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Completely agree. I don't think a single item needs to be displayed on the screen, though I can see some of these cues ending up being rather annoying or silly. It will take some creativity to have the functionality desired by the standalone without any HUD whatsoever. In the end a few icons may be the best route unfortunately, but they definitely should do their best to limit it. Well humanity perhaps shouldn't really be displayed as a number value anyhow. I also think it should be completely up to the player to keep track of their kills, in the notebook perhaps. Then the game can easily make your humanity raise or lower in the background without you ever being sure exactly what you have done, unless you check for yourself. This will make it so you cannot use your stats as a braggart, and instead your stories, pictures, and videos will be how you share your DayZ experience. This way game won't keep your kill count accurate for you, and you will be the only one who really knows if you properly kept track or not as you could just add a line to your kills at any time. This opens the door to people keeping track of whatever statistics they want in the game with their notebook, such as Mountain Dew consumption. I suppose this would be a rather tough sell to most gamers, as almost every online multiplayer game now tracks and displays a multitude of statistics for you to use as bragging rights.

Too many to count. I cannot understand how anyone can keep track of how many times they die to anything. I get out in the world and run around so much I feel I have died almost every possible way, many many times. Zombies have killed me a bunch, under a wide variety of circumstances. Favorite memory of zombie death though was from one of my very early play sessions with some IRL friends. We had made it up to the NWAF (only my 2nd or 3rd time ever) and loaded up with guns, found some chopper crashes, ghillie suits. May have been the best equipped we had ever been up to that point. We approached Stary Sobor from the south-west hill just above the market. We stopped on the edge of town to discuss how we would enter. The conversation was leaning towards quiet and sneaky. However, being so well armed, I felt invincible. As my two mates continued to discuss I said screw it, and began blasting the FN FAL I was carrying at the zeds around the store, charging in. My two buddies took the hint, stopped discussing, and started shooting. As we charged into the store, we were laying waste to the zeds we saw, not really noticing the incoming mass attracted by the FN FAL. One of my friends decided to change out his backpack in the store, switching the whole inventory as he went. The zeds did not like him doing this, and knocked him out. The other two of us began to panic as the more we tried to clear the incoming zeds, the more that showed up. We tried frantically to save our friend passed out at the back of the store, being eaten. I shifted around the outside back of the store to attempt to clear them from another angle, only to find more and more zeds running at the exterior of the store. I barely managed to fight my way to the back of the store, clear the zeds off my friend as he lay dying. Then the last two of us were in a cross fire and I was struck by a friendly round. The first to go down started laughing. Now there was only one standing, and two passed out guys in the back of the store. He managed to fight his way to us only to be incapacitated as he began to bandage the first guy to go down. There we were, three dying guys laying in the back of the store together, no help to be found. As the zeds finished us off, my buddies rightfully questioned my brazen charge, asking why I had not let the discussion run it's course. All I said was "I thought we had it, I suppose good weaponry is no substitute for sound tactics." Lesson learned. After a similar experience that led to zombies killing us at NWAF, we decided to call the FN FAL "The Death Sentence." Not for the guy on the receiving end of the barrel, but for the bearer of the weapon. Damn it used to pull so many zeds. I think this was back in the Lee Enfield "dinner bell" days, as even after many updates to the zeds neither gun seems to draw as many zeds as in the old days. Either that or my skills at avoiding them have progressed to the point that I do not notice as many.

No matter how many copies of the game that you buy, if malicious software is stealing your key, won't it just steal the new key you type in as well if you do not clean up your machine? It sounds like you may be infected. Also, why would someone that did nothing wrong be willing to purchase so many copies of ArmA2? If you had done nothing wrong, didn't hack or download anything fishy, and were really mad at them I assume you would stop giving them money until the issue was resolved. I can accept that maybe they make a small percentage of mistakes, but you have had three copies banned now? Statistics, though they may be damn lies, lead one to believe that something is wrong with either how you play the game or the security of the machine you keep installing it on.

US 520 and US 3480 are pretty good. Look for the admins as they (their servers, not the admins...) can go a little crazy in the wee hours, but whenever admins are present these 2 servers are the best. Been playing a ton of US 3480 lately and has been a refreshing experience after being dicked around by private hives. If you see me in there and you are a mature, (mostly) friendly player, hit me up.

