bain

In real life crouching doesn't make less noise. Indeed, silent movement is more difficult under the strain of crouching. Nor is prone movement silent. When prone, you have a lot more contact with the ground, so of course that's the noisiest stance. Realistically being fully up right, comfortable, and in control is the ideal condition for silence. All of those stances can be made more silent though by slow movement. So I'm in favor of a slow movement button that modifies all stances.

No, please. From what I recall, the idea is that if a group builds a base they can spawn their friends in that base. ...but just coding in squad spawning? No thanks. DayZ might not be for you.

Wow. Non-globally restricted gear (say, nvgs) = people server hopping to get them. globally restricted gear = people can't server hop to get them. End result: people are already server hopping for gear. This literally won't change the frequency at all. You don't need any of the things proposed for globally restricted loot. Your pet issue is closing the public hive and/or opening private hives. That will address server hopping. Not this issue. Move along, sir.

You're addressing an example. Obviously M4s and AKMs aren't going be globally restricted. You're revealing what I'm increasing believing to be true: people who are scared of globally restricted gear are really just butt hurt because they might not ever have the "best stuff in the game". We're talking about NVGs... come on, who cares? Do you really want everyone and their dog running around the NVGs? I promise you, if NVGs are NOT globally restricted everyone is going to server hop to get them. but guess what? With globally restricted NVGs you CAN'T server hop to get them. So instead of night time meaning everyone just plays green tinted DayZ (like in the mod), it'll mean actually dealing with the dark. Or playing on 24/7 day servers like you all already do. We're also talking about heli parts. Trust me, you WANT heli parts globally restricted. If every server can put even just 1 heli in the air then clans are going to get helis on really unpopular and never visited servers. Now they can server hop to an empty server, fly where ever they want, and server hop back to a full one and appear at your back door. Believe me... you WANT globally restricted helis. If you played the mod, you know this is true. We're also probably talking about some really powerful weapon or two, but this is speculation. Let's pretend the as-50 is globally restricted. ... Okay... who cares? They'll be so rare you'll probably not encounter one. Ever. Oh that's right! You're just sad because you want one too!

I usually don't speak up on these issues, but people are being really stupid about their resistance to the global restrictions on rare loot. They all bleat "that encourages server hopping. That's bad!" like sheep. Why do people server hop? To find those obscure valuable items. Right now, that's an AKM or an M4. Those two sets of weapons are more responsible for server hopping than any other factor. But what if those two guns were globally restricted? What if their 500 copies were already gone? No amount of server hopping will get you what you want. There simply wouldn't be a point. And then, instead, you see a fresh video of guy in server X with a M4. You want it, and you're willing to work a little. So you decide to play on that server to get it. However, you CAN'T server hop to get what you want. You HAVE to stay on server X to get what you want. Think about it for half a moment fellas. Globally restricted rare items will *not* encourage "server hopping". Not in the way you mean it. All it means is that you might have to go to another server and invest TIME in that server. That is the opposite of server hopping. Now don't get me wrong. Server hopping will not end unless they close the public hive. But it won't have anything to do with globally restricted rare loot. Period.

Oh I get it. All the people worrying about this really just want all the best weapons. This isn't going to cause server hopping to be any worse than it already is. These items are going to be so rare it won't even be worth trying hopping. There's nothing wrong with entering a server specifically because you heard a guy has rare loot. Indeed, that act will encourage people to hunt on that server for prolonged periods. That's the opposite of "server hopping".

I couldn't source it, and maybe I'm misremembering but I thought Dean said something about this happening down the road. Way down the road.

You and machete master are my heroes. Lol. You camp the hell out of the cabin man.

Stuck on a business trip today. I'll be living vicariously through forum posts today. split a zombie skull for me fellas!

That's the best advice on this whole topic. Emotional states impair you in every way. It's not about not caring and thus acting coldly or dangerously. Rather it's about detaching your emotions from the situation so your logic and reasoning remain clean. Cpt. Spears ftw.

Some people say surviving in DayZ is hard. It's not. All you have to do is sit in the forest, as you say you have. I highly suggest enjoying the process of gearing up from a fresh spawn. That's the joy of DayZ.

