Brew78

I got killed around 9 EST after hearing a couple booms I hadn't heard before. Figured it was a shotgun or maybe a grenade. When I respawned (was in the same area), well... http://steamcommunity.com/id/Brew78/screenshot/957263205410299064?filter=app_33930 Not sure if its just a graphical glitch, but several spawns later and even switching servers for a couple hours, the forest was still on fire when I came back. Could be nothing, maybe the server logs will show something, I dunno. *shrug*

I don't care if you like music, keep it low. I don't care if the gunshots and zombie growls are too loud for your situation, wear headphones. You need to PAY ATTENTION to the environment and listen for what sounds like footsteps that aren't your own. On top of that, turning around to check your 6 every now and then wouldn't hurt either. Quick CSB: I've been murdered 100% of the time I've ever gone to the Factory, so I tend to stay away. I spawned there last night so said what the hell, gonna be careful, gonna KOS anyone I see. There is no loot of any kind other than car parts and ammo. And a toolbox. Which I took. I'd found a hatchet in a house just outside town, so at least I wasn't completely defenseless. Taking it as a loss, I started inland toward the long barn. There's a dead survivor. Not a whole lot on him, but I got a bandage and painkillers so RIP "name unknown who died of unknown causes". Getting closer to the barn, I start seeing dead zombies. I get stealthier. I enter the rightmost door facing the barn, and there's no loot here either. I look to the left and there's a guy in a gillie suit with a hatchet looking at something, maybe a loot pile. I crouch-run towards him. The FULL LENGTH of the barn. He never once looked back. He turned around to look at what was on the other side of the barn door, then crouch walked outside. I'm still crouch-running toward him. As soon as he was out of sight, I Gump'ed it the remaining few meters to the door and switched back to crouch run. He was still slowly crouch walking back towards town and still never looked back. I got close enough that he saw my shadow and turned around just in time to take an axe to the face. He swung back and we had a hatchet battle. He took out a pistol and started firing, but it was too late, he went down for the count. I got a Czech backpack, lots of raw meat, a Makarov (with <1 mag), compass, hunting knife, food and soda. He had a toolbox too, but I already had one. Couldn't get the suit but.. *shrug* The moral of the story is, if he'd turned around ONCE in the ample amount of time he had available to do so, he could have said over VOIP "Oh, hai, let's team up" to which I probably would have agreed (even not knowing if he'd murdered the survivor I came across), or he could have drawn and fired and there would have been nowhere for me to run except back down the long narrow barn. Situational Awareness. Keep an ear out and turn around once in awhile!

You're right, I forgot about those. There's usually a box behind the hospital near a ladder to the roof, and there's usually a box or two on the roof as well. The last box on the ground out back that I looted didn't have a whole lot in it, though. I think a stack of bandages, a blood bag, and an epi pen. Don't remember if there was any morphine.... Either way, yeah - if you make it to the hospital and are unarmed you can still check those two boxes. And if there's no one ON the roof, you may survive!

Its a bummer when you break your leg before getting a weapon because you'll just stare through the hospital glass, after having crawled all the way there. In general though, if you break your leg anywhere other than a city with a hospital, and if you don't have any interesting inventory you'd miss, its honestly worth just hitting "Respawn" from the menu and dying. Its bad enough needing to crawl everywhere defenseless while looking for a weapon, its even worse when you can't even get up to run if you're spotted. But... if you DO get into the hospital ground floor, be aware that the loot is in the boxes, not regular looking loot piles. Sometimes there's empty cans and crap around the boxes that you need to pick up and move before being able to get access to the box contents.

I actually found myself with some tunnel vision myself last night. Going through barns I kept reminding myself to look around and not take my solitude for granted.

