Funkmaster Rick

I do think Bororm was referring to the act of wet-blanketing a thread, wherein one walks into a thread about a problem and claims there is no problem. It's a legitimate comment, but there are a lot of people on this forum who seem to do it to try to kill discussions they don't like. Pretty sure you're not one of those, though, as I've seen you post plenty and detected no bullshit. =3

All grass must die. The world must be cleansed.

A baseball bat with nails in it is the only backup you'll ever need.

I mean, you could choose to view it that way. Or you could consider that most games have an intended 'play-time' built into their design phase. Basically, there is generally a minimum time one needs to play a game to achieve satisfaction. These days, that time gets shorter and shorter since people frankly don't have the spare time anymore. The majority of people who play videogames are in their child-bearing years, have ageing parents who need help to do basic things around the house, and still work 40 hours a week on top of that. But DayZ was originally meant to be an anti-game. Its expected 'serving size' is more like hours at a time. You simply can't sit down to play DayZ and commit yourself to playing no more than, say, twenty minutes in a sitting. As soon as some kid on winter vacation decides to start stalking you, you're either committed to sticking around till you've dealt with the problem, or you have to walk away and ensure you lose all character progression. It's not a case of people having nothing to do in their miserable lives. It's a case of people choosing to play DayZ, which requires more of a time investment than your average adrenaline-junky murderfest. As for patience, well, come on bro. Everyone's got the capability to achieve the kind of patience that lets you do the same thing for hours at a time. It's how jobs work.

Dixie Chicks, all day erryday. Once radio transmitters are working, I'll play Dixie Chicks non-stop on the default radio frequency.

Will they be both invisible and pink?

Be advised that double-carrying is slightly risky, and you shall have to be very picky about what sorts of places you choose to swap weapons at, lest one disappear just after touching the ground. Perhaps this has been fixed for experimental.

Tatanko, help. I keep throwing my money at the screen but nothing happens.

Ah, this thread reminds me of the good ol' days when skiddies in the mod would keep their tents a good fifteen-minute drive North of the end of the map and talk about how badass they were.

No. Supes kicked your ass all over town.

There's a lot of crap flying around in this thread, mostly on the first couple of pages. Lots of claims about how Game Booster only speeds your shit up if you're running a Grandma PC chock-full of Internet Explorer adbars and the such. That's some bullshit. Here's a short, no-bullshit assessment. Game Booster will not get you banned. I've run it parallel to DayZ pretty much since SA launch, no worries about getting banned. Game Booster functions primarily by shutting down unused processes and services. The services part is important, too, simply because most people don't think to mess about with shutting down Windows service, figuring out which ones are unnecessary to your rig's current purpose. If you already kill processes, it's probably the services you missed. Overall, this can be achieved yourself. But why the fuck bother? Here's a handy tool which'll do it for you. It decreases your workload like a good tool should. Welcome to Technology, boys. It's also got a few other things bundled in, like defrag and other tweaks. Many of them are useful without you necessarily having to know too much about your rig, though a bit of fairly standard computer know-how will help. Overall, you can probably expect to gain 5 FPS at most. Some rigs will gain nothing. Some rigs will gain significantly more. It is silly and useless to worry about whether or not your rig will gain performance, or how much, since it's a free product you can literally try out and uninstall if you don't like it - just sacrifice a goat to Thor and give it a go. It's not going to track your porn usage and call you a weirdo. Probably.

So before this thread gets hijacked to suggest that DayZ is dying and that's why the servers disappeared, I'd like to ask: does anyone remember that thread, or perhaps those threads, which some time ago were complaining about how a certain server host frequently fails to investigate reports of ToS violations against its servers? Was it perhaps this Gameservers? I can't be certain, and I'm too lazy to find the old thread, but if I'm correct in my assumption, then it serves to reason that their contract was not renewed because of their lack of self-enforcement, or they were dumped altogether like a bad date. Basically, a lot of players said they shouldn't be allowed to host because they had no interest in upholding BI's ToS if it came at the cost of some rental fees, and now they're getting zero rental fees because they've been dropped as hosts. I could be wrong, of course, and I apologise if I've mis-characterised their company. But enough with the wild conjecture. DayZ is hardly dying. Stop panic-mongering and shit-disturbing. If I'm right, this is BI doing it's job and doing it right.

