Don't want to be a soft target? Get hard.

Yeah! Too right. Spending a couple minutes writing an SQL query and connecting with the player community is going to totally derail the entire development process. Get your head in the game, guys! :rolleyes:

The irony is empty servers are actually far more dangerous for server-hoppers. Why? Because those are the servers that server-hoppers choose and they end up killing each other.

When these knobs are done we're going to be left punching each other. Except they will complain right hands are overpowered and "something must be done!" Eventually we will be left with this:

Those are not counted. Holy motherfuck I have to say this 500 times a day. If you "tried" linking up with people in the "past" then you didn't succeed? Why are you no longer linked? Why is it in the past? One death broke up your group? You can meet up with each other again. You realize that, right? Every time a bandit kills me, one of my friends drives a motorcycle down to the coast and picks me up! Make more friends. And keep them.

If you witness someone murder someone else unprovoked, you can be relatively sure. I would kindly invite you to post here or here if you're interested in supporting ideas that would allow you to "remember" players you have witnessed commiting criminal acts or acts of unprovoked violence - and here for a way to further identify friends ands squad mates with visual accessories. The bandit skin was broken; you need only search the forums and read the related threads to understand why. I do not want to have the conversation again. But the core notion is sound - help players identify friends and enemies. We just have to find a more authentic, reliable and immersive way to do it. I think my idea does just that.

...what problem?

18.3% of players are Bandits. 16.7% of deaths are from PvP. Please, please, please if you want to have a civil discussion stop saying things that are proven inarguably false by the stats on the front of this very fucking website. You guys say everyone plays this way, yet two of you in this thread just admitted you do not. You think you're the only ones? You and you alone choose to play the way you do? Have you made any attempt to link up with like-minded individuals here on the forums or elsewhere? Because I have, and successfully so. Many others, as well. The gallery on this forum, Youtube, twitter, twtich, etc. are full of stories and videos depicting interesting cooperative play. It's really difficult to engage you guys in a discussion about the issues facing the game when you can't even speak about them realistically and demonstrate no efforts to work through them in a reasonable way as others have shown is perfectly possible. As to you, heretic, I'm still waiting for you to address my question: if your idea is just about increasing the atmospheric effects and horror elements of the game, why not apply it equally to everyone instead of using it to punish player kills? It is certainly "realistic" given the horrors and stress we all face every day in the game. I really genuinely want you to address this question. I'll continue to ask it as long as you continue to ignore it.

If the LE is powerful, reliable and plentiful then my suggestion is to take advantage of that fact.

Closer to loot = closer to death. The better and more abundant the loot, the more frequent the death. It's a pretty simple formula.

Without the threat of death, survival is not an accomplishment. When the threat of death comes from a scripted AI, people feel comfortable. It's within their realm of experience for the genre of games that normally house zombies - survival horror, action adventure, cooperative FPS, etc. Scripted AI, even the most sophisticated, can be easily studied and overcome in no time - especially by teams. You take the experience of Left 4 Dead. It's quite challenging at first, but once you get the pattern down and learn the zombie types, you drink a few beers with friends and walk through the game unscathed. High-fives all around at the end and then it's on to the next game. Challenge overcome. When the threat of death instead comes from unscripted human intelligence - suddenly it can't be so easily predicted and overcome. You don't know when and where the threat will emerge and you have no idea what actions any given player will take in response to yours. Combat is dynamic, outcomes uncertain, and even the most skilled and veteran players are at the mercy of happenstance. You cannot "beat" the human enemy the way you can a scripted enemy. And, this, frankly makes people uncomfortable. rocket realized this before DayZ was even a twinkle in our eye. He recognized that the zombie genre, thus far, has been all about line-up-and-shoot. From Resident Evil to Left 4 Dead to Dead Island to Dead Rising to Killing Floor to CoD: Zombies it's the same formula. Zombies are dumb but there's lots of them so bang-bang motherfuckers! Well, okay, that's fun - but it's been done. A lot. DayZ is something new. It has broken convention in so many ways, and that has people riled up in a lot of different ways. I think DayZ will thrive precisely because rocket is sticking to his guns and not bowing to calls to return DayZ to the status quo and bring it back in line with all of your expectations for a game that's exclusively focused on zombie survival. The human element is so critical - including the worst of the worst and the best of the best - to the experience that any shift away from it is in my opinion a misstep. Zombies are a thematic backdrop against which you are meant to involve yourself in a story with and about other players. It is very clear that this is working. Every day on these forums, reddit and Youtube new videos pop up of interesting experiences involving random strangers in the game. And why are these experiences worthy of reddit posts or forum posts or Youtube videos? Because they are special. Because they don't happen all the time. Because they arise from a pile of steaming shit, piss and blood and stand in contrast. If every random encounter in the game resulted in a salute-and-loot then it would cease to be special. Making friends in the game feels amazing and emotionally touching right now precisely because it is not the normal outcome you expect. If 9 times in 10 you avoid someone or get shot at, then that 10th time when you do make a friend you're going to remember it for a long time to come. "I met a guy and we worked together" is pretty goddamn boring if that happens 30 times a day. But, if it happens once a week? Once a month? Now that's something to write home about. Anyway, long story short - relax and enjoy the ride guys.

