ZedsDeadBaby

Is "Here we go again" in reference to the killing, or the incessant whining?

I strongly disagree. They're incredibly slow to reload, extremely difficult to fire accurately at a distance if you're inexperienced, useless at close range and useless once you're out of ammo (not useful as a bludgeoning device or anything). The ability to retrieve ammo is nice, but limited. Often you're going to be firing at zombies when many other zombies are around and you're in the process of GTFO'ing; you're not going to want to hang around for 20 minutes retrieving all your arrows/bolts. You want ideal weapons for the zombie apocalypse? Here you go:

Bows & arrows, fine, but "craftable?" With respect for awesome games like Skyrim, DayZ is not Skyrim. What are the odds some random schlub survivor is going to possess the knowledge and expertise necessary to craft a functioning, accurate, durable bow out of materials available in the wild? I mean, come on. We suspend our disbelief on the fact that everyone's a marksman and knows how to assemble and disassemble firearms like a highly trained veteran, but you've got to draw the line somewhere. Fashioning an effective bow from raw materials would require years of training. You're not just going to take a goddamn kitchen knife out in the backyard and whip yourself up a wicked longbow. If we get bows & arrows, they should spawn like other weapons in areas where hunters might be (I'm sure you can think of somewhere appropriate in DayZ), and look something like this:

Someone who plays on his/her own shouldn't be able to play on the same level as others. That's the whole point. Being able to join a group of survivors and combine efforts should (and likely will) always confer a big advantage in DayZ. You can be a lone wolf and survive, but you're not going to be achieving the same goals as a group working together. As it should be. Why should you be as effective as 5 or 10 other people who took the time and effort to band together? It's amazing - in one thread people complain that "KoS" is too rampant because the game doesn't encourage enough cooperative play, and two threads down someone is decrying features that require cooperation because they're an impediment to playing alone.

Why on Earth would they want to stop that? It's one of the things that kept the mod interesting. Trying to acquire as many vehicles as possible and defend them from other players was a huge part of the game for our group. People who think "hoarding" was a problem just didn't run with the right crowd I guess. I will be really shocked if vehicles are any less rare they they were in the mod. In fact, I would wager they're going to be even more rare and difficult to acquire.

I think a 60 second animation that only opens the can if completed uninterrupted is a good idea. Whether realistic or not, I think it's fair to say this also comes with a chance to lose 1 "serving" of the food in the process or something. This allows you to avoid starvation, while still creating a need for can openers so that they are a valued commodity. I think this is important, because if cans can be opened w/o one, then the entire notion of can opener as a tool kind of weakens dramatically. The 60 second animation is, like, okay you can call that a "penalty" but it's not like you're going to be trying to open a can of beans in the middle of a firefight. You're going to wait until you're safe anyway so I think the 60 second timer is not enough of a "downside."

Nah, it's really not. It's what makes the game fun.

It's always daytime in HALO.

I assure you Dean doesn't give half a rat's ass about jackasses like him.

Okay. I mean, I get it. It's cool and hardcore and that's great, and it's a bonus that people can't just sprint into Cherno and be geared up in 10 minutes, but can we also not pretend that loot only on server reset is actually a workable solution? That's impossibly restrictive and grants server administrators an unacceptable amount of power over loot distribution on their servers (i.e., they can choose to restart only when their friends are online and prepared to raid high-value targets). There must exist a middle-ground between the mod and this where loot respawns at a reasonable rate - especially food and basic necessary tools.

It worked out great for Notch and Minecraft; I don't see why it couldn't work just fine here. Try to relax. Deep breaths. Everything is going to work out.