I would like to add that I am *very* happy that broken legs are being looked at. Granted, there are enough glitches that leg breaks are a big problem even *without* zombies, but its a step in the right direction. I had some spare time so I played a straight 5-6 hours last night and broke my legs at least once per hour. Come to think of it, zombies were involved in most of them, but I wasn't always even being punched. Like... Ok, in Cherno, in the Town Hall, trying to go down the main stairwell, there's a zombie ambling after me from behind. Of course the stairwell is a mangled mess of crisscrossed barbed wire. I hit "V" to try to get over some of it, see if I can navigate it at all, *CRACK*, broken leg. The noise actually aggroed other zombies on the ground floor that sprinted clear into the stairwell and started punching me in the face. I crawled back up the stairs but got knocked unconscious and the upstairs zombie finally caught up. Sometimes I was being punched. Like, Elektro firestation, again trying to V over a fence to get into the stairwell (not even onto the staircase), V V V V V V, can't get over it, get punched from behind, *CRACK* knockout punch + broken leg. One of my many respawns was by the southwest airfield. OK, gonna check out the four tree stands and medical tents. I crouch run up to the area, drop to prone, crawl around to the break in the sandbags on the road side, a zombie inside the penned area sees me through the sandbags and barbed wire (I was hugging them as close as I could), ran up and punched and *CRACK*, broken leg FROM FULL 12000 HEALTH! I break my leg so often and under such ridiculous circumstances, that my group (guild/squad/whatever its called in this game) has started using my handle as an actionable verb - its actually gone past a simple running gag. Example, one might hear over voice comms, "Dammit, that drop was higher than I thought, anyone got any morphine? I Brew'ed my leg." I wish morphine injectors were stackable. I need to keep so many on me that I don't have much room left for weapons or loot.

I dunno. People talk about average chance to spawn a weapon or get knocked out or get a bone broken. And I guess I just lucked out as the guy at the bottom of the data pool used to calculate those averages. http://www.despair.com/potential.html

Excellent, thanks for the tip. I'd heard that toolboxes could be used to remove barbed wire, but didn't know to aim for the poles. And now that I have a toolbox for the first time, I can actually try! My very last spawn, in fact, lost his life to a fence he couldn't vault over. It was in a stairwell and the zombies caught up and broke his leg + knockout on the very first punch.

I'm not talking about being able to cover yourself solo 100% of the time. Of course you're going to be killed while in inventory from time to time. My first murder was when I was in inventory. What I *AM* saying is that while you're out and about, ESPECIALLY in a city where there's a higher likelihood of running into other players, you should turn around from time to time to look behind you. This guy completely failed to be aware of his environment and forfeited multiple opportunities to know I was crouch-running straight towards him for dozens of meters, so I'm using his story to perhaps enlighten some newbs as to a survival tactic that may keep them alive a bit longer. Speaking of which, another tip is that the Alt key is your friend. Whenever you're moving from point A to point B, hold this key down and sweep from side to side to look over your shoulder while still moving forward.

Stylin'? Profilin'?

Why' date=' yes. Yes I am. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. That is the total number of guns I've found since patch [b']1.7.1 was released, which was how many weeks ago now? I'm not talking about one night of play, here. When I say "dozens of spawns" and "hundreds of looted structures", I am not exaggerating in any way.

