Target Practice (DayZ)

If you pirate that game, I sincerely hope you get some kind of deeply unpleasant virus that melts your HDD. If you want to play a game, you pay for it or you find a demo. End of.

121-130 are now all up in your grill in the OP. :) EDIT - Holy crap, 92 cans of beans! Thank you so much guys, let's get it to 100! :D

Could one solution be installing a 'clean' install of OA, then copying/pasting that clean install somewhere else (let's say your desktop) - then, you have two clean installs on your system. Install DayZ Commander and tell it to point at the one you put on your desktop, so it can overwrite the files in there without disturbing your other 'clean' copy in the Steam directory. No idea if it'll actually work, and obviously not a perfect solution RE: hard disk space, but worth a crack, maybe?

Not to be a dick or anything, but almost every single person you shot was A) not moving and B) unaware of your presence. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and better than anything I've done, but it hardly takes that much skill. Still. Good job, I guess.

I suppose it could. But then I'm a suspicious bastard at the best of times. Point duly taken, however. :)

I can't be the only one that has this guy pegged for a troll, can I?

Yeah, I know, but I don't think I've ever found a more effective way of trolling Aussies and Kiwis than confusing them for each other. :P

Honestly, the biggest issue I had was that they pulled the cans more or less instantly with the hotfix. Now, whether that came from above or not is not something we'll likely be privy to, but to me it seemed too hasty - anyone who has ever followed any kind of game in alpha/beta that introduces new features will know that the first few days after a patch are marked with the forums being utterly besieged with idiots complaining that whatever it is has ruined the game FOREVER and how they're definitely not buying the game. Six months later, when another patch removes said feature, the community is besieged again with people complaining that said feature should never have been removed. Most people distrust 'new' things, and when you combine that with the types of folks that will register on a community forum JUST to complain about the features they don't like, you're going to have a recipe for disaster. Although it's taking a while, within a week, things are already calming down, as the reactionary types have gone off to complain about something else, and now we can actually have some kind of sensible discussion on the topic without Little Johnny Scrotebag coming in and telling us how he's been playing DayZ since day 1 and this is by far the worst thing ever to happen to it. (Also, because this is the internet, and context isn't always crystal clear, I'm not tarring all those that didn't like the cans as reactionary idiots who cry RUINED FOREVER at every single change. I'm simply saying that there was a not insignificant percentage of those folks involved in can-gate that perhaps made things look worse than they actually were)

Indeed. Most men have balls. That guy had grapefruits.

To pigeonhole and generalize massively (always exceptions, yada yada), the older generation of gamers have been doing it for years, and for every Quake, for every DayZ, for every CounterStrike, we've seen a Duke Nukem Forever, a Daikatana, a Leisure Suit Larry in Box Office Bust. We've been there, done that and no doubt a few times got the 'special edition' T-shirt to prove it. We've seen enough flash-in-the-pan hype machines to be able to tell the difference between a game with substance and a game that's flying on a popular license and a pro-active PR department. The 'new' generation haven't got that experience yet. They're not hardened and cynicised by buying crap that looks like it could be awesome but turns out to be a steaming pile of Romero - they've been raised in a generation where ever since they've been playing games, they've had budgets of millions of dollars, where multiplayer isn't a selling point, it's an expected feature. They've grown up expecting games to be so finely-tuned, so incredibly slick and polished that the rough edges are barely even visible any more, so when something comes along like DayZ that has an almost 'indie' production value/method but a 'mainstream' audience and following, it's a huge shock for them, because they've never experienced anything like it before - hell, they've never experienced a game where the developers are actually listening to the community and their wants, needs and expectations, and it's taking both sides some time to get used to that new experience. If you know where to look, that sort of thing has happened before on a smaller scale, and it didn't end well. Terraria was a huge hit, far bigger than anyone ever expected, and attracted a large following. The main dev, whose name escapes me right now, announced that he was more or less finished with Terraria to work on a new game, and that a console port was on the way, and would have a few new features that would later be added to the PC version. The PC crowd predictably raged massively, and in the end I think he came out and said 'you know what, screw you guys, if you're going to be like that, I won't bother bringing the new features across to PC at all'. Not suggesting for a second that this could/will happen with DayZ, I'm just using it as an example of when a game expands to reach an audience it never really expected to get, and how it can be difficult for both sides to deal with.

Depends when and where, but I might turn up for the lolz if we get enough people.

Man, that was some nosedive. :D

Nice. Hope that dude got what was coming to him, though - if you'd have stepped out, he'd have wasted you. :P

I had Firefox, but then it developed a frustrating bug where every half an hour or so, it would utterly lock up my computer for about 10 seconds and then go back to normal as if nothing ever happened. Mozilla didn't seem to be interested in fixing it despite thousands of people reporting the issue, so I went to Chrome. Then that started taking forever and a day to start up and would never load my homepage, and I ended up going back to Firefox who seem to have fixed the issue I was having.

Yeah, plus I'm yet to find a server where the helis haven't been snatched up by clans and are just being hidden way out in the ass end of nowhere and barely used.

Nice catch. Have some beans.

I have no idea, but I got rid of Chrome for similar reasons on my laptop, which has never had Commander or DayZ installed on it.

Ah, the dark side of Kickstarter. I'd link that penny-arcade strip if I could find it. Seriously, though, that's a pretty blatant attempt at 'sales by association'.

This. I make a personal point of NOT joining any two-bit server that does this.

I don't think anyone feels that the moderators should be worshipped and bowed down to - even the moderators themselves - there's nothing worse than having your ass kissed publicly. I do admit, the Left4deadforums case was towards the extreme end of the scale, and part of it was my own fault for having my Steam profile publicly viewable, but I've had it before with other forums too, albeit to a lesser extent. The general rule of thumb is, the more popular a game is, the more idiots it attracts, and the harder the moderator's job is. I can't say I'm going to envy the mods once the SA hits. :P With regards to others coming first, I hate to do it, as it will seem like I'm doing it to avoid having to concede that you may be right, which isn't my intention, but I have to plead a certain degree of ignorance there - I purposely try to keep my distance from the 'meta' of who does what and how much etc etc. However, I'm sure that as you say, there ARE others who have done just as much, if not more, and that I'm sure they'll be getting their own shout-outs in time too. (Hopefully to much less Q_Qing!)

You almost had me interested, right up until there. Thank you but no thanks.

Nice. That's quite a cool idea.

Sorry champ, but going to have to call you out on that one. I'm not sure where you've done it, but if it 'wasn't really a hard job' then I'm going to assume it wasn't a gaming community of any real size. Like yourself, I've moderated in the past (on the now-defunct Left4deadforums.com), and was on the moderating team for the infamous 'boycott' incident. It's not 'easy' at all, because you have to be able to justify every single action you take, often to a screaming, pissy little kid who hasn't got a freaking clue about what he's talking about but will still rant and rave about his 'right to free speech' - every day I was getting Steam messages from members wanting to know why I did/didn't ban someone, why I did/didn't close XYZ thread... the list goes on. If you really HAVE done 'proper' moderating, you'll also know that for every overt action the general public see, there's a whole lot more going on behind the scenes. It's an utterly thankless task most of the time, but moderators do it because they love the community and realise that without someone to look after it, the community will end up tearing itself apart or being eaten by spambots and trolls. I'm not going to comment on the cans themselves, as that's not my issue with your post, but the assertion that 'moderation is easy' is just... wrong. There's no other word for it.

As others have said, play the ARMA tutorials - they'll teach you basic controls and stuff. Or you could... you know... look at the controls menu by pressing Esc.

Yup, Mountain Dew will get you killed. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.