priestizzle

Encountered a strange bug yesterday when traveling with a buddy. We were attacked by three zombies, took them out. After the bullets stopped flying i looked at him and noticed he was bleeding. He claims he wasn't bleeding, but the animation was there. I told him to watch his blood number closely and he confirmed it was not dropping. The animation lasted for about a half an hour, he had no option to bandage himself but I did (chose not to waste a bandage if he wasn't actually bleeding). Seems the bleeding animation can happen without actually having blood loss.

Well the cat is out of the bag. Besides growing steam sales, worth of mouth, twitch.tv streams, and youtube videos (add to that the fact people have been looking for this type of game for years), a member of the press was bound to get his hands on this. All i hope is that the servers are prepared for even higher influx of people. I also hope this helps get some some money by way of inteviews, donations, and maybe even some more community coders willing to jump on (much like swgemu). Congrats Rocket and crew, you are the new revolutionaries! Most of all, thank you all.

I think one of the best compromises I heard here would be to not allow the secondary character onto the same server your primary logged off of for 30 minutes or so. This way you can't mule, can't exploit to kill someone who gets the drop on you etc. I don't want to see a database for each specific server because it would ruin the persistent world feel, I don't want to see deathmatchy servers where nothing saves because then it would decrease the danger on normal servers. I do however want a separate character to that which I play on my own lone wolf style, this way I don't have to get separated from my friends and play when they aren't on. The only way I can see multiple characters per account working is to have a web based account application where characters are then linked to your name. The web based application would not allow duplicate character names, and this way every name is unique, and multiple names would be linked specifically to GUID. This technique has been used on another mod for Mount & Blade: Warband. I don't know what the copyright situation would be on something like that so I won't say the direct name of the mod, but I will hint that it's the most popular mod for warband and it offers "persistent" characters which deviates from the vanilla multiplayer for the game. Might be worth looking in to.

I agree, more animals would be better than canned food, but the drop rate of the hunting knife and matches might need to be raised ever so slightly. I would also agree with removing the ocean as a water source if i didn't have to go swimming in a pond/lake to refill canteens and risk a full coyote elite pack disappearing into the abyss of the water. If we could go knee deep in these sources, by all means remove the ocean as a water source, but for now, the natural fresh water sources are too buggy.

Just thought of this idea before heading to bed. If you came up with a system where when someone dies they get the option to start off from scratch on the humanity scale as well, or keep their current humanity, this could offer you the chance to remove the passive regen all together or drastically decrease it. People who are willing to kill off their own character, rather than working at a change, can get back to where they want to be at the cost of their inventory. Only issue I can see with this is bandit griefing along the coast, killing with impunity for an hour with an easily obtained weapon, kill the character, change name, rinse and repeat. Griefing on the coast is already going on now though and not much would change. PS. A reference to rocket's thread on "if this were to become an actual game..." As per my idea to a cash shop selling convenience and not power, you could have the humanity reset be option without losing inventory at a reasonably high price.

I know how much of a headache the bandit to survivor (and vice-versa) transition was. Glad to see it petty much completely fixed. If the problem is easy to correct among a wide range of player models I would love to see 2 neutral models, and 4 bandit and 4 survivor models. All ranging in their degree of "evil" or "noble" looking. This would add a new element to the game. Truly bloodthirsty hunter bandits would be more difficult to play as they are easily identified (and in my opinion would make for a much more fun experience for this player as well). The skins closer to "neutral" would be much harder to distinguish and each encounter would be looked at different from the next, further developing the meta game of "trust." As it stands now with direct comms being broken, bandit too easily gained, and only two skin variants, the best course of action is to shoot on sight (which is becoming a more heated debate among my group of friends because it is quickly becoming harder for us to justify communication over violence). Some may say this will make the game less tense but I think the opposite. The neutrals will be just as hard to trust, and tensions will be incredibly high in those situations. Those who gained the top of the humanity ladder will be sought after targets for bandits, have to roll the dice each encounter with other survivors or risk their renowned skin etc. After a full release of the mod, with the possibilities of missions dependent on your skin could arise (ie. Bandit hunting down a goody two-shoes survivor, or a noble survivor ridding the world of a villain) with possible rewards as well. Of course this is much further down the line but alphas are great places to explore possibilities. Like i said, I don't know how complicated it was to fix the bandit transition so I don't know if the addition of 10 skins would really be feasible or even worth the headache, but it's a thought. Back onto the regen system, I think it's the only way at the moment to alleviate people becoming bandit in self defense going back to survivor. I don't know how fast it really is as I have yet to turn bandit, and despite my 200 zombie kills, bandaging friends, and all the other helpful things, I seem to be stuck at 2610 humanity. I don't really see any passive humanity generation at all in this range and I just assume it's intended. As it's still only an alpha, there's plenty of ways to go about this, and i will assume more ways to lose and gain humanity will arise such as some sort of random mission system as stated earlier, or even a dynamic one when stumbling on certain areas of the map.

Sounds like there's a few hackers server hopping and causing trouble. See my thread in general discussion as well about two entire servers being teleported to cherno minutes between eachother.