A simple fix to reduce the prevalence of loot farming via server-swapping. It is not a "hard" prevention method, but will still have a significant impact on the effectiveness of this loot collection method Solution When you login successfully, if it has been at least 30 minutes since your most recent prior login, you will be completely uneffected. However, if you logout and then login to a different server without allowing at least 30 minutes to pass while offline, you will be flagged as "loot suppressed" on the new server. To clear loot suppression, you must move at least 1500m from your current location, or allow 20 minutes to pass. Pro's Players will no longer be able to efficiently farm high-value loot quickly by swapping servers. It only prevents loot pick-ups - other game mechanics are uneffected. Unlike some "temporary ban" solutions it doesn't completely prevent you from playing. It encourages travel and remaining on a single server. It will be more efficient to travel from Stary Sobor to the NWAF and back on the same server instead of staying in one spot and swapping, for example. Same with tent farming - going from town to town will now be better than staying in one town and server jumping in hopes of finding a tent. This will make for more persistent player presence on a server, and less "blink in-blink out" type gameplay at these hot spots. It should be easy to implement, since ARMA 2 supports the "move at least x distance from your current location" mechanic already - some of the single player challenges revolve around this. Con's There is a chance your server may go offline or become unstable/laggy as you approach a high-value loot target. If the server does recover and you are forced to swap, you will be loot supressed even though you never looted anything. There is a slight "work-around" where players could take turns looting on servers, so a group of 5 could loot 5 different servers before every team member has loot suppression. Personally I believe the Pro's outweigh the Con's and that this would be an effective and simple solution to an issue that creates a lot of "meta" type gameplay around high-value loot spots. Players would now be strongly encouraged to remain on a single server and travel efficiently from one loot area to the next instead of jumping from one server to another and continually looting the same place. Edit, to clarify: I'm not suggesting loot disappear, only that the "suppressed" player be unable to pick it up. So nearby players would be unaffected. This creates a loophole (see my 2nd con), but still effectively puts the pinch on most incidents of server-hopping and greatly reduce it's presence in the game. More clarification: If you find yourself getting hung up on the specific numbers, they're obviously all adjustable variables. Maybe 15 minutes offline or 1000m distance/10 minute wait? The details would be up to rocket I think the core concept is sound.

50% of forum users interested in answering this poll, you mean. Big difference; the sample is neither statistically significant in size nor representative of the general population. Also, as duplication exploits remain unfixed the poll is largely irrelevant. What will the results tell us except "Gee, we sure need to fix those exploits." which we all knew already?

