SilverBulleT (DayZ)

I liked these games, dating back to the original operation flashpoint, soley for their massive evironments. As far as I can remember (I could be wrong), but it's one of the original ("sandbox") games to me, next to the GTA series. I played the original flashpoint for countless hours online -- shooting down helicopters with RPGs and whatnot. The game was nothing spectacular to look at, but I couldn't walk away from it. The graphics throughout the series were always a little dated compared to the competion - but Arma II is still a decent looking game on today's standards, provided you have a PC good enough to turn up the settings to high/ultra high. I find this is a game where the visual range is very extreme - it looks like cat-piss on low end PCs, but on a high end PC it's still pretty spectaular for a game that's now nearly 4 years old. Also, unforunately both series (Flashpoint / Arma) - even from both developers have been plagued with bugs, so I don't think they ever attracted the following that they could have, had they worked out the bugs. It amazes me that after this long, the product is still just as buggy.

Exactly. Losing gear on death is what makes the game somewhat balanced when comparing hardcore players vs. people who log on a few hours a week. Sure, the hard core people can build up a base with high end gear, but it can just as easily be discovered and robbed as well. The only thing I would like to see is some sort of camo tent / cover for vehicles, to help conceal them a bit better. I've found the best strategy (as already mentioned) is to set up 3-4 single tents and separate your gear. They don't have to be on separate corners of the map, but far enough away (~500m+) from each other, and not in direct line of sight (i.e. you can't see the other tents from each tent's position). That way any loss isn't significant. But it all goes back to rule #1 - don't get attached to your gear -- you're gonna lose it at some point.

Exactly - the gear doesn't fit the setting. Just like I've always questioned why is there so many damn empty whisky bottles -- don't russians drink vodka? :D I would much preffer a greater abundance of mid range rifles like the Mosin-Nagant, shotguns, etc. The most common military weapon should be a standard AK rifle, with no attachments. Any other military weapon should be found at a fraction of the rate, and considered hitting the jackpot. There will still be sniper rifles, and high end assault rifles, just not nearly as many of them. Players will adapt the gameplay to fit the items available. It will end up with a lot more close range combat, as opposed to everyone running around with an AS50 sniping, and counter sniping, which is totally an unrealistic setting for a zombie apocalypse. The picture that somebody posted of "The Road" (I believe that was the movie), is exactly what I want too. I wouldn't mind gangs of bandits, but they shouldn't all be running around with as50s and DMRs, unless they've somehow managed to survive for months to acquire that gear. In general, I think gear needs to be centered around more "lower grade" type weaponry. Your average person has no clue how to properly maintain or use a AK/m4/m16, etc... (just look at videos online of the FSA), nevermind an AS50 or DMR.

I've always liked the Winnie, silent, better rate of fire, and with practice you can learn the bullet drop off. I've had PvP kills at ~200m+ before. I defended my noob base at Krushevich in Taviana with a winnie against 2 players for 30-40 minutes before they gave up and logged. I'll pick up a Lee if I find one before a Winnie (which I usually do, due to the significantly higher drop rate), but if I have a Lee and come across a Winnie it goes in my backpack until I find a sniper / assault rifle. Just for fun once, I used a Lee inside a firehouse (forget what city in Taviana). I had 6 full clips, and I ran out of ammo, and zombies were still coming at me. Only when I switched to my sidearm and killed the already alerted zombies did they stop coming at me. Obviously using a Lee inside any city is a pretty bad idea, but my little experiment was the icing on the cake. I play Taviana mostly, and inside city limits visibility is usually limited to 100-250m. The winnie is still effective at the lower end of those ranges. If I'm being engaged from 300m+ inside a city I'm either dead, or the guy missed and I'm behind cover and moving another direction. If the other person has the drop on you with a Lee / sniper, it's usually a bad idea to find cover and try to peek out and engage, even if you saw where the fire was coming from. That being said, I've had my fair share of kills with the Lee as well, I just find the Winnie to be the all around more versatile weapon.

To me, this is a CoD / Battlefield gamer's vision of the game. Nameplates & server-wide player kill messages... not working together for gear. It reeks of CoD / BF3. The anonymous aspect is exactly how it would be in a real "zombie apocalypse". There isn't a console that anounces "billy was killed by jake", and you wouldn't be running around with a giant name tag over your head. I applaud the devs for the realism aspect in this case, even if it does lead to increased PvP. I don't find PvP to be a detriment to the game, in a real life zombie scenario it would be madness... many people would be out protecting themselves first, I just think the balance is currently a little too much towards PvP, and not survival / working together, and it needs to be tweeked a bit. I also don't think you'd have "backstabbing" at high value targets if 2-3 people were required to raid airfields or other military establishments, as long as it's designed correctly. Tough enough that you need 2-3 people to raid the place, but enough loot to satisfy the group. If somebody kills you after, at least you know who did it, and that player will quickly become known as a bandit (without an automatic, server wide message).