Having played quite a bit more, I still say that weapon spawns are way too few and far in between. After several hours of play, dozens of respawns, and hundreds of looted structures, I've found the following: * 2 empty Makarovs. The first never got used, as all exits were covered by zombies and I was eaten. The second I'm currently carrying. * G17 with two mags * M9 with two mags * AK with two mags (was in same stairwell as the M9, luckiest loot I've had in this game yet!) * Two double-barrel shotguns - shells are everywhere. One replaced by the AK, the other lost upon respawn when I got sick of crawling after a broken leg from a 9500+ health zombie punch (glad this is being addressed in the next patch!) * Two Enfields. One unfired, the other currently carried and as of yet unfired. That's it. Nine guns all-told, with two being more or less useless (Enfields) and only five being useable upon pickup. And its not like I haven't looked either, I'm talking Town Halls, Fire Stations, Airstrip Hangars, Military Barracks, Deer Stands, and an endless assortment of barns, houses, and warehouses. I can not overstate this enough - spawning with not even a melee weapon does NOT make this game more interesting or tense or nerve wracking or scary or nail biting, it makes it tedious. Zombie aggro can still be tough to shake sometimes (running through a house with two doors doesn't always work) and it seems like even handguns aggro everything in town like Enfields do, but all in all its WAY easier to manage than in prior patches. Once the sound-through-walls bug is fixed (in 1.7.2 according to the notes), it should be additionally improved. Way too many watches. Not enough Compass. Or Maps. I've found ONE compass so far, and my very first map last night. Still never found a vehicle other than a bicycle but I think I'm not alone on that one. They're *supposed* to be rare, right? Some people are nice, most are dicks, had a nice random teammate last night, we got out of Elektro with some weapons and backpacks even as someone was taking rifle shots at us. We were gonna blood bag it up since I had a bunch on me but then I remembered that I didn't have any anymore. When I picked up the new backpack, my old one fell through the floor or despawned and all the medical supplies went with it. And we weren't about to return to the hospital with someone actively tracking and taking shots at us. I will say that running zig zag up the hill with puffs of dirt kicking up at our feet was the most entertainment I've had in this game for awhile. I believe over direct VOIP I may have quoted Caboose, "Run-ning run-ning run-ning run-ning!" I do look forward to the next patch to see how the reduced zombie leg damage and ability to hear perfectly through walls will play out. But the tedium of spawning weaponless (forced stealth and needing to sprint away on any error, not to mention being picked off for fun by people with weapons who know you can't shoot back) and the ridiculously low weapon spawns do need to be addressed IMO.

I've had two people so far come up to me and call me by my character's name, but I'm not sure how they knew it. I never see name popups on other people when they talk, and I haven't seen a HUD/name in a very long time (server setting?) Switching channels between direct/group doesn't seem to make a difference either. Anyway, I'd like to know how to find the name of someone you come across, and how someone might know your name when you haven't said anything or given them any indication.

Hmm, might have to try the mousewheel thing. I was able to see the name when inspecting a corpse, maybe that's what they did? That's in the mousewheel menu, now that I think about it.

Also, agreed 100% - take the time to get the patch to how you like it before releasing!

At this point, I'm not sure if the leg breaking issue is due to zombie damage, or a problem with the leg break code itself. Saw this comic recently and I literally laughed out loud, this has happened to me WAY too many times: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0vGmgptH7yc/T-VXANTfjMI/AAAAAAAAAZA/sOswHisnPJw/s1600/fall_damage.png Not sure if its related to the invisible nails sticking up out of the house floors, but some houses I can NOT crawl through without springing constant leaks and needing to bandage.

Best find I ever had in this game was last Thursday, I think.. when I was last able to play, anyway. Lots of stuff happened, I met up with some friends, got eaten by a zombie after multiple leg breakages, respawned near Elektro and said what the hell, gonna take a tour. Found some random crap including lots of soda, can or two of food, and a compass. And of course an endless supply of random ammo for guns I didn't have. Before leaving town, figured I'd give the fire station one last check in case anything else spawned in the past few minutes. Nothing on the ground floor except some random ammo. I go up the stairwell. Sweet, M9 on the first landing! Keep going up. Sweet, AK! Keep going up. Backpack too!? Well, it was the same Coyote pack you spawn with so I just left it. I like to think there was a Czech or ALICE there and someone had recently swapped them, but narrowly missed the weapon spawns.

