I am simply identifying a side effect of the change. I stand by everything I posted in the other thread and am fully in support of disabling the respawn button, especially now that it will be enabled if you fracture your leg! In fact, if you took the time to read my suggestion in the suggestions forum, you would see that I propose further restricting the ability to suicide spawn. Allowing players to "choose" their spawn position whether through normal means or via suicide has no place in DayZ in my opinion. Still, thanks for the post and good luck out there! Maybe we will run into each other sometime; I'll be the one who looks stupid so you should have no problem recognizing me.

Valid point, thanks. But I'm not sure it would be a major issue. Every time the spawn-camping boogeyman gets trotted out, as it was when rocket removed starting weapons from the game and everyone claimed the beaches were about to become a shooting gallery... it turns out not to really be a big problem. But, just in case, the player could instead be locked to a region or subset of spawn points, such as Kamenka west, Kamenka east & Kamorovo - or Solichniy, Three Valleys, Krutoy Cap. So you don't appear in precisely the same location each time, but you also can't "travel" very far either. You're right, but I would prefer not to encourage server-swapping. Still, I think there is a compromise as detailed above.

Monday: This game is too easy. There's no challenge. Zombies are irrelevant and can be ignored! Fix this! Tuesday: I'm so bored. Zombies are no challenge at all so the only thing I can do is PvP! This will ruin DayZ! Wednesday: Who said this was a zombie game? This game isn't about zombies! Zombies are just background noise! The game is a PvP deathmatch and that's all. PLEASE make zombies harder! Thursday: M1911 and Revolver were nerfed against zombies. It now takes more shots to kill them! This is FUCKING BULLSHIT! ...got to love internet forums.

It's not about making the game easier or harder. There are greater complexities at work than that. I hope we can at least agree that it's helpful to be able to accurately measure the effects that design changes have on the game? Surely you're not going to argue that point... 25,000 new players per day, every day. 5-10 deaths each just trying to learn the controls, another 10 learning zombie aggro, then another 48 hour's worth before they learn not to go near Cherno and Elektro? Then a few when they learn about the NWAF and go there trying to get lucky? I wouldn't be surprised if there are half-a-million or more deaths every day in the 10-20 minute range and another half-a-million in the 30-50 range. If you have one 80 hour (4800 minute) survival, it only takes 120 deaths at 10 minutes to drag the average right back to 49 minutes. So I don't know. You're welcome to your skepticism but I think it's unfounded. The 49 minute stat is not that unreasonable at all.

I think we already addressed why we "care" in this thread. The statistics are used to inform design decisions so we all benefit if they accurately represent the game and are not skewed by odd behavior patterns. But, yes, we need Vipeax or someone from the staff to comment on what the threshhold is for a death to be considered a respawn. I was under the impression it was 2 minutes, not 5 and certainly not 20... but I believe the post I saw that in was lost in the forum hack earlier this summer. I also know the algorithm for calculating life expectancy has undergone at least 2 major revisions in the past 5 months so my information might be out of date. Hopefully a bored dev passes through and enlightens us. :P

It is often camped. It's high value but high risk. My advice gets you off the coast ASAP and inland to less frequented areas. It might take you longer to find a weapon, but I have died many times at the airstrip or medical tents so unless I'm playing "throw away" style, I avoid that area.

It's another "cycle" so as long as it takes to go from dark red to flashing is the same amount of time it takes to go from flashing to deadly. 15 minutes sounds long to me, personally. I think it's closer to 10.

Use http://dayzdb.com/map. Look for medium value farm buildings or deer stands near you and away from major population centers. Like so:

It starts to matter when rocket looks to the stats to gauge the effectiveness of his changes and updates. As a game designer, stats are incredibly important. When you look at forum posts or read media reviews, you get a very thin slice and a skewed perspective. Stats on the other hand don't lie. They can be misinterpreted, but if you gather the correct stats and apply careful consideration and analysis, they can often tell you far more about what's going on in the game than any forum or article will. For instance, when rocket removed starting weapons everyone on the forums said "Newbies will be sitting ducks! They are going to be slaughtered by the thousands!" What really happened was that life expectancy rose steadily afterward - indicating that in fact many deaths were a result of newbies having starting weapons and murdering each other and disarming them made them focus more on their own survival and less on finding someone nearby to shoot. So the forums said one thing and the stats told another story. If rocket had listened to the forums, he would have added starting weapons back in immediately because every thread was up-in-arms about it. So, yeah. This isn't so much about what players care about as it is about making sure rocket and team are gathering useful statistics which they can analyze and interpret to inform their design decisions. If the stats are skewed or poisoned in some way, it will be more difficult to extract useful information and analysis.

