AshleyP

Intractable? Furniture that keeps arguing with you and won't do what you say? "The furniture is aggressive." How about tables that you can talk to, or enlist as friendly NPCs - you can give them weapons and use them as escorts for when you're crossing the countryside. Just you and two or three tables walking behind you with M4s. Perhaps you could craft an armoured vehicle out of a fridge and some tyres. Paint it green, voila you have a BRDM.

There's also a fermented bread drink called Rasputin Kvass, which sadly doesn't get you drunk. Also, I found a pristine Kiwi, first time so far: It looks as if they haven't filled out the northern, north-western part of the map yet: I would hate to be standing in one of those empty zones when all the new buildings are patched in. You'd end up like the chaps in The Philadelphia Experiment, fused to the superstructure: Also, if you look at this and move your eyes about, you'll vomit:

"Yeah, I've found this SKS - but I don't have any ammo. Does anybody have any ammo? I'm at (location), we could swap..."

I logged off a couple of days ago in Guba, right up on the north-east coast, logged in today and found that they've added a whole lot of new buildings and bulked the town out. I wonder if they've done the same with the empty areas in the north of the map? Essentially the old train station is the same, but the steep rise and most everything in the south-west of the village has been changed. There's a police station, with a cell that you don't seem to be able to enter, and there's now a hospital near the waterfront: The waterfront itself is a single by Simple Minds has some warehouses and cranes, and there's a square with a church and a typical WW2 monument: They had kill-on-sight in WW2, as well, in fact it was encouraged. I suspect the town will end up like Berezino, which it resembles - people will generally ignore it, 'cause there's an airfield with military spawns just up the hill, and there's nothing really there. The hills to the north would be excellent sniper spots if there was anybody to snipe, but the rocks will make fantastic camp locations because there's lots of cover and it's not easy to climb up there.

The "secret" in this case is Photoshop's Auto Contrast effect - the screenshots are much much darker in the game. I've found that enabling / disabling clouds helps, though. On this server enabling the clouds makes everything brighter, disabling them turns everything pitch black. In which case you have to navigate with your sense of smell.

Corpses cool down slowly after death, so on a purely literal level anybody lighting a torch at night chills in place once they get shot, which probably won't take long.

The Drudge Report. Vastly popular news aggregator. Think of Slashdot, except that it still has the power to Slashdot things, whereas Slashdot itself doesn't any more. It's run by a conservative chap called Matt Drudge rather than a bunch of internet people. Matt Drudge really hates President Obama and is an arch-conservative and Republican. He's one of the most influential gay men on the internet. His best friend, Andrew Brietbart, was so fat that he died of a heart attack! Will this hurt DayZ? Not in the slightest; you have to click the link to find out that the story is about DayZ, it's buried away on the front page, and in any case DayZ is developed in the Czech Republic. If anything it might lead to a flood of kill-on-sight players who will play the game as a straightforward shoot-em-up. The fact of DayZ being independently developed is a massive help. When I think of computer gaming controversies that caused genuine trouble to the developers - Six Days in Fallujah, the "hot coffee" mod, etc - the trouble came about when the publishers buckled to pressure. Compare with e.g. Resistance: Fall of Man, which prompted the British Prime Minister to criticise the developers (one of the levels was set in the real-life Manchester Cathedral) but crucially the publishers held their ground, and the game was a big success. The only worry is that Steam might pull it, but that seems very unlikely.

Kill, you say? I didn't hear you properly. "Come kill me" it sounded like.

And fast-forward to 1m33s.

You know, I remember finding a website called The Daily KOS a while back, and I was expecting a load of Youtube streams of good, quality DayZ murders. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a load of guff about Hillary Clinton. Can't we all agree that although killing on sight might be a problem in DayZ - which is debatable in any case - Hillary Clinton is a far greater menace?

Although DayZ has sold nigh-on a million copies to date, there are only a few dozen regular posters here, and only a dozen or so with more than a few hundred posts. It would be more accurate to speak of the DayZ Forums community, because the multitudes that play the game will make up their own minds, independently of any discussions that take place on this message board. The same thing happens when a band hits the big time. The early fans get scared, because they sense that the band isn't theirs any more. Parents feel the same when their kids get married, I'm sure Werner Von Braun felt likewise when Apollo finally got the green light. Don't worry about the community; it probably doesn't know you exist and it won't notice when you leave.

I think the word worn is the problem here. I can understand an old rusty knife looking worn, or an axe. But a banana - it implies that the fruit has already been used and worn out. For something. I mean, fruit doesn't get worn - it either rots or you eat it.

Which is odd, because I've never found anything in these - perhaps the spawning hasn't been turned on (or I haven't been looking hard enough).

Ah, Temple of Doom - it was the one with the monkey brains! And that kid, Short Round. One of the reasons the PG-13 rating exists. Looks as if they've caught one of the crew in the bottom-left there, obviously rushing to fix the bridge.

Northwest you get this kind of thing: I remember popping up there on the first day of the standalone, 'cause it looked as if there was a hidden complex on the map. But it's just foundations for the moment. There's also a train yard in the north-west, in fact the train line goes in a big loop east to Guba. Guba itself is going to be a sniper's paradise, because you can hide up in the rocks and kill people exploring the train station there. The only problem is that if you get too close to the rocks you'll probably die. Guba was of course the baddie from Operation Flashpoint.

