AshleyP

As far as I know if you try turning them on in daylight they don't - it has to be dark. How dark, I'm not sure.

This raises a philosophical point. We live in a world without objective moral standards, and so a moral argument is unsound. Doubly so in the abstract, consequence-free world of a computer game. It doesn't make rational sense and it won't convince anybody. It's the wrong avenue of attack. For example, I was reading a story in the news earlier about a 26-year-old pimp in Miami who had forced one of his tricks - she was 13 - to tattoo his handle onto her eyelids. This was the second girl he had forced to have a tattoo, although the first was branded on the chest rather than the face. The fact of this being reported on the news tends to distance and fictionalise the reality of the story, but at the core of it was a man who had the force of will to compel a girl to mutilate her face, and who presumably felt nothing bad about doing so. A tattoo artist helped him, presumably without caring why he was branding "suave - house" onto the eyelids of a drugged 13-year-old girl. Numerous customers handed over thirty dollars to spend time with her, and presumably didn't care that the drugged girl was barely conscious. They didn't grass him up. They felt no pressing need to give him or themselves up to the police. They actively wanted this arrangement to continue indefinitely. The Mercedes dealership that sold the pimp his car wasn't interested in where he got the money. A huge great big circle of people - a whole infrastructure - turned the other cheek, and slept easy at night. Now, eventually the chap was caught and imprisoned, although the story didn't explain how this happened; but it took years, and it's just a pinprick. Good and bad do not exist. Instead there is strength and weakness, and the man with the gun and the will to use it is strong and will tend to prevail, barring random chance. Society is essentially an arrangement whereby lots of men with guns enter into an agreement to use them in accordance with the will of a committee, but the theory scales. My point is that morality does not have an objective basis; a society's moral code is subject to the same limitations and flaws as any monolithic code; individual morality would not survive a couple of days without food, and so therefore morality itself is a flawed, unworkable concept. Act rationally according to your goals based on the prevailing winds, do what though wilt to achieve them. DayZ is a masterclass in this. In the long run, the only surefire way to survive is to kill everybody that approaches within firing range. If there were limited resources, or essential needs that required the use of another person - for example, if you needed a mechanic in order to fix a car - then it would make sense to let them live as long as you need their services, but in DayZ each player is a kind of ubermensch who can do everything he requires by himself in order to live indefinitely. Therefore it makes rational sense to kill the other players, because they will betray you sooner or later. That said, there are numerous practical, tactical reasons why a player should not shoot unarmed targets. Firstly, the shot gives away your position. Secondly, there's a good chance that the sniper taking a bead on you might instead decide to shoot the unarmed person instead - in other words, unarmed players increase "clutter" at very little detriment to yourself. Thirdly, other players will be trying to kill new spawns as well, and would love to shoot down a geared-up survivor who has become target fixated. On a prosaic level shooting new spawns wastes a bullet for basically nothing in return. There's no point looting them, and they're basically dead anyway. And think of the shame you would feel if you missed. On an emotional level, killing a (presumably) new spawn is unsatisfactory. You're not ruining ten hours of carefully-amassed equipment hoarding, you're ruining nothing. It's useless as target practice, and it barely affects the other player because he'll just spawn anew. This is why so many bandits like to force their victims to roll on the ground or do something degrading - it gets the blood up - just as in real life people like to tie up and slowly torture other people to death rather than simply kill them straightaway. The problem is that in DayZ there's a risk that your torture will attract other players who want to kill you. Close range changes things. A hatchet can mess up your day, and the other player might have a gun in his backpack. Kill anybody who approaches to close range, unless they're moving away from you. I've never actually met an unarmed player (I keep to the north), but if one came running through the woods towards me I would give him a chance to make a swift ninety-degree turn, and open up if he doesn't.

