chichakman

Just wanted to point one thing out in your list of suggestions that might affect the skill system you set in place, @SalamanderAnder. Wouldn't the above have the possibility for abuse? Two players might just go off and made a bunch of sandbag walls until they had the required "level" to build a house (and people will do that even if it takes them days/weeks/months), not to mention the ridiculous prospect that by laying sandbags on top of each other enough, you would suddenly know how to lay a foundation, level walls, make cement, etc. This could pose problems in all skill areas as the activity that produced experience would only provide experience in that one field (e.g. setting bones). That field might have a slight relation to another, but knowing how to bandage someone and knowing how to treat an infection are two very different things. It is for this reason that I don't really enjoy the prospect of a skill system being implemented in DayZ. With the potential factors involved and the potential for easy abuse of they system, either a new system has to be made or the entire idea needs to be scraped. Skill systems are a wonderful way to create progression and give your character meaning, but I don't feel that it would work so well in an environment like DayZ. We need to really look past the run-of-the-mill systems that are so common in games today if we can make anything that would really work for this genre. It is apparent that rocket has been trying to get players away from the farming mentality so prevalent in DayZ by making loot spawns more or less unpredictable. By introducing a skill system like this, we would be introducing another system with the potential for abuse and therefore require a revamp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSefhmWhgos Just saying. At the very least, they could nerf the damage and increase the recoils, but according to multiple videos on youtube...it is very possible to fire a DMR in the same way that you might fire an AK (Apparently the M14 DMR has a fully-automatic function to it as well). Is this a fair weapon? At this point, no, it needs nerfing. Should it be nerfed by fundamentally changing the mechanics of an in game weapon that fires very similar IRL, no. According to this Wikipedia article, the DMR rounds are similar in size to that of a Winchester. All this being said, something like shooting a DMR like the above should not be possible. Rocket specifically mention throughout his talks about SA that the characters that we were to play are civilians, and would therefore be completely untrained. If anything, they first time we even pick up an AK and shoot it should result in a completely inaccurate spray of bullets. ARMA 2 was made with military combat in mind. The DayZ SA will be made with civilian combat in mind. How rocket will go about adding some sort of system to accommodate for comfortability and experience with weapons, I don't know. Regardless, anything like the about is done by professionals. If anything, shooting any sniper rifle should be an extreme challenge in the SA, let alone shooting it semi-automatic.

And after you have horses...you add horse armor =D

Ha! So I'm not the only one attempting to learn Cyrillic. Its not too difficult, you just need some flash cards and a bit of time to be able to comprehend the alphabet. Luckily Cyrillic consists of about the same amount of letters as that of the English language as well as having similar letters so its no a huge learning curve like Japanese or Chinese. The problem happens when you glance at a sign and think you read it correctly but you were a bit off...happened to me today and I figured out a little later that I was on the opposite side of where I thought I was =P. By the way OP...if you still want to learn Japanese, I found this site helpful: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/

I really don't feel that quick time events really fit DayZ. Not to mention that QTEs are just a lazy way to add useless gameplay. I'm sure that we could come up with a more entertaining, changing, skillful way to do some sort of backstab/knife kill rather than "pressing random buttons" on your keyboard. Sorry for bashing your idea @Devon206, I just have a problem with my game doing things for me rather than doing it myself in game. It makes me feel like the devs were/are lazy when they add in something related to pushing random buttons for some "badass" looking cutscene rather than include new and original gameplay to accomplish the same goal. Done ranting :D .

I kind of like the idea of being able to transfer blood from another player of the same blood type to you. Same goes for antibiotics. as long as the loot is balanced enough to give players a chance to deal with infections and diseases (I'm not saying spawning everywhere, but definitely available in certain buildings depending on whether they have been looted or not). The system needs to be difficult without making finding antibiotics, blood bags, and equipment a tedious grind. If it turns out insanely "grindy" then I would err on the side of less is more. As far as loot goes, I would rather see how their hive system works before reverting to the original spawning system for DayZ. Right now, the random chance aspect just encourages server hopping. If you look in the same place enough times in enough servers, you will eventually find it. The "prototype" system they have in place now would certainly prevent military weapons from being easily found and distributed. The question is, will this system make looting tedious and grindy. At the moment that is my only concern, and I believe most people would agree that grinding is not the right way to go (though there will be some amount regardless of what system is used, the key word is tedious). Anyways...those are my thoughts.