Just a little while ago, 5/7/2012 at around 6:50PM EST on the EU10 server. Me and some buddies were investigating the NE airfield when all of a sudden, EVERYONE connected (~50 people) to the server was teleported to cherno. Massive FPS drop, shots began to fire, me and my buddies proceeded to disconnect suspecting another hacker attack. We regroupped, and connected to FR1. We were now split up, half of our group in cherno and the other half in the northern wilderness. This is already annoying but hey, better than all of us being dead. After a few minutes, around 7:20PM EST, the SAME thing happened. Everyone on the server teleported to cherno, this time at a different warehouse, massive fps drop, and we disconnected. I browsed the forums, checked in with a few friends, and decided to come here and post. Looks like the popularity of the game is attracting undesirable people and 1.5.5 might even have some kind of security flaw. Either that or these two servers are having a bad case of admin abuse (not sure what admin capabilities there are with the arma II engine having never adminned a server. Wasn't sure which forum to post this to so, i figured here was as good as anywhere.

I would say a DLC one time mandatory payment model alla guild wars. I would also say an "item shop" of sorts also to help fund the increasing need of this games mmo like popularity. Before people harp on me on "NO MICRO TRANSACTIONS," take a look at this video how they can be done RIGHT: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/microtransactions. Basically, don't sell power. Sell convenience. Ex. Bandit skin back to survivor for a cost (or vice-versa. Also a once a week limit would be a good idea). Custom outfits. Accessories such as custom sunglasses, pins to wear on your clothing, model textures for your character. You get the idea. No buying of weapons or ammo or anything like that which could harm the survival aspect.

Seemed to have an issue with the database not saving my character properly. Date/Time: 5/6/2012 4AM-5AM EST What happened: At around 4AM EST me and a few buddies all logged off in the same spot. I logged on at 5AM EST just to check something to help out another friend, and I was not where I had logged off, was missing around 3500 blood Where you were: We were at the northeast airfield near berezino. What you were doing: We had looted the place, spent some time poking around, then headed for some nearby pine trees to find a safe point to log off. We logged off after a few minutes of checking out surroundings, and making sure it would be a safe area to spawn back into. Later when i logged on I was back in the airfield, I would say it's around 1km from where we logged off, missing the blood, and I believe a piece of food (not exactly sure it was the food, but I was definitely missing an inventory item I had received) right near one of the hangars. *Current installed version: 1.5.4 *Server(s) you were on: FR3 was the server i was first on and logged off from, NY1 was the server I re-logged on to and found myself almost "rolled back" to the hangar and missing blood. *Your system specs: N/A *Timeline of events before/after error: Aprox. 4 AM EST logged off around 5:15 AM EST logged back on

I have to say I'm impressed with the forum community, great constructive posts. I really like the idea of zombies spawning off view and walking into towns and such, would add some more random elements to traveling as well. As long as they don't end up all getting bunched up by choke points in the terrain.

It is all too frustrating to coordinate with a few friends to wipe out a small area in a town of 25+ zombies, begin to loot, only to have more zombies spawn nearby quite quickly. Most of the time this leads to multiple deaths, low blood counts, and other bad things. I think there should be a longer timer for zombie spawns. In a real zombie apocalypse, once an area would be completely picked clean it would usually be a little while before more would show up I would think, especially in such an open country. maybe make it so zombies won't spawn for 5 minutes or so in an area (plenty of time to loot and get out) or have the zombies not re spawn until no survivors are within 200-300 meters of their re spawn area. Hell, I would be happy even with more than 25+ zombies crawling around in an area to compensate for this. Not sure how hard the coding would be for this, or if it's even possible, just a thought. Zombie speed is also an issue in my opinion, mostly linked to the buggy arma engine when moving at those speeds. I would recommend a 40%-50% decrease in running zombie speed and a 30% or so increase in monkey speeds. This will be enough to make hitting a zombie on the run still challenging but more possible, and making monkeys more of a threat as well. Also, they will still be moving at around twice the speed of a survivor at this decreased rate. A possible fix to the classic arma bug of AI moving right through walls would be maybe a damage system to walls/barbed wire/sandbags and the like. Where if a zed contacts one of these physically he either takes heavy damage over time or dies outright. Even better if it can even be detected, if a zed actually makes it through a wall in any way, auto death. Any of these if possible will need extensive testing of course for balance issues. Don't want to make it too easy after all. This could reduce the "wall hacker zombie" issue if at all codable without damaging survivors as well. Again, I'm not a coder but it's simply an idea. It's frustrating to be killed by a zombie through a wall without even seeing him clip through to avoid being hit through it. These suggestions aren't any form of "we're entitled to this!" but more of an idea kick around for an alpha mod that I am absolutely ADDICTED to. This has quite quickly become my favorite mod for a game that I already loved to death. Any specific things you want us to test would be appreciated and I would love to help the dev team tweak and polish this mod. This is the game I've been waiting for. Again, thank you for all your hard work and time put in. PS. On a completely unrelated note to zombie mechanics, I understand that low velocity rounds work best with a supressed weapon in real life, but I think separating the ammo types is a BIT much. The rarity of silenced weapons and concurrent ammo for them is enough to balance out their power as it is I think, I would even support more rarity in this area if the ammo was to be consolidated.

Ah so the character is tied to your guid. Alright no problem, guess i'll just play with my buddies until this character dies. Thanks for the quick response, appreciated. I couldn't think of any way to allow separate characters without exploiting, i understand what you mean. Would be nice though to not be tied to one guy.

Can you have multiple characters? How are the characters saved? If I create a new profile and join a server will It be a separate character or are they saved my mac address or something crazy like that? I play primarily with friends but would like to have a lone wolf character to play when they aren't on so we don't lose each other.