There's a crowbar - which is rubbish, it's less powerful than the hatchet - and a machete, which is rare, and a bit superfluous because it's no better than the hatchet. I hope that the standalone introduces the following: - lethally sharp boomerang - combat yo-yo - those steel fans from Yie Ar Kung Fu - pocket sand - a rubber horse mask, so that the zombies assume you're a horse When I started, I used the hatchet all the time, for the same reasons as yourself. It's a silent one-shot kill that never runs out. You just funnel the zombies into a building, and thwock! Yes, thwock. But I had exactly the same problem with the bag. The game tended to try and stuff the rifle AND its ammunition into the bag, and so on the one occasion I got hold of an SVD I started with ten magazines and ended up with three without firing a shot. In the end it became untenable. I like to have a utility gun in my hands and a long-range killer in my backpack, which leaves no room for a hatchet. Now I either run past the zombies or I try to plug them in the head with a Colt 45. Back when magazines respawned, SD ammunition and one of the M16 variants or the M249 was an even better option - If you never depleted the magazines completely, they grew back - but nowadays you can't rely on having them. The problem with firing off a rifle isn't so much that it attracts zombies, it's that it gives away your position to other players (albeit that they would probably have noticed the zombies chasing you already).

That sounds like a pretty skilful bandit to me. He killed you stone dead, so quickly that you didn't realise you were under attack, and he then had a chance to loot your corpse at his leisure. Think of it as a learning experience. By venturing out in front of a known sniper position in a situation where you were disadvantaged, you basically killed yourself. The highwaymen were putting themselves at enormous risk of being killed either by your teammates or by other, less foolish bandits watching from the treeline. In fact, he followed the advice set out by Sun Tzu in his classic Art of War - build for yourself an unassailable position, and then fall upon the weakest aspect of the opponent's forces with the speed and fury of a lightning bolt. "What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. / ... his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

That's what this game needs - strong drink, not just empty whiskey bottles. It makes you immune to pain (and radiation) but you randomly black out and wake up the next day, stark naked, standing in a pond.

I agree, although I'd qualify it by adding that the game needs incompetent bandits. In your example the bandits were clowns - an effective bandit team would have just sniped you with the M107 long before you saw them. From your point of view the engagement would have been "run run run YOU ARE DEAD", which isn't very exciting. After the first week, that's how I have died, every time - a sudden burst of gunfire from nowhere and YOU ARE DEAD. Likewise, the only people I have killed died without knowing what happened. In my experience of playing Operation: Flashpoint and Arma and so forth, if the engagement lasts beyond the first volley of fire something has gone wrong. The same goes with the hackers that teleport across the map and shoot players point-blank; it's impossible to feel menaced by them because there's nothing you can do about it. It's like worrying about the Earth spontaneously blowing up. Incompetent bandits make the game entertaining. In this case they failed to spot you until they were in an iffy position, they continued to fail to spot you, and one of them ended up losing a tonne of blood and possibly dying in exchange for a Lee Enfield and (presumably) a few cans of beans. Against more heavily-armed opposition they would have both died somewhere near the beginning of your fifth paragraph.

/ Eats entire packet of painkillers in one go / Feels better afterwards ~ / Stuck in Eastern Europe / Only alcohol is whiskey ~ / Has no trouble cooking meat, boiling water / Eats cold macaroni and cheese from the can ~ / Uses last M14 7.62x51mm round, keeps rifle and hunts for DMR mags / Uses last FN FAL 7.62x51mm round, throws rifle away ~ / Fits helicopter rotor assembly in backpack, fights undead corpses, never has to sleep, game a masterpiece of realism / Cans have silly names, you ruined my childhood

You'd end up with something like an L42A1 / Enfield Enforcer: http://www.amstevens.fsnet.co.uk/History.htm Monstrously accurate, but it would be even more anachronistic and out-of-place in Eastern Europe as the Enfield itself.

I don't know if there's a backstory or not, but how do we know that there isn't a generalised zombie outbreak all across Europe? The fact of Chernarus being out-of-the-way might explain why the zombies are so widespread; the military is too busy dealing with outbreaks in more strategically important locations to be everywhere at once. I mean, if there was a zombie outbreak across the UK, the army would move to secure London, the port cities, the motorways, and would probably ignore Scotland (the Scots can look after themselves) and Wales (zombies have trouble climbing hills). Six weeks post-outbreak Wales would still have zombie zones and, in real life, brave and/or foolhardy looters would descend on the area to strip the place of valuables. Which brings us to DayZ. The hard part would be to launder the goods afterwards. Literally launder it if the infection is airborne.