tl;dr: if you don't treat child/women/baby/other zombies as a unique aspect of the game, nobody will care. The problem right now is that we are all emphasizing the idea that DayZ might include zombie children in it. If the idea of having children in it is not emphasized, then nobody will really care. Dead Space had mutated babies in its first iteration and wasn't banned (to my knowledge) in any countries. Left 4 Dead 2 involved pregnant mothers being morphed into acid spewing spitters. Did these games receive back lash over any of that, no (please correct me if I am wrong, though). They did not treat those NPCs as some unique aspect of the game. If you include in SA advertisements of DayZ that it "includes zombie children, babies, and pregnant mothers" of course people are going to go up in arms about it because you are emphasizing that aspect of the game, like shooting children is different than shooting a regular zombie. By putting emphasis on killing children, even zombie children, you make it wrong in others eyes because it seems as though this becomes a goal for the player. If other types of zombies, including child zombies, are to be included in the game they all need to be treated the same as other zeds; they all need to be treated as just another aspect of the game mechanics, not a focal point of the game. By making a thread like this, those of you that really wanted this to be a part of DayZ have already started digging this ideas grave. Personally I don't care one way or the other. I am all for having more variety in zombies. Anything that makes the game play more varied and interesting is a plus for me. If this aspect of the game really endangers it as a viable product in other countries, then I want no part in it. I would rather "survivors" from as many countries be able to play the game than have some stupid extra NPC in the game that causes enormous amounts of controversy about it.

OP, in some respects I agree with you. Its very difficult to wait, and for the time being Origins might be the next best thing for you. On the bright side of things, at least we know that SA is not going to be a Half Life 3. We know that the development is happening. There are dev blogs, videos, screenshots, and conferences to prove that. It is simply a matter of time until the game gets released, and no one but the devs for SA can decide when that will be. Like everybody else has said before, though, the SA will always be able to one up Origins because Origins is limited to an old engine that wasn't built for a Zombie Survival game. Even the mods that will come out on the modified engine for SA will be much better than Origins because modders won't need to twist the engine around so much. So if you find that you're not as excited about SA coming out, that's great. It just means that you will be spending less time waiting for the next dev blog and more time investigating new and exciting mods/games that are coming out right now. When SA comes out, you can let the excitement get the best of you and spend the 16+ straight hours on it that you have been waiting for.

@DaveZ you are exactly right. Its not alpha, its pre-alpha. Plenty of games have those as well and its on a "friends and family" basis, just like SA is right now. They are going to release the alpha once the pre-alpha testing has finished (By the way, the dev team was actually thinking about releasing alpha keys in batches of 50,000 or so, but they decided to just do one big alpha release...like minecraft...which is much better off than most other alphas let alone betas out there :D).

I'm pretty sure the reason that he is not telling us is because he is afraid to disappoint. If you remember last year, Rocket was talking about releasing it in December. There was quite a bit of hype around it, but at the last minute during a dev conference he said that they would be delaying the release till later this year. This seems to be a theme with people that care about the games that they are making (off the top of my head I'm thinking Valve). If you really trust Rocket to make the standalone, then you can find the patience to wait until the game comes out.

I'd love to help you out...though I'm not overly impressive at DayZ. I can survive a day or two depending on my spawn location and the situations I'm in. I have traveled the map enough to at least recognize locations that I have been in, though I haven't memorized the location of every outpost like Frankie has =P. Do you have a TS/Ventrilo/Mumlbe server in mind that we might be able to use? Here's the kicker...whats your time zone. Ping makes a difference on game, not to mention better VoiP connections. I am (-4 GMT) just so you know.

For those of you that think its easy for some people to get a new rig, you are right to an extent, but consider the average college dorm student. I have the money to buy a decent rig (I'm probably a bit better off than the average dorm student then...) but I just don't have the space to place a pc in my room. I am definitely not going to buy a high end laptop because the manufacturers rip you off, so I have to deal with my run of the mill laptop that is slowly going obsolete. That being said, I believe that the best option is to allow servers to give setting requirements so as to provide fair gameplay for the players. This seems to be a better solution rather than locking out players unable to get a decent rig.