mercules

Having played Vanilla Epoch which has limited vehicles, plenty of zombies, no seriously extra loot spawn points, no AI, no safe zones, no DMRs, no AS50s and such... I found myself with interesting challenges. Mainly I found myself trying to save up to start building a base. I wanted a secure base, but "secure" is a limited thing in Epoch. You can buy a car with a key and lock it, but people can find rare spawns from police zombies that have a "Hotwire Kit" that can unlock a vehicle once and until server restart. So while things can't be taken by anyone who wanders by, there are not always perfectly safe. The only thing that can store them safely is an actual Safe, which is expensive and limited in storage. I like that finding ammo for guns I don't use isn't a complete waste of time to be left on the floor until it despawns. I like that I can gather it up and trade it in for beans or a hunting knife. Some believe this isn't in the DayZ spirit and it is and isn't. I think a couple things are priced too low, but a lot of it is about right. I don't have to "farm an area" but can save up from all the crap I gather and trade and buy an item I want instead of server hopping, or triggering loot spawns till it shows up. I really like the time-sink of base building. Think about Vanilla. After you get your gear what is left to do? Um.... maybe get a vehicle and fix it? Okay... now what? Shoot people. In Epoch I get geared up, I get a vehicle, and now I spend a LOT of time hunting up building supplies and then building my base. I do it in and out of the way place in the hope I don't get shot and need to keep it maintained so I have to constantly go out and find building materials not just find a good gun or set of guns, ammo, basic gear, 4 tires, engine, fuel parts, and jerry cans, then go shoot people. It gives people an end goal and keeps them going to different locations on the map to find Cinder Blocks and Mortar. The fact that you can't get locks off of anything but zombie corpses and maybe as random loot found in an untouched vehicle means people actually ENGAGE zombies instead of just running around them and looting the buildings quick. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Origins on the other hand does a few different things right. You want a house so you can secure a few things. I think they are a bit too secure, but at least the first level house only holds ten guns and you can be shot coming out and your gear available to loot. To do that you have to gather a bunch of supplies. Again you have a goal beyond gearing up and going, "Then what?" Second level house means you have to get the plans for it, which means engaging a super zombie that takes a ton of damage. Maybe he drops it. The more rare plans require killing the mayor of a semi fuctioning island that is filled with AI soldiers. You need a small group to get in and out safely which encourages teaming up with someone so end game isn't all about PvP but some cooperation. Then again, you don't ever have to go that far. You could build a level 1 or 2 house and shoot anyone who wanders onto your lawn, so to speak. Some people won't, but it gives those who would something to do besides just survive or PvP. -------------------------------------------- You see, that is the ONE place Vanilla falls aside. It's a persistent game, with no permanency. Your tents can be run over, your razor wire pulled up, your vehicles stolen. While I don't think things should NEVER be taken I do believe there should be a way to take reasonable precautions so that someone can't just walk up to your tent and take all your stuff. If tents were only accessible while you were online and such that would be one thing, but when you work and have family and can only be online a few hours each week then having a tent can be somewhat pointless since you are not around often enough to keep people out of the area, or pack things up if you had to. This does, and does not make sense. What makes more sense is that you would find a way to secure an area and post guards to protect your precious food and ammo. I think Epoch and Origins better work for THAT aspect of apocalypse simulation. Vanilla went a long way by giving us the more easily hidden stashes to tuck things into, but that still isn't all that realistic. 5 guys could reasonably secure an area against a few desperate people and have a chance of guarding their gear, not have some random survivor, unarmed, starving, nearly dead, come to their camp and rummage through everything and walk away armed, healthy, and ready to go. You would probably have 2 people guard it at all times.

They are not as hard to "get around" but some are rather tough to put down without a headshot. If you have a handy building with a second exit you can slip through and hopefully lose them, but if not they are sometimes hard to take down. That and if you want Hero levels you HAVE to engage the zombies. If you want a bandit skin you just need to watch for players. ;)

Yeah, how dare we try and have a reasonable discussion about why you think they are horrible and/or explain the good things about them. I mean you've made up your mind off of falsehoods and nothing and lets not be rational.

