Funkmaster Rick

Why shouldn't it be? Stealing can be emotionally traumatizing for the thief if they're doing it out of desperation or fear. Regardless of how you view it, even if you think it's just a game, when you pull that trigger you're taking something away from someone. Specifically, all the hours they put into building that character up. And if you think that's not the same, go hire someone to do a job for you then try to stiff them after. Time is not worthless.

Private hives may or may not be experiencing issues with low loot counts due to their stable playerbase at the moment. Public servers get hit with a lot more wandering players and server-hoppers, and thus their loot cycles more efficiently. Even so, I have not had any issues finding basic survival gear on private shards. I suspect this issue relates almost exclusively to you being fairly new, no offence intended. Hitting up the out-of-the-way loot areas, like campgrounds and places like Kamenka, may help your quest.

Nope. There used to be some decent ones, but they've since died off. There are some servers out there that purport to be roleplay-centric, but they are generally untrustworthy due to shady admins. Of course, that's not to say that all of them are like that, just all of the ones I've seen or heard of. There was a man posting on these forums within the last week who was looking to start up a roleplay server. I recommend searching his post out. Perhaps he'll do it right.

I think the only realistic solution from the player perspective is to find a long-standing private clan shard and join up there. Of course, that means there's a clan on that server, so chances are that you're either going to have to join that clan, play pure hermit, or die often; most clans are strictly PvP at the moment. An additional consideration is the small number of long-standing clan servers and the long-standing tales of admin abuse on many of them. I won't name them publicly, but I can think of a handful of long-standing clan servers in the SA that are well-known for being run by megalomaniac and/or misanthropic server admins. There really are very few places where persistence is a viable option at the moment.

OP, if you want viewers for your YouTube video, I suggest just being up-front about it.

Huh. News to me. Then again, most of my firefights involve no more than a dozen rounds on my end, so maybe I've just missed it.

AK-74 with GP-25, here I come. =D

OP, that was an excellent read. I have to say, it's your self-awareness that really tops it off. What you did was cruel, but in the same way that the lightning strike that starts a forest fire is cruel: you're not an asshole for what you did, just a survivor. He might have been friendly, but the majority of players are not these days. You're just riding the statistics, doing what's smart. When most people are psychopaths, it's necessary for your survival to assume that everyone is a psychopath. That's not cruelty or psychopathy, just an eyes-open defense strategy. That's how I play, too. Never stop the self-examination, though; that's the part that keeps you human. When you've got the drop on someone and you're confident you can quickly create a situation where you have all the power and the other guy basically has to do what you say or die, then you have a realistic chance to assess their personality and see if they're any kind of trustworthy, see if they're still human. It's a sad state of affairs, but when the world's gone crazy, what else can you do? Don't give them a chance when the power balance isn't heavily in your favour, because there are simply too many people out there who will exploit it, tip the balance in their favour, and once it's in their favour you're a dead man. Life sucks in an anarchy with limited resources. You made the right call, even if it hurts.

I find them in sheds all the time. Their spawn rate is much lower. Given that it only repairs your gun up to worn, I do wonder why you'd want one. Perhaps if you took an unlucky bullet right on the gun, I suppose; if the gun took a bullet for you, it deserves some TLC.

I've played on a couple of servers like that before. Fair warning: if they don't die from boredom, they die from inter-group OoC drama, so plan for that and do what you can to avoid them both. I might even check it out when it's up. I highly recommend the following: Private Hive 1pp Maximum player count Some night The amount of night you want depends on your playerbase. I recommend four hours per day as a fairly average starting point. Also, I think you're allowed to toggle hip-fire crosshairs on and off. Everyone has their preference, but I don't think it'll really impact player recruitment and retention either way.

--Remember, boys and girls, this is not a 1pp vs. 3pp thread. Just as voters should save their complaints and vote, which is where it counts, forum-goers should vote by joining the servers they prefer.-- The vertical pan thing kind of annoys me since, at the moment, it gives a big advantage to stair-campers in the sense that some sets of stairs in certain buildings are basically unassailable from the front; your character literally can't aim high enough to shoot back if you attack those guys from the front. But I'm still playing 1pp, and not having trouble finding people. I play on 1pp private hives almost exclusively. Even when they're down to 10/50, I still seem to run into other players. And I see them fill up during peak hours each day. Granted, it seems at first glance that NA has more 1pp servers than the EU or CIS, so perhaps it's a bigger problem in your regions than for me. It should also be noted that while I enjoy a good firefight, it's extremely rare for me to actively seek out PvP - rather, I loot till I spot a player, and then I attempt to force some sort of interaction, whether it's by shooting him or just giving a greeting and a trade offer. Perhaps I differ from others in this respect. But it's still worth noting that I don't find the numbers on the servers I play on to be problematic - 50/50 for about five or six hours during peak times, usually not less than 10/50 during off-peak, maybe 5/50 at its lowest.

Appreciate you weighing in on this one, Bone. Always good to know BI is aware. =3

Stanley gets the picture. TDFBuster does not.

Boy does this look like a good idea to me.