I would love it if ammo were ridiculously hard to find. I heard some time back that they were talking about possibly implementing wild horses that you could tame. Once the crafting system really gets going, that'll be amazing. Craft me a leather horse saddle from less obedient horses, build me some full-body armour out of welded car doors and chain-link fencing, leather armour for my horse (again made from the less obedient horses) cut down a tree and make me a steel-pointed lance. I'll be the fucking medieval terminator knight of Chernarus, roaming all across the map charging down whoever I find, skewering them and laughing all the while. I'll trot from forest base to forest base, proclaim myself the Almighty Terror of the Coast of Chernarus, and extort these petty villages for food, supplies, and any items of worth. All who oppose me will be ridden down like dogs. But I will be just, as well: those who support me will become my favoured squires. One day, I will forge the entire Chernarussian wasteland into a crude despotism, ruled only with fear and my iron-shod fist. Hopefully the melee system will be better by then. Let my peasants quail. Let them condemn my actions, if they dare. Let me strike them down in glorious single combat and cow the survivors, bend them to my will. Let me pillage and slay those who resist, let me become King of the Wastes. No matter how hard you make it to find ammo, I bet someone will go find it to kill me by then, even if only for the psychological shift that'll hit the server once they realize I can be defeated. Never say that making this game a truly hardcore survival game will stop people from playing it. There will always be motivation to do things in this game, even if we as a community must do the heavy lifting in finding them.

The problem with gamma abuse is that it works on the hardware end, too. I imagine that it's possible to design a game to not respond quite so well to hardware gamma/brightness adjustments, but it sounds difficult.

Good story. To be fair, you cornered him and he behaved exactly as cornered people have done since antiquity. Not your fault, but he had every reason to suspect you would kill him regardless of his actions.

With persistent bases still being iffy and inventory space still at a somewhat unrealistic premium, I think aiming for a high capacity loadout is still a necessity; as long as there are items I will use rarely but would rather have (I'm looking at you, bulky and largely useless wilderness survival gear), I'm gonna need somewhere to keep it safe. At the moment, on my person is the only safe place for such things. Persistence items are difficult to hide, except for backpacks, which need to be checked daily, thus limiting their usefulness unless I restrict myself to a relatively small portion of the map to operate on, which seems not fun.

Hey, Grimsonfart. You seem particularly frustrated with BI's progress on the DayZ SA. Your experience with game development, from the art department, would seem to provide you a solid basis for comparison, but let me take a moment and tell you why you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. I'm only going to make one assumption, and that assumption is that your experience involved what one might call the 'traditional' development process. Feel free to correct me if my assumption is wrong. DayZ SA is nothing like that. Oh, there are vestiges of the old style, sure, familiar phrases like 'alpha' and all that. Don't let this fool you. This is an entirely different animal. It's like comparing orangutans to ants, lizards to apples, or dolphins to assholes who talk on their phone at the theatre. You're used to internal-only alphas. That's been the industry standard since forever. But the industry has been a decade or two behind the social changes hitting our world, and it's only in the last five to ten years that we've been seeing some serious effort to catch up. The Early Access, open alpha, continual beta, and other such recent trends are a part of that catching up process. Your experience with game-building didn't involve the massive community that the DayZ SA has, it didn't involve metric fucktons of continuous feedback via forums, bugtrackers, and social media. It didn't involve the same level of very public oversight that BI deals with on DayZ, and it certainly didn't involve the same sort of highly public backlash whenever even a tiny portion of the community is dissatisfied. Remember, we live in a world where the contents of your Facebook account can be grounds for firing, where accidentally getting caught in an Instagram pick some idiot took at a party where you're visibly nearby someone else doing drugs can get you fired, where one picture of you puking on the sidewalk after a night of drinking could ruin your career. Regardless of how much your boss trusts you, making a game under these conditions has got to be goddamn stressful: every time the community raises public objections to your design decisions and work, you risk having your boss pull you into a meeting where he basically tells you that you've fucked up - not on your game development, no, but on the public perception of your game development. We live in a world where most gaming companies are putting even more emphasis on secrecy and carefully-controlled hype management. And in that world, we have BI trying something interesting, something fairly new, and doing a decent job of it. But every time they get their players' hopes up, they risk a backlash that could put pressure on their job. I suspect BI is a better company than that, as evidenced by the fact that they haven't shifted their development focus in response to every complaint that got a lot of public support on Reddit or these forums. But the risk is still there. I'm all for transparency and openness in the business world, but I don't have an issue understanding their decisions to not release stuff till it has hit certain benchmarks, even if its just to cut down on the complaints. They're still experimenting, they're still branching and looking at new options as they come up, but they're also constrained by the fact that there's a community they're trying to keep happy, too. It's why the 'stable' builds are so stable, but it's also why they play their cards close to their chest - it's fairly new terrain, and it's a knife that can cut both ways; the internet and its denizens are still catching up with these changes, too.