Am I the only person that doesn't see any problems with nighttime as is? Only people with NVGs can play? I play in dark dark nights often without them. Yes chemlights and flares can make you stand out, but I outlined earlier how they can be used more intelligently than just throwing them right where you intend to be. I saw they were going to make the night-time brighter in the next patch. Though this makes me sad I can accept this as a game-play improvement I suppose. I agree that as currently implemented the NVGs give better vision than they should, however this is separate from the darkness issue. I agree that the darkness turns off many players, which is why I can accept change for improvements sake. What I take issue with is the charge that the game is unplayable at night without NVGs. That is simply not true, it's just a lot harder. For those of us that enjoy the extra challenge, night time is amazingly wonderful. Sure flares and chemlights have gotten me killed numerous times, that's how I learned to use them more intelligently. One of my favorite early memories from this game was trying to use the stars to navigate. I failed at that BTW. The dark dark darkness is not impossible, just really hard. It can be overcome by those determined to do so, without the aid of NVGs.

Whether the .50s were in the game upon release or not, laborious testing by all of us has shown the guns to be more than what is reasonable for DayZ under the current situation. I fail to see how this thread is anything but the OP venting his frustration that the rifles are slated for removed. Accusing everyone of lacking skill and just "not liking" the guns is a poor way to present your points and or arguments. The OP keeps repeating himself and accusing everyone of being whiners when in fact it was he who created this thread to complain about the .50s being removed. The OP has failed to seriously consider any counter arguments and has turned this into his own soap box to whine from. Removing .50s from the game does not condone nor discourage sniper play. Many people have tried to have a productive discussion about it but the OP does not want to participate beyond accusing everyone else of fitting into some group of complainers he imagines everyone who disagrees with him belongs in. This thread has outlived it's usefulness.

What about the player experience desired when the game was conceived?

If you won't respond to the argument that the .50 rifles go against the player experience desired when DayZ was conceived, then all you are doing is climbing on a soap box to preach. Please, lets discuss. EDIT: The guns are not over powered, it's just that so much fire power is out of place in this game. Removal != Nerf

You have already made up your mind and don't seem very open to debate. I agree with sniping completely, I just think the .50 does not make sense in DayZ. Another reason to remove the .50s is that once you take that easy stick away many players will give up on sniping completely due to the difficulty and head down into the city to interact with other players. Most players that I have played with are completely in awe of the AS50 and just believe the whole point of the game is to work towards the AS50 so they can then snipe unsuspecting players from very long ranges. Perhaps any weapon with a range over 1000m should be removed for more engaging game-play. EDIT: oh wait that is exactly what they are doing.

I have been playing since August of last year and sitting on the sidelines reading these forums on a regular basis. There are a lot of wild and disrespectful people around here, but most of them don't seem to last too too long, and the people I have read again and again over the past months for the most part have constructive criticism to provide and generally respect one another. Anybody who speaks negatively about the "state of the community" is just crazy as I have watched one of the most exciting mods ever being developed right before my eyes. The vision is Rocket's, but the realization of this vision is being crowd sourced and anyone who has been respectful in their discourse has been heard and the changes made have taken tons of community input into consideration. It's a beautiful thing and anyone who doesn't realize this is narrow in their thinking. The memory of receiving my pre-ordered copy of Gran Turismo 2 and discovering that it was unable to save ANY lap times, among many other bugs, still stings. Lap times are important in a racing game, no? GT2 was a huge disappointment in many ways as a result of it being rushed to market. There are many games which push annual iterations but each time the result is rarely much different than the previous one as there just wasn't enough time to implement huge changes. Being in a rush is a bad thing. Granted, waiting what seemed like forever for 3D Realms to put out a sequel to Duke Nukem 3D only to see the studio collapse was an experience in how taking your time could end poorly. But most people in the gaming industry are well aware of this tragic tale, nobody wants to see their vision end that way. Having already gone far beyond proving the viability of the concept, Rocket and BIS are in a unique position to build this game the right way without undue outside pressure for an immediate release. They would be fools not to take advantage, they can easily delay the release until it's the closest representation of the gaming experience in a reasonable amount of time. Titles with this much interest routinely take many years. We aren't even close to the point of it taking a long time. Battlefield 1942 came out on the heels of Operation Flashpoint. It wasn't as grand in scope but the idea was very similar, though BF1942 was much more arcade in comparison to OFP. I greatly enjoyed both games as they were some of the first to provide a comprehensive battlefield experience. I even used the mission editor to do some crazy things with a few friends. Call of Duty has always been more focused on infantry combat. The first in the series was a great start, but the franchise followed the way of Counter Strike and the multi-player always had less dimensions than those with all the military hardware. The sales numbers made it clear that the majority of players preferred the counter-strike style fast paced rambo-style gameplay. EA was not deaf to this and have taken the game-play of the Battlefield franchise in this same direction, as well as abandoning the PC in favor of consoles. The PC versions of it these days are seemingly console ports. They have done great things with the Frostbite engine and BF3 is a beautiful thing. However the game play is very far from the original. The franchise, over the years, was altered continuously with sales numbers in mind. The profitable casual gamers were catered to. I was two months into DayZ before I caught a post talking about how ArmA2 was an evolution of the OFP engine. I felt like a moron, of course it was! After playing some ArmA2 finally it became clear that BIS never abandoned the original vision. The results of catering to the casual gamers are clear, dumbed down games released annually that fall short of the original visions of their creators. The main reason people are so excited about DayZ, in my opinion, is there is no other game that even comes close to the emotional response this mod generates in it's players. Everybody is so passionate about it, even the naysayers. Straying from the vision of a hard-core realistic survival game would be folly, and this concept is simply not suited to many if not most casual gamers. Lots of people also seem to debate realism and toss around the fact that zeds aren't "real." If you take every zombie/zed/infected apocalypse story you have seen and replace the "monsters" with starving crazy mobs of people that want your resources after some social collapse, you will see the vision of the zombie trope is not far from a possible reality. It's obvious that the best course of action is to continue to implement realism until it genuinely hampers the game play according to the original vision. What exactly this means cannot be determined without imagination, implementation, and testing. Lets have faith that the designers, who take this community seriously, will do everything they can to preserve a delicate balance as this topic has been discussed to death and the basic positions are still having to be justified. After a negative private hive experience I moved back to public after months of being gone. DayZ has never been better and many improvements are currently just over the horizon. Thankfully most of the people who want DayZ to be something it isn't are all but completely absent from the public servers. This game is already one of the greatest, if not the greatest game I have ever played. And it's still only in "Aplha" with a complete overhaul in the works. The best is yet to come and everyone here should be proud to be a member of this community and a part of gaming history in the making. For better or worse, this is a hell of a ride that I hope never ends! TL,DR - There are too many people making posts with a negative tone and I don't think these people realize the value of what they have. DayZ is obviously going in the right direction and we should all be proud to be a part of it.

