Add squad identification mechanics. And allow players to synchronize their GPS. Players already form their own squads. All we need to do is enhance that capability. Limiting it to two sides, forcing players to "choose" on login, etc. are all unecessary and artificial restrictions. Players should be free to form as many or as few factions as they want, and join and leave them as they will. No need to build up an elaborate system around it in my opinion.

Anyway, +1 for new storage containers, but I don't know why it has to be tied to an incredibly convoluted class system. Just give us rare materials, construction tools and let us build shit. Let players figure out what they want to do in the game, instead of their "class" telling them what they're good at.

So basically like DayZ except incredibly boring and watered-down? Constant threat levels? So much of the atmosphere of this game relies precisely on variable levels of threat depending on where you are, who you're with, how recently you spawned and what equipment you have. Even out bullet damage? No storage? *sigh*

If they're equally geared, in what sense has the been PvP broken? What advantage are you gaining over their squad that they could not be equally gaining over yours with better tactics, superior numbers or both? Please, specifically indicate the ways in which this gun "breaks" the game. Do people with an L85 have advantage over a group wtihout one? Yes, but in much the same way a group with maks and revolvers have an advantage over beach spawn with flashlights, or the way in which a group with AKMs and FN FALs have an advantage over those with winchesters and crossbows. or the way in which a group with an AS50 and a pair of binoculars have against someone standing in the middle of a field in broad daylight adjusting their nutsack or trying to take screenshots of the sweet double rainbow they spotted so they can post it on reddit. What is it that makes the L85 more "game-breaking" than any of these other seemingly imbalanced situations? Especially considering that anyone in the game has full and equal access to the weapon? "It's very powerful, so obviously it's broken," is a vacuous argument. Fill it with something of substance. Oh, and if you want to insult me please just man up and do it, dude. "I wouldn't impute that on anyone." Oh, how very fucking droll of you. Were you feeling proud when you hit submit?

Holy sweet motherfucking potatoes. How many fucking times does it have to be explained to you mouth-breathers? The point to an Alpha is not fucking bug fixing. It is precisely to "get sidetracked adding new features." That is why Alpha exists. It is the phase in which many new features are quickly added, tested, tweaked and scrapped without regard to 100% reliability, stability, functionality, bug fixing or performance optimizations. If you want a team focused on fixing bugs and making the game more stable then shut the fuck up, go the fuck away, and come back when the game is in fucking Beta. Jesus flipping Christ it's like a circus in here.

If side chat trash talking and "whos frng in cherno?" are really what made this game interesting and compelling for you, then I submit you are perhaps playing the wrong game.

Which is exactly what they're doing. By making a stand-alone version of the game. Every single poster in this thread has explained it to you, how many times is it going to take for it to sink in?

Actually that's exactly what being an Alpha fucking means. What else would it mean? That's basically the fucking definition. Holy motherfuck.

Ah, perfect. My rule holds true. Anyone who starts their thread with "I know it's Alpha" is absolutely 100%, without question, guaranteed to spend the rest of their post demonstrating all the ways in which they actually have no fucking idea what Alpha actually means. Thanks, TheMachine, for adding further weight to my theory that anyone who uses this phrase is ignorant of the true meaning of Alpha. Sorry it had to come at the expense of your dignity and integrity. I've seen you make one or two respectable posts, but most are drivel and tripe, this most of all. I won't put you on ignore, but I'll certainly watch for more asinine bullshit to come pouring out of that foul chute you call a mouth sometime soon.