Well, I guess my thread got taken in the forum rollback so I'm not sure if anyone saw it, loved it, or even told me I'm a flaming idiot. Either way, don't want to post the whole thing again. The jist of it was that in an open sandbox world like this, there's a whole lot of potential RP, especially if forming squads and not just murdering everyone you see will be encouraged in future updates as stated by Rocket. So my thoughts revolved around three main things. 1) Ability to holster pistols. Two strangers meeting will potentially be substantially less hostile if they're not pointing guns at each other. It will also be a way to show submission if a robber got the drop on someone and has a gun pointed at them at close range. If the local/direct VOIP ever starts working properly (instead of that hideously annoying echo/stutter loop) then you could actually say "drop it!" to someone you snuck up on. 2) Ability to show submission. This could be a hotkey to drop or throw the currently selected weapon. It could be a "raise hands" emote that holsters weapon and is a toggle that needs to be unset before re-arming. 3) Improved ability to drop cargo. There's no question the inventory system is.... unique in this game. The ability to dump cargo with a "drop all" gear menu button might make it less likely that the guy pointing a gun at you will just pull the trigger and loot you anyway. Or maybe a hotkey or mousewheel option for use while running might be enough to get someone (or a group) off your back if you're being pursued and don't want to fight or deal with the crouch-and-fiddle-with-gear-menu inventory system. Perhaps a "dump random item" mousewheel option that would drop a single item while you're running. Or more options to categorize, like "dump a can" or "dump a magazine". ------------------ So, this train of thought is to try to encourage more non-murder crime. I mean, sure, the demographic that kills on sight for the sake of killing on sight will continue to do so. Those that kill on sight for the sake of looting will probably still do so. But maybe they won't. Those that enjoy a little RP in their sandbox might get a bit of enjoyment over actually robbing someone, especially in an organized gang. And those who are going for the only score there is in this game (number of days alive), or really don't want to spend the next half hour trying to run back to where their tent is or to join friends they were trying to find in the first place, they'll probably enjoy the opportunity to not take a bullet to the head and at the very least keep their location. A chance to retreat, even disarmed, may still be better than starting over. I'm not claiming this will "fix" anything, it just provides more tools to the players to use or not use.

