Target Practice (DayZ)

Well, the original post has been updated to include another batch I came up with over the course of a quiet afternoon. At this point, I should probably point out that you really shouldn't try out some of this stuff unless you have some very understanding teammates. :P Anyway, items 31-70 are now edited into the original post. :)

Sure, why not. :P Also, damn. Thanks for all the beans, guys. I'll probably come up with a few more later on, as I've been popping up with new ones all afternoon!

Take my beans and also have my babies.

Yup, as long as you're careful and keep an eye on your visibility and audibility meters, you can crawl through long grass as little as 10m away from a zombie facing you. Takes balls of steel, but it can be done. How do you propose it's fixed, then? Or do you not feel like answering that question? ;)

That would be amazing. Get this in the game already!

See, folks? This guy. Here is your problem.

Yeah, can't believe this won't be one of the very first things they put in the SA version, but if somehow they've not done it already, I'm very much in favour of this. Also a BIG fan of Pokey's idea of being able to pick up markers from the maps of your victims. That would add a whole new dimension to things. Everyone should give him all their beans. Seriously, that's an awesome idea.

Was there really any need to edit my quote like that, beyond being a dick? If you disagree with me fine, but don't start calling people names just because you happen to have a different opinion to them. On-topic, while I'm waiting for what, exactly? Surely the world of DayZ is big and varied enough that I and others can find something to do while one of the group catches up or runs an errand. I just see this as a complete waste of programming time and space that could SO easily be used for something different or interesting, rather than stealing the bits from Red Dead Redemption that no-one really cared about after the first go.

Haha, and there I was dreading having to go through the graphics options to turn off 'sweetcorn rendering'. :D Yeah, I figured that we're not actually going to get to see the act itself being done, but even then, as soon as you bring in a mechanic that features something you wouldn't bring up in polite conversation at the dinner table, some creative monster is going to come up with some way of doing something unpleasant with it. As I think I intimated in one of my earlier posts, I don't actually disagree with the idea to the extent that the OP does, and I'm willing to sit tight and see where they go with the idea, which I actually like the core 'thought' behind (waste management etc) but I do have very genuine concerns that unless it's executed near-on perfectly that it's going to be the source of a lot of problems. Still, we can but wait and see. :)

He hacked. So yeah, not exactly going to fall over myself to help this guy.

I think you're misunderstanding some of the arguments here - or at the very least the one I'm trying to put across. It's not OMFG POOP IZ BAD AND I DON'T WANNA SEE THAT IN MY GAMEZWTFBBQ, it's that I don't see what simulating the act of actually defecating and then having the... ahem, 'products' rendered in game is going to achieve that couldn't simply be worked around in ways less likely to cause problems with griefers. We already have water-borne infections in the game, so working something like Cholera in would likely be no harder than just giving a percentage chance of contracting it based on the location and player density of the area the water was taken from. Why do we need to have the cause of it in-game? And how many of us (besides deliberate griefers, which aren't really likely in the real-world scenario we're trying to recreate here) are actually going to go and take the time and effort, knowing the consequences, to crap in the local watering hole? In places where there is only a single source of water for potentially 20 miles or more, I can see the problem, but that's not the environment Chernarus is - there are multiple sources of water, from pumps to wells to open ponds and lakes. Water is one of the few resources (apart from Road Flares and tin cans!) that isn't in short supply. I don't want to get too deep into the spread of diseases and so on, as I'd be arguing about something which I don't even pretend to understand, but I'm just not sure that we need to actually have feces and the act of defecation rendered in-game in order to simulate their spread in an accurate manner.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. :) I think the issue is that a considerable percentage of people don't seem to grasp the whole 'cause and effect' thing, and how little provocation a paranoid, stressed and scared player will need to open fire on someone who he can justify to himself as a threat. The key to surviving these encounters is more often than not finding a way to give that person a reason to believe you're not a threat. I certainly wouldn't even criticise someone for shooting someone they felt was an imminent threat to their survival - the entire idea behind DayZ is that your life is the most precious thing of all, and you do whatever you have to in order to keep it. The bit that I'm trying to get people to think a little more about is minimizing the threat that you pose to other players, and therefore in turn minimizing the threat they pose to you.

It appears that your CDkey has been stolen, presumably through something you downloaded. The only way you can sort this is to contact battleye directly and give them the global ban number you are shown in the error message.