At least once per day I see someone post a comment to the effect of there being "no reason to cooperate" or "no benefit to grouping up." I grow weary of posting these reasons as a response time and time again, so I am creating a thread to which I can link in the future. It should also serve as an aggregate for ideas on cooperative play - if you have your own that I have not listed here, please add them in the thread and I will update the list as time goes on. Understand that I am not suggesting the game is "complete" with respect to cooperative play and I certainly welcome the addition of new, more complex mechanics that facilitate cooperation - such as fortifying positions, taking over settlements to establish outposts, etc. I am simply providing these as a counter to the people who claim that there are currently "no" reasons to do so - often followed quickly by a claim that this is the reason behind the rampant murder or wanton PvP in the game. I welcome everyone to post links to this thread in response to these claims moving forward. If you fall unconscious in battle, a friend can apply an Epi-Pen and revive you. If you are low on blood, a friend can apply a blood transufion to completely heal you. If you are losing blood in battle, a friend can continue to fire on incoming zombies or players while you bandage - or, in groups of 3+, one player can receive a tranfusion from a second while a third continues firing. Looting towns can severely limit your visibility and awareness while you are among the tall buildings, walls and fences. Ask friends to take high ground near town and watch for approaching players with binoculars or rifle scopes. Looting building interiors severely limits your awareness and visibility. Ask a friend to remain outside and watch the door while you go in to loot. Best when combined with a third player on high ground near town. Managing your inventory or reading the map leaves you vulnerable; have a friend watch your back while you do so. Setting up a camp fire, harvesting wood and cooking takes time, exposes your position with light, sound and smoke, and can leave you vulnerable. Have friends cover you while you prepare dinner for the group. Weapons in the game have wide ranging effective ranges and varying degress of ammo rarity. Have some friends carry close range weapons (shotguns, SMGs), others carry medium range (AK, M16) and at least one with long range (DMR, CZ 550, etc.). This will make you an effective fighting force at a variety of ranges; alone with a shotgun, you are a sitting duck against anyone with a medium/long range weapon. Mix and match ammo types among your group - don't carry the same primary or secondary weapons; this will allow you to take maximum advantage of ammo you find. No more leaving precious rounds behind, someone in your group can use it. Inventory space is very limited, even with larger backpacks. Carrying sufficient food, water, ammunition and secondary items like smoke and frag grenades often leaves precious little room for medical supplies like blood bags and epi-pens. Appoint a member of your group as the medic and ask that he sacrifice firepower in exchange for inventory space dedicated to these precious supplies. Vehicle parts occupy a huge amount of inventory space, and repairing a vehicle leaves you very vulnerable to attack. Appoint multiple people to carry various parts, and establish a "pit crew" style repair strategy which allows you to quickly, efficiently and safely repair and refuel a vehicle in short order. When using a vehicle to travel, stopping to loot a building can leave your vehicle vulnerable to enemy fire or theft. Leave at least one friend behind to guard your wheels while you set off in search of loot. Should you fall in battle, ask your friends to guard the corpse and await your return - or, alternatively, loot the "good stuff" and set off to meet you when you spawn. Should you fall in battle, friends can use a vehicle to pick you up and drive you back to base - rearming and re-equipping yourself much more quickly after death than would otherwise be possible and getting you right back in the action. You don't always need a large group to loot a single town - you can increase loot efficiency by splitting up into teams and simultaneously looting different towns or hitting a different circuit of deer stands; return at the end of the mission and share/store all of the great loot you found! Finding rare vehicle parts like engines or main rotor assemblies is very difficult on your own. With a larger group hitting more industrial sites, you can gather the materials necessary to repair a vehicle fully in much less time than you would have alone. The appearance of a large group can ward off potential agressors. If you are alone and someone spies you from afar, they will likely track and potentially murder you. If they see you with 4+ friends, they might decide to stay quiet and leave you alone. Sheer firepower - no brainer. More guns means more bullets means less enemies to worry about. Throwing a frag grenade can often leave you vulnerable to arms fire. To maximize the effectiveness of grenades, have a friend lay down covering fire while you lob the grenade. Friends can provide distractions for other players. If you suspect a player might be present very near you, try and coax him into revealing his position by asking a friend to fire off some makarov rounds at a medium, safe distance. The player will likely think "That was far away, let me investigate" and you will get the drop on him. Friends can provide distractions for zombies. If you want to loot a town but are short on time due to approaching players or because you are low on ammo or food/water, have a friend draw the zombies away using gunfire or, ideally, a loud, fast vehicle navigating through town honking the horn and dragging all the zombies away like lemmings. Friends can play while you are not. This increases your loot, survival gear and equipment gathering potential. If you log out low on AKM ammo, you might be pleasantly surprised when you login the next day and your buddy says "Hey, I found some of that AKM ammo you were looking for!" With a common tent, you don't even have to find each other to exchange items. Friends are eyes in the back of your head. If you are held down in a structure with two, three or more entrances you can only cover one at a time on your own. Having additional eyes and hands to cover the other avenues of approach increases your survival chances exponentially. General equipment sharing is more important than you might think. "Opps, I just used my last bandage/food/water" goes from a potentially deadly situation to just a minor inconvenience when you have friends with you. Helicopter pilots need gunners in order to be maximally effective. You will probably find a natural division of varied skill levels among your group of friends - some people will be great snipers, others good with short range weapons. Some will know certain towns or terrain better than you do. Maybe some are great pilots for when you finally find that huey? You're probably not amazing at everything - so surrounding yourself with others is a great way to round out your available skill set. Just having people around to chat and joke with makes the game much more enjoyable, intense, emotional and sometimes heartbreaking. Alone, you will never save your friends life nor he yours. You will never accidentally shoot your friend in the back and have to apologize profusely while bandaging him. You won't make jokes to take the edge off a tense situation. Nobody will be around to say "Nice shot!" when you spike that 400m shot on the money. In short, as in real life, friends are nice to have around even if they're not currently doing anything to help you personally.

