Morrighan

The point is to force everyone onto those servers as cannon fodder for the people who live in this game and have gotten bored with it. What's the point of spending twelve hours a day gaming online if no one's around to appreciate how easily you kill them? Same thing with the night servers. Want to play night time? Look for the servers with less than ten people on them. The only way to get people to play night time, and therefore be convenient targets for the lovers of the night time, is to force them. Because plainly given their druthers, they won't go. And that's why page after page and thread after thread, the demand is not to allow people to choose what kind of server to play on, but to remove those options altogether. That's the only way the Superhardcore!!!!11!!! players will get targets to shoot at in the land of perpetual darkness. These "realistic" features like first person point of view and pitch black night are obviously not popular, so odds are, for the sake of the continued existence of the game, they will not be forced upon all players. There's the line between gameplay and realism. If the "realistic" elements are so onerous nobody wants to cope with them, they'll get scrapped for the survival of the game. Rocket can't continue to develop the game if only 10% of the players enjoy watching a two week bout of incapacitating malaria before dying of thirst.

I thought this thread said (and pies!) There should be pies. I am formally requesting pies right now.

Well realistically, zombies shouldn't all be the same strength and speed anyway, just like humans aren't. Bigger stronger people should make bigger stronger zombies. And a well fed zombie is a happy, stronger, faster zombie.

Zombies aren't supposed to be really dangerous one on one. The idea of zombies is sheer numbers dragging you down, so you don't have enough ammo, get cornered, and feel the pressure of just being surrounded. That's hard to do without lagging the server out, but in my opinion that's what the zombie encounters should be. Maybe there can be a few super zombies, but it should be sheer numbers whenever possible.

It would seem to me that if servers empty out after nightfall, which they do, then the answer is to figure out how to make nighttime more appealing, not shrug it off and say, "separates the men from the boys" and accept that your server population is going to plunge every time it goes dark, or worse, attempt to force people to play in the dark with server restrictions, because that'll just make people turn the game off altogether. Maybe have glitchy power grids rather than downed ones so that cities will have street lights flickering on and off. That would enhance the atmosphere and make it easier to loot at night.

1. People who have a day job should not be restricted from experiencing all aspects of the game because of some ludicrous demand for your preferred daytime set up. Is someone forcing you onto daytime servers, kicking and screaming? Did they chain you to your desk, tape your eyes open, glue your hand to your mouse and force you to play on daylight servers? No? Then WHY are you trying to force others who ARE bound by a job--shocking! Employment!--but would still like to play with ALL of the features of the game that they bought? 2. I don't use lamps or headlights even when I have them at night, because they're as good as screaming my position to the world. The fact that there's a shovel in the game doesn't obligate me to dig trenches; the fact that there are flashlights doesn't mean I have to use them. Again, you're attempting to dictate to everyone else how they must play. No one's trying to do that to you. If you like night, go to a night server. If you don't, don't go there. You can't force people to play a set-up they don't like. They will just leave. 3. I don't care if gamma settings are cheating. People's monitor configurations differ, and I know that firsthand because I used to design gaming environments and what looked bright on my screen was sometimes almost unplayably dim on other people's. It's a big world. There are a lot of monitors out there. You cut out gamma and brightness and you cut out whole swaths of people. More, and this may shock you, I'm not in DayZ for any kind of horror. I don't like horror, and I'm not scared by DayZ in any case. I'm in it for the survival aspects, and for crafting, gathering, exploration. So making it night for hours on end doesn't increase my immersion, it just gets in the way of the things I like most to do. Not everyone likes the same things you like or plays for the same reasons. But again--no one's forcing you to play something you don't like. 4. No one's demanding easy mode! They want to play the game during the day AND the night! I don't get how this keeps getting missed. It is NOT an unreasonable request to ask to be able to participate in ALL available aspects of the game, ESPECIALLY when primetime gaming is in the evening after work for the vast majority of civilization. How does THEIR getting to play on a day server ruin YOUR immersion? Don't go in that day server in the evening, then. Pick a different server. As far as the difficulty level...I've said it before and I'll say it again. All the nifty detailed stuff is no good if only the expert players survive to find it. If the devs hide things so well no one finds it, then what's the point in creating it? If daytime is only accessible to a subsection of the DayZ population, why make it? All of these dictatorial pronouncements about the "spirit of the game" and accusations of "easy mode" are just elitism. Because not everyone has played as much as you, new people join all the time, and if you DON'T vary the experience levels and difficulty levels in your game, then you have a stagnant game where the number of people playing it is perpetually decreasing. What about people who've never played DayZ before? If their introduction to it is hours and hours of pitch-black night, repeated starvation and dying of thirst, zombie mauling, and running around unable to find any loot because they don't know what's available or where to find it and can't see in the dark, how long do you REALLY think they're going to stay? The success of this game long-term is dependent on constantly gaining new players. If the "spirit of DayZ" as interpreted by you is to tell those people to sod off and quit ruining your immersion, then there will eventually be no game.