I don't know what it's like in the States, but in the UK a lot of internet plans have limits. E.g. Plusnet, who have a slow 10gb plan, a fast 40gb plan, a slow unlimited plan, and a fast unlimited plan: http://www.plus.net/home-broadband/broadband-only/ BT, the national telecom provider, has a similar model. As far as I can tell Plusnet's slow unlimited plan is the cheapest unlimited data plan, and it's £9.99 in some areas. The 100mb/h quoted above seems about right although I assume it depends on how much player interaction is going on around you. Of course this doesn't account for bandwidth throttling - not just at peak times, but a couple of years ago a Canadian ISP got in hot water for throttling World of Warcraft: http://www.geekosystem.com/rogers-throttles-wow/ I've always assumed games were relatively light in terms of network traffic, though. Not like streaming video for example.

My experience mirrors one of the chaps on the first page. I spawned at night near what I now recognise as Kamenka, and headed inland ASAP because I didn't want to be shot at the spawn point. I knew from the Wiki that the clouds went east, so I headed north and slightly west. At the back of my mind I was thinking "this is an island, I'll reach the other side eventually". Of course, if you head north and slightly west from Kamenka you end up running up hill and down dale and then into the wilderness, which is where I ended up starving and freezing to death. And so my first go at the popular zombie mod DayZ consisted mostly of holding down the W key whilst looking at a mostly-black screen and listening to a man panting. For an hour.