Goal Give players a means to identify and classify other players in the game. Identification must be made visually and classification is left up to the player. Philosophy First, players, not the game engine, are the best judges of player behavior. Whenever the game engine classifies players for us, it is inherently playing the role of third-party judge. It must use pre-defined behaviors and actions to determine which category a player falls into. This inevitably results in very black & white categories - good or evil, friend or foe, kiss or kill. There's no room for personal interpretations by the player and no sense of personal responsibility on the player's part. There's also rarely distinctions made based on mitigating circumstances, historical context or personal allegiance. Second, player identification should rely on the survivor as much as the player controlling him/her. Identification should be based upon the survivor's ability to get close enough to recognize identifying features, and recognition should be attached to the life of the survivor - death will erase your memory of friends and foes either partially or completely. How it Works The first step is identification. In order to make a successful identification, a survivor must be within 20m of their target with unaided eyes, or an 'equivalent' distance using optical aides such as binoculars or rifle scopes. Once identification is made, classification can take place. Classification has two parts: naming and categorizing. Unlike server's which enable nametags (yuck), this system requires players to assign their own labels to identified survivors. The idea here is that you should not necessarily know which survivor in the game corresponds to which name on the user list or leaderboard (though, if you want, you can guess). The second part of classification is categorization: the player defines categories and assigns each category a name and color - and inserts identified survivors into one of the pre-defined categories. For example a player might create categories like Ally, Friend, Unknown, Suspect, Enemy and assign colors like green, blue, grey, orange and red respectively. The end result being: Whenever a player sees another survivor in the world whom they have previously identified and categorized, their assigned name will appear in the color of the assigned category. This name/color combination is only visible within the specified visual identifcation ranges (20m for unaided eyes, equivalent distance for optics and binoculars). Why it Works This places all of the power of identification and classification in the hands of the player themselves. You are now the judge of who is a bandit and who is a friend. Nobody does the work for you! You can use this system of classification in any way you see fit. Responsibility is in your hands. It's integrated into the game world. No magical nametag fairy whispering the name of the survivor in your ear from 1000m away. No third-party judge telling you who is naughty and who is nice. You are the judge now. It's up to you to make the call. Lastly, by attaching the memory of identified survivors to your current life - and erasing your memory upon death - a great deal of added value is attached to survival. The longer you survive, the more you know about the other survivors around you. Survive long enough, and you will have a vast library of information about other players in the game. And the great part about this is there's no way to "cheat the system," so to speak. You can't write anything down to remember later. Once you're dead, your memory is gone and there's really no way to get it back. This will make it an invaluable asset - even more valuable than loot in some cases, as you can always get new loot but rebuilding your library of identified and categorized survivors could take a very, very long time. Conclusion I think it's a perfect compromise between the "game decides for you" systems (like the Bandit Skin) and the current state of the game in which you have no idea who is who - even if you have seen a survivor before and witnessed him saving a life or committing a vile act, the next time you encounter that player you will not be able to attach those acts to that survivor. Please comment! Similar or Related: elektromanager: Communication/identification between/of survivors Hieronymus Josche: Yet another suggestion to encourage teamwork and PK accountability Vigilance: Familiarity Player Identification (Bandit/Trade "solution")

I miss the days when rocket would occasionally stop by General Discussion and outright ban jackasses like you. Now I'm left to just mock you and rely on public shame to force you to vacate the premises and never return. You ridiculous prat.