This morning I would have been agreeable with this idea. This evening I say absolutely no, not a chance. I record my DayZ sessions, and today that player list has helped me identify a hacker that attacked me. Thanks to that player list (and the hackers using their game names when talking to each other), I was able to compile video evidence that's being sent off to the server admins for a ban. With the kind of glitchers and cheaters in DayZ, we need to know who we're playing with. The player list should stay.

I know server resets are necessary for now in order to respawn the loot. But that won't be the case forever. Back in the mod a lot of servers had a 4 hour reset schedule, and a lot of servers in SA still do that. A lot of servers nowadays shorten that to 2 or even 1 hour. Every time I'm in a cool and tense situation, and things are really starting to heat up and get good... boom, server reset. That wouldn't be so huge a deal if everyone in the server just rejoined immediately, we could all just get back to whatever circumstances we were in. But I find that rarely happens. When a server resets, most people go in search of another already full server, leaving the population of the original at well less than half. On a popular server the number will go back up to full soonish, but it's all different people. The situation before the reset is gone forever. It's disrupting and breaks my immersion every single time. (This is why I loathe 1 - 2 hour reset schedules) I don't know much about the loads that build on servers over time in the form of dropped loot, bodies, and so on. I know in the mod if a server sat for days with out a reset it progressively tanked the framerate more and more as time passed. (I learned this when I realized my "home" server had a lazy admin). BUT! A server left running for a day straight performed just fine. Is this similar in SA? How long can a SA server run with out a reset before experiencing this bog down? And most importantly, once there's a loot respawn system in-game, will people want to run a longer reset schedule? I sincerely hope so. What sort of reset schedule would be reasonable? Once a day? Twice a day?

This isn't a new idea, I know, but upon searching previous threads I couldn't find anything discussing it at any length. I train wilderness survival in real life, which includes tracking. Let me say to start off, tracking is one of the most difficult skills to pick up in the survival realm. It requires a life time of practice to do it well and reliably. That said, any system in a video game is merely a representation of reality and doesn't always need to be perfect. IN-GAME CONCEPT: I'm not a coder or developer, so I have no idea what is reasonable or possible. So I'll begin with the concept and how I think it would benefit gameplay. As it stands, our interactions with other players are limited to chance encounters and planned ambushes (that often is considered camping). There's very little intention behind it, it's going to be some random person we probably never met before. We see someone and we know if we lose sight of them it'll be a lot of guess work and luck to try and follow them. So we force interaction in the moment because if we pass it up it may be a long time before we see another player. That interaction may be shooting or talking, and both have their consequences. But what if we could track them? I know that if I spotted someone in the distance I'd be very excited to run over to that spot and track them to their destination. Maybe I want to follow someone for awhile and see how they play before I talk. Maybe it's a group I'm tracking and I need to set up the perfect ambush to make sure things go my way. Or maybe I'm looting a dangerous airfield. Everything looks clear, but if I take the time to track around it maybe I'll find tracks left behind by a group of bandits. Maybe that military jail with a closed door is not untouched, considering the track in front of it. Tracking could add more intention into the encounters we have with one another. Also, it's my belief that a core pillar of DayZ gameplay is that nothing is safe. If people can track us, we'll need to consider that in our movements. Maybe we'll have to engage in some confusing counter-tracking techniques to throw people off our trail before we set up that perfect sniper nest. Maybe we could even use our own tracks to lead our pursuers right into an ambush. It gives us more choices for what we do when we encounter another player. THE REALITY OF GAME DEVELOPMENT: I would love to have a system where barely visible tracks were laid down after every foot fall. Maybe that's a texture applied to the ground that changes based on ground type. Something that faded over 30 minutes or so. That's enough time to track a player but not enough time to really take your time with it. If you take to long the trail obscures. If something like this were to work, it'd have to be really hard to see. Think about MGS 3 when you're fighting The End. Sure you can put on thermal goggles and the print light up like a xmas tree, but if you don't use that crutch the tracks are still there. They're just really hard to see. Is something like this even possible? I don't know. Sounds like a heavy server load, but I admit I know nothing. THE GRASS METHOD. A SIMPLER CONCEPT, A COMPROMISE PERHAPS: We already know grass flattens when we crawl on it. It already as an animation where it slowly pops back up to full height. What if we changed it so it half-flattened when we walk through it, and fully flattens when we crawl. Then we slow down that animation where it pops back up to take 15-20 minutes or so. It's a system already in the game, so clearly the server can handle it right? It's also not entirely obvious to spot. If you're blasting through a field at top speed you probably wouldn't even notice. Also, it's a form of tracking only applicable to certain areas. Honestly, in real life tracking, if you search for each and every track you're going too slow. You have to get in your quarry's head and predict, only occasionally verifying at obvious tracking spot to loose soil or mud. The grass method kind of emulates that. You don't get a constant line straight to the quarry. You have to predict still, keeping tracking as the chess game it really is. FINALLY, ONE LAST QUESTION: Grass only renders at a certain distance. I may have to test this when I play next, but I wonder: if I flatten grass when my friend is out of the rendering range, will the grass be flattened for him when he comes into rendering range? I'm not sure. Just a question that occurred to me while writing this post. TL;DR: Trust me, you don't have the patience for tracking anyway.