Flicking through this thread, it's actually quite heartening that the clown masks didn't catch on. I was expecting most of the players to be running around with clown masks, but no. Well done men. Obviously they're very conspicuous, but if we're being honest it doesn't matter. 99% of the players wearing military camo gear spend their time running around in bright daylight out in the open, or in a city. A clown mask isn't going to make any difference, You know what'd be great? Brass knuckles that you can wear over the gloves.

Can openers are tricky to spot: PROTIP: They pop up in the hangars / big empty warehouse buildings, and it's easier to see them against the white floor (also a good place to find the tactical vest, which seems to be the same as the assault vest but black, and it looks less scruffy).

I've managed to fill a backpack with stones, and also a vest with stones and my trousers as well. And yet when I go swimming, everything is fine! Have you tried spraying bleach on a stone? It's one of those things that you'd never bother with in real life, but in DayZ it's strangely therapeutic.

For me by far the most frustrating thing isn't the other players - it's the "activate this door" zone. I mean, you run up to a door, expecting to click the mouse button to select OPEN DOOR, but it turns out you have to take a step backwards before it works. Or you have to turn left and right and left and right until you hit the exact angle. Or with swinging gates, you have to run around just outside them until you find the OPEN DOOR spot. I assume it's coded into the map data and would take forever to fix.

Wouldn't it... drop off?

Well, after living in London for a year I came to the conclusion that it was the perfect environment for a serial killer, provided he was careful and didn't try to be "gimmicky". Successive waves of mass immigration have produced a situation where absolutely no-one knows the people who live next door, and the rest of London and Britain in general simply doesn't care what happens outside zone one, Brick Lane, and the Shoreditch area. Seriously, you search the BBC's news website for stories on Harlesden or Willesden and you get a couple of murders from years ago and basically nothing else. A lot of people believe that American Psycho was a delusional fantasy, because there's no way a man could get away with that kind of murder spree without anybody noticing, but seriously, it's not all that hard. I mean, in America who would notice a man going around killing people in Detroit or Chicago? But ultimately it's unsatisfying. You can't tell anybody. You can't target anybody you've met, or personal dislike, because there's the possibility that the police might link the victim to yourself. You can't even rob anybody, because it's too risky. And they have nothing, they're poor. Other people have done far worse, that's what I tell myself. I mean, Tony Blair killed thousands of people, and he made £13m last year. The kind of people who pay money to listen to Tony Blair speak respect him for his body count. It shows that he got things done. As for DayZ, it was the first day of the standalone; I discovered that Zelenogorsk had some barracks, and also that you could just swap servers to gear up, and it so happened that the other guy used his torch at the wrong time. I plugged him with my M4.

I'm not a sentimental man, but there's a germ of truth in this, although sadly it's inescapable. It has to be said that Pokemon, poker, most professional sports, indeed most things are fundamentally just numbers games. Marathon running and Formula One racing stand out. The DayZ developers could combat it by adding a random element, but there will always be one player who's prepared to spent twelve hours a day maximising all of his stats. And I imagine there are lots of players who want to know this kind of insider information so that they can beat the competition. I learn, for example, that in the absence of a threat it's actually more efficient to run full-speed all the time in DayZ than it is to jog. You cover more ground while using the exact same energy as a walking man. I'm reminded of that chap who came up with the optimal Sim City 3000 layout. The entire map was covered in buildings and it was a hellhole to live in, but it was the most optimal layout of buildings. Sim City is really just a mathematical simulation with a graphical front end. I say this because I used to play a game called Aces High II, an online flight simulator that modelled WW2 aircraft. The problem is that the simulation was very mechanistic and the aeroplane stats were publicly available, so you would have a situation where (say) P-51D pilots would cruise at precisely 12.5K feet all the time because that made them a few mph faster than all of the other aircraft or at the least on a par with the 109K4: http://www.gonzoville.com/charts/index.php?p1=p51d&p2=109k4 Combat itself involved memorising a load of aeroplane stats - climb rate at certain altitudes, maximum sustained turn rate, fuel burn - and then estimating the enemy's energy state and finally only committing to battle when you have an enormous advantage. It wasn't much fun. On the other hand the environment of DayZ is far more chaotic than empty, windless air.

I broadly agree with your third, fourth and seventh points. However I believe point nine is unworkable. You're right about the zombies though.

Assuming the pistol has any bullets in it, and assuming that I have a good shot at Mr M4, I would immediately shoot him until he falls over dead or I run out of bullets. The important thing is to kill him before he has a chance to log out. Then I'd rush over to the corpse, grab as much of his equipment as possible, run about ten feet away - so that I'm not next to a wall or a piece of furniture - and then log out. I'd wait a couple of minutes and then log in to a different server. And then get the hell out of dodge. Run in one direction for ten minutes or so. Then stop and check the condition of the gear, eat and drink etc. Not before. I'd be alive, with a pile of gear. Kiss my face. Remember - it's not about who's right, it's about who's left.