Spent a few hours last night on .1.5 and having had a night to think on it, I got a combined feedback and bug report post. Its kind of a mental dump, so not in a specific order. Don't want to spend forever editing it since I'm already wasting time at work as it is :D FEEDBACK = Opinion BUG = Pretty sure its not supposed to work this way REPORT = Not sure if this is intended or a limitation of the game engine or if you even care about it but I'm bringing it up anyway 1) FEEDBACK: Zombie aggro is MUCH better now. Its still not perfect (occasional aggros through walls while not making noise, etc) but I didn't feel nearly as helpless as before. And I'm not talking about the "omg this is a great scary movie" helpless, I'm talking about a "WTF, this game is bugged" kind of helpless. The bad kind. So very nice on that one. 2) BUG: Zombies still interact through walls. Like I said, I've gotten aggro through a wall while laying prone. I was right next to the wall, so perhaps the zombie was within range of some kind of auto-detect aggro thing? Maybe I'd clipped through the wall a bit? Either way, he not only aggro'ed on me but started attacking and landing blows through the wall. On that same note, I was trying to lose some zombies in a house and was hiding in a corner of an upstairs room as the zombies were coming upstairs. Some of them started attacking me through the stairwell wall. Again, was I the one clipping through? 3) BUG: Players can interact through walls, too! Not sure if this was always there, but I was climbing the stairwell of the Elektro firehouse and noticed an up/down arrow (forget which). Not sure what it was for, I middle-clicked and went through the "mounting ladder" animation, after which I warped outside and was on the ladder out there. 4) REPORT: Door triggers seem to have a radius type range that doesn't take terrain into account. Again, at the firehouse, took me awhile to figure out what door I was opening and closing from either on the roof or in the stairwell, but it was one of the main firehouse bay doors. I've noticed that doors can be triggered from everywhere in the past, but this was the first time I've been able to actuate them from obviously impossible places. 5) REPORT - Zombie behavior is still kind of glitchy inside buildings but I'm not sure if its intended or not. Specifically, they sometimes alternate between slow walks and sprinting. In .1.4 I noticed a LOT of zombies that were running full-tilt the entire time they were inside buildings, but in .1.5 its much more back to them walking indoors. They just sprint between walk points from time to time now. 6) FEEDBACK: Knockout time should be nerfed I'd attracted some attention and had run inside a house to manage slower zombies, but had found a hatchet (needing to reload still makes me chuckle) and was confident I could take them since I was still almost full health. I kind of wish I'd FRAP'ed it, and maybe I'll start doing that.. memory colors things in the shade of how you were feeling so I'm not sure how accurate my numbers are, but I'm trying to be objective here.. Either way, I'd killed most of the zombies and had one or two more after me. I'm pretty sure only one was indoors, the other was still running around outside, trying to figure out where the door was. I don't know what my health was, but I know it was over 8000 at this point. I was probably bleeding. This one zombie gave me a knockout punch, and when the hourglass came up, it was not moving. Or more accurately, it was moving extremely slowly. Figuring 500 damage per punch and 100 bleed damage per tick, with what, 2 seconds per tick? That's 300 damage per second, or 26 seconds to death. That knockout timer was not even close to the halfway mark yet. Maybe a little over a third? Seriously, there's no need for that. 7) FEEDBACK: Assume survivors did in fact drink their milk I'm noticing a WAAAAY higher incidence of broken bones as of late. Its getting kind of ridiculous. I'd suggest tweaking the math a bit so that broken bones only happen via punches at a lower blood level than now, and at a MUCH lower rate, like maybe 1/4 or less of the current chance. Given the scarcity of morphine these days and that you no longer spawn with it, even if you survive an encounter with a zombie, you're stuck crawling everywhere. And this is a BIG map. Even sprinting from point A to point B can take hours if you don't know exactly where you are and the exact shortest path. Crawling makes this game cripplingly boring. And if you've actually found a gun and can finally play the game instead of playing this alternate Thief/Hitman stealth minigame, its not the kind of boring where you say "I'll just suicide and respawn so I can start this grand adventure again!". Its the kind of boring where you log out and don't log back in until a friend lets you know they have morphine and are in the area. 8) FEEDBACK: Spawn with a morphine (or a splint!) Given that you spawn disarmed and can't fight back against any zombie you do aggro, even IF the math is changed as suggested in #7, a new spawn shouldn't be forced to automatically suicide just to have a play experience that's actually worth playing. Maybe they found a nice backpack, or a map and compass, just not a gun. One chance to get back on your feet isn't too much to ask. IMO, not having it is too much to ask. 9) REPORT/FEEDBACK: Zombie run behavior is kind of erratic - is their run speed too high? They sprint in random directions, zig-zag toward you, teleport in front of and behind you.. They're basically impossible to hit, since you never know where they actually *are* (as far as client vs server goes). I'm not sure if this is a server lag issue or what, but maybe cutting their run speed would make them behave more smoothly? Would make losing them a little easier too. Given that they can teleport right up to you, I've had zombies on me that I literally couldn't shake. Took aggro near a deer stand recently, ran up hills, down hills, around trees, through thick patches of pine trees, around fences, just couldn't lose the thing. Eventually got it off me for a sec when it glitched on another deer stand's ladder, but as soon as it broke free it was