Wolfguarde

I reference The Road because Rocket himself has actually said its atmosphere is what he was looking to recreate within the theme of the game. Additionally, I - and many others, judging by its popularity - judge that story to be an accurate representation of human nature within that setting. If you do not think the value of human life and courtesy would break down in a major way during a post-apocalyptic scenario, then you are very, very naive.

Read McCarthy's 'The Road' - and then decide for yourself if people are roleplaying the apocalypse in a realistic manner. I'm saying this not out of malice or a desire to belittle, but because the theme is largely what the mod/game designer based the concept on. Expecting people to do anything but try to kill you the majority of the time when they have the means to do so is unrealistic at best. Even if they do not intend it, they are roleplaying the scenario that has been presented for them. That being said, you - and everyone else - need to understand both sides of what I am about to say: Roleplay is stigmatised in this day and age. A lot of the vital essence of that field is lost because so many people ridicule and belittle those who do it. The result is that the majority of the people you meet are in it for the competition, rather than the story - in this and anything else. And sadly, this means you're not going to find many people with a genuine appreciation for the potential the game offers. A lot of people like this game because it offers a different shooter experience, rather than a different roleplay experience - I am one of them, though I have nothing against those who enjoy playing in character. This is the answer to your title question. You will not find as much support among the ravening masses as you might hope for, even though I suspect the point you're trying to make is in line with the intentions of the people developing the game. The best you can hope for is to set up a place/forum for like-minded players to meet or use as a reference point, then coordinate to a particular server and make yourself its majority. In doing so, you'll mitigate whatever impact other groups might have on your experience, and ensure that most of your encounters will be interesting rather than bland.

Lone wolf/scavenger, generally wind up attracting the attention of some group or another after I've been around for a while and so become part of one. If I spot someone who hasn't spotted me and don't feel like PvP, they generally never know I was there.

Not really. We know exactly why there are daylight servers :P Rocket did mention a long time ago that they intended to destroy this particular glitch - level the playing field between those who know how to use their settings to brighten up their nights and those who do/will not. Here's hoping we're seeing some progress there. I like my nights to be dark, but like so many others, I use the exploit so that I don't die to someone else who does.

Majestic. As. Fuck.

Reinforcing my point. I'm not for either side in the argument. I don't see the point to arguing an issue that is ultimately unsolvable. Each side is demonising the other to the point where the argument sustains itself for the sake of seeing who's better at insulting the other party. You're not arguing for the sake of proving your point. You're arguing for the sake of argument. And that is not contributing in any way to the (endless) discussion at hand. Stop speculating, stop arguing, and wait for a status report. Then unpen the dogs again. Let the devs have a chance to actually say something on the manner, so you and the others can tear it/each other to pieces over what's actually been confirmed. Hold off the ego stroking until it will actually contribute to something.

Nobody is bringing anything of value to this bullshit argument. You're flogging a dead horse. The sooner you ALL let it go, the sooner you will stop supplying the other side with more shit to bitch about.

Opinion. Seperate hives and start handing out temp forum bans to the warmongers who keep flogging this issue. Neither side is a minority, and with seperate hives neither suffers as a result of the other's existence. You have all established your pissing grounds. You all know the other side is never going to relent. Stop bitching, forget they exist and get back to playing the fucking game. The issue will never be resolved to either group's satisfaction.

Have you ever tried to drive a non-offroad vehicle through the forests/plains of Chernarus for an extended period of time?

Stack coins on the key until you can press it in and not have it pop back out. Viola! Autorun. Now go forth and make coffee or whatever.

Chicks don't have it any harder than we do. The stereotype against gamers is mostly negatively biased against males, which is why you don't hear about female gamers. There are, in fact, quite a few out there, even if the ratio inclines more toward males. Maybe you should stay inside today, or for the rest of the week. The odds of a piano falling out of a high-flying cargo plane and smiting you like the fist of some vengeful god seem disproportionately high at the moment...

