mercules

No one is trying to ruin your fun. In fact I am attempting to help you understand how much better the game becomes in 1st person. I am in fact trying to help you take off your training wheels so you can learn to ride your bike in a manner that is more fun. 3rd person is a crutch. I'm 100% sure most of them would say 3rd person since the majority of people really don't like challenges and so will take the easier route. Just like all the really popular servers for the mod where you started with food, water, guns, bandages, a backpack, and maybe even a bicycle you could unpack and pack so you could get around easier. Actually, it's you who is mimicking the little young minds you teach. I'm pretty sure if you told them they could have a candybar if they solved a math problem or they could have a candy bar if they sat there for 10 seconds they would pick the 10 seconds option since it is easier. Sure they wouldn't learn anything or really have a sense of earning the candybar.... but hey they prefered it, right? I agree with you 100%, but I still think you would have more fun in 1st person. If it makes you sick then you might need to adjust the settings a bit, probably just turn off headbob since FoV is the same in either mode, one is just 3 meters above the other so you can see everything around you.

Which is why I bought a gaming Keypad and I'll never go back to just Keyboard. ;)

Which you can do in first person. The sound is also going to be worked on so that it more perfectly correlates to the location it came from. Also, you can't hear something standing still 600 meters from the fence you are behind, but you can see it in 3rd person... so... Lies, in 1PP you can glance over your shoulders to see the zeds just fine. Makes different backpacks more worthwhile too since some of them hold more, but block LoS over your shoulder.

I take it you don't drive?

Don't forget you can make torches in .57. Stick + Rag = Torch. You can peel bark off a tree and Bark + Stick = Firedrill so you can light your torch. Flashlights are so .55.

...and if the limitation is location as to what you ISP can offer you... you would have to move. I actually check out what is available in areas before I consider them places to move to. My wife loves this inexpensive house with 10 acres and a small barn.... but you can only get ADSL and the switch is a few miles away so screw that.

What if they are a coprophiliac?

It's pretty much:

Test servers are all 1st/3rd person servers right now so I was forced to play on 3rd person servers if I wanted to play experimental. My time there went like this: Well I suppose I should see if the changes have made a difference for 3rd person.Hmmm... I can still look over fences and around cornersCrap, High Traffic area, I better switch to 3rdHuh... I can see things around me a lot easierDrinking from a fountain isn't as scary as it wasWOW IS DRIVING A TRUCK EASY! Holy crap as passenger I can see people in buildings or behind fences...Hmmm... I don't like looting tight buildings in 3rd, but it makes making sure no one is in them easier.I best leave this on.... that zombie would have surprised me otherwiseThis game seems easier now I then went back to playing on a 1st person private server and had to unlearn several bad habits I picked up.

Sigh.... 3rd person. Perfectly demonstrates what I hate about it though. Laying in cover scanning the horizon without exposing any part of your body. Might be why you were pinned down that long since there was no incentive to move as you could see them moving around and adjust. Oh well, otherwise nice video.

You have looted a town that has multiple spawn points for it. As people start/restart they run through that town and loot what they can before heading inland where more loot is available. I started on a server today and left the coast immediately. I headed for a town not typically on anyone's route and walked away with: backpack, gun, ammo, military jacket, hunting pants, matches, fully hydrated and energized, misc items for survival, and basically geared enough to survive for a pretty long time. Tiny town, 2 zombies, no one had been there in a while. Berinzino = Lot's of someone's have been there recently, many zombies, no loot. You need to change your tactics.

It doesn't apply to zombies or animals. Which makes scouting for zombies to avoid them trivial. Which makes zombies even less of a threat and they should be a threat. It also doesn't apply to the guy approaching a building that has no cover around it. The guy on top of the building and see him clearly and pop up to shoot him at very little risk to himself. That means it is not, "Well the other guy can peek." Usually not, because a lot of the best places are first come first serve. There is no counter point where you can peek to see if they are there, you just have to know there is a chance someone is in that position and avoid it or risk it. There is no counter. Which is dumb. In addition you can gain information without exposing yourself to danger. This makes firefights very boring and basically boil down into two people behind cover watching to see who moves out of cover first and shooting them. Very often a third party or Zombie resolves the standoff by forcing one to move. In 1st person you have to put yourself in danger to keep eyes on the other person's cover. You can actually use suppression fire and other real world tactics that just don't do a thing with 3rd person. You are correct, except in 3rd person the advantage is, "I am in a position where I can see and shoot anyone approaching and they can't see me no matter what they do." 3rd eliminates many tactics. It makes CQC room clearing very easy to do, it removes suppression, and it basically rewards camping a high traffic area from cover. To camp something like a rooftop in 1st person you would either have to remain blind and in cover, or peek out and risk people seeing you. In 3rd you just hide in cover and can still see... wait for person to turn away and shoot them in the back. Very little risk at all. It's boring. In addition it makes zombies worthless.