The fashion issue results because many clothing articles haven't been implemented, balancing has been minimal, and the game is incomplete. Any changes will simply shift the meta, making some other piece of clothing the 'endgame' item for its slot. It's definitely not just the waterproofing: carrying capacity is king; water resistance is important while the rain is as common as it currently is, which is for testing purposes I suspect; damage absorption is important too, but will be turned on its head for a while if they release a new damage system. Hell, as character speed is progressively decreased to realistic levels (which it will be, as has been stated in the developer blogs) and the weight/fatigue system comes into play, I suspect players will radically reconsider whether its worth sprinting through the rain for maximum-overdrive lootruns, which will have a further impact on the fashion trends of post-apocalyptic Chernarus. Indeed, I think it's far too early to worry so much about everyone wearing similar clothing. That's just the metagame at the moment. Frankly, there are other systems I'd prefer the developers continue to work on rather than delay to address this.

So I went fishing lately. Had a pristine tripod and pot. Combat knife and hatchet, plus a large stone to keep them relatively sharp. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how much work it is to find a fishing hook these days, even if you can carve them from animal bone. Caught two fish out of a pond, gutted a filleted. Tossed them in the pot, built a fireplace, attached the tripod and pot correctly - no need to inform me that you have to attach them via the grey area. Lit the fire, sat back and waited. And waited. And waited. After going through half a dozen logs, I tried adding water to the pot. And waited. And waited. Then I packed everything up and went to the nearest house with a fireplace. Built a fire, attached the pot correctly, and waited. Tried both with and without water. At no point in my adventure did the fish become cooked. They did change their icon slightly, but were still named 'raw fish fillet.' Even after sitting on the fire for what must have been a grand total of an hour of RL time, they never progressed to burnt. So obviously cooking is bugged at the moment. Any ideas on how to make it work? Is this a known issue?

If that's the case, then why did they never burn?

Poop-smeared arrows to infect the target would be nice. Well, not nice, but useful. Just, you know, don't eat him after.

The only NPCs in DayZ are zombies. Personally, I would prefer it to remain that way. As much as I enjoyed Epoch mod back in the day, the SA is a whole different monster and not well-suited to that style.

Updates used to be a lot faster, but the past few months they've been working on some rather big chunks of the project - while the updates come less often, then tend to bring at least one major component of interest, or fix long-standing problems at the moment. DayZ is on the up-and-up, in my opinion. Zombies, when they get added back, are actually quite fun and interesting. They have animal intelligence at best, but retain a surprising amount of their social skills; they can call out to eachother and notify nearby zombies of the presence of tasty, tasty brains. Their ability to detect people is constantly being fiddled with, but in their last incarnation it was very possible to sneak past them, and it was fairly obvious when they'd caught sight of you and it was boogie time. I never took much note of Aftermath, but H1Z1 made an impression, being that it was basically Sony's attempt to sweep the rug out from under DayZ and steal its fledgling playerbase by offering a more complete game right away. In the end, though, it's an entirely different game - H1Z1 focuses on cartoon violence, DayZ focuses on hardcore survival. That being said, DayZ is still in alpha. The next few months are poised to deliver some of the tastiest updates in a long time, so the game will be vibrant for a while, but it still has the distinct tang of something unfinished. Animations are clunky and often cumbersome, graphical lag is extremely common - a good rule of thumb is 60 FPS in the wilderness, 40 in any village, 20 in any town or larger area. Downtown Chernogorsk, the main population zone pre-infection (and maybe even post-infection), delivers a routine 10-15 FPS in some of its most crowded parts. The new renderer that is expected to solve this issue is due very shortly, but it can still be a bit of a trip if you're not used to it. Banditry is rife. If you're not speaking to someone on TS or some other VOIP solution, they're going to kill you and eat your face. Friendly interactions are rare at the moment, though they do happen. You should be advised that while DayZ makes an effort not to discourage any particular playstyle, you should not expect the days of Kill Everything Banditry to last forever.

It's kind of nice being able to check NEAF out without getting one-sniped from Olsha mountain. Maybe not exactly in the spirit of the thread, but I like that it's a more civilian loot zone now.

If they're unarmed, how can you call it a PvP mechanic? It does two things - it moves fast and it provides a vantage point. Both of those apply equally to, say, scouting targets for your buddies, and rescuing freshspawns from the coast.