It seems at least once approxiately every 72 hours we are treated to another thread calling for the excision of sniper rifles, .50 caliber rifles or both from DayZ. I have engaged in many of these threads in an attempt to argue for the tactical significance of sniper rifles in the game, suggest ways in which players can deal with the existence of these weapons, support the fact that they enhance rather than detract from the overall experience, and systemtically rebut each of the common arguments put forth for their removal. In the interest of sparing my fingertips and your eyes, I am going to post a single response to which I can link in the future any time the Suggestions or General Discussion forum plays host to another one of these exciting exchanges. As new arguments take shape or old ones morph into new forms, I will update this thread with new rebuttals. I fully expect discussion to take place within this thread as well, but my main purpose here is to have a repository of my feelings on the subject as it seems to come up so often. So, here are the arguments I have seen for their removal, and rebuttals: It is unrealistic for these rifles to exist given the game's setting. This is a common argument against the presence of sniper rifles. That it just "doesn't make sense" for them to be lying around Chernarus given the setting. The problem is, this is an incredibly slippery slope upon which a single step would result in the removal of approximately all of the game's weapons save perhaps the hatchet. None of the weapons in DayZ accurately recreate reality in their frequency or location. You would not be finding Winchesters and Lee Enfields lying behind haystacks in barns, nor Makarovs under the dining room table of the neighbor's house nor Revolvers in the grocery store nor M1911s in the church nor really any of the weapons in almost any of the locations you find them in DayZ. If you did find them, they certainly wouldn't come conveniently pre-packaged with ammunition. Following this argument to its logical conclusion, we would end up with a version of DayZ in which on any given 50 player server approximately 5 players have firearms and of those only 1 has ammunition. The rest would be swinging hatchets or poking each other with pointed sticks which I think we can agree as a community would not be a very compelling experience for anyone involved. Which is why DayZ does not seek to accurately recreate reality in this regard. It makes weapons and ammunition more common and distributed more widely than they would be in reality precisely to facilitate game play. If you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept that barns infinitely generate shotguns and crossbows, then you can easily extend that suspension of disbelief to the fact that the military was dispersed across Chernarus in an attempt to combat the early infection and quell uprisings in many areas. Why do deer stands have military equipment? Because they were no longer being used as deer stands - the military started using them to keep tabs on the spread of the infection and the roaming bandits that began wandering the countryside in the early days after the infection. Why do firestations have guns? Because they were set up as temoprary strong holds. Military presence in the grocery stores because they had to defend what little provisions remained from rioting civilians. Have you noticed all the HMMV's around? How about the piles of dead bodies indicating that the military were involved in early cleanup efforts? Why do you think there are crashed helicopters carrying high-value military equipment and sometimes medication? The military were transporting new supplies into the airfields for dispersion among forces throughout Chernarus. As bandits became more common and began to take over abandoned military equipment, armor and helicopters - it would have become necessary for the military to employ more powerful equipment including .50 caliber rifles to counter their presence. These weapons are too common. A common argument, but the most easily rebutted. Once rocket fixes item and ammunition duplication issues, certainly in DayZ stand-alone but perhaps earlier, all questions of frequency and commonality will be washed clean. Right now hundreds of rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, maybe thousands of rifles and tens of thousands of rounds are being magically created from nothing each and every day. If we can stem the tide of duplication, we can have a discussion about how common these items really are. It takes "no skill" to sit in one spot and snipe. There are three rather short and sweet problems with this argument. The first is that it requires "no skill" in the same way to fire any weapon from a prone position at a stationary target. I can sit prone in a church aisle and point my gun at the door and pull the trigger any time anyone's face shows up in the door way and I'm employing a "no skill" strategy. This does not imply the necessary removal of the weapon in question. The second is that a great deal of skill involved in sniper combat comes long before combat initiates. Choosing an ideal vantage point - one which both provides a sight picture of the target in question while simultaneously providing sufficient cover for the sniper himself can be a chore and to do so on short notice requires extensive knowledge of the map, terrain, and common enemy movement behaviors. This is especially true when seeking to cover dynamic targets such as the randomly occurring helicopter crash sites which can present a huge issue for a sniper since they have two sides and can provide natural cover and concealment for any enemy near or approaching the target area. Lastly, it actually does require a fair amount of skill to effectively snipe targets using these rifles. Unless the target presents at a fixed distance and remains stationary, effective firing is as challenging as it is with any other weapon in the game, if not moreso. There are no effective counter-measures against snipers. This is one of the most baffling arguments I have seen levied against sniper rifles as they themselves are their own counter measure. If you suspect a sniper might be in the area, or you just want to double check to be sure - assign a counter sniping team to scout the area using appropriate optics and engage any targets using sniper rifles. If a sniper can see you to fire, you can see him to fire back. It's all a matter of who is more aware and who has the better sight picture (see above re: skill involved in sniping). New players are helpless and victimzed en masse. A common argument which is usually followed immediately by a story starting with "So I was in Cherno..." The fact is new players are not helpless to avoid snipers. There are countless counter measures even unarmed players can take to make themselves more difficult targets: Avoid Cherno and Elektro at all costs. Do not remain stationary any longer than necessary. If you must be stationary, go prone first. Travel near cover whenever possible - walls, buildings, steeply sloped terrain, trees etc. can all stop sniper sight lines and bullets. You can almost always cover at least one direction with an object. Do not stand on rooftops. Travel through forests whenever possible, even if it means going a little further or round-about. If you must travel through open fields, do so at their most narrow point and run full speed in a zig-zag fashion towards the next nearest cover source. Never stop under any circumstances, even to check your map. Wait until you're under cover to do that. Very few snipers in the game are good enough to hit a target at full-sprint moving serpentinely, even at a modest distance. Occasionally you may encounter a crack shot, but most of these jackasses will just shoot around your feet while you run unharmed to the next stand of trees. etc., etc. the list goes on. Don't be a victim. Plan ahead and think about what you would do if you were a sniper, and then avoid doing things that would