The prisoner's dilemma assumes both participants have the same goal - to avoid jail time. In DayZ not everyone has the same goal. Some people want to gather equipment - others could care less about it. Some people value companionship and friends, others would rather be alone and still more like friends but have all they need and don't value more. Some people want to travel, others are happy remaining on the coast to witness the non-stop bloodbath. Some people want nothing more than to have a vehicle, others are perfectly happy on foot. Some people value murder above all else. That's okay too. In short, the prisoner's dilemma is overly simplistic and does not apply appropriately to a situation in which many people participate and each have their own personal set of values, goals and objectives. You cannot place static values on cooperation or betrayal - it's different for everyone. You can increase the inherent value of cooperation by introducing more cooperative mechanics or decrease the value of betrayal by introducing social functionality, but you cannot change how players personally weigh these things. For my part, I have all the friends I will ever need in the game already so no matter how many more cooperative mechanics get added, I'm still going to avoid or murder strangers I encounter because they pose a threat, however small, to my well-established system of trust and security. Still, interesting post and thanks.

Increase radius for direct comm (shouts) - but it alerts zombies. Add radios and broadcast towers. Add signal flags and more colored smoke grenades/flares to indicate intentions from a distance. Add more clothing customization options for squad identification. And a million other mechanics that would be a lot cooler than side chat. From the EverQuest West Commonlands to WoW's Barrens to Stormwind Trade Chat I have had enough of global chat channels spammed day-in day-out with ridiculous bullshit, racist trolls, rantings, ravings and general ass-hattery. I don't miss it in DayZ and I don't want it back.

Very unlikely the two items are related. There are operating system level protections for this kind of intrusion even if the app itself is not secure they can't just burrow into your machine through it. A recent steam update caused some problems, which it sounds like your friend encountered. It happened to me and I verified my game cache and Steam found 5 files corrupt and replaced them and the game worked fine after that. So that's what happened to your friend. The steam update - not a hacker. Which means whatever happened to you is probably unrelated to ARMA. It just so happened that you rebooted because of ARMA and that's when the issue cropped up. Random happenstance. At least until I see some corroborating evidence.

Okay, that's fine. But my critique still stands. I don't really care if it's there to document the pretty flowers you find in Chernarus - it shouldn't be magically and instantly shared across all other instances of the item in the game. Make it a stand-alone object and let players who find it inherit the information from previous owners, but it shouldn't just absorb information magically from the surroundings. This makes for a much more immersive experience. Imagine finding a notebook on a body that included hundreds of documented actions and now allowed you to identify the parties or objects involved? The very old journals would become some of the most powerful and sought-after objects in the game - no matter what information they contained. Friend, foe, points of interest like vehicle spawns, etc.

It is the recollections of dead travelers who instantly know the name of their murderer and who are somehow able to instantly share that informatoin across time and space with all other holders of this object? That's magic, brother. If an item like this were to exist, it would have to be stand-alone, meaning one instance of it exists on a player and he is able to record crimes he witnesses, but only if he survives to tell the tale. If he dies, he leaves the notebook behind and it can be picked up by another player and added to, but other players who find separate or new notebooks would find them blank and have to make their own. In this way it eliminates both forms of magic inherent in your system, and creates a much more realistic way to document crimes in the game. Players could play almost exclusively as journalists, documenting crimes without getting involved. You still have the problem of not knowing the person's name to contend with, but you can get around this with perhaps photography or a sketch of the assailant? What if I want to make a notebook full of false crimes, am I allowed? There is a problem with it, actually. I'm all for PvP and fully against artificial deterrents, but if the players themselves want to try and establish a system of law and order by systematically identifying criminals, then they should be given the tools to do so. rocket himself has said he wants players to either establish order or let the game devolve into a free-for-all frenzy. But if he wants to make those both equal possibilities, he must provide some tools to accomplish both. Right now we have a lot of tools to wreak havoc, but not many to establish order - because those are the more complicated mechanics like base building, squad identification and player classification. I will never support deterrents or punishments for PvP that are built into the game, but if rocket gives players tools and they use them to establish their own deterrents and their own system of punishments then he will have truly achieved something amazing (and unprecedented in the world of online PvP). Check my ideas & suggestions post for a post on identifying players.

So just continuing a locked thread then, as if it wasn't locked for a reason? That's always healthy.