I was told that if I don't have anything nice to say, say nothing at all. Since you asked though. You play poorly, the video quality was poor, your friend whining and squealing in a pubescent voice was annoying, and overall it wasn't enjoyable to watch. Telling everyone you met during the video to "Suck a D***!" was probably not great material to include either. How is you being an ignorant teenage bigot something I want to watch? Happy? When I say you play poorly I could see clearly that you had no knife but passed one up on the floor of the gas station along with what I think was 3 AK mags but might have been AKM when you intended to head to a location for loot spawns that would include, AK and AKM. ???? Half the time I couldn't see what should have been clear on your screen which is probably something your video capture software is doing. 2 out of 10 because you at least attempted editing but didn't fade out the sound when you tried to bridge the scenes with narrative so it was hard to make our what you were saying.

Not every person who plays "DayZ" is a "DayZ Player". I am a person who really enjoys the pure version of DayZ but I also play mods like Epoch and Origins. Heck I even tried out the Battle Royal mod which is interesting a very different way, but it is not anything like Vanilla. We have games out there that you can drop into and play for an hour or two and come out having had fun but not had any real investment in. Games where the world isn't persistent and what you do today has little to no effect on what happens or what you do tomorrow in the game. That is not DayZ and shouldn't be. The appeal of DayZ to some of us is that we spend a good deal of our time and effort in gathering all the needed things and maintaining that status of alive and functioning. The threat that some other human or Zed could end that status makes it appealing. I enjoy gearing up but I don't enjoy rushing it because I know someone is going to grab the first Lee Enfield or other rifle he can find and go camp the fire tower in 3rd person. He won't worry about food or drink, or anything else because he has 20 shots and will probably die before he uses those up so doesn't care. That guy will just die, grab the first gun he finds and go right back to the firehall. He ruins the game for the people who are actually trying to play it and not turn it into a 30 minute round PvP CoD/BF match. There is a lot to be said for gathering everything you will need to not just survive, but thrive. Couple water bottles and means to boil them and cook meat, stockpile of meat, extra ammo for you main gun, and secondary weapons of your choice. Then you sit back and decide you might want to find a vehicle to fix up and maintain. Then maybe hunt the north for helicopter crashes, and such. That game needs a chance to thrive but it doesn't if there are 1000+ vehicles, extra barracks, self blood bag, start with DMR servers sucking up some of the playerbase. I get the whole, "But if they go there they wanted to play that type of game." and that is not exactly the whole truth. What ends up happing is that there are players that would be perfectly content to play DayZ Vanilla, in first person, with limited guns and ammo, with fewer vehicles, a full day and night schedule... IF there wasn't something easier for them to run to. I've got friends that would play First Person just fine, if Third didn't give huge advantages that made the game easier for them. Instead the cop-out and play the easier things. In the end they lose the experience they stated they wanted to have and realize that Battlefield is better for the game play style of spending a couple hours in a FPS PvPing like mad.

Just because something is a game does not mean it shouldn't be taken serious. It should not be taken to an extreme, nothing in life should be taken to an extreme, not work and not play. Desptite that, you can take this game very serious, much more so than other games. Surviving and finding that rare bit of gear, finding a good camp location that no one finds for months on end, surviving for an extremely long time, and all that can be really rewarding and does require being a bit serious about it. The issue is we have a generation of gamers which believe that a game should be, "Let me in, get me into the action and doing what I want immediately, don't make me worry about what happens when I log in again." BF and COD as well as many other games are ideally suited to that mindset but Vanilla DayZ isn't and shouldn't. Give the rest of us a game we enjoy.