Everything coming out of the dev-blog is really exciting. I have followed game development in the past on other titles, and getting any information can be near impossible sometimes. Even when the response from the DayZ team seems to be short in supply, we are still getting a wealth of information. I really take issue with how many players feel they are owed some sort of release or update. The people making this game don't owe many of us much of anything. When we paid $30 for ArmA2, we got what we paid for, ArmA2. DayZ was a bonus and no matter how much you play it or post about it, you aren't owed anything for your time invested unless you actually contribute in a meaningful way. And even then, what you are "owed" may not be much. And to Box, yes I agree with you on many points. I dislike private hives with a passion now and they did create a lot of problems, but mostly just for players. I do not think all the private nerfing of the game has driven the development in the wrong direction. But I am thankful for them as they are a great sponge to absorb the players who just aren't cut out for the original game. Even though forcing these players onto public hives would make the servers more populous, many of them wouldn't last as players methinks.

I definitely agree with you, even in the extremities those large bullets really tear stuff up. I am not saying that the bullet shouldn't kill you, but that a big bad one shot kill weapon cuts out all the interesting things that happen after a player is unconscious and bleeding from a sniper round. I haven't been told officially, but I assume the player health was raised for this reason, to make engagements more interesting. Realism is important but it isn't the sole focus of this endeavor. With or without .50s people will still get shot in the head and die instantly plenty. It's just that one shot kills take good shooting skill with every weapon except two, which kind of make them stand out as an oddity in the game, no?

Wait a minute here. I am not arguing that the combat between players need to be balanced, but that a guaranteed one shot kill weapon goes against the level of skill the rest of the game demands. I am not talking balance so that combat is fair, you misread my point. I am arguing that such one-shot weapons go against what DayZ is trying to achieve overall. Otherwise they would not have raised the blood level of the player. DayZ is about interesting player interactions and the one-shot .50s are counter to that aim. I am talking about balancing realism and game-play, not PVP combat. Removing them until another solution can be thought up and tested makes perfectly good sense. Realism is not the only argument against the .50s anyways. There are more I can keep going.

Changing the clock away from a 24 hour cycle is the absolute last thing that should be done. Yes, playing at night is hard, it should be. In some ways it makes sense that the servers are less populated because in the game, just as in real life, most people fear the darkness. I think many of the players asking for changes to the game in this thread have not learned how to play at night. Also, the OP said NVGs are the only tool that give you a slim chance of survival ... ? That is crazy talk, your wits are what determine your survival, not your equipment. Equipment can aid a player in surviving the world but the mass between their ears is what really wins or losses the day. Yes the night time is scary and difficult, but if you don't feel comfortable playing in it, then don't. It is always daytime somewhere in the world.