It's an idea. I think you would find that private hives would sooner or later badger for private loot tables though, although that's not really relevant to either of our points. Having said that, I can see the same thing happening on a wider scale, albeit with a shallower impact, with full coverage. The most skilled shooters stack up on guns and other gear in the early stages, then go absolutely nuts and engage in wholesale slaughter for weeks/months at a time. The balance would swing slightly back toward average every so often - when gear gets too scarce and they leave off to go play elsewhere - but I honestly don't think it would ever move toward the loot-heavy side of the balance. This is just my opinion, mind. As you said, I am somewhat pessimistic in my outlook. I do, however, feel that I know for the most part how PvP players will treat their games - or servers - as a general rule. If I could actually hit with more than one shot in ten, it's probably a problem I would contribute to. I play games like this mostly for PvP, rather than for the rest of what the content offers. You could use that to abuse servers, though, I think. Kind of like DDOSing a server... you and your clan go on a server whose owner/population you don't like and just don't log in anywhere else, making it your 'home' server and permanently skewing its loot tables toward scarcity for however long your attack goes on for. I can see a lot of people doing this when they decide they and their group want to leave the game, or simply because the owner bans one or two of their members, justified or otherwise. People are vindictive on the internet.

I think 100 could work on the Chernarus map, assuming open release has dozens/hundreds of zombies roaming alone and in packs, in cities and across the countryside. People will be frequently running into each other, yes, but it also means that there will be that much more general chaos. That, to me, adds to the feel of games like this. To be able to run/crawl into a city and see any of a few dozen different scenarios unfolding as a result of other players - either playing alone or interacting. Can you imagine the coastal cities when there's so many zombies around that a sniper can't afford to make more than one shot before haring off to a different mountain to avoid being dogpiled?

It depends. On the one hand, you are supporting the standalone's development if you buy now/in beta - the game is in its bare-bones stage, and informed buyers will grab the game now either as a show of support for the developers or to participate as bug testers and contribute directly to its development. These buyers will know to be patient (note: informed) and do as they do intending to help improve the final release. And of course, many will buy now simply to save on the cost. On the other hand, you might be one of us who really likes the game, and appreciates the game to such a degree that you actually want to pay what you feel it is worth, even if it means missing out on early access. There aren't a lot of people who will think that way; most of your average open-release buyers will grab it once the marketing department starts pulling out the stops, or when they realise a massive chunk of their steam list/gamer friends are playing it. I can't think of many reasons not to buy early, even if you don't play straight away, that aren't sourced in fanatical appreciation of the work that has gone into it. Of course, if it will stretch your wallet a bit, there isn't really any rush to get it. Rocket has stated that the price is not likely to change for a while yet.

| | | v To put it simply: Be creative. DayZ has taken a very interesting turn in not providing a specific structure for you to follow, aside from basic survival and acquisition of defensive gear. Most games will tell you what you're meant to do. DayZ tells you to work it out yourself. Personally, I like this. Speaking in music terms, most games are presented as a completed song, with little means for improvisation or creative addition to the content. DayZ, on the other hand, is an instrument - you have everything you need to make whatever music you desire, if you only have the imagination to use it properly.

Chainsaws would be hilarious solely for the colossal zombie dogpile that would ensue after about thirty seconds of noise. Every zombie in your closest city... and most of the ones from the next one :D

Might be wrong in this, but I would assume servers capable of handling that many players would also have significantly better performance/higher loot/zombie/vehicle/etc capacity than servers that cap out at lower figures. Meaning they might work to get the server performance up to that kind of level in order to cap it at a lower level and vastly increase the zombie count, introduce vehicles and the like.

Depends on if you see me or not, really. But if you're armed and I need what you have, I will probably take my chances.

If you're flying and the game restarts, assuming you don't die from whatever issue it is that kills people who disconnect in moving vehicles, you'll lose the chopper. Because it doesn't have a pilot, it usually crashes if it's a disconnect, so I would say it's the same for a restart, or just that a flying helicopter cannot be saved during a restart because of its location.

