mercules

I keep hearing this but I have driven an ATV from Ballota up past Devil's Castle into the hinterlands zig zagging all over the map looting places on the way. I've also never damaged a tractor that badly although I have wedged one between two trees. Maybe it isn't the paint or brush, but the artist.

Yes KoS... the thrill of ~COMBAT~. Sitting on a hill shooting a new spawn who doesn't have a gun is not the thrill of combat. ;) I know you say you don't do this, but others do. I know we will never stop that. However, a lot of KoS happens not because I or someone else really wants to kill them, but because to leave them alive means I will probably be killed. I feel bad for those guys, but there are times I have to shoot them. I'd like some options so I don't HAVE to shoot them or at least know who is more trustworthy. ;)

Of course it won't! What is your point? The OPs point is that he and others would like an option that doesn't involve killing. Why? So when I run into someone I don't want to kill I can defeat them without killing them. Imagine I run across a survivor. I'm not certain if he is a danger to me or not so I tranq him or taze him and leave the area. I have dealt with it without having to lose a hero skin. Otherwise my options are to avoid them and hope they don't notice me, try and talk to them and hope they don't decide to use my "friendly" as a chance to get the drop on me, or shoot them. That is it. Besides, imagine how excellent stunning someone and then removing their weapons so you could take them prisoner would be. I think it would be a lot more exciting to be taken prisoner than "Vwip!" followed by "You are Dead!" and respawning on the coast.

The Tractor is a decent off road vehicle. It stores 50 items and several guns and goes faster than most road vehicles offroad. It's not HMMWV or SUV but most people ignore them so if alone out in the boonies and you need to cross some land it's faster and easier than running and can hold some gear for you.

If you would intentionally make your own situation worse just to shoot someone then you probably qualify for the "ass" title. At that point you are simply working to make someone else's game/experience worse/harder. That is what he stated he would do.

I was talking about how it is in the mod. You were attempting to alter the subject to avoid my arguments by shifting the goalpost to SA. First it was, "Well, it is designed so badly you can't." which I have countered by pointing out that you can and people do. Then it was "It's not realistically dark." and "People can see in pitch black without light because I said they can contrary to scientific fact.". Now it is , "Well, in the SA it won't be dark." and "Flares don't exist in Chernarus even though they do in game so we should ignore the tools the devs gave us and just not play at night." Do you have a real argument with merit?

Yes, but people who are a bit less... Um... what is a polite term for this? How best to say this? You are an ass. You go out of your way to kill people even when it probably hurts you to do so instead of benefiting you. Not everyone is like you. So while they will never discourage jerks from being jerks they will discourage others from acting that way. Will I follow someone with a bandit skin, stalk them, and shoot them? Yes. Will I do the same to an unarmed person with a survivor or hero skin? No. Do I need Bandits around? Yes. Do I need people who gear up and then get kicks by shooting new spawns before they even have a weapon? No but they are fun to hunt. In games I am the sniper/marksman of our group. I tend to fall naturally into the "overwatch" position and have no issue with patiently scanning an area over and over and keeping an eye on my allies. I will happily take an hour infiltrating/exfiltrating and hopefully keep everyone safe. Not everyone has the nature or patience for what I like to do. This means that if I had a mean streak or just plain wanted to be a dick I could happily sit up on sniper hill and kill every bambi that wandered into sight. However, I tend to have the attitude that if they look to be leaving me or my team alone, I won't mess with them. Bandit skin means they are unlikely to do so and so they get popped on sight. Why do I mention this? Because I would never bother to go out of my way to kill someone that wasn't likely to be trying to kill me. There just is no reward in it either in game or mentally for me. Measures to tone down KoS won't affect you in the least, but they will cause people like me to actively avoid putting ourselves in bad situations or wasting resources just to kill someone who is no threat to us. As I stated before, NOTHING will stop KoS attitude from some people, but many things will discourage it in a large number of people.

I don't think people grasp what some of us are actually discussing. You will never stop KoS because there will always be someone out there that just gets their jollies shooting every person they see. However, you can stop the KoS mentality from being prevalent. You can mitigate the KoS mentality. One of the ways to do so would be to make it so that we can identify people who are more trustworthy without putting them at disadvantage. The Hero skin is somewhat of a disadvantage since it sticks out a bit more than most of the survivor skins. The good thing about it is the, "I don't want to shoot you and lose my status." it projects. It looks like SA will have some things to discourage some of it, which is good. In real life I could get a sense of a person from body language and such as to how ready or likely they are to be lying. It isn't perfect but you can read a real person a lot better than an avatar which has no mannerisms or body language. So some sort of visual clue similar to the Hero skin would be nice.