You want a valid reason? The player health was raised in DayZ, seemingly to make the gunfights last a little longer and be more interesting. In ArmA2 you go down really quick and really easy, from most all guns. Sure some more than others, but the bullets are much more deadly in general. The decision to add health to the player shows that DayZ intended for the player interactions to be a little longer and more eventful than just quick bullet kills. Yes realism is desired, but so is engaging game play. Obviously there has to be a balance struck here and the .50 cal sniper rifles upset this balance. Every other gun takes a fair amount of skill to one-shot a fully blooded player. It does not make sense that the largest most bulky gun in the game is also the easiest to kill with (in many but not all situations). It seems to me that all the people who's play style revolves around the guns that take the least skill are the ones that need to update their play. Now they will have to develop skill. Saying that people getting shot by .50s are lacking in skill is a fair point, but people who go to great lengths to keep an easy gun in the game that requires no skill are hardly able to have a skill-based discussion on the matter. I feel that there is a place in DayZ for .50 caliber rifles, but other things need to be addressed first. Adding wind or other difficulties to sniping would be a good way to bring them back. As it stands right now, however, the .50s throw off the game's demand for skill to succeed. More than likely SA might be the only place .50s make sense, as the loot will be much better managed.

I find that night time play is some of the best. But everyone is afraid of the dark and finding servers that run normal night time AND are populated is rare. Many times while playing at night I turn on the in-game music to get that spooky feeling back from when I started playing that I have seen so many people talk about how much they miss. Yes, chemlights and flares make you a target, but who said you had to use the stupidly? The light radius on a chemlight is pretty short, so you can throw those without alerting people that aren't in the immediate area. Its actually somewhat crazy in that you can't see the chemlights at all until you cross the radius and then they light up instantly like a camera flash. If you are going to carry a light source, chemlight is the way to go. Carrying flares is really dangerous, but you can use them in other ways. When I am going to loot an area at night, I usually throw flares in many directions around the area. That way whoever sees my flares will have a larger area to search for me. Also, many times I will throw flares at places as I leave them to draw people away from me while I loot elsewhere w/ a chemlight. Night-time play is some of the best play, I mean really dark where you can't see anything. No moon. In fact I have had so much fun playing in the dark that if they said tomorrow that they were removing NVGs from the game, I wouldn't mind. It seems that most players demand daylight or they won't play at all. This is easy to see when server populations die off when the sun goes down. Even though the nighttime is the easiest time to avoid zeds. In conclusion, why the hell are so many people scared of the dark?

The main reason people are doing this is they find the normal game too difficult to survive in and find gear in. They forgot the number one rule and lack the patience to play the game properly. To a certain degree, culture has pushed them in this direction with such emphasis on instant gratification and of gaining an "advantage" over your adversaries by whatever means necessary when in competition. Good sportsmanship takes a back seat to the glory of winning. What is comical to me is that the "combat" experience they desire is ready and available in ArmA2, complete with AI warriors and the ability to grab any gun you want, so if they just wanted to blast each other and get tanks and Apaches or any other number of non-DayZ hardware, all they would have to do is start that up. The people I have mentioned this to said "But it's the survival aspect I like" as they loaded themselves with free gear and then required zero effort to survive. What these people want to do, with all their extra guns and so forth, is ruin someone else's day. They enjoy the fact that some other poor bastard is trying to survive and they can ruin their day with some advantageous, and purchased, gear. I agree with Orlok that allowing people freedom even when they do this is better than locking up the game to only one presentation. It is clear to me that the biggest problem of this issue is that new players have a really hard time knowing an official, vanilla, everything normal server from one that is totally jacked up. DayZ commander does a horrible job of differentiating, I don't know much about the Six Launcher. Perhaps there could be some logo that appears on loading if and only if all server settings are within standard vanilla boundaries? I dunno, but something needs to be done. Freedom is a good thing to have, but some good old labeling can help player make an informed decision, no? I think there will be a whole group of players that have no idea there is a difference if they don't come to these forums. Then again, if they don't come here, who the hell are they anyway? :P

But the private hives soak up the players that are willing to, say, pay for a better load-out. Or have the server saturated with cars, that refuel effortlessly. The private hives were a great alternative to allow people to do those crazy things they needed. In a rightfully separate place from the public hive. Most likely. I was trying to point out that most of the wild and disrespectful people burn out and leave in a "this is why I hate DayZ now" rant post, and what is left are the people who love the game, more or less. It would have to be, or else why would they continue to be a part of the community?