Target Practice (DayZ)

Not sure if this is new to 1.7.7.1 or whether it's been a known issue for a while, but recently started playing again and noticed that on many loot spawns there will be at least one zed stood completely still on top of the loot spawn - not just wandering around it or whatever, but stood there running through the various 'idle' animations. Is this just me on a spectacular run of bad luck, or have others been noticing this too? I did check the bug reports thread, but if it was reported in there, I must have missed it. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be a feature, as it makes no sense for them to behave that way.

I've been 'Target Practice' for 17 years now. All started during a LAN game of the original Quake with a bunch of friends. I made a passing comment that one of them seemed to be killing me with annoying regularity, and he joked that he was using my many corpses for target practice. I jokingly changed my name, and it stuck.

2.5mbps is hardly 'extremely slow' - granted it's not super fast, but there's still plenty of folks getting by on 1mbps or less! I'd guess you're probably looking at four to five hours for OA alone. Don't forget you'll need to download base ARMA II as well. EDIT: threadreading fail - for some reason I saw the title as 'oa download' rather than 'co download'. Yeah, above poster is probably right - somewhere between 6-8 hours for both would be a reasonable expectation.

I thought this thread was going to be about a friday night out on the tiles with Hetstaine. :(

True, although one would presume that they're being run on a system that's capable of running at that level of detail at at least 20-30FPS, if only for the shot-taker's sanity.

I'm pretty sure Rocket has expressed a desire to see some more variety in zombie behaviour, too. I know he said recently that he wants 'well-fed' zombies to be stronger and more dangerous, so zombies that get lots of kills will be more dangerous than those that don't. The only downside to this that I can see is that Kamenka will become a deathtrap, as pretty much anyone who spawns there immediately commits suicide by zombie - the place is going to be full of incredible-hulk style zombies! I'm pretty sure that I've also read/seen somewhere that he quite likes the idea of roaming 'hordes' of zombies, which will be possible in the Standalone, as the way zombies are spawned will change completely. Now that would be an interesting thing to stumble across on that long hike from Stary to the NWAF!

Those are indeed rather pretty. Any indication what kind of rig those were taken on?

I'm still not 100% sure you're understanding the point here. As far as I can see, no-one in this thread has any problem with zeds spawning and lurking around loot spawns and inside houses. That's explainable behaviour and still gives the player a reasonable chance of getting the loot without getting aggro (as long as they're careful), and I'm all for that. The problem that this thread is addressing is the one you alluded to in your third paragraph - zeds spawning on every single loot pile and standing right on top of it without moving. That's neither explainable nor particularly fair on the player.

There's always got to be a balance - if PC gaming wants to remain the pinnacle of gaming, then technology needs to move forwards, and that means that slowly but surely older technology will become obsolete. Sure, we'd all love to just buy a PC now and still be playing cutting-edge games on it in ten years' time without upgrading anything, but that simply isn't realistic. On the other hand, it's also important that we don't go back to where we were ten years ago when you could spend £1500 on a new PC and then find out that in six months time your system is very much middle-of-the-pack, because people will just go across to consoles, where they outlay £300 or so and are set for five to seven years. Right now, I feel the balance is about right - a good, well-built gaming system might cost £1000-1200, but it's also going to last a long while (as long as you don't want to play Crysis 4 on full settings!) There are always going to be people who are complaining that they can't run DayZ on full settings at 60FPS on their integrated graphics cards, just like there will always be people that complain that DayZ doesn't make full use of their triple-SLI GTX Titan rig. Those people will always be around, and nothing you can do will change that - as long as the majority of systems bought/built in the last 3-5 years can run a given game on reasonable settings, that seems fair enough to me.

Yeah, I get what you're saying with that, and in some ways, that would make sense, and I could live with that - as long as they weren't standing completely static on top of the item in question, I'd have no problems with certain items of loot (food, corpses etc) attracting zeds to the general vicinity. I'm reasonably sure that this is a bug though - I can't think Razor and co would stoop to such a blatantly 'fake' kind of difficulty. We all know that zeds are buggy as hell at the moment, so I'm fairly happy that this is just a passing phase. Hopefully 1.7.7.2 isn't far off and will fix this!

