Target Practice (DayZ)

Interesting point, but it seems you're looking at DayZ from a much more PvP aspect than I am. Whilst I accept that DayZ is a multiplayer game and that if I don't like playing with others I should find a different game, that doesn't mean that I particularly want a large amount of PvP in my game - like most things, a bit of it in moderation keeps things interesting, but this "fast paced travel times and then fight for your life in towns" that you speak of sounds nothing like the DayZ that I fell in love with, nor does it sound like the future of a particularly good survival game. As much as I hate to use the example, DayZ isn't Battlefield. If I want fast-paced action and crazy firefights, I can go play BF4. Hell, that's what it's made for. If I want to battle the constant threat of starvation, dangerous zombies and the risk of potentially hostile players, I'll play DayZ. A large part of the atmosphere in DayZ is the pacing, and that's why I'd be so reluctant to toy with the movement speeds and/or effective mobility of the player, because you'll throw that pacing off - too fast and players will gear up too quickly and get bored once they run out of things to do. Too slow, and they'll get bored having to spend half an hour just to get between towns.

Yeah, because everyone joins a forum fully educated in the subject they wish to discuss. Seriously, elitist crap like this is how communities wither and die. We should be welcoming and looking to educate new players who maybe haven't grasped the subtleties of DayZ just yet, not berating them and casting them aside so we can sit here and circlejerk whilst talking about how much better DayZ was 'back in the day'.

See, that doesn't help the issue of players reaching endgame too fast though. All you've done is just cut out the first (and arguably most important and enjoyable) stage of the game - surviving. Those first few hours where you're scrambling from house to house frantically trying to find a tin of beans because you're starving, where your only option when spotted is to turn and run because you don't even have anything to use as a weapon, and where the running from town to town is worth the wait because you know that whatever you find will be useful. If I can find a car inside an hour, none of that really matters. I've not got to worry too much about finding food, because I'll be able to travel from town to town in a minute or so - my hunger will have barely dropped, and I'll be able to loot three to five times as many locations as I would on foot, because I can get between distant points so much quicker. Zombies won't be too much of a problem as I can just hop in my vehicle and run them down/drive off. Personally, I hate the idea of bases, but I accept that it's simply my own preference, and that I'm just going to have to accept them as an inevitability - hopefully they're a long way down the line though. Either way, I wouldn't be using Epoch as a model for the future of DayZ just yet - the only thing it's shown for me is that if you make it too easy for players to gear up quickly (and it's pretty easy to do that in Epoch!), then they'll run out of things to do, and when they run out of things to do they'll either stop playing or start hunting other players to amuse themselves. There's a fairly large KoS problem in DayZ at the moment, and there's a particular school of thought that believe that it's simply because so many players enjoy the game but have done everything there is to do, so they do the only thing that's always going to be changing and fresh - hunting players. I do agree that for most players though, base building is the 'current' endgame, but that doesn't mean that you should therefore shuffle vehicles to early game. Leave vehicles as they are now - rare, hard to find and even harder to keep, because it adds more playtime to the game - more things for players to achieve, and more to keep them occupied. For me, DayZ should be a kind of pyramid. You start at the bottom with your can of beans and your winchester, and you learn those basic survival skills that you'll use in everything else you'll do in DayZ. That's what you'll spend the most time doing, even in endgame, you'll still have to stay alive. Once you've done that and geared up enough that you can start raiding industrial spawns for vehicle parts, you can move up to the next tier and start hunting for and repairing a vehicle, because even when you're building/built your base, you'll be needing that vehicle to move the heavy parts and get you to and from distant locations to search for stuff. Then, once that's done you can finally move into endgame with the basebuilding and whatnot. If you take away that first tier, not only do you drastically reduce the amount of time before players reach endgame and run out of things to do, you also rather drastically skew the development of new players. What good is having a car if you don't know how to survive when you have to get out of it? Heh, we've deviated a little bit from the original topic here, but I'm enjoying the discussion. :p

