Target Practice (DayZ)

You're trying to appeal to an already over-saturated market. Ask yourself what YOU do differently to any of the hundreds of other DayZ servers/communities out there. I'm not talking about extra vehicles or starting loadouts or anything like that, I'm talking about something that no other DayZ server out there has, and why people would come to you. If you're serious about this, ditch the wordpress domain. Nothing screams 'not really committed to this' than a project with a website that's hosted on a free site. If you're not prepared to invest a few dollars in a domain and some cheap hosting, players aren't going to be prepared to invest their time in your project. Don't push too hard. If people enjoy what you're offering, they'll come to you and ask to join. If you irritate them by constantly recruiting and hassling people with messages asking them to join, they'll go find somewhere else to play where they're not bugged by over-zealous recruiters every ten minutes. Case in point - I've recently started playing ARMA II co-op missions with a group of players - they play it 'realistically' with a command structure, orders etc, but they're pretty laid back about it, and it's good fun. They're a clan, and it's a private server, but they open it to the public on Friday and Saturday nights, and I happened to be invited to play there with a friend one night. I enjoyed my time there so much that I now visit regularly and am toying with the idea of applying to join and play during the week - not once has anyone hassled me or asked me to join, I've just found it entertaining enough that I decided that it's something I might like to do. That's what you need to do - offer something different to everything else out there, and make it an atmosphere that people will want to come back to. If you do that, you'll win every time. And don't expect overnight results - this stuff happens slowly. Whoever said 'build it and they will come' was most definitely not talking about websites and communities. You have to work damn hard and nurture it without ever smothering it. Good luck.

It's the ARMA engine, you're just as likely to survive as you are to be warped to some faraway dimension never to be see again. It's chaos theory applied to game design. :P Seriously though, the easiest way to find out is to load up a multiplayer editor session with your buddy and test for yourself at the exact location and height you're planning on doing it. That'll give you the answer. For what it's worth, when dropping players off over water, I always tend to fly as low as I dare (often altitudes of 5 or less) and let them hop out there - much less chance of them splattering from that low down.

Indeed, although I would presume that the North, like the South will be getting a bit of a makeover- at the moment, it's the NWAF, NEAF and a whole crap-ton of forests and hills that all look the same, and the shipwreck won't help that, as it's miles away from that central Northern region. Out of interest (can't remember if this has been decided or debated yet), are they continuing the trend of spawning along the Coast, or are they also including inland spawns in the SA? Because if they're randomising the spawns, it'll likely make Elektro and Cherno slightly (and only slightly) less dangerous and pvp-focused.

Yeah, I'd be careful with using Wasteland as a 'like for like' training tool for DayZ. It's a good way of getting used to the pressure of pvp play and finding what weapons work for you, but it's also worth remembering that players in wasteland aren't as careful with their lives as they are in DayZ, and you're much more likely to be using/facing gear that's either rare or doesn't exist in DayZ. Still though, it's well worth doing if you remember the differences between the two - Wasteland is actually very good fun in its own right.

Not keen on putting it too far North - there's already next to no incentive to play further South, adding more good loot spawns/interesting sights up North is just going to make it worse. Not suggesting it should be put 200m off Elektro or anything, but somewhere different would be nice.

I doubt he'd be a one-shot kill with anything judging by the amount of ammunition I've seen him soak up, but it'd be interesting to see how many AS50 headshots it took to bring him down.

I believe you might also need to upload the sig image to a 'whitelisted' site such as photobucket and link to it there. As for the weapon, I also quite like the SA-58 variants, as they're not all that uncommon or hard-to-find, and they're nice and versatile. Another good option is the AKM or any M16 variant. To be honest, unless you're planning on doing a brass-balls charge to the NWAF barracks and shooting your way out, the only reason you'll ever need any kind of primary weapon is for PvP, be it for offence or self-defence. Zombies aren't currently enough of a threat to really warrant anything beyond a pistol, and once again, what you carry will depend largely at what range you're planning on engaging enemies. For cities and other high-population areas, an assault rifle is ideal - preferably an M4/M16 or similar, as STANAG rounds fit lots of guns, and ammo will be hard to come by. If you're planning on lurking in treelines and ambushing, a sniper is going to be much more efficient - the CZ550 is a pretty decent shout, and isn't too hard to find (or at least compared to the other, higher-powered rifles). My personal favourite is the L85A2 (I think that's the one) - usually comes with an ACOG scope or similar for longer-range work, takes STANAG rounds, and doesn't make much more noise than the M16 family. Only downer is that they seem to be pretty rare - I usually find them at the military camps in Stary Sobor.