Did you watch the other one from one of the players he shoots at and misses? I'm thinking it's not totally faked. It is edited to show the best parts which is why I prefer watching Lewis of PsiSyndicate who isn't afraid to show us his worst moments. To the OP: The servers are locked until a game opens up. At that point the game shows an hourglass in the list and you need to log into it fast. To those not liking the mod: Don't play it. Trust me when I say it is gathering it's share of morons and 12 year old "I wanna be Alpha Male" types. The first match I got into there were 10 people screaming into the voice channel while the countdown went on. Those kids went away once it was past their bedtime. It was an interesting experience. When the 10 second countdown started I was nervous and got ready. Then everyone went running to the center to grab things. Both games I played I ended up without a weapon. I don't know if someone grabbed it out of the bag I snatched off the ground or if those bags had alternate packages since they are random. I suspect it was the later though as I got a bunch of band-aids and medical supplies in the one and the other had lots of food and drink and a binoculars. The later didn't have a map which was a real pain once the bombing began. It was a lot like a mix between Battle Royal (an excellent "bad movie") and hunger Games borrowing aspects from both. Zombies were in limited areas of the map and I was almost killed by a mob of them because I didn't realize there was one at the top of the tower who climbed down and smacked me around. There is a bit of weird strategy going on with this all. It might be good to race for a town before anyone else gets there as you might get some good stuff, but you are guaranteed a backpack in the middle plus something else, likely a pistol. So heading to the center might work too. Do you grab and go though? Or try and pull out a gun and thin things out early? Do you head for a vehicle or take a shorter route on foot to a loot site? The vehicle lets you get into blue areas and out of bombing areas faster but is noisy. The few spots where items spawn have no promise of anything useful to you. Sometimes it is a gun and no ammo or ammo without the guns. So you might need to hit a few to find something worthwhile and there the vehicle comes into play but it makes you a target and is easily noticed. It was a fun way to blow a couple hours last night. It is NOT DayZ but it is fun.

Until you stop and look at games that have been built for console and PC release. DC Universe: Online, for example forces you to choose 6 active abilities and everything is otherwise built up using combos. Why are you limited to that? So that they can fit those actions on a control. By contract EQII, Rifts, Guild Wars 2, DDO, even Champions and City of Heroes when they were still active allow hundreds of possible power triggers and macros. Difference? One is designed to fit with a controller in mind. They "could" port a game with complex controls like this over, but it would have to lose some things first.

Hey... look at that... there are lights on in some places. Communications systems tend to have more hardened systems for obvious reasons.

I can promise people who have been knocked out do not hop up and run. All the times I have knocked unconscious... lets see... Choked out and nearly died in a fight: First I could hear ringing in my ears and speaking like it was very far away... much like some movies. Then roaring like wind or water as my hearing came back. It was a while before I could see clearly much less flop my arms and legs around. About a minute later I could move in a coordinated manner. That was AFTER coming to. Knocked senseless from a concussion being kicked in the head. I woke up. Tried to stand up and promptly fell flat again where the world decided to spin me around for about 40 seconds until I vomited. I managed to get on my side for that so I didn't choke on it. Car accident head on into a tree from icy roads. Woke up sitting up with the seat belt holding me in. I had hit the steering wheel because they didn't have airbags back then and the I hit the tree right where the steering column was so it was shoved back about a foot. I groggily woke up and I don't remember the first 5 minutes or so of being awake. Which is why I only found one glove before walking 8 miles into town in a blizard because this was also before cell phones. You don't just hop up after being knocked out and start running around. You are lucky they only hit you with the animation and don't force you to stop and vomit or sway/curve while moving because your equilibrium tends to be knocked off kilter. The lack of hearing is a bit accurate depending on how you were hit but some double or blurred vision would be good too.

The GPS in your phone typically uses a LPS system where it determines your locations based off of triangulation with cell towers all of which are known to the master DB. These sorts of systems would still be somewhat functional although the accuracy would be reduced. In addition it would take a while, months and years for the satellite network to be so far out of orbit that it would become inaccurate much less crash. Some are automated to retain their location. We don't know how long the infection has been going on, it could be days, weeks, months, but it hasn't been years and we have no indication it has spread beyond Chernarus. Other parts of the world could be fine and have quarantined the area and so satellites could be up and working fine.

Yep.. that has never ever happened in Vanilla... ever... Look, There are bugs in Epoch, tons of them. There are bugs in Vanilla. Maybe you shouldn't pick a bug that is in BOTH mods as a reason to not play one of them.

They do. It would have to know what gun you are using and where it was zero'd to, but for something like the DMR which doesn't zero and the bullet drop is known for it wouldn't be that hard to make. It would simply have to know what direction and speed the person is heading in which it can get from the data being transmitted to the client and then have been calibrated to the gun. Distance is again info transmitted to the client.