Yeah, I see what you're saying, but it's one of those things where you have to be willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of gameplay - sure, it's pretty unlikely any of us would be wanting to run 10km over uneven terrain on a diet of nothing but baked beans and mountain dew, but when the 'realistic' alternative would leave players potentially having up to 30 minutes of doing nothing but holding the 'W' key, you have to decide whether that's going to be the sort of thing people are going to want to spend their free time doing on a regular basis. As for cars/bikes, Chernarus doesn't strike me as the kind of place where cars are everywhere. For me, finding and repairing a car should be a mid to end game kind of thing - if I can find a car within ten minutes of spawning, where's the challenge and the enjoyment of spending all that time scavenging for parts, finding the car in the first place, and then trying to find a place to hide it? There's already a pretty major issue with players not really having enough to do in DayZ after a certain point, and I can only think that making vehicles almost immediately accessible would exacerbate the issue. It's the same with bikes, if not worse - a bike can achieve a good 30-40 km/h on most terrains, which is better than a good proportion of vehicles. It's silent, and it's damn hard to find if it's hidden well. Once players become too mobile, they'll gear up even quicker than they do already and once again run out of things to do. It's a very tricky balance to get right, which is why I feel that the status quo of mild disbelief is a better option than the potentially game-breaking changes suggested. I'm not deliberately trying to be an ass, and I can see that your suggestion's been given a bit more thought than some of the dross this particular section gets posted, but I do enjoy playing devil's advocate and I can definitely see some potential side effects from the changes.

The main issue with this is one of travel. No matter how many cars you dot around the map, there are still going to be a lot of players who will spend long periods of time without access to a vehicle, which means that if they want to get anywhere, they're going on foot. Now, I'm a pretty patient player, but DayZ already has plenty of 10-15 minute periods where I'm literally doing nothing but running from one point to the next. That's 10-15 minutes of running. Add endurance into the mix, where I can only run for 1-2 minutes before having to slow down, and that journey gets a lot longer, and I spend even more time moving through large patches of terrain where nothing is happening. That doesn't make for great gameplay.

I think to be completely honest, the only way you can be 100% sure that you won't be accused of admin abuse is to not play on any server you admin. As we've seen recently in this trainwreck of a thread, people will not hesitate to assume the worst and then shout their opinion from the rooftops, whether they're in possession of all the facts or not. Sadly gaming is infested with sore losers - the kind of people who can't comprehend that it may have been a mistake on their part or good play on their opponent's part that lead to them dying. If they died, then there must have been some other factor to it besides their insurmountable gaming ability - if you kill that guy, what do you think he'll do? Say 'gg, you got me there'? Fat chance. He'll be screaming admin abuse to anyone who'll listen, and sadly there are plenty of people who are willing to believe it because it's (equally sadly) not all that uncommon. In the example I linked to above, the video wasn't even filmed on a 'live' server, it was a private test server, but it didn't stop the accusations flying in at some pretty well-respected members of the community. Even the option of changing your name when playing is a risky one, because if it gets out that you've got admin powers (and it will sooner or later), you're still going to have the same problem, but this time the witch hunters will insist that you were even so nefarious as to use alternate profiles to cover your 'cheating'. You can't win. So yeah, as sad as it is, unless you either know every player who will connect to your server, or are exceptionally good at dealing with the fallout from sour losers and abuse accusations, it's just a headache waiting to happen. When the need to play rather than assist takes you, simply find a good server and go there.

Yeah, I don't get people's fascination with killing zombie children. Just about every zombie game I play, there's a bunch of people complaining and whining about the fact that they're not allowed to shoot something that looks like a child. Whilst I'm not going to imply that there's something wrong with that, it doesn't exactly do the public perception of gamers as bloodthirsty maniacs any favours. Personally, it doesn't bother me either way - I don't have a strong objection to shooting a slightly smaller model as opposed to a larger one, but on the same note, I really don't ever notice the absence of them when they're not there - if I had to go one way or the other, I'd go against, simply because it's got the potential to garner negative press, and gaming doesn't need any more of that. Why risk it for something that would make zero difference to gameplay?