To those that are arguing that all objects need a shit-ton of polygons, I would argue that Bethesda have been using the 'low polygon count, high-res texture' trick for small items for ages, and it works just fine, and allows there to be hundreds of items on screen at once. Whilst I'm lucky enough to have a decent gaming rig, and I'd love the standalone to look as breathtakingly pretty as my GTX 670 can handle without catching fire, I have to be realistic and understand that at the moment, my machine is ahead of the curve somewhat, and not every game is going to make the most of it's power. I won't lose sleep over that - as long as it doesn't look like a giant bag of inside-out asses, I'm willing to accept the odd rough edge if I look REALLY REALLY closely.

Haha, oh right, my apologies - it's difficult to tell sometimes on here... There are people who would probably try and make that claim seriously!

Thanks for your input, but I'm not sure exactly how you've worked out that the zombies 'know what its worth' with regards to loot - I don't want to start the dreaded 'realistic zombies' discussion, but that certainly doesn't match the behaviour of anything I've ever seen depicted as a zombie in any films, books or games. Also, if you have a read of the post, it's not the zombies spawning inside that I have a problem with - I quite like that feature - it's the zombies stood outside and completely static on the spawns that I have the issue with. I'm more than capable of navigating around the ones in houses, but it's the ones that resist any attempts at distraction and just stand on the loot that I have the issue with, because if you aggro that one, there's a pretty good chance that you're about to do the 'Benny Hill run' around the town of your choice with a conga-line of pissed-off zeds in hot pursuit. Not ideal when you have no food or drink!

This. I think the actual scarcity of the loot and so on is pretty much spot on - it's rare enough that you have to dedicate time to actually finding food and drink now, whereas before you were falling over it. The only issue is that every can of coke now comes with a free zombie glued to it. Not a problem if you have a makarov or a crossbow or whatever, but when all you have is a handful of road flares and a bandage, it becomes a pretty huge issue.

Just to revive this, as it's actually making the game unplayable for me at the moment, and I'm amazed that more people aren't reporting this issue - maybe it's because every thread about 1.7.7.1 keeps dissolving into people arguing over whether it's too hard or not. I just jumped into the Balota Buddies public server to give it a whirl, and as I'd not played that particular server, I started as a freshspawn not far from Solnichniy. For me, that was ideal - nice quiet area, decent loot spawns within a reasonable distance, and none of the hassle that goes with spawning anywhere near Cherno or Elektro. So I hit Z and started crawling around to get my starting gear together. Only I couldn't. I must have checked 8-10 different loot spawns, and every single one had a zombie standing on top of it or inside it and not moving an inch. I sat and watched one for fully five minutes waiting for it to move - nothing. I threw a tin can to distract it - nothing. The second I go near it, thinking it's bugged out? I get aggro. Now, don't get me wrong - I love a challenge, but it needs to be a fair fight - if you want to fill every single town and city with hundreds of zeds that can Falcon Punch me across the map in one hit, go for it - that will make the looting raids all the more tense and enjoyable, but at least give players a fighting chance of getting some loot without HAVING to get aggro. I don't want to be 'that guy' who claims that 'OMFG NEW PATCH HAS RUINED DAYZ I'M NOT PLAYING AGAIN EVAR!!!!!111!!ONE!!', but this bug (which is what I'm assuming it is) has sapped all of the enjoyment out of the game for me, and I'm struggling to find motivation to play the game, as I know what's going to happen before I even get to a town.

Interesting. Hopefully this will boost the population on the EU servers a bit - I've only been on BB's EU servers once or twice, and whilst the folks there were awesome, it was a bit deserted.

And I don't disagree with you in the slightest. Go back a page in this thread and read the post I made towards the bottom of the page - judging by your post to threadstarter above, it seems that we share almost exactly the same opinion on the matter at hand. My point was that there's no point getting angry and SHOUTING ABOUT IT, because it doesn't achieve anything other than putting a negative spin on the thread and deflecting away from debate and discussion and towards arguing and fighting - if that starts happening, the thread gets shut down, and the devs won't have anything to go on at all. I would assume that they'd most likely much rather have a balanced and well-thought out thread with point and counter-point, pro and con than they would a locked thread where everyone was shouting at each other.