Okay, there are two parts to this discussion and these threads always get them mixed up. First, you can sit around all day and wax pseudo-philosophically on what would actually happen if such an infection were to spread. It is of course disingenuious of you to ask for "proof" of anything. Any such discussion is inherently speculative. You may feel you have more basis for your speculated outcomes than others, but please lets not talk in absolutes - proof, truth, fact, reality, etc. these words mean nothing when you're talking about a theoretical future and an event such as that depicted in DayZ. Second, you can have a practical discussion about game design and mechanics and whether the presence of unrestricted murder in the game is a boon or a detriment to the overall experience. But, don't mix these two up. Just because you feel strongly that DayZ may not 100% accurately recreate what might happen does not mean you have identified a flaw in the game design. One need not justify their actions in the game on the basis that "this is how it would really be." You run into all sorts of pitfalls if you start to claim that DayZ's goal should be to emulate reality as closely as possible. For instance, we have killed 128,461,093 zombies so far. That's almost the entire population of modern day Russia. Even when you account for the number of servers, we would be running out of zombies eventually. Also, once all the guns are gone, nobody gets anymore guns. Everyone else has to fight with their hands. I'm sure you see where this is going... I could go on for 3 pages with things that would break immediately in the game if they were turned from game mechanics into reality simulators. Every one of these threads mucks these two concepts up and the conversation is unproductive and circular as a result.

Yes. People who use the word "homo" are well known for their professionalism. I'm sure your private hive cluster isn't going to be full of people just like you. Cluster indeed. Cluster fuck. Have fun and good riddance.

Just another upstanding admin feeling oppressed by all the big bad rules... Instant kicks for anyone not in his circle of friends. Please investigate at your leisure.

Averages do not work that way... Respawns are not included. Vipeax has confirmed on multiple occasions.

That makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. If it was a cash grab, why would they even bother implementing or trying to enforce these rules? How would that help in their efforts to make money? "Gee guys, lets make some quick cash! Yeah, and in the process we should implement a bunch of rules and spend our time trying to enforce them just to pass the time we could be spending doing other things!" "Yeah! Brilliant!" Holy shit you people are fucking delusional. rocket could have easily made $4MM in his personal name via kickstarter if wanted. The money would still be coming in today. But he refused to. Cash grab my hairy asshole.

Uhh, yeah. I did. Which is the evidence that plenty of new servers are coming online since the number of players and players per 24h has gone up every day for a month. 92,000 new players in the past 4 days, and we still have empty servers. Exactly why the ones that get shut down because the server owners can't ban people for stealing their vehicles anymore won't be missed. Just go away quietly if you want to shut your server down. You're not that important.

Oh, surprise finding you here. Please begin the tirades of obscenely insulting posts lacking paragraphs and punctuation. Just the sort of people these "asshole devs" should be giving more power to... Laughable.

If server admins would stick to kicking and banning hackers we would be fine. Unfortunately most of them take to kicking whoever the fuck they want and banning people for arbitrary bullshit. Go try to join US380 right this very second and see what I mean. Why should the devs give more leeway when people can't even follow the fucking rules already?

Seems like plenty of people are more than happy to follow the rather simple rules and provide stable test environments. You're not. That's okay. Two new servers came online in the time it took you to write this.

Go try to join US380 right now and tell me server owners need more power...