Here is a neat thought for you. Things you "earn" are more valuable to you than things you are given in most cases. A perfect example is my daughter who was given multiple older iPhones from her grandma and aunt and broke them. It was only when she had to replace the last one by working for a summer that suddenly and magically she learned to really care for the expensive thing. Some games I play simply because they are easy and I don't have to focus on them. Others I play because they are more challenging. I don't dial every game with a difficulty slider down to "easy" Except DayZ is not a battlefield simulation... Horror is a lot more dramatic when the person is not separated from you by being a 3d puppet you manipulate. There are dozens of reasons why it is not realistic starting and probably ending with, "It is a game." however some of us want a more "This is me." not "This is my guy/gal." feel to the game. Obviously when my character falls down a ledge and breaks their leg I don't want a hammer to swing and break my leg. Obviously no game is going to be totally realistic. However the developers use that word authentic, and to me that means not being able to see over fences/ledges or around corners without my eye actually being above/around it. True line of sight. You don't have to tell me about spatial awareness as I can walk down a dark hallway and sense open doorways on either side just from the change in air pressure. You are never going to get that level of detail until they can wire a game right into our brains. However I still feel that the game is much stronger in 1st person. That lack of perfect perception is actually right on for a survival horror genre. Zombies are not "horrible" when I can easily avoid them by swinging the camera to look over a fence. I can hear zombies moaning and stepping in first person, but to actually do more than guess their location I have to peek and risk them seeing me. To me that improves the gameplay. As for Bohemia and their "battle field awareness" this goes back to the "peripheral dots" that would alert you to objects that were not directly in your vision. Which turned into a legal wall hack since it didn't bother with LoS so much so you could see if someone was crouched behind a wall by turning your head away from them and seeing the white dot show up. One of the more well known hardcore sim communities, Shacktac, does not play ARMA II or III in 3rd person. What does that tell you?

You only have one screen... ? So in your honest opinion, which is more realistic: 1. Looking around like you are wearing goggles or glasses that don't allow peripheral vision to be used as much.... 2. Looking around as if your eyes were on stalks like a slug but 3 feet behind and above you so you can see your own ass but not was is half a foot in front of your chest...

If you go back and read through my post I never mentioned respawning. I believe they are planning on checking SPAWNING, which will, as you so kindly pointed out, be happening a lot with server restarts every 4 hours or whatever the admin sets up and should give them tons of data. You can't tell if REspawn is working correctly if you are unsure even the initial spawn was working the way you wanted it in the first place. I'm sure I and everyone else will miss you just as much as the last time you took a break.

It does against the zombies and other AI who don't get the magical view from on high and have to look around at eye level. In other words it trivializes encounters with Zombies and Hunting Animals. Two important systems if the Devs are to be believed since they are rewriting them. ;)

Fixing bugs is important, but we are still adding features that are very likely to recreate those very bugs they fixed. Fixing a bug for sound, for instance, and then ripping out and replacing the sound code means they might reintroduce the bug, or have fixed it only to remove the cause. Why not just update the sound code and see if the bug still remains? Does that make sense? Correct... however despawn is part of the persistence issue. You say "persistence" and I think to you it means, "Does this item stay here?" and that is the end. What you fail to understand is that in DayZ given the database structure if every item remained forever the servers would rapidly(like a day or two) bog down. So the server has to clean things up. Part of that is the server knowing what needs to not be cleaned up(aka persistence) and what should be cleaned up (aka despawn) they are related and two sides of the same coin. What it looks like PGI is going to do is to remove persistence and throw the CLE into the wild without to see if it really does spawn the right items in the right locations. Things will clean up rather than sit around for a week so that they can get an accurate measure of items spawning independent of the persistence/despawn issue. Once they are certain the SPAWNING works correctly then they can point a finger at the despawn being the actual issue and focus attention on that. This is a VERY logical and typical troubleshooting step. You eliminate variables. Say Outlook 365 crashes on start up? Do I immediately uninstall it and reinstall it? No, because that is a long process and it might be something simpler. My first step is to see if Outlook will start in Safe Mode. If it does then I start to look at the add-ins. I might even disable all of them and see if Outlook will start in normal mode. If so it is an issue with an add-in and I can slowly add them back in one at a time. What if I see a suspicious one and don't want to slowly add them back in? Well, I can disable just the one(like disabling persistence) and see if my assumption is correct. Then I can work on that add-in if a user needs it for something, maybe search the web for others with the issue or download a newer version of the add-in. By eliminating the variable they can then go, "OH! Things are not even spawning in properly. We looked through that code but now we can adjust some things in it and see what happens." or "Okay, the spawning works fine, we are going to focus on Persistence and despawning and see why that breaks the CLE.