In the mod I spent a lot of time trekking the western wilderness looking for camps. I picked a single server, and started generating a list of map coordinates for found camps. I'd check them every so often looking for regular changes to figure out which ones were active and which were abandoned. Eventually I realized someone was doing the same thing on my server. We kept stealing the same motorbike back and forth and trying to hide it in different spots. Eventually this lead to a friendly rivalry between my group and theirs. Taken as a whole, the drama panned out over several weeks and is to this day one the most gratifying DayZ experiences under my belt. So hell to the yeah I can't wait for persistent storage. Also, I was guilty of hoarding weapons and gear in a network of camps stretching from the woods west of zeleno all the way up to the top of the map. It didn't take long to realize just how much work that was. I stopped and just started to play. So yeah, people will do the things you fear... but they'll spend all their play time doing it. Eventually they'll probably stop and just play.

We get several threads about how much people enjoy meeting friendlies in game to team up and go loot and kill zombies. It's held up by many to be the quintessential DayZ holy grail experience. I get it to some degree, I'm fortunate to have a few real life buddies who play with me and I love the teamwork aspect of that. But I also have had the experience of meeting randoms and teaming up for a while. It just isn't the end all be all DayZ experience for me. It's just the same as playing with my buddies only minus the hilarious in-jokes we toss about as we go. I started playing the mod way back in the day BECAUSE the other players out there are untrustworthy and blood thirsty. I love the feeling of isolation and hopelessness when hunger/thirst forces me to enter a city echoing of active gunfights when I have nothing but a flashlight. Even when I play with my friends, I still crave the solo play where it's me VS the world. Honestly, when I'm looting through town and some poorly equipped guy runs up in hopes to team up and loot together, I'm a little disappointed. I'm not the kind of player to KOS them, nor do I like the notion of holding them up. I don't need their gear regardless of what I'm carrying or not (I freely admit this game needs far more difficult survival aspects). Having them with me invites the threat of a bullet in the back, and even if they're legit they'll just slow me down. Most of the time I turn them down and send them on their way with a couple cans of beans. I play this game because I want people trying to KOS me. I don't want less of it. On top of that, looting up is easy and boring (unless people are shooting the town up). Zombies are an after thought, boring, and I don't need help with them either. Playing with friends is fun, but again, only really when we have other human threats to deal with. Am I alone in this? Am I spoiled in that I have friends who play? Are the most of you stuck being lone wolves against your will? Why do people speak of KOS with such disdain?

Your title asks the question "why". The answer is simple: To read threads like these. This is a "don't let the terrorist win" scenario. I know it's frustrating to die by hackers but they want to get a rise out of people. I suggest not giving them the satisfaction. Report it discreetly and move on.