right back on me again. Come to think of it, zombies seem to currently run FASTER than humans at full-tilt. I'm talking "C" mode, sprinting. They can always catch up no matter what, and looking over my shoulder it looks like they drop off a bit when they take swings at you. The swings generally miss, but they're always right back on your tail. When they don't miss, seems like they quite often break your leg - which is even worse when you're bleeding and can't stop to bandage because you can't shake him! 10) FEEDBACK: Increase gun spawns In my dozens of respawns since 1.7.1.x, I've found exactly three guns. First was an unloaded Makarov in the air control tower by the airfield. I was eaten shortly thereafter, since zombies saw me and covered every exit, climbing up stairs and up the ladder. Second was a G17 with two mags that I just found last night at the Elektro fire house. Third was an Enfield I found in a random house in a random town north and west of Elektro. This one I will not fire unless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY because as we all know, this gun's on the edge of not being even worth having. A hatchet is more useful than the Enfield. On the other hand, I've found more ammo than I know what to do with. Not ammo for the G17, mind you. I have MP5 mags, AK mags, AR mags, .45/M1911, shells galore, DMR mag, even a damn 200 round machine gun belt! I don't know if I just have abnormal luck as far as my loot spawning goes, but seriously - hours upon hours of looting houses and barracks and towers and warehouses and hunting stands and the only useable gun I find in five patches is a G17? 11) BUG - Is leaning broken right now? I noticed that as of .1.5, hitting Q and E don't lean. Still roll while prone, but leaning doesn't work. 12) BUG/N00b question - How the hell do you actually USE a flashlight? I've never actually gotten a flashlight to work in any patch. I get the flashlight in the pistol slot, I hit "L", nothing happens. In case the mapping was off, I looked through the control config and mashed pretty much every button that looked like it might use an item or toggle something. I've heard that "it only works at night", but that doesn't seem to have any impact. First time I found one was inside a house at night, and it was pitch black. The G17 looks like it has a flashlight on it. Is this one supposed to toggle with "L" as well? If I switch to 3rd person view it looks like the light is always on, but there's no illumination to be had. Am I supposed to hit "F" to put it into a different firing more or something? Do I need to do the Steam "verify cache" thing? 13) FEEDBACK/BUG: Throwing cans generally works! Very cool, I only recently learned that this was something that could be *done*, its not actually documented anywhere. I posted a suggestion to the Newbie Guide thread about that, actually. The throwing is a bit bugged, in that hitting "F" to change modes will sometimes throw whatever the first throwable item is, whether you want to throw it or not. Its a good way to get attention in the wrong place, waste a smoke grenade or flare, get yourself killed, etc. Especially bad when you're prone and hiding, waiting for the proper time to throw a can. Hurp de durp, I'll just stand all the way up and throw a can at the zombie on the other side of this short shrub! OH NOES IM GETTING EATED! Its kind of hard to predict where a can will land and whether it'll even be within audible range of a zombie (seriously, we got some major league pitchers here!) but I think that will come with practice. Overall I do very much like this functionality and feel it adds immensely to the feel of a horror movie where you use distraction to sneak by a danger you don't want to confront! 14) FEEDBACK: Spawning without weapons of any kind is still too rough I get that you don't want new spawns running around and PVP'ing and running through cities with no fear at all. But its swung too far the other way, and remains this way in this patch. Lack of defense of ANY kind makes the game too difficult and not fun until a weapon is found. ANY mistake and get spotted, you gotta run, you pick up an entourage, you may or may not be able to shake them by running through a building. You come across another survivor with a gun, you're dead. I had a guy chase me down just to take my bicycle that I'd just found near the spawn area. Knocked me out, ran up, murdered me. At the very least, give spawns a melee weapon. As I've said before, make the flashlight into a MAG. Let them pick up a rock or a stick or one of those axes we see stuck into stumps sometimes. We have arms, let us be somehow armed! 15) FEEDBACK: Final Thoughts Overall, this patch has made the game playable again. Patch .1.4 was impossible to play for me because spawning with aggro and having the zombies sprint through a house along with you made it impossible to shake them. That being said, I said "playable", not "fun" and think the difficulty still needs to be tweaked down a little. I'm still not even really sure what to do when getting aggro on a zombie after spawning, because all you can do is run, which sets your visibility/aggro to max, which means you pick up more aggro, which means that you end up with a train of zombies after you. If you can't shake the entire group in one barn (if there's even a barn nearby) and a single one is still on you when you exit the other side, you still have to continue running, and the cycle continues. Its frustrating, not fun. Bones break too easily, lack of spawn morphine means you're going to be randomly screwed by a random punch. Knockout punches are too common and can last FAR too long. Weapons are too sparse, making it a game of crawling everywhere hoping not to get spotted, then trying to lose an entire gaggle once you ARE spotted and are forced to get up and run. Yes, this patch made it so you CAN survive, but it still feels more like a chore than a challenge. With a couple tweaks to some numbers and fixing some more of the glitches (like wall clipping), its definitely going to be going in the right direction!

What server are YOU on? People are worse jackoffs than ever, since they know that new spawns can't fire back..