make you vulnerable to those same strategies. When you are sniped, think about the mistakes you made and what you might do differently next time around. Snipers are only used to murder other players. There are no "legitimate" uses. This is such a vacuous argument that I'm surprised how often it appears in these discussions. I have had my life saved on countless occasions by my sniper team because they spot threats before I do and open fire, either scaring off an approaching bandit or eliminating them before they have a chance to engage me. From your point of view it looks like "senseless murder" but from our point of view it is well-planned, specifically-intentioned tactical combat. We are eliminating threats before they become dangerous. Exactly what sniper rifles were designed to do, and they do the job in DayZ beautifully. You may think medium or short range combat is "more exciting" but I'm not here for your excitement. I planned ahead and have a team so you don't get to get close to me to shoot your AK or your M16 at me. Maybe that makes you sad, but it makes me very happy and it gives me more reason to make friends and have a squad and communicate and cooperate and work together which are all things people on this forum seem to claim this game lacks an incentive to do... well, here's your incentive: if you're tired of snipers, then cooperate with some other survivors and come up with a plan to neutralize or counter their effect on your strategy and game play experience. Sniper rifles aren't used against zombies, therefore they don't belong in DayZ. This argument ignores the fact that rocket himself has declared and intends for players to be the greatest threat in the game. Tactical sniper rifles are not used for zombies generally, true. But, so what? I'm more concerned with the threat of players than zombies and that's not a flaw in the game design. That's precisely what rocket intended and precisely why sniper rifles remain an important tactical element of the game. The weapons are too deadly. One-shot-one-kill should not be in the game. This is an attractive argument for a lot of people because it appeals to a sense of "balance" which has been a ubiquitous hot topic since the first online games. We are conditioned to expect game designers to strive to ensure that every choice has a trade-off, every benefit a downside and any strength a weakness. It's also a difficult argument to directly rebut, since it rests heavily upon player preference, expectation and a long-standing cultural design tradition. My rebuttal is two-fold: to indicate two ways in which these rifles are balanced, and to support rocket's general philosophy on balance as a focus of game design. The first way in which these rifles are balanced is that they are absolutely outclassed in medium- and short-range combat on uneven terrain, heavy foliage or urban settings. Unless a sniper is able to pre-select a vantage point and know when and where his target will appear, he is faced with the choice of firing "from the hip" or attempting to acquire a sight picture through a shakey, wandering reticule. By the time the sniper is able to steady the sight and come to rest on a target, any assault rifle would have fired a full clip. Even a Winchester can outclass a .50 caliber at ~200m and shorter distances, such as you would find in many towns, cities and building interiors. Second, a natural balance exists in that these rifles are available to everyone in the game in equal measure. You don't have to be a certain class or level or faction or nationality or skin color in order to acquire any of these weapons and use them yourself. If you find them so absolutely overpowering as to make their user some kind of immortal killing machine, then you would do well to find one yourself and assign a member of your team to immortal killing duties. To the contrary I think you, like I did, will find that they are not actually the boon that they first appear to be and often the player with the sniper rifle ends up prone behind a wall while players with more effective medium-range weapons and optics engage in PvP combat. And when you're out exploring the world, looting helicopter crashes and trying to farm car parts to repair vehicles, most combat takes place at these medium and short ranges. Sure, a sniper can just stay away from the action and lay in the trees, but that in itself is a balance tradeoff. You spend hours doing "nothing" on the off chance that you will be able to use your concealed position and vantage point to your advantage. Carrying a second weapon in your pack is possible but incredibly limiting in terms of inventory space, and swapping weapons takes time that is usually unavailable in urban combat scenarios. Maybe you disagree with these assessments and still consider the rifles "imbalanced." Fine. Let us discuss the greater issue of "balance" in general; we know rocket's opinion on the subject. He's not interested in balance and has no intention of providing it. So we are left to ask ourselves, can we play and enjoy a game we perceive as imbalanced? Can a game that sometimes feels "unfair" be fun not simply in spite of but sometimes because of the presence of that unfairness? Is it unacceptable for a game to make us feel frustrated or even victimized? Will the challenge of adapting to these perceived imbalances make us take a different perspective on the game, one we might not have otherwise considered? I think these are all questions rocket is toying with. I personally don't believe .50 caliber rifles are particularly "imbalanced" but many do and neither opinion is probably right. But if rocket remains true to his vision, the imbalance will remain true or otherwise - so you should look to how you can adapt to it rather than asking for it to be removed from the game. (New 8-Aug) The inventory requirements, encumbrance and handling difficulties are not accurately represented by the game. Though I do not necessarily consider this an argument for the removal of the weapons, I will include and discuss it for two reasons: first, it is a very commonly sited problem with these weapons in DayZ, and second because I actually completely agree. Eureka! We've struck oil. But, right. Okay. We need to talk about how to solve that problem, not simply take the weapons out of the game because of it. "Cutting off the nose to spite the face," and all that, right? Taking these weapons out because we don't want to put our heads together and come up with a way to make their management and maintenance a more compelling trade-off is kind of like giving up. We can probably do better. Decent ideas have already been proposed in this thread, and I'll add a few: Reticule wander when firing from standing and crouched positions is too subtle. Increase it to more accurately represent the importance of firing these weapons from a prone, supported position. Increase the number of inventory slots necessary to store these weapons in a backpack. 12 or 15 may do them more justice. Players using these weapons may run more slowly, or tire more easily Should any kind of stamina or exhaustion system be implemented, carrying these weapons might contribute to said. Weapons could be assembled and disassembled using a toolbox, but with a realistic time requirement. So, perhaps a disassembled AS50 might only occupy 8 slots in your backpack, but re-assembling it would require both a toolbox, and 60-90 seconds prone on the ground while performing the task. A very compelling trade-off between inventory space and speed/efficiency. However, filed under "be careful what you wish for:" all of these same issues and restrictions would probably apply to LMGs which are similarly bulky and difficult to operate from any position save prone and supported, right? Military experts can correct me if I'm wrong here but I highly doubt shoulder-fired SAWs are as accurate as they seem to be in game. Cheers to those who raised this issue, though. It's a good topic to discuss w/ respect to these weapon systems.