This is a story with three pretty unique perspectives, and I hope the other two people involved chime in. In any case, here's my perspective on a lesson in how we're all connected in some small way as a DayZ community: I spawned anew at the grocery store west of Kamenka. Immediately I saw a guy with a mosin running around. I figured he had a gun and I didn't so any loot was his. I make a run, and I don't think he sees me. I cut the corner to get to Pavlovo, mostly to get at the water spigot there. I have a good drink, then set to fist fighting zombies and looking for a backpack. I took a zombie out in the street, to then look up and find another survivor down the road. We see one another at the same time, and I call out “friendly, I don't have anything anyway.” The guy waves. BANG! A gunshot rings from somewhere unknown to me and my new found friend is already dead. Having already spoken, my position was already known. So I go on speaking, claiming to be friendly and unequipped. The shooter emerges and says it's cool, he won't shoot. It turns out this guy is new to DayZ. He barely touched the mod, and was completely lost. He shot the other dude because admittedly the other guy was well armed and he felt nervous. I didn't blame him, and said indeed you have to be careful in DayZ. I've been KOSed several times already in SA. We share the loot and I suggest we hit the military base nearby. He agrees, and we share names. I'll call him Brian in this story to protect his name. As it turns out, Brian was the guy with the mosin from my log in. At the base we encounter someone else. This guy was being chased by zombies, and though he had a M4 he claimed to have no ammo. We help with the zeds and he asks for ammo. Brian and I decline and head deeper into the base. The new guy leaves towards pavlovo. Once alone again, Brian asks whether he should have shared. After all, he had enough ammo. I told him it's better to be cautious, and something about that guy's voice made me feel iffy. Shortly after, deeper in the base, the iffy guy returns. He claims to have spotted a dead guy in the streets of pavlovo, and saw 4 armed fellows that he thinks is headed our way. Brian and I stay mostly quiet with our weapons aimed at the door. I wasn't going to say anything about knowing exactly who murdered the guy in pavlovo, and Brian stayed quiet as well. But after a long and awkward stand off we decide to tentatively trust the guy. Particularly if 4 guys were coming at us. We all leave the base together and head north towards Zelenogorsk. We'll call our new friend Dale, again to protect his name. Along the way we loot a little. We discuss tactics and marching orders, slowly building trust as we go. At Zeleno we all crash and Dale suffers from some bug that makes him unconcious when he logged in. Brian came back on the wrong server, but thanks to Dale finding us all on steam (a surprise to me) we all end up back in the same server and communicating again. I go find Brian, who was really happy to reunite. It surprised me a little. I've played the mod a lot and it jaded me. It was refreshing to have some one excited to team up and work together. Sadly we couldn't help Dale. He respawns and we all meet up again and recover his stuff. I had real life errands to run, so I told the guys “I have to log soon, but I'll go as far as green mountain with you.” Brian says he'll log out and wait. (High five to Brian, an ultra cool dude). I tell them it's fine to go on, and thanks to steam I'll catch up later. The trust level in the group was really high... so I go out on a limb. We were still enroute to Green Mountain with Dale on point. I say “Dale, I have a confession. That dead guy at Pavlovo...” Dale whirls around to face me, and I can't help but notice the M4 in his hands. “Did you do that?” “Well no,” I say. “Brian here did though.” Brian offers the same story he gave me about being nervous and unsure. Dale says, “I have a confession as well. That dead guy at Pavlovo... that was me.” Brian didn't believe it at first. But immediately I started connecting the dots. Dale died, and probably spawned really close. He came back up, likely hoping to find us and get revenge. Or at least get his gear off his body. But when he found us we had the ammo, and he didn't. That's why he didn't follow us into the base. Because he wanted to check his body in pavlovo. But by the time he had ammo, we'd been working together and building trust. By the time it all came out, it was water under the bridge and now I have 2 new DayZ buddies. Then Brian admitted it was his first DayZ kill. We had a laugh, but after reflecting on it I've come to appreciate that as an amazing connection. I remember my first kill from the mod. It was some weirdo fresh spawn at night running in circles around me like a lunatic and revealing me with his flashlight. I have no connection with that guy. I'll never know who he is or share a laugh with him. I think it's cool that Brian got to have that chance. I hope it helps define his choices moving forward in DayZ. I hope my cynicism and mistrust doesn't rub off on him too much.

Hey guys, I'll give you a try. I'll send you a PM with more info Grunt.