I do really like the compact look of the 74u (especially in bandit gear), but I do seem to notice the lack of range compared to the 74/74 kobra. It also has more recoil, which makes sense considering its a smaller/lighter gun firing the same round as the full sized 74. Personally, I thought the full length 74 appears a a little too big... but it's probably scaled correctly and I'm just out to lunch. I would like to see the AK47 added though...

I've got a few. Enfield is the obvious "starter" choice, before getting any military gear. Accurate up to 300-400m -- if you can see it with the iron sights you can hit it. One headshoot = kill, and a body shot can knock out players for an easy follow up execution. If im in a sniper rifle mood, I like the cz550 - again, fairly easy to find, and as long as you got the drop on somenbody there's no reason you shouldn't get the kill. Personally, I don't like sniping all that much though -- i find it to be pretty lame actually. If im really looking to get dirty, I like the winchester. Again, as long as you got the drop on somebody 2 shots should be enough, and it's got a fast enough rate of fire to get the kill before the person has time to react.

The other obvious reason why PvP is so abundant is because of the anonymous aspect of killing people. I don't like the idea of running around with a nameplate over your character as if you were playing World of Warcraft, and I don't really like the private servers that announce "Player X was killed by player Y" either, so I'm not sure I'd like to see either of those solutions implented. I like the anonymous aspect, but it obviously leads to the shoot/kill on sight aspect that has taken over the game. I think the best idea is to really make survival challenging, but I think it's a fine balance. You can't make it so survival is nearly impossible on your own either though. However, I think difficulty of raiding airfields and other high value targets should almost require a group of 2-3 or more -- i.e. improved zombie AI, way more zombies at high value targets & boss zombies (almost like grouping for an instance/raid in WoW). You want the best loot/items? You need to cooperate with others to get them, or grind out low value targets over a long period of time with a much poorer drop %. That way, flying solo is still an option, but you're stuck to low or maybe medium value targets. High value targets should almost require a group of people, with significantly better drop rates. The low value buildings should be able to spawn some of the same loot, just at a much, much lower rate. Also, another idea could be no vehicles spawn as driveable (or maybe less than 1%), and parts take up significantly more inventory space. If you want a vehicle, you will almost NEED to team up to get one running. That's not stopping somebody from executing somebody after a vehicle is up and running... but then you would at least know who did it.

it would be kind of cool to have a bayonette on some of the rifles... maybe something to look forward to in the SA version? A nice stealthy way to take care of zombies inside city limits... Before something like that comes into play, I would like to see zombie AI/difficulty improved a little. It's easy enough to deal with zombies now -- if the zombies are smarter, tougher and ammo is rarer, then rifles with melee attachments would be pretty cool.

The most obvious advice is not to stash it in the direct path between two cities, cities/airfields, etc. Print off the map you play on from a site like DayZ db (or just use your imagination) and draw lines between all of the well traveled routes. Placing your tent, or stashing vehicles in (wooded) areas 500m-1k+ away from those direct routes will significantly decrease the chance that a player will find your stuff -- only players who are deliberately camp hunting may stumble across it. That being said - if you play on a popular server 30+ people, it's only a matter of time before somebody has the same idea for a camp location as you.

Your CPU (APU) is bottlenecking you. Arma 2 is fairly CPU dependant, more so than a lot of other games (as others have already said). This is why you get decent FPS in skyrim (GPU dependant), but suffer in games that are CPU dependant, like Arma 2. You really should have a 6 - 8 core processor thats pushing at least 3GHz or more - something like an Intel 2600k (or better) or a AMD FX-8120 (or better). I have an AMD FX-8120 (overclocked to 4ghz) and an nvidia 560ti (448 cores), and still only get around 30-40 fps on max settings. When I'm playing Taviana and enter some big cities I can even drop down to 25fps... In BF3, or Skyrim, I get 40-60+ fps, as those games rely that much more on the GPU then the CPU.