DayZ is a Horror Survival. 3rd person makes the horror less and survival easier since the zombies can't see you while you see them and you can check around corners so no surprise face to face encounters. 3rd person separates you from the game. You are no longer looking over your shoulder to see what that noise was, you are turning your puppet and seeing what they see. You can see your clothes in the inventory screen. People play 3rd person because it is easier. Point in fact, in the Mod you never saw a 1pp only server that offered starter gear... almost all of starter gear servers were 3rd person. Why? because why do easy mode on the harder setting. Hell no. In 1st it feels like it is me peering out that window or going to a kneeling position to look over cover. When a shot hits nearby I don't see the dirt fly up over at my side and so am able to trace where the shot came from. I can see only what my character could actually see and so I have to turn and look behind me and up and down. I wonder if there is some sort of social disorder that people relate more to a puppet version of a character than looking out through the character's eyes? I suppose in real life you just wander around in purple pants, a yellow undershirt and ugly sweater vest with mismatched shoes because you can't see your clothes most of the time? I mean you only see them when you turn your head and look around or in a mirror. Dumbest excuse ever. 1st person certainly doesn't stop you from doing that.

...and how many players would just not log in during that time since they would then possible lose their "nice gear"? Besides loot is a CORE component to DayZ, always has been. Loot rarity determines the flow of DayZ and it is an important thing to get right so it is a feature that has to go in before other features. What good is implementing sickness if you can easily find items to cure it or never find items that cure it? CLE needs to be built and implemented as it is one of the core components. It is what separates DayZ from a dozen other horror survival games.

Persistence is part of the despawn issue. You speak of persistence as if it only applies to tents. It applies to EVERY ITEM. Which means the despawn is part of the persistence, because if you only every respawn items removed from their spawn points you will either end up with spawn points plugged with useless items nobody moves, or piles of useless items near spawn points that do nothing but bog down performance as it tracks and renders every one of them. Persistence has never worked because the items have never "timed out" and despawned correctly as they were supposed to when persistence was fist announced.

This is not the Alpha you are looking for. We are in Alpha, even the production server. We are not feature complete in any way shape or form. So many features a glimmer and nothing more in the distance it is funny. Persistence does NOT work fine. It is barely functional at all and ONLY because of the frequent wipes that allow it to reset. If you don't wipe weekly you end up with a server full of books, wrenches, small hammers, paper, and ruined clothing. Might find some painkillers....

I believe the answer to that is "Yes." and here is why I believe that. You will notice that a large number of "survival" and crafting options have been rolling out lately. They have the basic found items in the game, and now they are working on the crafted/hunted/grown items. I think they HAVE to get the spawned loot correct at this point otherwise they will get very little feedback on the created items. For example, if I can run to 5 of the same type of house and 2 police stations and basically be sure I'll have a gun with some fitting ammo, when would I consider creating a bow and arrows instead? Why would I find a barrel, lime, and hunt an animal to create a leather jacket or vest when I can just about guarantee finding one after hitting one military area or possibly just checking every crashed Ural along a path while I gear up with other things? Why peel bark and carry sticks when I can find matches all over the place? So to get us to at least try the other options, they have to have a system that distributes loot out and doles it out in a manner that doesn't invalidate what would otherwise be a more time consuming for same or less reward route. For both crafted and found gear to be "viable" they have to get the loot system working. Persistence is part of that. They can't use feedback on things only 1 in 100 does/uses, especially if that person only does them as a "I wonder how that works." and then never does it again. Maybe 1 in 10 times something doesn't work right but only 5 people ever try and do it.... the odds are not very good that you will discover that bug and how to reproduce it.

Do I even have to say, "ALPHA."? We all know things are going to break, and break again. Old bugs will return as they add in new code. It's a given even for released games with patch updates several times a year, bugs come out in production that don't exist in a test server.

No it shows that the majority of the people will choose the easiest option given the choice. I'm pretty sure if you made it so that you could turn on people starting with a backpack and gun that type of server would become a "popular" choice for many people. In fact I know for a fact it would because in the Mod people did just that and pretty soon there were dozens of normal servers and hundreds of servers where you had a starting loadout with guns/food/backpack. I'm pretty sure if I said, "You can either run a mile and I'll give you $50 or you can sit on this bench for 4 minutes and I'll give you $50." I'd have more people on the bench than running. Then again the only issue with 3rd person in DayZ is you are cheating yourself out of a better experience by playing easy mode.

Solution, play on private servers. There you can be fairly sure that anyone with "loot" ran around and got it the old fashion way, not from farming on a "locked" server or server hopping.