I do a fair amount of hiking in real life, and I was drawn to DayZ because it's basically an orienteering simulator that has zombies in it, and also snipers. It's great fun to cross large areas of countryside and emerge from the woods in just the right place to dive into a barn. It's also fun to swing a hatchet and kill somebody, or hold a distant figure in the sights of a rifle and blow his brains out. And not just in real life - these things are fun in DayZ as well. So I'm going to share with you my tale of crawling for a long time with a broken leg, which I did yesterday and earlier today. See, I like the east, north-east chunk of the map. It's much less of a meat grinder than the south, but there's still a fair amount to do, and there's occasionally a vehicle spawn at the north end of Berezino. Also, if you go exploring the other side of the small gulf in the extreme north-east you occasionally find interesting things. I've got all the survival gear except for a pair of binoculars, so I went off to the supermarket in Krasnostav to see if I could find some. There's nothing much in Krasnostav except for the supermarket, but it's an interesting trip - the top of the mountain just to the south has a nice view of the ruined mansion to the west, and there are a couple of ATV spawns, and sometimes heli crashes. So I traipse off to Krasnostav. If you approach from the south-east, the supermarket's right on the edge of the woods, so it's relatively safe. There's a concrete wall in front of the supermarket's back entrance, and you can go around it to the left - which leaves you exposed to the valley that leads south - or to the right, which brings you onto the road but keeps you covered by the buildings. So I took out my hatchet and went right. You have to crawl through a break in the wall, and just as I dropped to the ground a zombie spotted me and decided that my leg looked tasty. Dunno if it was because I was crawling, but for the first time in a month, SNAP, my leg went. I killed the zombie easy enough and patched myself up, but I couldn't walk. The last time I broke my leg a glitch un-broke it - I think I equipped binoculars whilst kneeling, and then did something with my backpack, and for some reason my leg magically healed. But not this time. No amount of fiddling with my gear, equipping my rifle and then my binoculars etc did the trick. I was stuffed. On the positive side, the supermarket had some binoculars and lots of food, which is important when you're crawling because it takes ages to get anywhere. No morphine though. Didn't expect any. So I took stock. According to the Wiki, morphine has a tiny chance of appearing in residential spawns, so I half-heartedly had a look around the nearest houses, which was fraught because crawling through doorways is potentially lethal. Nothing, wasn't very hopeful. There's the airfield to the north-east, which I dismissed. The server had about thirty people on it and a constant stream of kill messages and "how could you just kill me, I only just spawned" moaning. How could they kill you? They aimed for the chest, that's how. I check the map, and the nearest hospital is in... where is it? Yeah, Berezino, but there must be another one. There couldn't be such a huge area without a hospital. Berezino, Berezino... that's a fair old hike. The next-closest is Elektro. Elektro. Don't fancy crawling through Elektro towards a tall building with a flat open roof. So Berezino it is. which is on the other side of the mountain, across open fields. Contemplate this map: In theory I should have let the zombies eat me and just respawn. All I had was a Lee Enfield, ten bullets, a Colt 45, a hatchet, lots of bandages, food. Two AKM magazines just in case I find an AKM. Better get rid of those, never gonna use 'em. But I have all the survival stuff - hatchet, knife, matches, toolkit, etc - and dammit I can't give up. That would be weak. Let's get cracking. Have a Pepsi first, it'll pep me up. I crawl south, up the mountain. On the positive side, the server has third-person view, and with a mixture of ALT-looking and third person I can basically scan the whole area around me. If anybody hoves into view, I'm already prone, and my Lee Enfield and its ten bullets will quiet them. Assuming they stand still, and there's only one of them and they're idiots, and they're not in a car. On I go, reaching the top of the mountain and wearing down the W key at the same time. As usual, there's a broken ATV at the spawn with nothing in the trunk. I sit on it and make brum-brum noises. I should really skirt around the edge of the mountain's bald patch, but screw it, I can't be bothered. I cross the field and move on, looking left and right in case someone comes in with a helicopter. The top of the mountain south of Krasnostav is where I would land my helicopter, if I had a helicopter. It's flat, you can see all around, the trees are below the level of the peak and so no-one can look down on you. Descending south, I spot a boar. For a moment I wonder if I could gut it, crawl inside the boar's body, and use it as a kind of boarmobile. I would put my arms and legs into its arms and legs and just hobble around like a boar, or I could roll. No-one would suspect anything. But the only problem is that a hunter might shoot and gut *me*. On the off chance that eating lots of food will heal broken bones - it doesn't, but it doesn't hurt to try - I shoot and gut the thing and cook the food and eat well. In my experience the water meter runs down first, so I'm not going to die hungry. Log off for the evening. Log on the next evening. South of the mountain the woods break up a bit, so I skirt west. My navigation's sketchy at this point because there aren't any landmarks and I don't know how fast you crawl in the game. No camping tents, surprised. I have no idea how many people go off to the north-east - I assume the geared-up players just fly over it en route to their camps, everybody else ignores it. As it turns out I spot nobody. It would be trivially easy for a sniper to hide behind a tree, lean out, and plug me, but it must have been my lucky day. About half-way down the mountain a chopper flies overhead going south, but again I'm under cover so they either didn't spot me, or didn't care. Moving on I skirt the edge of the forest until I hit a road, and then I notice a brightly-coloured chalk track leading north-west, at which point I realised I'm approaching the outskirts of Berezino. At this point I've got two options. There's a spit of forest that leads east-south-east, direct to Berezino's northern suburbs and its military camp, which sounds too dangerous. So I back up, head west again. Gonna cross the road next to a little house where I almost died the very time I played, a couple of months ago. I've been there before in another life. With the addition of zombies in the fields I'm in a worrisome predicament. They seem to head straight for me, and I can't outrun them. If they spot me I can hack 'em with my hatchet, but I have to fiddle around with my backpack, swapping the hatchet for the rifle which takes time. Luckily they turn away, but I cross the road fully expecting to be jumped, or shot, or run over by a passing motorist. By this time there are only nine or so people on the server, so sod it, let's go to that hospital. Never going to get a better chance. The deer stand west of Berezino has a smoke grenade and some bandages, but I have plenty of bandages already. Imagine if you could use bandages and firewood to make a splint, eh? And then perhaps after an hour - this is a game - your bone heals and you can run again. Imagine that. I used to play Op Flashpoint so I binocularise Berezino and then evaluate my approach. Entering from the west you go downhill slightly. There's a warehouse to your left, but the zombies are just wandering so let's assume there's no-one there. No-one on top of the hospital, which is dead ahead. To the right I'm totally exposed to the treeline south-west of Berezino, but there's only so much I can do to minimise the risk. Luckily there's a run of trees and a low stone wall that provide cover from the north, and also from the roof of the hospital, so I crawl straight in. The zombies are useless at spotting you when you're crawling, so despite coming really close a few times they just ignore me. By this time I've switched to my hatchet, 'cause in the city there's no point using my Lee Enfield. I don't have the mobility for an urban gunfight, and the noise will just attract the walking dead, who will swamp me before I get a chance to pull out the hatchet again. A gunman on top of the hospital will be able to kill me at his leisure, but again, I can't account for everything. Crawl crawl crawl. Perhaps it's a server thing, but the streets of Berezino are generally free of zombies. It's an odd city - lots of dead soldiers, broken-down military equipment, but only a very few military tents. It's split into three zones and has two supermarkets but it's not really on the way to anywhere, so people ignore it. Still, the hospital beckons. I contemplate going round the back, because I've been here before I know that the east side of the hospital has a little maze of walls. But victory is in sight, so I crawl crawl crawl up to the window and whack it with my hatchet. Doesn't break. Whack it again, doesn't break. Fully expecting to be eaten or shot. Whack, it breaks, and luckily there's a medical box right in front of me. I gulp down morphine like that chap from Alice in Chains, but instead of making me die - again, just like that chap from Alice in Chains - it heals me. And I can walk again. It's great, walking. Basically just like falling, but you put your foot out and balance on it. Layne Staley. I always felt sorry for him. He had a lonely childhood without a dad, who ran off to do lots of drugs. No-one took him or his band as seriously as Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. He was partial to the old smack, and so was his fiancee - who was far more attractive than Courtney Love - but they drifted apart and eventually she died. He was devastated but managed to track down his dad, who unfortunately was a drug fiend and total waster, so basically Staley was screws. Him and his dad ended up doing a lot of drugs together until they drifted apart again, at which point Staley became a recluse. They found his body two weeks after he passed away. The last person who saw him alive was Mike Starr, the band's bassist, who died of a heroin overdose in 2011. The lesson here, kids, is that if you're crawling on your belly into Berezino from the west, keep to the trees as long as you can and try not to aggro the zombies and above all don't take any heroin, it interferes with your judgement. After taking the morphine I fully expected some sadistic git to shoot me in the head just for fun. But no, I did not die. Instead I filled my backpack with morphine (perhaps I can sell it on the open market, or combine it with something and make crack or something) and run basically south-west into the trees, until the zombies stop chasing me, and then I log out. Still alive, and I can walk. Phew.