Yes, but that isn't because of game mechanics, that is because you enjoy being an ass and shooting other players. Don't get me wrong, I don't want banditry to go away, but I do want a few people to realize that ~I~ and not going to shoot them for no apparent reason or just because it looks like they have a bigger backpack. Hero skins are all good and fine, but could they maybe be NOT BLINDINGLY WHITE AND BLUE and easy to spot against the background? :)

Were we originally talking about Stand Alone? No... we were talking about the Mod. In the mod it is dark and most of the time it is not so dark you can't see. When it is you have tools given to you by the game to still get around. What gear may or may not exist in Chernarus is relevant, but not when the devs have already decided that in their little mythical location Road Flares are available and apparently more common than hunting rifles and matches. You are now obfuscating the point by digressing into, "But there shouldn't be the things the devs gave you." There are and you can use them or choose not to. Now, if you don't you will face periods of night where it is far too dark to see... just like in real life. This would be why I have a keychain flashlight and flashlight app on my cellphone.

I switched a server over from Breaking Point to Epoch. Here is why... Breaking Point was too easy while having some random crap that would simply kill you for no reason. There was loot scattered everywhere and if you could find a chopper you could simply hit the Carrier or Oil Rig and tons of guns and likely an ammo box or medical box with no spawns so you could just run a loop around it and grab guns junk or not. Drop the junk in a corner and by the time you looped back through something else spawned in it's place. In this way my friends and I were swimming in SD assault rifles and fairly nice sniper rifles. While the different color ghillies were a nice addition, we had about 20 normal ones in a truck somewhere. Heck we had a rocket launcher and 4 missiles to fire out of it. The only non-player thing that scared us were Bloodsuckers and ONLY because they were glitchy. Things would happen like I would fly in to drop off friends then pull up and circle while they searched an area. A Bloodsucker would spawn, hit my friend, and I in the chopper 100 meters up would end up taking the hit. That would knock my unconscious and of course lead to a crash. Which would lead to a long run. The chopper didn't matter because we knew after a server reset it would be back in one of 3 spots and with a couple jerry cans we could get it up in the air again. We had two bases chock full of gear, food, water, weapons, ammo, vehicles. There was so much that even when someone came across our stash they couldn't take enough to make us care. Someone loaded up a military offroad with 2 guns with NV scopes, 2 of our decent sniper rifles, and about 20 SD Stanag clips. We didn't notice for about 4 days and then suddenly went, "Hey, there used to be another vehicle here." We went and found it with the gear I mentioned. Breaking Point just has too much in it. The loot tables are silly and you can get geared up so quickly it is ridiculous. My friend would die and before we could get on and get to him in something like a Little Bird or HMMWV he would have everything he needed. Looting his corpse was a matter of, "I like the black version of this gun better than the desert camo." or "I had one of our 3 Farm Ghilles in my backpack.." At the end I was like, "My server will come down in 5 days, so we should run out and try that rocket launcher or just walk through Cherno guns blazing, or do a convoy with several armed vehicles and just blast everything. In those 5 days I don't think a single one of us logged in. Instead we were playing Epoch.

You can change things without changing the systems. It would require cultural bias though and typically the cultural bias for game populations is toward easy or action orientated. Not shooting someone is probably the best idea at times, but very few people can resist if there is nothing else to do and I think people are so adept at gathering up gear and avoiding zombies now that they have grown bored and decided to challenge themselves by shooting at things that shoot back. So then the pressure is on shooting first since these other people have and you get a cultural bias towards KoS instead of away from it. More people KoS and after being shot several times after stating you were friendly others give up and give in to just shooting and not worrying about communication. So one way to swing it back without changing the system is for people to simply decide they are not going to KoS and sticking with it. Eventually you will again have experiences where you trusted someone and they didn't betray you and there will be a slight bias away from KoS. My friends and I like to hunt those with Bandit skins. We know they are shooting people so we don't mind KoS-ing them. Others get better treatment and maybe will not go down the path to a bandit skin because of it.

What that quote doesn't say is as important as what it does say. Drinking water is good for you and definitely won't harm you. Being dropped in the middle of the ocean means you will probably drown. Floods can wipe out whole towns. The reason I mention this is that KoS in moderation is a good thing. When the whole game revolves around KoS and finding the next kill though, it falls apart. Not killing someone immediately is become so rare that it isn't even a default stance anymore. Instead we see someone and start to shoot. That makes every play just another obstacle to avoid instead of those occasional times where you end up friendly with someone. While KoS gives meaning to befriending others and a risk vrs reward aspect to it, too much KoS simply wipes it out and removes a major part of the game.

Few days back my friend and I did not shoot not just 1 but 2 players on sight. Instead we talked to them, considered some trades but didn't need anything, and when some bandits hit the area in a helicopter my buddy and I tried to offer up some cover fire for them despite the fact that we will probably never see them again. We need some bandits in the game, but it sure would be nice if not everyone was a KoS bandit.

How many M16A2s have you seen in firehalls? If UN troops hit the ground there will be flares with them. Heck, ALICE packs are obsolete U.S. equipment. Road Flares are not uncommon in Europe. In fact, there was an incident in 2012: http://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2012/6/15/3089576/euro-2012-soccer-tournament

I tend to actually be like I am in real life. "Ugh, I had beans last night. Is there any beefsteak in my bag?" I really like to mix it up and like when I find the more rare items.