If they choose shooting because it's easier, that implies they have weighed other, harder options. Which means they do stop to think about it. But, because they opt for the action that you arbitrarily decry, you denounce them as being thoughtless. Because they make a choice other than the one you would have made, they are a "problem," right? Every single one of your posts is the same arrogant tripe. You're way of playing the game is a sign of care and patience and intelligence and maturity and anyone else who doesn't enjoy the game in that way must obviously be a low-born peasant who is too weak to resist the urge to give into their baser and disgusting desires. You sell yourself as an "old school gamer" yet stand in unwaivering defense of the status quo that MMO's have only established in the last 15 years. The original multiplayer games, the MUDs of the early 90s, had far harsher penalties for death and loss in PvP. You could lose month's worth of equipment, week's worth of XP and hour's of travel time for one mistake. This was devestating. I've seen grown men cry over a death in one of these games. These game became niches, because most people just couldn't deal with the stress and emotion of that kind of loss. And THIS is why MMO's have restrictions on PvP. It has nothing to do with keeping the low-born rabble under control, as you imply, and everything to do with marketing games to an audience that wasn't willing to accept consequences for their failures. MMO marketing departments saw a population of players that weren't willing to match their wits & skills against other players and face the proverbial music if they came up the loser, so they took those parts out of the game. Even XP penalties and decaying corpses eventually went away. All you had to do was click a button and "Voila! Good as new." They wanted all the win with no lose. Give me gold and give me shiny items and give me a backpack full of awesome equipment and give me, give me, give me but if you dare for a moment think you can take anything away when I fuck up, I'm going to run off to the forums and scream until I'm blue in the face and tell all of my friends how awful and terrible your game is. It goes right along with the "everyone gets a trophy" generation. Which, again, is a recent phenomenon and not old school in the least. Nobody loses. There are no losers. Just "runners up." So maybe you don't get the best stuff, but we promise you will get stuff and nobody will ever be able to take it away from you and you can curl up with it at night and suck your thumb until you fall asleep on your giant pile of loot and items because that's all that matters. Now give us more money, chumps! Right, because the primary critique on the forums from people, including yourself, is that the PvE portions of the game are insufficiently interesting or compelling and that is why people choose to PvP instead, devolving the game into "nothing but a deathmatch." Yet, the stats show that participation in PvE makes for the vast majority of in-game interactions. No. Looking at those stats will tell us nothing but the story of Cherno and Elektro, where the vast majority of unintentional interactions occur. They say nothing of the many veteran players who choose to avoid contact with other players altogether which is a big part of the game. If people are playing to stay out of the way of other players and play their own game with their friends, again it is a contradiction to the claim that the game is an all-out deathmatch and everyone eventually devolves into human-hunting barbarism. So it would be convenient for you to exclude this population from your statistical analysis, but it would also be disingenuous to make claims about the state of PvP as it relates to the overall activity level in DayZ without considering their presence and numbers. Personally on my best survivor - 38 Days - I went for a ~14 day stretch without seeing another player. I would not be surprised to find that MOST people play the game this way - stick with friends, avoid strangers, survive and accomplish goals. Which seems to be exactly what people like you say you want. Yet, when the stats show that's exactly the case, you ignore them and claim doom anyway. Oh, Virfortis. You can always be counted on to fit some baseless commentary on the gamer class system into your posts. Once again you belong to the master race of gamers. I'm sure your life is completely angst-free, right? And here again you accuse them of being a "typical gamers" while you yourself sit in defense of a very, very typical model for PvP in online games. YOU are calling for a typical game, Virfortis. DayZ is atypical as it is, and far more old school in its approach to PvP mechanics than any recent online game. It goes back further than you, so instead of comparing it to the games from which it actually draws heritage and inspiration, you compare it to what you know.

I absolutely adored this post because it starts with accusing people of being narrow-minded, and then immediately goes on to explain how your personal subjective values on what parts of the game are enjoyable are inherently more valid than other people's. Aren't you the one being narrow-minded in that equation? You are the one passing judgement on them for the way to they choose to enjoy the game. Killing people in DayZ is fun. It just is. I don't see that as sad any more than saying that jumping on Goombas in Mario is fun or stabbing Darknuts in Zelda is fun. Except nobody made me feel guilty about killing them. Ooo! But, no! That part of the game is arbitrarily forbidden. If you go there, you're lesser than everyone else. You're a "fun ruiner" and a "griefer" and you're "ruining DayZ" and you're responsible for the inevitable downfall of all that is pure and glorious and amazing about the game. It's comical. "There is so much to do in DayZ," you say, "but make sure to choose the right activities, or you're an asshole!"

