Batbard

Oh man, I was so ready to agree with this post when I read the title. Things like different places slowly getting more and less populated with zombies, respawn of items going down in towns if overused and other things like that would really add to the need to explore openly and try new things rather than going straight to whereever you get your best gear, looting up until you have good guns and then being a bandit asshole for the rest of time. Then I read your post. I... I really don't know what to say to you. You obviously don't know a thing about game development or the proper usage of resources, and you're still talking shit. DayZ SA isn't great so far, but considering the amount that has been added to the game I'm not surprised about that. People in this thread have mentioned the possibility of moving onto a new engine, and I don't know if there's a single other engine out there that does what Real Virtuality has done for years. If there was one that ran smoother, allowed for more optimization and didn't feel like clunky ass I would be all on board but odds are it would be at the cost of the scale and open-endedness that makes DayZ a unique experience.

I've been recently thinking about the community of DayZ and how much it's changed from when I first played it. Back then, 90% of the players were ArmA vets, and I feel like that made a unique attitude and feel that's been missing for a long time... or I could be talking out of my ass, so I figured I'd ask people a few questions. -When did you first hear about the ArmA series? -When did you first play an ArmA game in the vanilla format, if you have? -What is your preferred playstyle in ArmA? -When did you first hear about DayZ? -What is your preferred playstyle in DayZ? -Did you ever take any breaks in playing DayZ? I feel like these questions are important for understanding where the community's gone in the past year and a half, and also to help justify my illogical elitism. To answer my own questions, for the sake of getting this started: -I first heard about the ArmA series by seeing ArmA 1 on a shelf at a store and figuring it couldn't be the worst purchase I could ever make. -I obviously played that one for a few years, and in 2010 I moved onto ArmA 2 and later Operation Arrowhead when DayZ came out. Never did ever get around to OFP, though. -As someone who enjoys overly tacticool stuff way too much, I've done plenty of the full ACE and ACRE games with coop and adverserial play. There's something really enjoyable about that kind of stressful teamwork. -I believe I first heard about DayZ from a gaming board sometime in June 2012 on a gaming forum. I grabbed OA just to play it, and it was a very fun time. -I've always been a fan of working with people, though instant friendliness isn't something I enjoy. That feeling of not knowing whether you should really risk interacting with another person is very unique and hard to find elsewhere, though as time has gone by it seems like that has faded a bit. -I stopped playing sometime in August or September of the same year on account of the streaming boom, and I've popped in sporadically since then. This new standalone has promise (thus why I bought it) and I hope I can get that old feeling back somehow.

"Head Turn" Go hold down the alt key, then have a miniature orgasm. Now use that key for the rest of your life and complain when other games don't have it. Also I don't feel like zombies by themselves will reduce KOS tendencies, mostly because people who do it usually either have nothing or have everything - they either would like to gain anything so they kill indiscriminately or they've stopped caring about losing stuff so they kill indiscriminately. A few dozen zombies aren't going to stop that mindset.

You are the most honest person I've ever seen on this issue. Thank you.

My stance on 3rd person is the same as it is in standard ArmA: it gives too much awareness in comparison to real life, whereas first person doesn't give enough. I can't stop you from doing the ol' peeky deeky around the nearest corner, but it does make you a bit of a douche. For anyone who played the abortion that was Rainbow Six Vegas, it gives the same problem here as it does there - being the one able to peek out from the corner has literally no disadvantage, and the one advancing on the corner has all of them. This is not how it works in reality, try to use first person when peeking so the guy you're stalking/being stalked by has a fair shot.

Recent indie games such as minecraft have made it so people have forgotten the intention of the term 'Alpha'. It means this shit's broken. It's going to be broken. It is playable in the sense that you can use some/most of the features currently implemented. It will get better eventually. Hopefully.

I'm glad that I have a mic so I can discuss philosophy before backstabbing people who blatantly have only played DayZ with the comfort of their teamspeak friends beside them.

"Manually aligning the sights" We call that one zeroing, son. If you're talking about left-right wobbly stuff, well that should be an issue on more damaged weapons that have been dropped and kicked and used to bash in a couple skulls but a regular AR-15 doesn't have much excuse for shooting close to sub-MOA.

Rule number one of the DayZ: if you just spawned, death ain't a biggie. I don't like that often being the viewpoint, but that's something no game mechanic in the world can fix.

Honestly, I completely understand some people playing DayZ as a comfy simulator with a hint of zombies. Walking around fields and abandoned cities and watching the god rays flow in through a barn window is just fantastic. ...Buuut at the same time no matter how nice it is to soak in everything it's important to only do that if you're looking to enjoy those surroundings 'til death does you part.

Just because I'm not killing you currently doesn't mean you should stop being cautious. Also you're singing german anthems, it's enciting my duty as a REAL AMERICAN to grab my desert eagle brand 1911 and shoot you for being even vaguely related to nazis.

There isn't really proper protection beyond Steamworks(?) currently, people are going to get past it real goddamn quick. It's an alpha. There are going to be some glitches, some bugs, and some people out to ruin everyone else's day. Try and deal with them as best as you can.

I believe the correct response here is 'you're all idiots'. If you want to kill people really bad, go find a place that at least has interesting people to fight against. If you don't want to die, immediately survey your surroundings and be careful when moving around. Just because there aren't currently hundreds of zombies doesn't mean you get to let caution go to the wind and prance about while singing german anthems.

I've never bothered to sign up for either the DayZ mod forums or this standalone forum, but I just wanted to say that this is poisoned logic. Err... not this specifically. I actually agree with this, as someone who's played the ArmA (took me forever to not say Armed Assault) series for a few years now it's very important to have proper situaitonal awareness and make as little a target of yourself as you can reasonably manage. With that said, the situation that comes out of what people usually intepret this logic as is a painful one. My first experience with DayZ was fairly early on in the development of the game (enough so that the Revolver was still the main weapon) and the first week of playing it was really something. There were a few talented bandits, a lot more groups of kind-hearted people, and even more horribly bugged zombies. In general, contact with someone was very cautious but there wasn't that urge to just raise your .357 and empty every chamber into the guy. Well, not much. About two months later, I had quit DayZ. Why? Because that was at the height of the streamer boom, which brought on the mindset that is still seen to this day. That logic is very simple - people are always looking to kill. If I cannot avoid a threat, I should eliminate a threat. And so people did for months on end, turning DayZ from a survival game to a survival game where we all roleplay sociopaths. It's fun to get the opportunity to get a good kill, or taking on a bandit and barely pulling it off, or even getting killed by someone who just has better tactical sense than you. But when that's the only experiences you have in the game, you start wondering why you're even playing DayZ instead of just popping on some crappy deathmatch mod and calling it a day. Also @Mallow, I will never feel right using 3rd person. It's essentially creating the same problem terrible third person cover shooters have and I never want to promote terrible third person cover shooters.