Provide IP or it doesn't exist.

I still don't know why there are people trying to dictate the way everyone else gets to play. If a 24/7 daylight server exists somewhere in this world, it should be shut down immediately because it offends what you say the spirit of the game is? It's not enough that you just go play on a server you like, no, that other server can. not. exist. I'm not arguing for a 24/7 daylight server, I just don't get why one group of people feels that there is the One Configuration and if you don't like it don't play the game and go back to Candyland you pansy wuss you. If you want to make the standalone into an indie game that appeals to a very small subset of gamers because you will not allow the settings to be tweaked to appeal to different types of players, then this has been a LOT of time and money to invest for a very small return. And if you think the "Night Only Forever, Bitches" coterie of DayZ players is the majority, then let's set up a 24/7 day server and a 24/7 night server and see which one stays populated. In the meantime, let people play the way they want to play and mind your own business. Set up your own hardcore server if you want. You can make fun of the daywalkers and we'll make fun of the people stumbling around in buildings feeling around for more flashlight batteries, and everyone will be happy.

Or maybe if you DON'T use rocks to make your firepit, you'll start a forest fire and possibly burn down half of Chernarus and everything in it. That would be entertaining.

No, that's the argument being made against daylight: that those that want to play in color are afraid of the dark, need their hands held, want to play candyland DayZ, when I guess real men like playing in grayscale. So I threw out a reductio ad absurdum and asked why bother with weapons at all, then. Real men beat zombies to death with their bare hands. Preferring to play in color has nothing to do with how hardcore you are or aren't and no one's saying the night should be done away with altogether. The people asking for some daylight servers--which has nothing to do with the game being in alpha unless the devs created the word in black and white--is not an unreasonable request and the pushback from people saying no, NIGHT FOREVER is just bizarre. Go play on a night server then, no one's stopping you. Just change the day/night cycle for the other at least half of us that would like to be able to actually see the game we paid money to support.

So basically everyone has to play not how they enjoy the game, but how you say the game should be. Because allowing people to tweak settings to their own liking and choose the server configuration they want to play on violates the Spirit of DayZ, where every night goes on a year, you start wearing boxer shorts and carrying a rusty spoon, and there's a 75% chance you'll die every ten minutes or so. Did someone twist your arm and force you to play a 24/7 daylight server? I'm guessing not. So why you feel you can do the same to everyone else is a mystery.

Do you not have a job? Is there an employment penalty for DayZ that means you're condemned to play in darkness eternal? Alienating the people who have jobs and therefore money to buy, say, beta and final release games does not sound like a wise business strategy.

I think it should be first person only, night forever, with a twenty to one zombie-to-player ratio where zombies can kill you with one hit and a fifty-fifty chance that you'll die every five seconds for no reason whatsoever. Every night is so cold you freeze to death if you don't run constantly, and if you want to kill anything you have to gouge out their eyeballs with a spork. Also you're lactose intolerant and 3/4 of the available food and drinks on the server include dairy. There. THAT'S hardcore and if you don't want to play that way you're a pansy and have no more right to live on this planet than a geriatric hamster. Having different servers set for different difficulty and day/night preferences would just be too simple an answer, I suppose.

I came here specifically to try to find out whether DayZ was going to be nighttime eternal and wow, some of you are totalitarian in your gaming. "No! We play only the way I say is fun! I like pitch black night so that's all anyone can play ever and if you disagree you're a whining noob and unworthy to play standalone!" :huh: Well, fine if you like it, that's still no reason to force everyone else to play that way. There's a difference between trying to make your environment immersive and alienating the people who are supposedly going to buy your product. If servers tend to empty out at nighttime--and they always have and always will--then it means a lot of people don't find it fun to play at night. Short of handcuffing them to their computers, the options are to find out why nighttime play is not fun for a lot of people and try to fix it, or watch them leave and not come back. If you count on people who can't get enough of the pitch black night for your financial support, you're going to be very broke very quick. Every DayZ server I've ever played on loses a third or even half of its player count when it gets dark, and I'm betting all but a few of the remaining players either tweak their settings or have NVGs. You calling them pansies isn't going to make the slightest difference. I agree with the other people in this thread who have a day job and don't want to play nighttime DayZ until the end of time. Make some servers bound to local time and other servers with faster or opposite day/night cycles (day when it's realtime night and vice versa) so players can CHOOSE the environment they want to play in. Otherwise I, like a lot of the others in this thread, just am not going to play, and I'm certainly not going to buy the beta or the finished game. Some of us aren't the least bit bothered by the "horror" aspect of the game whether it's dark or light, so the only thing night means is that I'm annoyed that it's hard to see. Four hours of being annoyed that it's hard to see--which is how long I played last night--is a REALLY long time.