Your thread was deleted because it was vapid, useless trash. Threads asking why other threads were deleted usually get deleted too, so I hope this one follows quickly.

Also, you could use your judgement based on the fact that there are fucking interviews being posted with rocket from like yesterday... just because they're booth isn't open doesn't mean they packed up and left the conference. And even if they've been back for a day or two, maybe they're catching up on sleep and not fucking hacking away at bugs the minute they walk in the door? You know. Or just facepalm and post some inaccurate info.

Does being color blind prevent you from counting?

You mean like the update they posted that said "We're going to be at GamesCon" which has basically been going on since the last patch came out? Here's an update, Sherlock: They're still at fucking Gamescon. Shocking news brought to you from the front lines. /r/thewarz has a whole 500 subscribers and it's Facebook page has 330 likes. Meanwhile nothing on Kotaku, nada on Gamasutra, squat on IGN... basically no mentions across any gaming news site (because there's nothing to mention since they haven't done anything since releasing those 5 concept screens a month ago)... and Google searches pretty much just return threads on this forum. So, yeah, it's totally blowing up... a real social media "darling." :rolleyes: Like, what? The stand-alone will be released in Alpha state, yes. This is openly acknowledged. The point to stand-alone is not to solve all of the issues at release, it is to move the game on to its own engine so that rocket and the team actually have the power to address those issues. They could certainly sit down and do all of the work to fix the issues before releasing, but that might mean mid-2013 before we see anything. I for one would much rather play an unfinished stand-alone even if it is plagued by some of the same issues than wait around for 6-8 months with no DayZ.