I'm not really interested in the whole worldbuilding aspect. The problem is that it would encourage stagnation, like Wikipedia or Second Life. It would attract the kind of players who are willing to spend seventeen hours a day, every day, building a large base at a strategic location. Eventually the majority of the gameplay would consist of building bases or chatting about building bases. Then there'll be arbitration committees, a community liaison cadre, a layer of admins, a layer of super-admins, layer upon layer of bureaucracy. I prefer the idea of a game where you have to go out and hunt. Your resources consist of your brain, your reflexes, the stuff you can carry on your back and perhaps stuff into your jeep, and that's it. And the tents, which are vulnerable. In fact the existing setup is surprisingly clever. You can't just hole up in a warehouse because you'll eventually be overrun with zombies, just like in Day of the Dead. They never stop, and after the most recent patch you can't simply log out and log back in to restock your ammo. Similarly, the respawning loot isn't realistic at all, but it neatly solves the problem of dwindling resources. A more realistic system would result in a game where the committed, seventeen-hours-a-day players eventually sweep the entire map clean. There will be players who want to do this, to just sit on a huge pile of loot, occasionally sniping unarmed stragglers (for seventeen hours a day). They'll have their fun, no-one else will. Bribase's points are all very good, although I'm not sure about per-server maps. I remember reading a blog post on PC Gamer that introduced the game - the writer described his first "raid", and it was fascinating because I had just been to the very same location, a year later. I could recognise the terrain from his description (it was the north-east airfield). With per-server maps the war stories people share on this message board would be meaningless to people who are on other servers. Still, my dream is a larger map, with more to see and do. The military are now a factor. Periodically, AI-controlled army soldiers are helicoptered in - or they land at the coast - with orders to secure an area, and if you're in the way they kill you. This is how you get military weapons; by fighting the military, which is hard. The cities are mostly free of zombies, because there's nothing there for them to eat, although there are stories going around of eight-foot-tall, nigh-on-bulletproof zombie leviathans that can run at forty mph and throw cars through the air. If you turn a corner and run into one of them, you're dead. Instead, the regular zombies have moved into the countryside, which is lethal for the unwary, filled with killer zombie wolves. As a player you are in danger from the military and other players in the cities, and from zombies and wolves in the countryside. And there has to be a reward for all this aggro. That's up to the developers, because it baffles me. The team that runs Aces High II, the flight sim, posts a scoreboard at the end of the month. Perhaps DayZ could have you as a man seeking out rare metals - perhaps the area has been hit with a meteor filled with zombanium, a rare and extraordinarily precious metal that turns people into zombies unless they have been vaccinated - and your goal is to grab as much as possible. Again, this would favour the seventeen-hour-a-day crowd, but some things are unavoidable. By keeping the player vulnerable even persistence wouldn't be a guarantee of success. In practice, given past form, DayZ two years from now will be almost exactly the same as the first standalone release of the game, with the majority of the development time spent on patching bugs. DayZ II will come out in 2017 and will be almost exactly the same as DayZ but with more detailed grass.

