying off the deep end. You're bringing up topics here that aren't even related to the subject we're talking about. You've also really exposed your ignorance on several of the topics you brought up. l don't even know where to begin answering you. I'll just make a little bullet list instead I never said making the world more enterable makes players less interactive. How can you be that far off from what I said? I said that adding so much explorable area spreads people out and leads to less interaction across the map. I never made any connection between buildings and how players interact when they meet. That was your doing.If you could "NEVER GET ANYONE TO SAY THEIR FRIENDLY AND NOT ACTUALLY KILL ME RIGHT AFTER IN THE MOD" then you're just revealing how bad of a player you are or the fact that you weren't actually playing on vanilla DayZ servers but rather carebear PvP servers with vehicles and choppers everywhere. My squad and I interact with players in vanilla mod successfully all the time. It takes skill to do this. You can't just run straight up to people screaming "FRIENDLY!" over direct chat.You're claiming that a) vanilla DayZ has side chat enabled (when after a couple of months following release they removed it on public hive servers, so for the most part vanilla servers had no side chat, though that has changed with private hives which mostly enable it) and /b) that my squad and I use side chat. You know what...WE DON'T. Go ask any player on US434 and they'll tell you. We only use direct chat to interact with players. In fact, everyone in our squad met through direct chat. And since when do SA players not use Teamspeak? You know what though, THIS HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE TOPIC OF THIS THREAD, so I'll stop there.I don't need statistics. I play vanilla DayZ mod on a regular basis and meet people in all types of areas on the map, and in 3 solid months of playing SA I encountered about 5 people outside of coastal areas. The boredom just killed me. With practically no zombies or player encounters, the alpha had nothing to offer but boredom for me, so I stopped playing because I'm not fond of coastal deathmatch with fresh spawns. Either way, in case you missed every single one of the times I said this already in this thread (I'm putting it in all caps and large bold text just to be sure you don't miss it this time): THERE IS A MIDDLE GROUND THAT THEY SHOULD HAVE AIMED FOR. I'M NOT SAYING THE MOD HAD THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF ENTERABLE BUILDINGS. I'M SAYING THAT MORE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ADDED, BUT THEY WENT TO FAR AND ADDED TO MANY. SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER. I can't for the life of me see why people are completely missing my point even though I've made it very clear.

So wait, you're saying that in an apocalypse there's not going to be *ANY* buildings or houses that are locked up, barricaded, or boarded up? Strange, I actually find it immersion breaking when every building has perfectly functioning doors that are not locked. Also, you're taking it to the opposite extreme in your statements. I'm not saying DayZ should be non-stop encounters. I'm not saying it's about spawning, finding a gun, then murdering fresh spawns out in the open. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to hide. I like the idea that I might encounter a player or I might not just as much as you do...except the problem is that in SA...it's almost guaranteed that you're not going to run into players for a very long time if you leave the coast. I'm not sure how many times I have to repeat it in this thread, but there's a middle ground that should be the aim. Not enough buildings in the mod, too many in SA. Thanks, yes, that's what I'm saying. I agree with your other points as well. I'd like to see more incentive to explore the map. I also really love the fights that you get into out in the open in vanilla mod. 2nd person to say un-enterable buildings breaks immersion. I don't quite understand that. I'd think that in an apocalyptic scenario there'd be plenty of locked, barricaded, boarded up, and caved in places. As for your second statement, again, I DO feel there should be more buildings/apartments than the mod (which would lead to the far more interesting encounters you're talking about), but not as many buildings/apartments as are in SA. I'm not saying mod buildings > SA buildings, so I repeat again, there's a middle ground that should be the aim. Exactly, though I do wonder if 100 person count and fixed loot will solve the problem or not. I'm not quite sure why, when I make an argument based on the premise that mod buildings were too sparse and SA buildings are too many, that most people respond with arguments that mod buildings were too sparse. You're just agreeing with half of what I said, not countering my argument. My argument is that there's a middle ground, and they should aim for that.

It should, but it doesn't. I played SA for a few months and barely saw another soul save some fresh spawns near where I spawned in. This might be the case if there were 150-200 players per server, but with 40 players it just isn't. I would spawn in and just run around getting incredibly bored trying to find my initial loot. I'd run into maybe 1 or 2 people that were fresh spawns, and then I'd make my way to NWAF to get fully geared. After hours and hours of running around not seeing anybody, I'd eventually cave and go back to the coast just to get into some action.

It's not nonsense. You cannot deny that you have incredibly higher chances of running into people further inland on the map in the vanilla mod than you do in SA. I played SA for three months and can count on one hand how many times I ran into people in places like Gorka, Novy, Stary, Veresnik, and Vybor. While there are a number of factors that lead to this, an over saturation of enterable buildings is one of the biggest ones. You keep referencing the kill map...but how long does that data span, and how much more saturated are the markings for the coastal interactions than towns further inland? Of course people are going to end up killing each other in various places eventually, but I'm telling you, one of the main reasons I quit playing SA is because of how few players I ran into even on 40/40 servers. If you exponentially increase the explorable area of the map but fail to increase the number of players to fill that area then you're going to reduce player interaction outside of the high value loot spots very close to spawns. Not sure how you cannot see this.

Since you asked... You misunderstood my post. It most certainly does decrease encounters in a number of ways. I never said anything about the ability to detect which buildings people are in, it's just that there's too much square footage of buildings in the map for 40, or that matter 100 players. People are going room-to-room-to-room-to-room in coastal cities rather than exploring the map. Venture inland at all and you see nobody. The map has become exponentially "bigger" because of the added structures yet player count is less than that in the mod. Looting is tedious. There's far too many structures which is killing server/client performance and reducing the amount of player encounters throughout the map. Like I said, there's a middle ground.

It's not the sole reason (note I mentioned above that they need to add incentive to venture to places like NWAF) but it plays a huge part. In the mod, you would spawn in say Cherno, hit the super market, fire station, the two hospitals, maybe some industrial, and some apartments to get your starting gear. Depending on your luck you'd get a lot of what you needed or maybe just a hatchet and some bandages. Either way, within 15-20 minutes (depending on the action going on there), you would have exhausted the loot areas and would move on to get more stuff. Where to go? North. If you spawned in Elektro this was even quicker, say 5-10 minutes and you'd start to make your way to another town. What this meant is that you had a good chance of seeing other players in towns between the coast and NWAF as they were trying to find items like backpacks, maps, and weapons. Pusta, Zelenegorsk, Polana, Mogilevka, Rogovo, Gorka, Pustoshka, these were all towns where you were fairly likely to run into other players on a full map. In SA, it's the coast or practically nothing. Again, there's a middle ground. In the mod you can loot your initial town in 5-10 minutes and be headed North. In SA you can spend 2 hours going room-to-room in all the buildings. I feel something in the middle would have been much better as it's become incredibly boring to go inland in SA.