Removal of the debug monitor probably didn't even require a line of code, rather just a /* */ to comment out some draw calls. Calling it out as if it's somehow distracting from larger issues or bigger changes is ridiculous. Yes, we all know there are other issues facing the game. Some of them large. That doesn't mean all other effort must cease until they are addressed. On topic: The blood situation seems like a non-issue to me. Color blind or not, use your judgement. How many times have you bled or been hit by zombies or gunfire? Once? Eat a meat. 2-5 times? Eat a few meat. Screen shaking despite your best efforts? Probably time for a blood transfusion. The fact that you have to rely on the debug monitor to gauge how wounded you are, to me, is perfect evidence of why it needs to be removed. People get spoiled and rely on it to hold their hand through the scary parts.

Zombies exist: Accept without question. Zombies have enhanced hearing: WTF THIS IS BULLSHIT.

It will remain in Alpha as long as it does. No more, no less. He obviously doesn't have a singular vision for the game that he is working toward. He has openly admitted as much, and said that's why he is using this model so that he can develop the mod along with the community and allow it to evolve dynamically. What difference does it make to you? Are you only going to buy it if you know precisely the date upon which he will stop calling it Alpha and begin calling it Beta, and yet again the precise date when it will cease being Beta and be called Final? They're just words after all. As long as he continually updates the game and it continues to entertain me, I could care less if he calls the thing Chicken Whiskers or Titty Sprinkle.

It's neither childish nor an exaggeration. You wanted to know what place resurrection had in the game and I answered you. Without it, we would have to buy a new CD key every time we died. You can either come back to life after you die or not. It's that simple. No troll, son. There's more to death than a gun and some tool-belt items. And, yes, part of that is losing connection with the history of the character. When I had a 42 Day old survivor I could look back on his life and recount all of the things he had gone through to get him where he was. The near misses, the life saving moments, the mistakes, the triumphs, etc. All of that was connected to my current survival, along with a mass of zombie kills, bandit kills, distance walked, and probably 70+ hours of survival in the game. When I died, I lost all of it. No, I didn't magically forget all of the experiences, but they were no longer tied to my character. I could no longer say proudly "This is the same survivor that rescued you from that burning bus all those many weeks ago." I was newflesh again. All washed away. And you think I thought for one solitary second about my gun or Map or a couple smoke grenades? Equipment is not what makes a survivor. And losing it is not what makes death hurt. Not for me and not for other people I know who truly immerse themselves in the game and enjoy the sense of building a story and history around their character. People like you who think the game is just about "stuff" might see the act of reacquiring your equipment after death as a violation of the concept of permanent death, but for myself it's an afterthought. Getting my old gun back doesn't give me my old life back, and it doesn't reconnect the history of my character with my newly spawned survivor. Personally I prefer it that way. "Oh, no, I lost my stuff" should not be what's on your mind when you die. It should be "Oh, no. My survivor died and his story has come to an end." It's a lot more emotional that way. And personal.

The Real Virtuality engine is RV4 i.e., "ARMA 3 engine." They will branch it, meaning starting from RV4/ARMA 3. And then incorporate parts of ARMA 2 (i.e., the 1.62 netcode which is a known quantity and something the engineers are familiar with). All of it makes perfect sense. This thread is full of misinformed drama. Umm, yes it is. That's exactly how it works.

You... don't need a toolbox to fix a car. Really.

Is it too early to cast my nomination for stupidest post of the year?