Target Practice (DayZ)

Unless I'm mistaken, this is an intended feature. If you fire non-SD rounds from a SD weapon, you'll still get aggro. I believe it works slightly better the other way round though - SD rounds out of a non-SD weapon will make a noise to you and anyone around you, but the zombies won't react for some reason. Could be wrong though, been a while since I've tested that.

Are you feeling okay? Did you take your medicine this morning? No-one's so much as hinted at removing or warning you, and in fact, they're being considerably politer to you than you are to them. If you have an issue, by all means raise it and let's talk about it, but don't be an ass when there's no need to be, as it'll just escalate from there and the issue at hand will get lost in all the mess.

So. Hypothetically, how would someone tell that said item of food is poisoned? What purpose would this serve? What would the in-game reason be for doing it? What exactly would the 'poisons' do?

This is my biggest issue with a lot of players too - the fact that they have this idea in their head that just because they scream 'friendly' into the mic every three seconds that it'll act like holy water to vampires and send seasoned killers running for the hills. Just because you're friendly doesn't mean the other guy has to be - don't assume anyone's friendly until they've proven otherwise. If you're stupid/naive enough to run up to a complete stranger in Elektro, you shouldn't be surprised if he turns out to be hostile. Or he might figure that anyone dumb enough to be running round Elektro like their pants are on fire isn't the kind of person he wants following him round anyway and shoot you to make his life easier. As has been said before in this thread several times - it's all about a common sense approach. The more selective you are about who you let see you, the less you'll get shot.

Some people get attached to their character - some people play the game just to survive as long as they possibly can. If you've got a character you've kept alive for 95 days and someone comes up behind you, points an AK at your back and gives you the option of starting again from day 0 or handing over your shiny M14 AIM and coyote backpack, it's a choice you have to make. Some people play DayZ as a 'game' and some people play it as an 'experience'. Just because you play one way doesn't mean that the other way isn't a valid way of enjoying the game either.

This pretty much nails it for me - in my experiences in DayZ, I've had more friendly relationships with other players than hostile ones. It's about being careful, making sure you see them before they see you and above all, controlling the situation. If I see a guy in a bandit skin lurking on the roof of the Elektro Fire Station, I'm not going to go up to him and ask him if he needs blood. On the other hand, if I'm approaching Msta and see a guy in the normal survivor skin backpedalling furiously whilst trying to hatchet a group of zombies, I might well decide to call over to him in direct and tell him that I'm friendly and I'm going to try and help him out a bit. On the same note, if I happen to be looting a supermarket and realise that someone's in there with me, I'm not going to cover the door with my AK and wait for him to come round the corner - I'll call out in direct and let him know I'm there whilst covering the door with the AK. If he responds and seems cool, we'll both get on with our looting. If he doesn't respond, I'll probably look to get the hell out of there. Interacting with people in DayZ isn't hard - you just have to be prepared to think ahead and communicate in ways that don't involve pointing your gun at someone.

It is what it is - walking along minding your own business and then dropping dead out of nowhere can be pretty frustrating, especially when you've worked hard for a long time for your gear. Some people respond to that frustration by loading up Bulletstorm or Call of Duty and slaughtering everything that moves for half an hour to get it out of their system. Others come on the forums and have a bit of a grumble about it and what they feel would fix it. It's simply the way certain people deal with it, and that's not going to change. I do agree that there is a bit of a KoS problem in DayZ at the moment, and it's prevalent because the game's currently 'trendy' (god, how 90's is that word?!), and as a result is attracting a lot of those folks who - to put it as gently as possible - maybe aren't the brightest stars in the sky. They've seen zombies, seen guns, and figured that the aim of the game must be to kill anything that moves with your gun, and have no interest in actually preserving their own life - they'll just respawn, go fetch another gun and go back to the big cities again to resume killing. Those guys are the problem, as they're essentially a heavily-armed, unlimited-numbers enemy army - no matter how careful you are, how many times you get the drop on them and kill them before they kill you, they'll just respawn and come right back at you. The problem is, how do you fix a problem like that without punishing 'legitimate' bandit players, who almost everyone agrees are not just a part of the game, but an integral feature?

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.

Well, it won't be much use to you to buy, as it's a UK-only site, but I used PCspecialist.co.uk to order mine, and their 'build' page has an awesome checker when you click 'proceed' that checks stuff like your PSU capacity, your motherboard and so on and so forth to make sure that it all works together nicely and that nothing's overloaded. It's not perfect, but it'll give you a pretty good idea of what's compatible and how big a PSU you'll need.

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.

To be honest, you'd probably be better asking for advice a little closer to the time if you want specific part recommendations - there's recently been a few new entries to the market and prices for the older models haven't really settled yet, so something that's not a great deal price-wise now might be a bit more appealing in two months. As for building vs buying, it's definitely cheaper to build. Have you considered buying a custom-made machine? There's plenty of places out there that will let you design a machine and will build it for you - on one hand you would pay slightly more than you would if you bought the parts and put it together yourself. On the other hand, you'd have a guarantee on workmanship etc, and you'll know that it's been done properly.

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.