The baffling part is how you freely admit no other companies are doing a better job, yet single out BE for your ire. They didn't lift all 10,000 bans. That was a lifetime ban total. They lifted the false positives from the last two days which probably amount to a few hundred. The reason they don't "stop scripts" in ARMA 2 is because scripts are specifically allowed by the engine. Until BI comes along and says "Don't allow scripts to do x y or z" then how is BE supposed to just arbitrarily stop them? How can they tell the difference between scripts from hackers and one's that are needed to do things that people like rocket need to do to create things like Dayz? It's all the same scripting language and scripting engine. You can't just shut them all of or everything stops working. In other words, it's a lot more complicated than you let on. BattleEye is doing fine. You don't need a fancy website to be good at your job. They're not a graphic design or media company. I could give a shit less if their website is plain text.

100% without fail if someone opens their post with "I know it's Alpha" the content of that actual post is guaranteed to demonstrate the fact that they actually have no fucking idea what the fuck that means. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. That's part of what it means to be in Alpha. Please, everyone, I beg of you, if you're going to start your post claiming to "know" something, try to fucking know that thing or your thread is going to turn into a giant shitfest instantly. Good day.

ARMA 2 released in June 2009. rocket started employment with Bohemia Interactive 1st August 2012. So, no, I don't "realize that" because it's not true and never has been. Unless you're proposing rocket is capable of time travel in some regard? Vehicles exist in the ARMA 2 engine by default. However, they were never meant to be persistent for weeks or months on end and have a persistent "saved inventory" mechanic. They were designed to exist temporarily and then go away when the mission ends which is usually less than an hour. ARMA 2 doesn't have any concept of a persistent world that must be saved indefinitely - rocket had to cobble that all on top of it with the hive database and the ARMA engine is not designed to work that way. For this reason there are many issues with data integrity and reliability, especially around inventory and storage, that are just not easily fixed in ARMA 2. The feedback has been given, and rocket responded saying exactly what I've told you. What more do you want? Take it or leave it. But do stop spreading ridiculous misinformation about rocket being the "lead developer" on ARMA 2 because that shit is hilariously inaccurate. And please spare me your "I wrote some Perl scripts so I know how development cycles work." When you've participated in a full life cycle from concept to live ops with a full team of engineers and testers in a commercial environment you can bring up your "I'm a developer, too" argument, okay?

None of what you said indicates the presence of hacking?

...

And I predicted, new ones are coming online just as fast.

No more 1.7.2.5. 1.7.3 coming soon.

Why is that an elephant in the room? We all knew it was coming. My guess is $14.99-19.99. Right. For everyone. Nothing about a "big discount for people who already own DayZ."

In a dream you had?

Absolutely not. Vehicles are amazing precisely because they're rare. Even a 25% increase would turn them from a rare and precious find to an every day occurrence and people would be tearing around like some kind of GTA knock-off. Keep vehicles rare. The first time you hear that engine sound and pull out on to the road will be so much sweeter if you have to work for it and don't just have a truck put under your Christmas tree by rocket and co.

Perfect. Sounds like fun. Where do I sign up? Oh, wait. I already did. Now if only rocket sticks to his guns and doesn't let ideas like this fuck the whole thing up we might get somewhere.

Wow, how quickly people become spoiled. Give them magical free ammunition and suddenly they think they're never supposed to find themselves starved for bullets. I am going to go out a limb here and guess that rocket's vision of DayZ as a brutally harsh, unforgiving, frustratingly dark and cold experience does not include the goal of "Make sure everyone always has plenty of ammo for their favorite guns!" All ammo, not just military-grade ammo, should be a rare and precious commodity. You should be forced constantly to hunt for that next magazine or slug pile because you're under threat of pulling a click, click, click as a horde of zombies pours into the room with you. You should be aiming for headshots not because it's cool and your pretty little counter ticks up, but because you are desperate to save every possible bullet you can. As much as I hate to tread around the "play another game" territory, I have to say that if bountiful piles of unlimited ammo for all of your favorite shooty-bang-bang toys is what you're after, perhaps DayZ is not the place for you?