To be honest, unless you're actively playing a bandit, you've got it spot on - look to avoid confrontation/other players wherever possible, but don't be afraid of shooting if someone's clearly (or even just likely) to be a threat to you. DayZ is a strange beast at the moment, as it's populated by 1/3 players who will just shoot anyone they see on sight, 1/3 'friendlies' who charge around Cherno and Elektro shouting out that they're friendly and then wonder why they get shot by bandits/Kill on sight players, and 1/3 players like yourself, who aren't openly hostile, but are unlikely to go out of their way to engage other players unless they have to. It's really all about what you're looking to achieve - that will likely dictate your playstyle and the way you go about things.

It took three of us damn near every last bullet we had to put him down, I think we were using an M4A3, an M249 and a CZ550, and he just KEPT. ON. COMING. I wouldn't recommend trying to kill him at all, but if you decide to for shits and giggles, I'd go in with heavy-duty weaponry - preferably vehicle-mounted, but at least a LMG and/or explosives of some kind.

Yeah, as mZLY said, your CPU was the one that jumped out at me as a potential issue here - ARMA II (and in particular DayZ) is very, very CPU-hungry - far more so than many other games. The HDD option may help, although I should add that I'm playing on a 1TB HDD (WD Black), and don't have any major problems, so it might not be a miraculous fix. Either way, hopefully the standalone will be much better optimised - your existing system will likely run it just fine. :)

I remember back in one of the many debates about introducing defecating into the game, I expressed concern that it wouldn't take long for some half-wit with a mild scatological fixation to go out there with the express intention of pooping on everything. I never imagined that they'd be recruiting before the feature has even been introduced, though. Please let me know what server you play on so I can avoid it like the plague.

Mag-fucking-nificent. All my beans.

You can just define your own keys by going into options -> controls... why does no-one ever actually think to do that?

Honestly, it doesn't matter. Even if the AMD does perform better, unless you're that desperate to play the DayZ mod (let's not forget that the standalone could change this) right now that you bought a gaming PC with the SOLE purpose of playing DayZ, the difference between the two manufacturers is fairly significant in a considerable number of other applications. Both processors run DayZ just fine, so to be honest, this is a bit of a redundant question - if the FX 8350 or i5 3570 weren't capable of running the game, then it'd be different, but they do, so... yeah.

This is nowhere near the level of some of the stuff you guys were pulling, but I remember way back in about 1996 when I was in High School, I discovered you could have some low-level fun with MS Word's autocorrect dictionary. As we shared computers between classes, and I knew the guy who also used my computer, I set the autocorrect to change his name from 'John Smith' (changed to protect the innocent!) to 'John 'I like willies' Smith'. Ended up getting called out of another class to go fix it, as the IT teacher couldn't work out what I'd done, and the guy's coursework had 'I like willies' at the top of every page.

See, this is the problem with trolls - the first time it was vaguely amusing and well done. Now it's just 'done'. New material, please.

For those who don't have time to read the initial post, allow me to summarise: "I don't like a specific design decision, so the whole game is going to be a failure".

Indeed. In fact, I believe that Microsoft had something in place for a long time that meant that developers/publishers HAD to charge for all DLC above a certain size. I seem to remember this being an issue with the DLC for the original Left 4 Dead, as Valve wanted to give it away free, but Microsoft wouldn't let them. I don't know if that's still in place, mind.

Great work, thank you!