Careful, heretic, if that horse gets any higher you're going to run low on oxygen all the way up there. Your suggestion is a wolf in sheep's clothing and you're doing your best to keep the disguise on but it's not working. Nobody misunderstood your idea, we just saw it for what it really was. No amount of semantic dancing makes it anything but a direct detriment applied to players who kill other players. You say "Whether they killed in self defense or were the aggressor." but you know as well as anyone that players who choose to play specifically to PvP are going to end up with more kills more often and therefore be more subject to your distractions, which as I discussed have real and concrete in-game consequences for strategy, preparation, planning, awareness, etc. I've tried to remain civil, yet firm but now you're actually starting to piss me off. The details of your idea are plain as fucking day, dude. You wrote them up yourself. More killing = more chances for distraction. You are punishing killers. You fall back on this claim that you are just interested in "atmosphere" and "scary stuff" but you conveniently fail to address my question as to why this wouldn't apply to Survivors and non-killers as well? If you just want more spooky/scary stuff, then drop the "more kills more chances" bullshit and just talk about a sanity system that applies to everyone in the game. I addressed pages ago the reasons why survivors and murderers alike would be prone to psychotic breaks in Chernarus. Just because the people YOU murder are infected with a disease doesn't make you a walking fucking saint, dude. You're still slaughtering hundreds of humans. So you need to get down off your high horse in-game as well. Imagine that. Stop acting like you're being persecuted by some kind of forum mob. You're being called out because you're being semantically deceptive. You are proposing a punishment for PvP and doing everything in your fucking power to claim that's not what you're doing and it's getting silly. Just stop.

My experience has been different. Of course both of our experiences are anecdotal and subjective so I'm not claiming either as fact. But, I personally have witnessed some pretty suspect behavior. Clans that auto-kick on server join if you're not a member ([TAG] anyone?). Admins pushing players out to make room for friends or clan members. Unannounced "crashes" in order to exploit item duplication bugs en masse. "Connection lost" at incredibly convenient moments as the tide of battle turns. Bans for murder or theft. "No PK" servers. "Travel" servers. At quick glance right now there are at least ~100 servers that are currently password locked. Many with 5+ players online. And what's the trade off? Besides hunting for hackers (which, again, by the time you parse through the logs and find them the damage is long since past) what powers do you feel Admins simply have a right to wield over players on their servers? Because try as I might I really don't see why you should ever have a reason to do anything but restart, or justified kicks/bans.

That's pretty much exactly what they should be focusing on. I don't think it's any mystery that ARMA3 is DayZ's ultimate destination. ARMA2 and Chernarus are a placeholder environment for the concept and pre-alpha/prototype phase. And funding from ARMA2 feeds into ARMA3 and DayZ proper. I'm not sure if you're saying this is a bad thing? Because it seems like a really smart way to handle it, the only logical course of action, and an excellent way to springboard DayZ development on a relatively modern engine to which it is already intimately related.

When 15% of Admins use their power to do that, and the other 85% use it to kick anyone who isn't in their clan, or who tries to steal their vehicles, or raid their camp, or just happens to kill someone they like, then, yes, cumulatively that's bad for the player base as a whole. Maybe it's not quite as severe. But even if only 25% of Admins (I feel that's low) are using their powers unscrupulously that still has a massive impact on the game. Not to sound dramatic, but apart from hackers, rogue Admins are the greatest threat to DayZ at the moment. A few are dedicated, motivated and professional individuals out to contribute to the advancement of the mod but many, many are a consortium of children who pool 5-10 bucks apiece every month for the privilege of taking advantage of the power that gives them over other people. I've said already I appreciate your dedication to hack prevention, but that in the grand scheme of things you're basically spitting on a bonfire. By the time you know someone is a hacker, the damage is done and by the time you ban them they're off on another server anyway and by the time BattleEye gets around to banning them the next 5-10 people are lining up to take their place. Hacking is a problem that is going to have to be dealt with wholesale, most likely when DayZ makes the jump to a new engine and branches off into it's own stand-alone product in which case they will have access to all client and server code, not just the mod, and be able to deal with the issue in a broader, more comprehensive way. It's not going to be stopped by some grassroots effort to IP ban then 1-by-1. It is a dynamic demographic, made up of people who have either quit playing DayZ or quit playing ARMA and don't care about their CDKEY anymore, or those who are capable of finding other ways to acquire CDKEYs. The very small percentage of Admins who have the time and dedication to do what you do, while noble and laudable, are not going to make a difference across thousands of servers and 700k players. Oh, god. Because if DayZ turns into an abysmal failure they won't turn around and fire him. How do you think the world works? Like, okay, he's hired now he's set for life? They hired him to do a fucking job. That job is DayZ.