=fox= damocles

I think you miss understand the concept of an Early Access Alpha. The price will only go up from here. What people will gain from the experience now is that they get to give their input and for all intents and purposes contribute in some small way towards the final product when it's released. The advantage those of us that have adopted it early on will find is that, in return for all the bugs and things that we'll have to find, report and then contend with will be that we wont have to pay any more for the finished product. Kind of like a loyalty program. I'll feel sorry for the people that leave it and leave it and leave it and end up paying full retail for it.

Ok, seeing as your post comes across as a new player to DayZ in general, and the fact that most of the responses only target one or two of the issues you've raised I will try to answer all of them for you in (hopefully) a non hostile way unlike the dude above me. Not that I'm saying any of the other responses were :P. So: 1. As others have said, this is pretty much the fact that items on the coast don't respawn at the moment. Whether or not this is a bug or intended to herd the players inland to search for new areas that weren't in the mod is unknown to me but will be changed/fixed at some point in the future as updates roll out. The fact that you only found a limited amount useless items stems from a number of things, the main one being that everybody else passing through that area took everything useful and left the chaff coupled with (like has already been said) the fact the loot isn't respawning, also not all loot or weapons have been added to the loot tables yet, infact not allot of loot has been added to the Alpha. This will change with each update so that as new items/features are added, any fresh bugs can be spotted and eliminated quicker than if everything was there from the start but there are a 1'000'001 bugs to find and fix. 2. Again, this is purely down to the stage of development the Alpha is at at the moment. Some Zombies (or Zeds to the regulars) are on the map, just in very limited number. As has been stated, this is because they are in an unfinished state, which unfortunately makes fighting them up close near suicidal so unless you have a firearm (which aren't widespread enough at the moment to make having hordes viable) and can take them at range they're more of a hindrance on the QA side of things. However, as with the above, this will change as bugs are fixed, coding is finished and updates are rolled out. 3. The answer to most of this issue has been offered by Mr Dean Hall himself a couple of times but I'll re-iterate for the sake of the post. Since day one of the mod's release it has been almost a selling point that DayZ is intended to be an unforgiving, hardcore, survival horror mmo. To that end, it's widely acknowledged that you wont be, nor should you be, handed anything on a plate, so starting with a map isn't a likely occurrence unless you are playing the mod on a custom server. 3a. Ok, you feel that the game is not very "new player friendly" and you shouldn't have to research anything from the get go and that's your prerogative. That being said though, there are two main reasons why you should, being a new player and all. It would be worth having the map of Chernarus Google searched and open for easy access so you can at least orientate yourself when you start, most towns have their names sign posted somewhere, so all you need do is find out where on the map your town is and then you can have a rough idea of where to head for funtimes. (On a side note, if you'd paid through the site and got the Supporters Edition or whatever it's called you would have had a hi-res map sent to you via e-mail as one of the bonuses). The other thing to note is that the game isn't going to hold your hand so there is allot of stuff that you can do which won't be obvious right away, and finding these things and utilizing them adds to the survival and, to an extent, the social aspect. You need to survive? What can you do to manage it? What are you prepared to do to achieve it? How do you achieve it? Can you learn anything from people you meet in the game and have you found anything that you could teach them? <---- that is of course if you can find someone that isn't going to shoot you on site because they "want what you got...". I wont bang on anymore about research and I don't want to insult your intelligence but YouTube has some handy tutorials on there for people (not just noobies) that don't wish to do the leg work themselves and just want to play and have fun. Some are short and to the point while others are quite in depth and very helpful. 3b. Backstory. One of the earliest taglines for DayZ was "Survive or die. This is your story". This is probably one of the main things that makes this mod/game such a popular concept. The idea being is that if you want story, you roleplay a character type that you want to personify. Be-it a hero, bandit, a last surviving soldier, someone protecting (or has lost) their "family" or portraying a group or individual that is going through the trials of attempting to restore order and rebuild society from the ashes of the outbreak, it's entirely upto you how you play and what kind of back story your character has to get you to that point. If the game was to give you a backstory then you may as well be playing a story driven multiplayer game rather than a survival MMO. 4. Your gripe with food and drink/starvation and dehydration. This is simply something that's needing a tweek. Aspects like, how long it takes to get from A to B on foot, how much of it was spent sprinting/resting/fighting and other factors need to be monitored and assessed over time so an acceptable adjustment to the mechanic can be made. As for you being shit. Everyone was at some point, I was when I started on the mod, I'm not afraid to admit it. But as I found a way of surviving and a " rp story" that worked for me (and watching videos and such) I started to have a lot of fun. Finding a good group (and by good I mean not people that troll or shoot fresh spawns on sight) to play with you'll feel more confident in the way you play the game, you'll find yourself more willing to take risks for big payoffs when you have an organised group of survivors at your back. It all adds to the roleplay at the end of the day and that's where the enjoyment of the game comes from. At least for me anyway. I'll PM you the address for the group I'm a part of, we're not so much a clan than a community of gamers that just want to have fun. We have our own Stand Alone server so if you want to learn the rudiments of the game you can find one of us with a =FOX= tag and we'll take you under our wing so you can find your feet. Hope this has shed some light on the current state of the game and that I managed to deliver it in a helpful manner. Damocles.