Not all of us do. But, even if we did, why would that be "sad?" To the OP: The game is what you make it. Do what seems interesting. If nothing seems interesting right now, take a break and come back in 3-6 months when the game has more mechanics and features. My personal suggestion is to build a community of like-minded players who are interested in the game and willing to stick with it long term. No matter what rocket adds to the game I can guarantee that the most valuable item in the game will remain a group of trusted friends. And finding partners in DayZ is a bit more difficult than other games, because you not only have to find someone you trust who shares your play habits and times roughly, but it has to be someone who chooses to play the game in the way that you do. Most games make that simple by making sure there's only one "right" way to play so everyone has the same goals and motivations. But in DayZ you might find that even your real life friends don't quite get the same pleasure as you do out of the same activities in DayZ. Good luck out there.

http://dayzmod.com/f...5-zedsdeadbaby/ Banditry and murder rates are at an all-time low right now, and trends indicate they are falling. 17% of players are bandits. Not 40%, not 60% and sure as holy fuck not 99%. Let me guess, your experiences in the game are mostly centered around Cherno and Elektro? Your brilliant analysis based upon the last 10 spawns where you sprinted headlong into the middle of Cherno with 15 zombies on your ass and ran into the fire station hoping to get lucky and find an AK but instead found a winchester slug in the face? The fact is you're probably the one playing the game like CoD. Run-and-gun and hope to gear up as quickly as you can. Well, sorry. That's not going to work. Get off the coast, get your head down and shut your mouth and the game will stop feeling like CoD and start feeling like DayZ again. It's that simple, really. Ethics are largely cultural. And culture is pretty much fucked at the moment. The moral correctness of things like rape, human sacrifice, infanticide, slavery, kidnapping, child abuse, etc. have all changed a great deal over time and between cultures. One can assume that when all of civilization falls apart and ceases to function, things might change a little bit too.

Except we actually have data that supports rising temperatures, decreased surface ice and increased melts, etc. and therefore we can predict an eventual rise in sea levels. Your analysis would be the equivalent of doing studies and finding a decreasing temperature trend, increasing surface ice, decreasing melts and saying "Yeah, yeah but we think it's going to get hot anyway so just trust us, okay?" You are correct about the point of prediction, but your predictions are supposed to be based on data and analysis of that data, not on unsupported speculation and gut-level guesswork. And I already refuted that point. The population of DayZ didn't "suddenly double." It has been rising dramatically for months. If experienced players were inevitably going to become bandits, we would by now be seeing the increase you predict. But, we're not. So until we do I don't think anyone has any reason to buy into your analysis or predictions unless they just happen to want to join you in a fun little guessing game and hope they're right. But that's not statistical analysis and educated prediction, it's just guessing and you don't need fancy charts and graphs and data to do that. You can just guess whenever you want. I plan to update this thread every week with actual data, and if the % of bandits and death-by-PvP is again lower next week than it was this week I think you're going to have to try really hard to convince anyone that some day soon that trend is just going to magically reverse the game is going to collapse in upon itself in a frenzy of unmitigated banditry.

Helicopter crashes have the best loot and they are scattered all over the map and randomized so they can't be camped. But, you have to go searching for those which is hard and takes work so I can understand why you want to take the easy way out and have some perfectly safe, static and stationary place you can run to and be guaranteed a cache of the "best" gear in the game. Except that's not going to happen. It's the best stuff, why should it be easy? Search for choppers or fight for your gear at the airfield/Stary. It's kind of a well-balanced risk/reward scenario as it is.

Condemning rocket and threatening to drop support for the mod because of the current hacker situation is kind of like kicking your doctor in the balls because he can't cure your cancer. It's like, yeah it's his job to keep you healthy but he's doing the best he can and cancer is a real bitch, you know? Be patient. No pun intended.

Wow. Umm. No.

Can you link to the interview in question? Because I'm pretty sure what he said is that DayZ might go stand-alone by the end of the year, not that it would be released as a stand-alone by the end of the year. Which is to say DayZ would probably still be in Alpha, but would be running on its own engine. My prediction is ARMA 3 and the timing seems about right since DayZ would go stand-alone about the same time ARMA 3 would be hitting Beta before its 2013 release. Anyway long story short "going stand-alone" just means getting started with a stand-alone engine. It doesn't mean the game will be out and available for sale by the end of the year.

Most people would take away a valuable lesson: don't assume because a guy falls down that he's dead. Put another bullet in his face when you run up. You are not most people.