Ditto - this is on UK 172. After the WHY_YOU_NO_LOVE_ME_ANYMORE message I get to the last loading screen, it counts up to about 40, and then "something went wrong! disconnect and try again". It looks as if Felix, one of the chaps in the screenshot above, is still trying to log in as well.

I Googled for "tactical hatchet", because I was curious to see if anybody had tried mounting a scope rail on a hatchet, and found these things, which look pretty nasty: http://www.brownsafe.com/blog/top-10-tactical-tomahawks/ I actually felt a bit faint reading some of the descriptions, and had to have a cold shower afterwards. Of the Condor Tactical Rescue Tomahawk, the writer has this to say: "The serrated back spike pierces sheet metal with ease, and works well as a hook for clearing debris or wreckage, while the blade is sharpened on the underside of the beard, allowing you to sink the head into your target and lever it out like a giant can opener!"It's the gusto that makes it funny. The first comment actually points out that the tomahawks look like something from a zombie movie. I mean, can you imagine driving the blade of a tomahawk into a zombie's skull and then levering it out like a giant can opener? I could imagine that all day. Also:

In practice they will know you're there - the zombies won't have spawned otherwise. And when you stop to bend over and look for the discarded bolt, the sniper on the roof or in the treeline will shoot you. Or he'll realise what you're doing, and wait until the next time you stop next to a dead zombie. The quiver that was introduced in the most recent patch alleviates this to an extent, but the crossbow is still a short-range precision weapon that doesn't work too well unless you stop to aim. Which puts you at risk. My tip - when you're outdoors, run past the zombies. Don't attempt to engage them. Run past them. Keep moving. The other players want you to stop, so that they don't have to lead their shots. I want the other player to stop moving, so that I can get up close and really pump him full of bullets. You've got a choice between briefly having a small number of zombies running behind you, or spending ten minutes carefully moving very slowly out in the killing zone. Instead, lure the zombies indoors, then kill them. You get cover, you get the chance to search for bolts and loot their bodies at your leisure, and it's not your house anyway. It's a shame the game doesn't have a zombie disguise that you can put on - the game has raw meat, you could smear yourself in that - because then you could blend in with them as you exit the building.

My only issue is that they missed a trick, by not making them actual muffins that you can toast in front of a fire. 'cause, er, as a British person this is my vision of a muffin: http://en.wikipedia..../English_muffin They go well with Marmite, which of course DayZ can't have because it's a trademark. But they could add "yeast extract". In the game it would give you a protein boost and if you equip it in your hands the zombies will try to avoid you, because zombies hate Marmite.