I see your point, but to me, I don't see why we need to poop to increase the feel of realism. I can honestly say that in my near-25 years of gaming, never once has the thought occurred to me that 'you know what this game is missing? Bowel movements'. There are a lot of things that would make the game more realistic - the need to rest occasionally after running/walking for ten days non-stop, for example, but there are certain things that are considered acceptable breaks from reality. I get that there are good intentions behind the mechanic, and that it's not just been thrown in for shits and giggles (pardon the pun!), but I don't see why we need to give problem players a free tool to upset people. It doesn't matter that it's just pixels on a screen, it's the intent that is key - an example is 'teabagging' - it's generally considered a disrespectful thing to do in gaming, and is reserved for instances when someone is specifically looking to extract a negative emotional response from someone for whatever reason. Both parties know that it's just pixels clumsily giving the appearance of placing one's scrotum on the forehead of a downed player, but that's not the point - it's the intent behind the action which is key here. As much as I'm loathe to admit it, we live in an age where morons have easy access to public games and the ability to remain anonymous while doing so. For as long as that's the case we will have to tread the line between giving legitimate players as many features as possible and preventing future experimental lobotmy candidates from abusing said features. I'm just not convinced that the benefits of including defecation outweigh the potential grief it would cause.

I guess a lot of it depends on how 'into' guns you are. To me, someone who's not really into them and only really knows as much as I do about them because of the number of games I play, I've never even really noticed the lack of animations. To someone who's an enthusiast or happens to spend a lot of their time around them, I can see how something like that would really bug them.

I have no idea what kind of servers you guys play on, but they seem to be very different to the ones I play on. Not including my bandit games (where I consider myself a fair target to literally anyone), I have been shot by players a grand total of three times. Once by a group of idiots up by the NWAF (I walked round the corner of a hangar and saw two regular-skinned guys - ran off in the other direction calling 'friendly' and 'leaving the area' on direct comms, and they chased and shot me in the back. Can't do much about those guys I guess). Once by a guy in Elektro who thought I was someone else and immediately apologised and offered to guard my corpse until I respawned and reclaimed my stuff. and once by a sniper in Stary I never even saw. Apart from that, I've never been killed by other players. I've been shot at once or twice and got away, but even then, those are rare occurances. Want to know why? Because like Xianyu, I'm good at what I do. I'm not a good shot, and I don't know all the best ways of hiding. What I am good at is communicating. The faster you establish a dialogue with someone, the harder it becomes for them to justify shooting you, because you're no longer a voiceless, faceless enemy player, you're a living, breathing person at the other end of the mic - someone who, like them, is just trying to survive. The important thing to remember is to pick your moments - I don't establish comms if I don't have to, for example if I happen to be walking through the woods and spot someone crossing my path ahead of me who hasn't seen me - if I don't need anything from them and don't feel threatened by them, I'll likely just hide nearby and let them pass. On the other hand, I won't go out of my way to avoid anyone who doesn't appear to be threatening - if I'm headed to a hospital and see someone go in ahead of me, I'll probably pipe up on voice comms letting them know that I'm coming in behind them and I'm just looking to pick up some medical supplies. If they tell me to go away, I'll go away, but most of the time, I'll walk round the corner to find a guy pointing a gun at me. Once it's established that I'm not here to kill him, we usually agree to just stay out of each others' way and get on with the looting whilst watching each other carefully. I'm not suggesting it works every time, and I'm sure that at some point in the near future, that tactic's going to bite me in the ass and get me killed, but those players that are claiming that 80% of players are out to kill you might be pleasantly surprised if they actually tried engaging other players in ways beyond pointing a gun at them and waiting to see whose nerve gives out first. No, you're still missing the point - the situation you were in was irrelevant, it's the way it was handled that is the issue - it didn't matter if you were both on 0.1 blood each and armed with a can of beans and a makarov. I'm willing to bet that unless the three players you were watching happened to be dedicated bandits with more guts than brains, if you'd have piped up on chat and explained your situation, they'd probably have agreed some kind of deal (EG they'd take what they wanted but leave you a morphine pen and a blood bag to come and pick up once they were done) that would mean both parties got what they wanted. Instead, you decided to make first contact by shooting at them. So they responded by fleeing for cover. Unfortunately, the direction they ran in took them towards you, so you made the call to shoot them properly this time. However, if you'd not actually fired in the first place, you probably wouldn't have had to have made that decision in the first place.

No, you're trying to create strawmen - most of us aren't defending the game mindlessly as you seem to be trying to claim - in fact, many of the players that have posted here have raised some very valid concerns about other aspects of the game that they feel need improvement. The simple fact is that some people actually disagree with you. Just because we don't share your 'worries' about the game heading down some kind of fictional microtransaction route (which you are still yet to provide any actual evidence of) does not mean that we see the game as some kind of holy object that is beyond all criticism. Please learn to distinguish between the two.

There's a difference, though - as far is immersion is concerned, a player who roams the streets of Cherno laying waste to all comers with a FAL is a lone madman driven insane by the end of civilization, or simply a bandit who's snapped - whatever flavour you want to put on it. It's still more or less justifiable in-universe. Now, unless immediately prior to the outbreak Cherno was visited by a travelling band of unusually well-fed and nervous elephants, I can't really see an in-universe reason why damn near every available surface in a city-wide area would be covered with butt-dumplings. I'm not suggesting one is more offensive or 'worse' than the other, but the fact is, for a game like DayZ to really work as well as it can, there needs to be a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief, and for me, most people are willing to overlook a lone gunman far more than they are a city full of crap.