Very well thought out idea, and I like the concept of it. However, I don't see it following the theory if it were actually implemented in the game. I've seen something similar before, can't remember where (may have been Aion)... but the basic idea was that PvP intensity would ebb and flow with each faction's control of a field, which would result in a steady resource distribution from the nodes on that field. In theory, it's a good system - faction 1 hits the field hard, captures everything, the top 100 contributors to the capture are rewarded with currency and items needed to obtain rewards. Faction 2, lacking rewards and presumably having a higher interest in obtaining them due to the lack of revenue, group up and overwhelm the other side by force of numbers, and the balance swings the other way. In practice, each side was so brutally determined to dominate the field that once they held most or all of it, they never lost anything - they became so good at keeping the advantage that they never lost it. It universally broke the morale of most of the players on each server, even after they implemented a balancing mechanic - which simply resulted in a certain balance being kept on the field, with a coalition between both factions making sure nobody took anything they weren't supposed to. I bring this up because while the mechanic and balancing is different, I suspect something very similar will happen if this is implemented - you'll get people so hellbent on dominating the PvP field once their 'faction' (clan, group, whatever) is geared up that they'll just rip into anyone who challenges them - or simply keep killing until any chance of good gear spawning is minimal, thus maintaining a severe advantage and total dominance in any conflict on their server. They can duck in and out of other servers they've tabbed for good gear distribution - they can have a scout play one for a few days, mark its rough loot percentages, move on - without loosening their grip on their base server, effectively shutting it down and probably killing it in the long term. As players begin moving away from elitist/hardcore-dominated servers, those servers will die, and eventually you'd wind up with a small selection of servers dominated by a clan or two each who use them to deathmatch. With an organised group doing this kind of thing it can become incredibly difficult to dislodge them, as they're usually co-ordinated enough to reclaim the gear of dead comrades and keep hold of it. Wiping the whole group becomes steadily more difficult the better their gear gets, and trying to do so in a server whose gear distribution they've deliberately skewed for their benefit would be next to impossible without having a fully geared group of your own - which runs the risk of giving them more gear if you lose. I hate being brutal about this, but I would hate to see DayZ fall apart the way Aion did because of a mechanic like this. It is a good idea, but unfortunately there are a good number of people who like to exploit this sort of mechanic simply for the sake of bolstering their ego. They would slaughter the game balance wherever they went and make a massive chunk of the available hives unplayable if this was a vanilla mechanic.

Someone did something interesting to me a couple of days into my game, which I felt was a similarly clever use of attachments... I was heading to one of the airfields at night, and could see a flashlight panning around inside the radio tower. It's flashed across me a couple of times, then gone still, facing off at an angle. I've figured the person's waiting up at the top of the tower, intending to kill me when I reached the top of the stairs... it took me ten more minutes to actually get into and up the tower, and I wound up finding the flashlight - sitting on the chair, facing into the room. They'd somehow managed to drop it in a position that made it look as though they were standing there holding it, then left, presumably avoiding a potential bandit with superior weaponry while leaving a useful distraction.