Minnesota U.S.A I also have a hatchet, candles, waterproof matches, blankets, bandages and such in my car, I was a First Responder for many years. Getting dumped in a ditch in the middle of a winter blizzard can be life threatening. I've done the 8 mile walk to the nearest civilization bleeding with a concussion with only one glove because the other vanished somewhere in the middle of the crash from the passenger seat. However, emergency kits are very common around here and emergency flares are not only good for being spotted during white out or foggy conditions but also can be used to get fires started if you lack other means.

The two topics are not separate though. KoS is legitimate. I have done it myself. My friend and I scouting an area and hunting for bandits ran into a group that did not have bandit skins but didn't have hero/survivor skins on either. Without that we could not be sure if they were bandits or not but they were moving towards Elektro from two HMMWVs under the cover of the woods with scoped weapons. Sure they were assualt rifles for the most part and not sniper rifles but we also don't know what is in their packs. 4 of them moving into a sniping position all geared up? We had to make a choice. We could talk to them and have them quickly spread out and flank us(and we were in a not so great area to stop that) or shoot first. We took down 3 asked the last guy to surrender and when he continued firing into the tree I was using for cover we killed him too. At least we were kind enough to not hide the bodies so they could get their gear back and hopefully they thought twice about that area. If I see a bandit skin, I don't ask questions or call for surrender. I assume they will happily shoot me even if I didn't have a gun and so avoid and/or shoot them. Survivor skins will have me avoid the person unless there is a reason to interact. Hero skins will often have me avoid shooting unless shot at.

Why would flares not be common? Why would it be unauthentic? Do you know how many emergency road kits contain road flares? Both my cars in real life have them. In addition I can actually pick them up from just about any gas station not to mention any car parts store, Walmart, and so forth. Notice in SA we are looting broken down cars, finding road flares and a first aid kit would not be unusual. Hopefully we will be given an option to have a pistol and flashlight in hand together and or craft torches and other light sources.

Eh, I do what I can. I tend to play with friends and so have back-up most of the time. This gives me an option to talk but I always make sure that I am covered by a friend and also sure the possible hostile knows it too. Example: My friend and I hopped on an Epoch server. We were at Trader City Keln dumping some things we didn't need and buying a few things we did need when we heard a vehicle approaching. Guy drove up and into the area and we took cover. My friend went out and talked to him while I stayed in cover ready to shoot if he appeared the least bit hostile. He wasn't (or maybe decided the odds were bad) but we took turns covering him as one of us and he went about our trading. Another person shows up, same thing for him. Finally a plane starts buzzing the area. Spotting people it circles back and begins to circle. We quickly finish up the last of our trades and move into the cover of the woods as a helicopter shows up and the shooting starts. My friend and I laid down cover fire for the neutral parties to help them get out and then broke off once the one guy was dead and the other had gotten away. We have also canvased the various known sniper areas in groups of 4 and cleared out those that were shooting new spawns. My favorite was a guy who just kept climbing up to the top of one of the firehalls. I killed him with an M16A4 ACOG at about 400 meters. He came back and picked up his CZ, bandit skin clearly showing this time instead of a ghillie. He then laid down in the same spot I just shot him so I killed him again. He came back and finally I just had my friends sneak up to the firehall and killed him AGAIN. This time when he came back they killed him as soon as he set foot in there and he finally got the point.

http://www.pneudart.com/

The thought occurs to me, maybe pick up flares, glowsticks, and/or flashlights when it is daylight? Maybe not drop the flares you start with? I try to always have an option for nighttime on me even if it is just glowsticks in my backpack. Then if I ever do log in during a dark period I can at least use those until a better option comes my way. I've also ran around with a G17 as my secondary because of the flashlight or even stuck a Rem 870 into a stash I know I can find later if needed.

Correct. | Melee | Main Gun | Pistol | are the three options. Read the release notes.

Our release dates for my company's software are set up when the gold master goes out to get turned into CDs and the printer is receiving the PDFs to turn them into guides. We already know X, Y, and Z will be in place and what date it will be in the warehouses to ship. Before that we will say things like, "Coming soon. Expect it late third quarter of 2013." and it might still end up in the first quarter of 2014 if unforeseen issues come up.

Rediculous is your opinion. I for one think it is a reasonable facsimile of real nights and love that there are times when it is pitch black. All those other games that made it night but then made it so easy to see that really it was not worth it. DayZ gives you not just one tool to deal with the darkness but half a dozen and really turned it into a gameplay feature that is pretty wild. The problem is that a lot of people give up without trying it because it doesn't meet their immediate expectations and miss out of this awesome feature. People want self-bloodbags too so they can be anti-social KoS griefing asshats too, but that doesn't mean that requiring another person to bloodbag you is a bad design decision.