Yeah, mechanically etc, I see no problem with your idea, but as you quite correctly point out, it would make it even easier for groups of 4-5 players to simply get a pickup truck and then wander round the map towing every single vehicle to their secret camp in the woods where they can repair it and then... well, look at it, I guess. I don't entirely understand hoarders, but there we go. It's a nice idea, but off the top of my head, I can't see any gameplay reason you'd need to include it beyond 'have one car, want all the cars', and it would make hoarders (already a minor problem) even more of an issue.

Okay, I think you seem to be misunderstanding my point here. You use the Berezino Hospital incident as an example of when you 'had' to put someone down. Because they ran for cover in your direction. After you started shooting at them. I don't know about you, but if I'm in a high-risk area like a hospital in a city and bullets ping off the walls near me, I'm not thinking 'oh, those were warning shots, best be on our way', I'm thinking 'shit, we're under attack, find some cover and get the hell out of dodge'. That exact same situation could have been far easier resolved by using either side (or direct if you were close enough) chat and telling them that you have two guns aimed at them, but you're not going to shoot as long as they leave sharpish. Any players with any sense are going to realise they've played this one wrong and that it's better to retreat alive and come back later. If they don't and they try and look for you, then you can start thinking about warning shots and overly machismo displays of superiority. The point I'm trying to make is, in damn near every example you've given me where you've 'had' to shoot someone, in reality you actually haven't, you just didn't seem to realise that actually establishing a dialogue and communications with someone before using displays of force is far more likely to end up with everyone walking away with no extra holes in them. I don't have a problem with that playstyle - it's an open-world game, and you're free to do as you please, but when you do play like that, you forfeit your right to complain that people are shooting you on sight, because most of the time, you're the one instigating it.

Well, for starters your processor is below the minimum required, and your graphics card is below the recommended requirements. Add that into the fact that DayZ is a pretty demanding game because it's running on an engine that wasn't really designed for it, and the bad news is that to be completely honest, your machine probably isn't quite up to the task. :(

I think they've started that way with the 'combat roll' animation, and the 'vault' animation is already in there - I'd imagine that the animations for both will be smoothed out considerably for the standalone. However, both of those can be used for hopping fences, and aside from that, I can't really see too many situations where jumping is really going to be necessary? All I can see is it leading to bunnyhoppers and doorframe campers, both of whom can go die in a fiery pit.

Am I right in thinking that Rocket (or someone on the dev team) uses something called the 'penis factor' as a measuring stick for player 'abuse'? I seem to remember reading that on here somewhere. Anyway the gist of the idea is, "how long will it be before someone decides to use this mechanic/object/item/whatever to make a penis of some sort?" It's essentially stating that at some point, someone's going to find a way of using something for things that it wasn't intended to do, usually to a negative effect. I can't see how it never occurred that this is going to be pure troll fodder. As UmBe points out, the first thing you'll see is every significant area of player activity being covered in excrement, and it'll be from two differing groups: A) the hyperactive kiddies who think poop is hilarious and that spreading it over everything and throwing it isn't something that should be left to chimpanzees and B) the dedicated troll/griefer player, who will proceed to get himself infected with everything from the common cold to galloping knob-rot and then proceed to crap/vomit/ooze all over highly-populated areas in order to deliberately infect as many others as possible.

It's no worse than that from a technical standpoint, but it's the implication that's the issue. It's not going to take long for the hysterical watchdog groups and mass-media imbeciles to jump on something like that, and that's not the kind of attention DayZ (or gaming in general) wants or needs. You know it's just light banter/trolling/griefing, I know it's that, but that's not how it's going to be portrayed to the eyes of the world. Imbeciles who've never played a game in their lives will be on Fox news as 'experts' on the 'defecation and murder simulator' DayZ. I don't think defecation is a bad idea technically, I just don't think that we, as gamers, are ready for it yet, and that the mechanics it's designed to implement (disease control etc) can be simulated just as well in other, less potentially damaging ways.

Wow. Just wow. Nice 'tactics'. And here I was thinking your username probably meant you wouldn't have much to add in a sensible discussion. Coming back to actual tactics, I don't play bandit all that often, but I find that there's a lot to be said for waiting in the forests at the sides of roads. Many players are smart enough to know that running down the middle of the road is bad for your long-term health, but aren't confident enough (or simply don't have the gear) to navigate using just the map and compass, so will run full-sprint through the forests next to roads, particularly near player hotspots like cities and military areas. You can catch a lot of players by surprise like this.