I get a kick out of all the CoD bashing. You can't even compare the two. Your average CoD player's brain will fall asleep after 5 minutes of running through a forest. The CoD players that adapt to DayZ and stick around will have their own perspective of what the game should be. (just like the rest of us) Play on official hive servers (use DayZ commander) if you want the true DayZ experience. I don't think the amount of PvP has anything to do with a "CoD player invasion". Survival becomes pretty simple after you've figured it out. Zombies aren't much of a challenge -- run to the next building and pick them off with your sidearm while they struggle to find the doorway, or get through it... (that is if they haven't stopped chasing you already). With survival being such a breeze people turn to PvP for something to do - and I can't blame them. The only thing I can see CoD players contributing to is the number of un-official / private hive / insane starting gear / always daylight type servers, however, purists will 99.9% of the time avoid those servers. All it's doing is artifically inflating the number of players. There may be 1.4 million players/characters as per the DayZ site, but maybe only 500k are playing it the way it was intended. If people want to have a server with custom weapons / loadouts, and 500 vehicle I don't really care -- it isn't affecting my gameplay. Personally, I've never played CoD, but I enjoy PvP in DayZ. Why? For the reasons I mentioned above. I like DayZ, but the survival aspects have become mundane. The only thing I would like to see is maybe 12 hour or 6 hour day cycles instead of 24. If im working afternoons, it basically means playing in nighttime 100% of the time during the week, or finding a server in another timezone if I want daylight. A 3 hour day / 3 hour night cycle would help that (or 6 hours day / 6 hours night). You already need to eat/drink practically hourly to survive - if we want a truly realistic experience either match the amount of food/water required for a true 24 hour day cycle, or modify the day cycles to 6-12 hours and then the amount of food/water we are currently using would be a little more realistic.

I'd prefer an AKM - easier to find and does more damage. Considering you can only find the g36c at crashes, I'd much rather come across a FAL at a crash sight as opposed to a g36c - the only problem is ammo. With the g36c being able to use STANAG ammo, you shouldn't have too much trouble keeping stocked up. FAL ammo is obviously quite a bit harder to come by. It does a bit more damage I believe than the M4 or AK74 variants which use STANAG or 30 rnd AK mags -- but nothing to write home about. AKM does more damage, and is fairly common (along with the ammo).

Only been playing for 3-4 weeks, but this is basically my hope as well. When I first started playing I envisioned servers where everyone was working together to repair vehicles (which were hard to find), make bases, survive, etc. Then when I approached the first group I saw after about 45 minutes of playing (unarmed I might add) -- I took an axe to the chest. Now that I've played for about a month I understand why that happened. It's hard to trust people - mainly because the PvE environment offers little to no challenge once you figure out the horrible zombie AI, so people turn to PvP for something to do. (not that I mind PvP now that I've got the game figured out -- it's just survival is pretty basic once you've played for a day or two) I don't mind some of the server side mods (custom loadouts, etc), but it's tough to find a reasonable balance on a populated server. I've found a server that has some basic starting gear (revolver with 2 clips, flashlight, etc) that is fairly populated (20-30 people at peak), so I don't mind it. However, in my short experience, I have the feeling that the majority (more than 50%) of the people that play on custom loadout maps with 1000+ vechicles and "always day", wouldn't survive more than 30 minutes at night with basic / no starting gear. If the SA is geared towards a "true" survival experience, then I think "always day" should be out of the question for any server side mods, and you should only be able to join servers in your own timezone/continent to prevent people from joining servers 12 time zones away just to play in daylight. I realize there's ways to get around this, but I think people miss out on the survival experience of playing at night.

Don't know if I would consider this a new feature, or "polish", but in 3-4 weeks of playing, PvE-type servers are non-existant -- mainly due to the terrible zombie AI. How hard is it to run into the next building, or up a few stairs and pick off the 2-3 zombies that are left chasing you with your sidearm? Or -- run into a pine tree, and forget all about your zombie problems. Zombies not being able to run indoors? Why exactly? If they have a straight line to you there's no reason they shouldn't be closing the distance just as fast as if you were outside. It makes the PvE aspects not very challenging, and it's why I feel a lot more people become bandits, or engage in PvP. If people were a little more concerned about zombies, I think people would be more inclined to team up for survival purposes. Since surving zombies is way too easy, people start to engage in PvP for something to do.

Yes, I'm sure this bug would have anything to do with your FPS or system specs.

Long story short; 1. If it's someone camping the spawn zones (esp with a sniper rifle), it's pretty lame. 2. Once you enter cities, airfields (or other military bases/outposts) as a fresh spawn, you should be prepared for the worst. If you walk around a corner and somebody is there - you could get shot simply out of fear/surprise/reaction. You have to understand that everyone has had their own experiences in DayZ, and most people don't trust strangers on sight. When I first started playing (I've only been playing for about 3-4 weeks), I thought everyone would be friendly, working together, building bases and repairing vehicles, etc. That changed quickly when I approached the first group I ever saw (unarmed I might add), and took an axe in the chest. I play with a small group of friends, and avoid all others where possible. I usually don't go looking for battles or to start wars/grudges, but If I see somebody approaching my position, it's pretty much KoS. I feel like if I let those guys get to my position and see me, 90% of them wouldn't think twice about killing me, so better them than me.

Never - and I don't play a bandit on every server I play on. My last "murder" (not a retaliation kill, defending camp/base, etc) was a HS with an enfield. Buddy was looting a supermarket in Taviana, I had him covered from a nearby roof. Waited until I had a clear headshot. It was incredibly satisfying -- watching his corpse fall with blood leaking from his skull.