Pabst Blue Ribbon... AKA: Hipster Beer.

Mac OS is annoying. If you either rip it out or bootcamp it though, the Mac can be nice. Then again your paying at least half again what you would for the same hardware not in a Mac format. I get asked the question "Why doesn't your software work on a Mac? Why wouldn't you make a version for it." The answer is simple, we would have to redo the development and QA for the majority of our products doubling our costs for less than 50% of the market. Not worth it. We could develop, and have, software that works in both OS which means it isn't twice the development time but is significantly more, and is still twice the QA time. More cost to make back minor profit. Again, Not Worth It. So yes, hold onto the precious Mac you paid to much for and tell yourself it is better. Then install bootcamp which really means installing WINDOWS and get what you should have had in the first place for playing games but decided to pay too much for just because. Don't forget to order your PBR and talk about how good band X was before mainstream discovered them.

Why?

NEVER! Imagine me standing on a demolished console with a keyboard and mouse raised into the air in triumph.

Solution for now... stay away from towns close to spawn points. Unfortunately that eliminates the coast. No one can be killed and then quickly return to their body if you are not in one of the spawn point towns. I don't go to those already for other reasons. Everything you need can be found off the coast.

Based off the BattleRoyal film? Awesome! Not DayZ but still awesome.

1. You are off on the "Two Year Deadline." Last year they had talked about releasing DayZ as a stand alone and in doing so meant packaging the mod into a bundle with all the ARMA II code. At some point they changed the focus of that and instead decided that as along as it was going to be independent of ARMA II they might as well fix a bunch of things that bother them and us. User interface, animations, zombie pathing, scripts/cheats and such. These were all limitations from ARMA II. From that point it has been about a year of work so for them to have anything playable in that time, even minus vehicles, would be really good solid work. 2. They are starting the vehicles from scratch because ARMA II vehicles are a bit hashed. They work "well enough" but again this is one of those areas they think they can improve upon. So they are. 3. They are adding a lot of systems to the game, ones that specifically deal with the player and their avatar. New gear systems, weapon attachments, medical systems, animations, new actions, and such. That is the focus, not vehicles. Vehicles are something nice but not needed for the DayZ experience. They are something that can wait. Heck, most of us playing Vanilla don't see a working vehicle except passing us on the the road while we slip into the trees and debate if we will need to shoot it or not.

I've found that people rarely hit me short of emptying a clip or standing on a straight section of the road so they are shooting straight at me, I'll drift back and forth a bit after the first shot but I have been shoot off one by a very determined person with a few clips of AK ammo they wanted to burn up. I think they hit the ATV more than they hit me but I eventually fell unconscious and crashed. You can also go WAY offroad which is my normal tactic on one. It's not as loud as you think either. I drove to about 200 meters of an area I was going to loot, hopped out, and made it the rest of the way on foot. Ran into a guy and did the "friendly" dance. He hid without replying and my heart started thudding. I was in good cover with eyes on him and kept repeating myself, "No really if I had wanted to shoot you I had you dead to rights while you were crouched and looting." He finally made a break for it, got into his chopper, and flew away. I had an MP5 SD and M1911 pistol on me and he had an M4 of some sort, I think CCO and so outgunned me... but he ran. I swear he should have heard that ATV in the distance but my friend went to loot a small town while I fueled up at a nearby station. He had left the town and was up in the wood and was trying to give me and idea where but couldn't so I was buzzing around to try and find him in the dark and he could barely hear the ATV so it was a bit like a really bad "Marco-Polo" game.

See! I love these people. they leave me a handy vehicle just sitting there.

Another person ignorant as to what the SA is actually going to be and in for a shock.

No, no... being able to level to end game by memorizing some number crunching and skipping anything that might smack of difficulty or being less loot/xp per minute than some other area/way/tactics or being able to "pwn noobs" is what makes a game a game... Or wait that is only true post 1999.

I don't want to know where you buy your computers at... because the $500 dollar computer I bought 2-3 years ago plays this game fairly well on the highest settings. My $1,200 computer doesn't even stretch to play Arma II/DayZ on highest settings and that is a least a year old now. Trying to play games on a 4 year old $300 laptop is dumb and I see people trying to do that all the time and then complaining about the results.