I have played with/against a few of the Musty Admins on the Musty servers, and I can say hand-on-heart that I've not seen even the slightest hint of admin abuse. I've killed/been killed and witnessed the deaths of many admins. I've looted their corpses and found no more or less ammo on their bodies than one would expect to find on any other corpse. To be honest, I'd like to think that anyone with half a brain will see that this video was created in a private environment for the purpose of amusement. Anyone without half a brain? Well, to be honest, I'm not too worried what they think.

Thanks Rocket. These kind of updates every now and then are perfect for letting us know where things are, and it's appreciated. Keep up the good work.

Aye, that would be the simplest solution. Display a message to whoever put the handcuffs on saying that "Little_Jonny_NoScopezz has disconnected" and leave the character in the game for 20-30 seconds or so. That's plenty of time for the captor to get cruel and creative with the punishment (kneecap 'em then empty their backpack?) or to simply just place a bullet in their skull.

Thank Christ on a bike for that. The combination of wildly inaccurate melee and zeds that can defy the laws of physics with their turning speed has now got to the point where unless I'm in a building against a lone zed, I won't even bother attempting melee. I'll just run until either I lose them or I'm far enough away from other zeds and players that popping a few bullets into my pursuer won't get me undue attention.

To answer your questions: Not an awful lot - KoS is a pretty big problem at the moment, but gameplay-wise the mod's moving in the right direction. Best place to catch up on all the changes would be the changelog threads in the announcements forum. Still no official release date on the Standalone, but it now exists in the Steam database, so it perhaps wouldn't be a million miles away to assume that if they're not on the home straight, they're rounding the last bend - at least as far as the Alpha is concerned, obviously. And yeah, they still walk through walls - unfixable in the mod, sadly.

You know that post is over 18 months old, right?

I've very little interest in mods of DayZ, but Epoch keeps cropping up in conversations, and I see there are quite a few decent folk frequenting this server, so I might well be tempted to stick my nose in (and no doubt get it shot off, as I'm terrible at PvP).

Ah, okay. Thanks for clearing that one up. I'm not too familiar with ACRE, so wasn't sure how that would work.

Sorry, I'm intrigued. In a hypothetical server where these rules are enforced by admins, how exactly are the remote admins going to be able to ascertain whether someone is using Teamspeak or not?

Yeah, what Inception said. AFAIK it doesn't make any difference to Zed/NPC (if you're playing a server/mod with NPCs) visibility, but if/when you're playing with others, dark/dull coloured paint is a necessity if you want to be able to hide your vehicle with any effectiveness.

Yes, but when most of those replies are people desperately trying to persuade you to come down off the metaphorical edge of the cliff, that doesn't really reinforce your credibility much there, feller. You get replies because you're a slightly better than average troll. You say things that don't make much sense and make outlandish statements that are contrary to popular opinion and then you stubbornly refuse to listen to any point of view other than your own, meaning that most of the replies are just you and a frustrated poster going round in circles until they get fed up trying to talk any sense into you and give up. It's pretty difficult to say for sure whether a reduction in weapons/ammo will definitely result in a reduction in KoS behaviour. It certainly won't eradicate it altogether, and anyone who says it will is just as far off the reservation as our good buddy Ozelot here. However, I'm not convinced it'll increase it. I know that if I've only got one STANAG mag left, I'm a lot more hesitant to shoot my way out of trouble than I am if I've got five more mags sitting in my pocket - I'd be willing to wager most players probably think along similar lines. I generally don't attack players unless provoked, so I can't really apply a bandit mentality to it, but I'd likewise imagine that unless the player is reasonably sure that 1) the guy they're attacking is carrying more ammo than it's going to cost to kill him and 2) that they can kill him quickly without him sending half that ammo their way at several hundred meters per second, they're going to at least think twice before opening fire. Let's also not forget that (hopefully) zombies are going to be a bigger threat in the SA too. I remember one of the early dev diaries showing the new pathfinding AI follows the player in a much tighter manner, meaning that firing your AK on full auto in the middle of Elektro might be closer to a death sentence than the mild inconvenience it is now. That's got to have some effect on the decision-making process as well, surely.