It's striking how much East St. Louis, Illinois - apparently the most crime-ridden, urban-flight-ed town in the US - looks like something from DayZ: http://www.city-data.com/picfilesv/picv7377.php Pop open Google Maps, search for it, scroll down a bit and you get this: http://goo.gl/maps/vYizr In DayZ I remember spawning in Kamenka once, looking at the map, and thinking "bum". As a new start it's not much fun. Kamenka itself doesn't have much. You can go north to the deer stands, but you're either going to run across open ground or do a tonne of circling around. Further north you have wide open spaces, culminating in the supermarket in Zelenogorsk, which is a dream target for any snipers hiding in the forest to the south. It's conspicuous, it's overlooked by a rolling hill to the south-east, and the only escape routes involve running across open fields, and there's no cover. Or you can go east, to Komarovo, which isn't much of an improvement on Kamenka. Then there's Balota, which has a tonne of loot and is one of those dangerous but loot-heavy places where new players go, even though it's incredibly risky, because you can just respawn if you die. Not so bad if you spawn on top of it, but irritating if you've just spent twenty minutes running there. I get the impression that most players occupy a diagonal band from the airfield in the north-west to Elektro and Cherno in the south. I suspect that if you drew a triangle with those three locations at the points you'd encompass the majority of players at any one time. The south-east has forest to hide in, but the south-west is simultaneously boring (there's not much to see) and very dangerous (one single sniper can dominate large areas of countryside, if he has the patience).

All they have to add now is discarded Playboy magazines - and booze. You could barter those things for... other Playboy magazines (May 1974, the one with Marilyn Lange). And booze. Also, some kind of portable music system. Stake out a location in the middle of the map, dump in toilet paper, Playboy magazines, booze, and voila! Instant music festival.

This goes all the way back to Operation: Flashpoint, in which you were a lowly infantry soldier who could also drive and command an M1 tank better than a trained tank crew. In fact it was generally easier to drive and fight in the tank solo, without messing around with LEFT! FORWARD! LEFT! FORWARD! all the time. Same with BMPs, sniper rifles, LAWs etc, you just knew how to use them. And reload them, which is odd in the case of LAW rockets. In DayZ a helicopter is thematically appropriate - Dawn of the Dead had a helicopter, with lethal whirling blades - and there are few more effective ways of getting around, so it makes sense that the game would have one. The problem then is striking a balance between realistic helicopter flight and accessibility. I've read Chickenhawk, a book about a real-life Huey pilot in the Vietnam war. He had a fixed-wing private pilot's licence before he started his helicopter training, but even so he found it very difficult to transition to helicopters. He started on piston-driven Sikorskis before moving to the UH-1, which was apparently easier to fly (it had auto-throttle and much more power) but nothing in the book suggests that flying a helicopter was easy in the 1960s and I suspect it's still very difficult. In my opinion the current model strikes a good balance between difficulty and accessibility, although I would prefer it if they got rid of auto-hover and added wind. It's still tricky enough to catch out the unwary, but not so hard that it's impossible to take off and land. The rarity makes it awkward, from a gameplay point of view, to teach the player how to fly. It would be unrewarding for the player if he fought through hell and high water only to find a helicopter that he can't use; and a dedicated set of tutorial missions would be disproportionate given how rare helicopters are in the game. I'm sure the developers are pondering the arcade / simulation balance at this very moment, deep in their bunker in Eastern Europe. Besides, the basic premise of the game is unrealistic. No way would I risk my life for some tins of macaroni and cheese. Packets of macaroni and cheese, yes - I love macaroni and cheese - but not tins. The sauce is horrible. Mountain Dew, again, I might risk my life for Mountain Dew, because they don't sell it in the UK any more. They used to, back in the late 1990s. It was like Sprite but with twice the sugar. One of the few drinks that can simultaneously cause AND cure a heart attack. But you can't get it any more. And that's not right.