I've gotta say, S3V3N, ColdAtrophy: I'm glad to see people putting this shit in proper English, with thought behind it. Right on, mates. It's much more interesting and useful to see well-considered posts than it is to see people crying that they're incapable of understanding the Early Access cycle. I'm actually quite happy with how BI have handled things thus far. There have been definite steps backwards, steps around, really just a lot of dancing in general. I support that. It's a necessity. I've got no illusions about BI, and I don't fanboy, but I acknowledge they've taken certain risks with DayZ. Developing the SA was not one of them, as ArmA 2 sales and usage statistics almost certainly pointed out, quite clearly, that there was a robust market for the game. No, their real risk was Early Access. I think it was also a necessary decision to keep the community from fracturing and running off to play lesser games like H1Z1. But here's my real point: So far, BI are the second studio to run a truly successful EA program. The first real EA game that I can recall was Minecraft. That game was sold cheaply at first, with prices going up as new things were added. Same model as DayZ SA, basically. I've seen a lot of EA games fail hard, and I've seen plenty of pure cashgrabs where the developers were basically just scamming communities with huge promises and little delivery. We've all seen a bunch of these. The fact that DayZ is still going strong and BI didn't drop off the map as soon as they'd raked in that 30 million or so USD, is kind of amazing in the present gaming economy, where quick-buck F2P, 'failed' Early Access, and stagnant AAA releases seem to be the norm. BI gives me hope.

An armband of any sort, white or coloured, suggest to me that he's got friends nearby, or means to meet up with some friends. Therefore, he should be assumed to be a murderous psychopath, as I believe that the majority of players who group with others do so to facilitate their murder-sprees, to ensure that they're the dominant force (in numbers, anyway) in a given area. If he has an armband, he's going to try to kill me and cook my ass into hotdogs and hamburgers. Armband means shoot.

I stand corrected. All hail Lord Wobo and his adherence to the basic precepts of science, but mostly for actually doing the legwork on this sort of research. =)

Well, the vast majority of us care, Baker. Many of us remember how it was in the mod days, and do not wish to return to that untamed wilderness. Another major consideration is that people who pay for servers are getting the option to gear up free from harassment by other players, an option those of us who merely paid for the game do not have (unless one keeps strictly to low-population servers, a tactic generally regarded as only acceptable for newer players still learning the basics). These server admins then come onto other servers on the public hive, and they kill people. When they die, they get to gear up again on an empty server. This is an advantage. They are paying money for this advantage. But they're not supposed to be able to buy that kind of safety and then still interact with the more disadvantaged players - it's just plain dirty, and nobody respects a man who buys his way into victory. Also, when we're allowed to host our own servers, this should still matter. To maintain a successful server, you need consistent, reasonably high population numbers. A server with less than ten concurrent players during peak hours is a dying server. As DayZ is primarily about player interaction, prospective players will naturally gravitate towards servers with more people on them (the only exceptions being when someone wants to gear up the dirty way, or perhaps play solo with a friend without being disturbed) - in this sense, servers with high consistent numbers during peak hours are self-sustaining in terms of player recruitment. There were lengthy periods in the mod days where many of the 'standard' servers were dying while those servers that promised hundreds of vehicles and massively increased loot were the only self-sustaining ones around. A player looking for a server had a choice of playing DayZ authentically but having very infrequent interactions (thus disregarding the primary draw to the game itself), or to play on a server where 'stuff' is plentiful but there are few survival considerations other than inventory management and shooting people. I think the community in general would prefer it if authentic servers were still a reasonable option.

NWAF and surrounding cities are hotzones again for me. Myshkino tents has the occasional sprint-looter. Haven't seen much of anyone elsewhere in my travels. It should be noted that I avoid all of the coastal cities except Kamenka once I've managed to get healthy and leave the coast, and I haven't been up to Krasnostav or Novodimitrovsk in a while.

Server hosting rules say no automated restarts except if they're in 12-hour intervals. I think that necessarily precludes anything based on server population? Sounds like your GSP is fucking around, or the particular tech who answered you just doesn't know what he's doing.

With all due respect, Thumper, this sounds like a reasonably serious issue. Cookie-cutter responses don't help. This requires additional research. If Vilayer is slow-rolling it consistently, they're effectively letting admins abuse their servers to avoid losing monthly fees. If that's the case, it needs to be corrected.

I find that human corpses have something like a 98% spawn rate for backpacks, though sometimes they have holes in them.

If they do it like Rust, I think it'll end up fairly Meh. If they do it like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I think it'd be pretty badass for DayZ, and really help with the atmosphere. Personally, I don't think the current map we see will quite be what we end up with by release: I picture a lot more detritus, half-finished improvised constructions, and hopefully some fairly vast underground areas, or something like it. A Stalker-type contamination could be quite interesting on top of that sort of atmosphere.

Perhaps all this undergrowth is already implemented in the game, they just neglected to tell us they swapped all the zombies with vegans. I guess that explains where they all went; I haven't tried looting a Whole Foods lately.

As far as I know, the only thing these attachments do (aside from some battery-powered scopes and flashlights) is balance your Pimp vs. Thug factor. I like to keep them with their oldschool patterns for the pimp factor, myself.