This came to me earlier - in a situation that I feel reflects the loot balancing issues with the mod rather perfectly at the moment, I'd ended up in a situation where I had two high-grade military assault weapons but couldn't find a wood axe for the life of me, so I couldn't make a fire to boil water and stay alive, but I could quite happily hose down as many players as I felt like. Anyway, point is, whilst working my way through one of the small collections of houses between towns, I stumbled across a house with a woodpile built into the back of it. A huge-ass stack of wood just sat there doing nothing. But I couldn't interact with it in any way, and that felt like a real missed opportunity. A similar example would be the 'axe stuck in the tree stump' object that I'm sure we've all seen from time to time and thought 'man, I could really use that axe right now'. Is there a reason we can't? I have no idea how possible this is - I would assume that 'house' objects are just pre-made and therefore the ability to interact with specific parts of them is pretty limited, but for me this would be a really nice touch if it was possible - there's nothing more immersion-breaking in a game than seeing something that you need that's been put in the game world, but because no-one thought to make it usable, you can't actually take it or use it.

Yeah, but they weren't aggroed - that's the thing. They were just walking normally.

Had an interesting little glitch last night, I would have taken a screenshot, but it was the middle of the night, so any shots I'd have taken wouldn't have been clear enough to be of any use. Long story short, I ended up low on blood in the Berezino area and put out a call for a blood buddy. Someone came, and we ended up bumping into another couple of friendlies at the warehouses in the Berezino Docks area. We exchanged blood bags, traded some excess stuff away and then went our separate ways. As I went to cross the road back to Berezino, there was a HUGE conga line of zombies just walking along one side of the road. I've never ever seen anything like it before - they were all un-aggroed, just in their idle walking/crawling/loping animations, but all walking in exactly the same direction up the coast road towards Khelm/NEAF direction. It was too dark to get a proper headcount (plus I was trying to look for a break in traffic to cross the road!), but I waited for over 5 minutes, and there didn't appear to be any end to the line when I finally found a big enough gap to creep through - I'd estimate well over 40 passed me before I got through - one of the other guys reported the same thing a little further down the road. It was pretty awesome to see, actually - like some kind of horde wandering round, it's just behaviour I've never ever seen (or heard of) before.

Dude, chill out. I'm not attacking you, no need to get your back up. I'm just pointing out why it might be kind of tricky to do even on a server-to-server basis, and a few situations where it's not quite as black and white as you seem to think.

Yeah, my only worry is that I'm assuming houses are classed as one 'object', and that presumably the woodpiles next to them are considered part of that object, so it depends if it's possible for only a specific 'part' of an object to be interactive (IE, you don't want players to get the option to 'take wood' when they walk past the front door of the house in question).

Well, I was thinking just use the same method they use for chopping wood near trees. Once you get near a wood pile, the 'take wood' option appears, you middle-click and the wood appears in your inventory. No need to access the gear menu, and since people rarely ever need more than one pile of wood at a time and it's only used for fires, it's not like there'd be any real drawback to having it as an infinite wood generator. :p

Not to be an ass, and I freely admit I don't care for the mods of a mod, but I've actually not heard of it, whereas I'm at least aware of the stuff like Origins and Epoch, so I'm not sure it's quite as popular as you think. Either way, I don't have a problem with it in theory, and I understand that you're saying it's not a 'blanket' thing, I'm just pointing out that it's going to be nigh-unenforceable. No matter what you put in place, people will find a way round it, either because they want a tactical advantage, or because they just want to be able to gas with their friends whilst playing the game. I play BF3 with a small gang of guys, and regularly we'll all be in the same Teamspeak with some playing BF3, some playing DayZ and some playing Payday 2 - there's no tactical advantage to what we're doing there, no rules are being broken, so how are you going to differentiate between that situation and the one of a clan of guys all working together in in-game silence thanks to Teamspeak?