If it's going to be a success as a standalone product then, yes, it will need constant growth. Bohemia does think about it from an economist's point of view, because they're a business. An erratic, passionate, occasionally frustrating but generally visionary business. Short of a subscription model or some kind of "pay money for tricked out guns" system the developers will need to constantly attract new players in order to fund continued development. And also trips abroad, legal fees etc. Short of proper data this is really one of those imponderables. Looking over old news reports the game seems to have passed a million unique players in August 2012, double that of a month earlier. Presumably it can't have doubled every month since then otherwise there would now be thirty-two million players (which would dwarf World of Warcraft). But of course the game is no longer new, and a lot depends on how you define "unique players". A PC World article from October 2012 talks about one point three million players, which if true is a considerable drop-off, but again, what does "unique players" mean? Individual sales? User accounts? People who played a demo once and gave up? Existing owners of ArmAII - there must have been some people who bought ArmAII - who tried it once, and gave up? The problem is that the mainstream news media seems to have given up on the game late last year, and I have to say that most of the threads I find on this message board when I Google for something peter out in September 2012. But then again I can remember a similar thing happening with Second Life - the media was all over it, then there were lots of "whatever happened to Second Life" stories, but it still has players and presumably still pays the bills. It's just that the media is fickle. And ultimately DayZ isn't a mainstream game on the same level as Wii Sports or even Halo. It's frustratingly hard for new players, it won't run on an iPad, it takes commitment, and I can't think of any other titles where basic orienteering is essential for survival. The future depends on how Bohemia want to play it. The sensible business case would be to slim down the terrain, turn the gameplay into an arcade-style shooter with RPG elements, introduce a subscription model, pay real money to have different avatars etc, but that would ruin it. Still, from Bohemia's point of view it must have been an incredibly economical money-spinner, even if numbers are falling. I hope the developers got a big bonus for Christmas. And a yacht. With girls in it.

True story: I went for a drive to the local supermarket back on Sunday, and at the edge of the car park there was one of the local homeless people. I live out in the countryside and there are a few people who sleep rough under bridges, in the few patches of remaining forest etc. This chap had a bunch of bags, rucksack, several layers of winter gear, and my first thought was "oh yeah, he's got an ALICE pack, probably stuffed with Heinz baked beans". In a way DayZ is a simulation of being a homeless person. An insane homeless person who thinks that you or I are zombies - mesmerised by consumer products - and that twigs and stones etc are assault rifles. Perhaps that'll be the theme of the standalone game. When you win it, a crisis team drives up and carts you to the local A&E and hence to Social Services, who give you a bungalow. So, yes, you've played DayZ too much when you start to get all philosophical about it.

I was a big fan of Operation Flashpoint back in the day, but I loved the engine more than the game. The wide open spaces and non-linear gameplay deserved better than the stock missions. Armed Assault was a bit rubbish but ArmAII was great fun, and DayZ is essentially multi-player OpF/ArmAII with zombies and a survive aspect, so what's not to like? What do I love about it? Primarily the freedom of motion. It's not like STALKER, for example, where the atmosphere is broken by the tiny maps. I remember feeling disappointed when I realised that each map in STALKER was essentially one or two large buildings in a field rather than the huge open sandbox I was expecting. There's the fact you can, if you choose, approach the target from any direction; you can use guile, or you can use superior resources if you have them. There's the sense that if you die it's your own stupid fault - which is ruined a bit by the bugs and hackers, but generally when I die in DayZ it's because I got cocky, not because the game rolled a set of bad luck dice or the enemy had a superior set of armour etc. In DayZ it doesn't matter if you're tooled out with lots of equipment, one Lee Enfield shot to the head and you're dead. Unlike e.g. Eve the combat is actually combat and not just dice-rolling. The atmosphere is scary, although STALKER beats it in that respect. It would be great if the two franchises could merge - DayZ' enormous map plus the anomalies and ghostly air of STALKER would be awesome. There's the tension of realising that you didn't have food in your backpack after all, and you're going to have to get some soon. And the tension of approaching a deer stand and you notice that there are already dead zombies underneath it - someone's been there, and recently. But, essentially, it's multi-player OpF/ArmAII with less of an emphasis on crawling literally everywhere and more things to do. The loot and weapons give it a collect-em-up quality and the zombies make it just tricky enough that you can't simply run through the map picking everything up (although you can, but there's always a risk that you'll over-reach yourself and get knocked out or end up with a broken leg).

Earlier on you were looking for a hoe: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/122659-looking-for-a-hoe/ It's like evolution in action. Next time, you'll be looking for a lady, to join a party of seven gentlemen. To participate in a merry evening of gentlemanly rousting with a group of slightly whiffy reanimated corpses in the jolly countryside.

It just doesn't ring true. You were expecting them to chase after you with a machine-gun and a sniper rifle (at least), but you still had time to shoot and gut a cow, light a fire - at night - cook the meat, and eat it. It's not as if Namalsk has a plethora of cover, either. I love that word, plethora.