Agreed with the threadstarter above - there's no harm in discussion about the various possibilities, opinions and feelings about something like this - it creates interesting debate and a chance to consider other points of view. As pretty much everyone has agreed, there's no way of enforcing such a thing, so any debates are entirely theoretical and there's no need to get angry about the fact that the discussion is taking place - if you're fed up with discussing it or feel the discussion has no point, give the thread a miss, it's easy enough. :)

Yeah, it's possible that was what he meant. Hooray for a descriptive and informative first post, I guess. I'm not too clued up on the server side of things, but it's possible that a lot of useful info may be in here: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/55657-start-here-a-beginners-guide-to-dayz-servers-and-administration/

Errr... Do you mean how do you add a whitelist to your server? Because unless I'm mistaken (which is possible!), there isn't a whitelist of servers. Oh, and it's spelled 'how'. :P

Exactly. As good as DayZ is (and will be once the SA hits), it's still going to be a game, and with that comes all the baggage that playing a game online brings - bad losers will ragequit when you kill them, idiots will run around guns blazing like it's Call of Duty: the MMO, and competitive types will use every loophole, glitch and exploit they can to give them that little edge over other players. These are all pretty much inescapable issues with online games, and to date no-one's come up with a way of preventing them - merely ways of reducing their impact. The point is, no matter how realistic and engrossing the in-game world is, it's still a game, and as such there are going to be things that we need to accept as 'acceptable breaks from immersion'. For me, Teamspeak etc falls under that.

Yeah, as others have suggested, this is basically unenforceable, even if there was a desire to do so. Even if there was some way of blocking Teamspeak/Ventrilo/whatever your voip of choice is and the players couldn't/wouldn't use an app on their phones to do the same thing, it would take all of about a week for some clever programmer to come up with a 5mb download that would provide a way around the system. Personally, I don't see it as a problem - it's gaming, and people like to do it with their friends. I don't see how stopping them (or trying to stop them) chatting to each other while they're playing can ever be a good thing.

This one's been suggested a couple of times, and my personal opinion is that it would be a wonderful way of wasting all your ammo and not a whole lot else. Unless you wanted it to be horribly overpowered, it would be realistic to assume that you have an icecube in hell's chance of actually hitting anything person-sized from more than 20-30m away. The person you're trying to hit is going to know that, and will likely just go prone (or even just stand still) and wait for you to burn through all your ammo whilst hitting absolutely nothing, then wait for you to have to stick your head to run because you don't have enough ammo left to fight. It's a nice idea, and it wouldn't break the game or anything like that, but I simply cannot see any situation where it's actually going to be a valid and useful tactic - use it in the open (behind a wall in a field or something) and your opponent will just wait for you to run out of ammo. Use it in a town and your opponent will either just flank you or wait for the thousands of zombies you just aggroed to get you instead.

True, but you, I, and anyone else out there who's been on the internet more than five minutes know that that isn't the way it works - as someone above me pointed out quite correctly, if folks are enjoying the game, they're in-game playing it, not on here complaining about it. Look at it this way - how many long-term forum members have been vocally complaining about the 1.7.7 patch? I'm not talking about guys who registered in May and have 10-20 posts or whatever, I'm talking members with 500, 1000, 2000 posts, folks who have been registered on the forum a year or more. The Rage VGs, the Steak and Potatoes, the Hetstaines. These aren't folks who are likely to come on and create the 'ZOMG 1.7.7 sux WTFBBQ' thread for the 100th time and claiming the game's been ruined forever because relatively small changes have been made, even if they absolutely abhor the decisions, they'll take their time, weigh up what they like and don't like, and then explain exactly what they feel is the problem and usually, what they feel will fix it. Those guys are the voices that are worth listening to, because they're in there, playing the game on a daily basis, and have been doing so for months and months - they're interacting with that community both in-game and in these forums, and what they're feeling is probably going to be an effective barometer for what those invisible players who don't visit here regularly but love the mod anyway are thinking.

I don't think it was aimed at you specifically, more at some of the others - in fact, I think the issue you raised (disappearing wild zombies) wasn't removed for balance reasons - I think there was some kind of technical/framerate issue with them, so they're fixing that before they bring it back. :)