Inb4 legions of idiotic "OMFG ALL CONSOLE PLAYERS ARE KIDZ AND CONSOLE SUX!!!111!! LOL" type posts. Now, on-topic, I have no problem with this at all. DayZ is a fantastic game, and there's no technical reason why it wouldn't be possible on one of the new-generation consoles. I'm not convinced the hardware in the current generation (particularly the 360) is enough to do DayZ justice. I can't imagine any situation where the console version is going to delay the PC version, especially seeing as the PC version seems to be approaching completion (or at least the Alpha stage), and to the best of my knowledge, the ARMA/ToH engine hasn't been remotely designed for consoles and as such would require reasonably extensive converting/optimising. As far as the controls issue goes, there's actually not all that much to worry about when you think about it. Remember, even the current generation gamepads have 16 buttons on them (not including the thumbsticks, which will be used to control movement/camera). Off the top of my head, I'm not sure I use that many buttons regularly, and lesser-used functions can always be mapped to a sub-menu, much like the current mousewheel menu. Bottom line is, DayZ is a great game, and the more people that get to experience it, the better it is for everyone - opening it to consoles creates a whole new market for the BIS guys, which potentially means more cashflow, which potentially means they're able to expand and give us more awesome stuff like ARMA and DayZ. I don't really see how anyone can be against this for anything other than 'I want it to be PC-only because elitism/console kids iz douchebags lol'.

Judging by what I've seen, apparently you now go to the hill overlooking Cherno and snipe freshspawns. :P But yeah, at this point, you'll probably find the most fun in finding and helping out newer players. It's obviously risky, but risk is half the fun of DayZ. :)

Yup. Mountain Dew is just rare, that's all. A lot of the lore about it has come from the community jokingly saying it has mysterious powers as a lot of people who find it tend to die shortly afterwards, hence a running joke that it's cursed. That's literally all there is to it.

I use Teamspeak while I play with friends for convenience - even though it would be more 'realistic' to play without it and have to find my friends manually without any form of communication whatsoever, I wouldn't find that fun. I play DayZ to have fun, and being able to do so with friends increases that enjoyment, and at the moment, as there is currently no in-game way of communicating with them over long distance, I use Teamspeak to facilitate that. Does that make me a 'cheater'? No, I don't think it does. I'm not using it to give myself an unfair advantage, and even if I did, it's not like it's not a free program that absolutely anyone can download and use. The key argument here in my eyes is that dreaded 'realism' thing. DayZ has a fanatical following, and a section of those followers are folks who want the game to be utterly, hyper-realistic to the point ot essentially mirroring real life. For me, that's not a good thing. Sometimes to make a game enjoyable, slight concessions have to be made - in the movie industry, I believe it's called 'willing suspension of disbelief' - the audience know deep down that whatever's happening is implausible (if not outright impossible), but they let it slide because it's enjoyable. The problem is, the line is set at different places for different people, and a quick look in the 'Suggestions' forum will prove that far quicker than can with words - some people would quite happily see A-10s patrolling the skies and giant 'tank' zombies stalking the land. Others will fight tooth and nail to ensure that a broken bone is treated with more than just a shot of morphine because that simply isn't plausible in real life. The issue is finding a happy medium that doesn't mortally offend too many people. Someone is always going to complain that the game wasn't tailored specifically to their own personal desires, but the more people you can get to say 'meh, I can live with that', the better. Personally, I currently see the use of Teamspeak in that category - sure, I'd prefer to have an in-game equivalent, but I can accept the fact that DayZ is a game and that as such, there are going to be concessions made.

Shooting on sight solves nothing and in fact makes the problem worse. Colekern got it right when he said that a lot of your deaths are simply from poor decisions that you'll learn from in the long run. There are always going to be untruatworthy players in DayZ, and most of us wouldn't have it any other way - it adds to the danger and fun. You just need time to develop that sense of when something's a trap and when it's not, and the more you play, the better that instinct becomes. Also, get the hell out of Cherno and Elektro. They're deathtraps - get inland as soon as possible and you'll find things considerably better.

No, you're definitely stupid. Your first thread had the information you needed, rendering this one utterly unnecessary. Also, if you don't want your new key *ahem* 'stolen', it's worth considering reformatting your HDD to be sure you got rid of whatever it was you downloaded in the first place.