I love how people think in terms of endgame content as a solution for anything... in a game that isn't really designed to have endgame content. MMORPGs have created a whole little complex of their own, with people subconsciously adopting their content structure as the ideal. It's really somewhat annoying, since said structure isn't really all that great, but that's a whole different topic. Your best bet until probably late this year/early 2015 would be the mod - it's clunkier, lots of bugs and whatnot, but it does have a lot of the content that isn't yet implemented in the standalone.The devs have implied that zombie AI is a long way off, so it will likely be this way for quite a while yet. There was actually a really good thread with a theme of enforced cooperation started halfway through last year (and necroed at Christmas, which is the only reason I found it), where the poster's idea was basically to make it impossible to survive alone, and to give any potential martial conflict severe ramifications for both sides - basically, having realistic wounds/crippling, healing times, infection mechanics, et cetera. He wanted to see the game be made into a living hell, and a lot of his ideas were rather appealling and well thought out. Search 'make DayZ a living hell' and you should get the thread, if you want to take a closer look. It got me thinking for a while, and there were a couple of things I felt would really make cooperation more desirable - giving zombies full movement speed inside buildings (no kiting them indoors and meleeing them to death from a safe distance) and giving zombies the ability to tackle/drive you to the ground and pin you down. You become virtually helpless unless you have a sidearm or small melee weapon you can use to disable the zombie, and disabling said zombie is likely to result in infection, either through serious bite wounds or from the gore splatter when you bust its head open. It also leaves you open to whatever other zombies (and when the standalone's zombie AI is done, there WILL be other zombies - a lot of them) are trailing the one who happens to knock you down. In such a situation, you would want a partner or four, simply to increase your odds of survival - if you're facing a small group of zombies and one of you gets pinned, another player can pull it away, or kill it, to save you - or draw off the excess zombies to give you some time to free yourself. It would make solo play a hell of a lot more dangerous, but this game is angled around an authentic survival experience... and I can't think of many better ways to make cooperative play appealling through the game's core mechanics. Zombies are not really a challenge as they are now, simply because they are so basic in their behaviour. If they actually have the potential to render you helpless, it changes up the game a lot.

I believe someone, somewhere, mentioned that Rocket is intending to add looting mechanics for zombie/dead PC clothing, with a chance of becoming infected if the item is worn/looted. Not sure on the specifics. I do like the idea though. Also, I think the zombie AI as it is, is simply acting as a filler; the devs have mentioned that the finished zombie AI probably won't make it in for a while yet, so I imagine the despawn timer will probably be changed up with all the rest.

Is it bad that the first thing that comes to mind reading this is Dante's cinematic when he gets the Lucifer Blades in DMC4? :P Not in the personal sense, for the most part - but nonetheless, the slaying of another human being is murder, whether it be justified or in self-defence, and any who are party to the planning or execution are guilty by association and therefore classified as murderers. The psychological impact is definitely different, and I agree that violence and the desire to end life are unnatural, but that's not so much what I'm arguing; rather, I'm arguing that those who murder can be part of an organisation, and often can become much more efficient at it by doing so. With the right structuring, an organisation built around murder can thrive where it should, by rights, collapse. Just on a side note: I understand you including the difference between killing someone face-to-face and killing someone from a distance. I mentioned in another thread that one of the biggest contributors to the KoS mentality is the lack of communication; it's harder to make someone's game difficult when they're communicating in a warm manner than it is to kill someone who refuses to communicate at all. I think you'll find that the removal of side chat as a feature in the transition from the mod to the game is intended not only to make for a more realistic experience, but to increase the risk factor in running into someone on the fly. You have no way of knowing if the person you're approaching is someone you've met and played with before, or someone who has killed you, or a potential asset or risk. It adds an element of fear to nearly every encounter, which is only partly mitigated by having something like TS running as well. I completely agree that we are conditioned, at least in part, by our environment. DayZ is very much set up to discourage spontaneous co-operation. You might be able to cover more ground more quickly with two people, but a city that might contain enough materials to supply you will now have to supply both of you. Excess supplies you could carry off and stash are now being sunk into another person - who, in any given case, might be an asset or a liability - and you run the constant risk of being backstabbed once they tire of entertaining you. Or stealing from you and running off. Or restraining you, poisoning you with rotten food, etc, etc. The game makes it very difficult to trust - and the most extreme manifestation of distrust in a setting like this is the refusal to engage in any sort of negotiation, favouring hostile engagement instead. You make some good arguments in your post, and I would normally be happy to debate it properly, but I feel this point is more on key with the discussion that's developed in this thread. In short: The KoS conundrum, as the OP refers to it, is a natural byproduct of the game's setting, its theme. Discouraging it without actually impugning on that theme's impact and immersion value seems to me like a rather difficult task.

I had Audiomachine's 'Red Sorrow' running in the background, 15 seconds in when your link started rolling... strangely fitting :P