bad_mojo (DayZ)

I completely agree with all the points you bring up and I've even suggested in the past to reset your position to the coast when joining another server. That said, as a player I see a lot of benefit with cross-server characters. None of it has to do with trading, server hopping, or to rally up with friends. It's all about catering to the player. If I dislike a server or the players on that server, there's nothing holding me there. With a couple clicks I can be in an entirely different world with none of my progress lost. That simply cannot happen if every server has its own character. If we could get 150+ players per server, and they were professionally administrated by BI emplyoees, I wouldn't mind settling down to one server. But, time and time again I've had to find new servers in the mod. Good servers aren't everywhere, and they don't last forever.

The idea of cross-server characters is great in my opinion. It does have its problems in DayZ, but I'm glad Rocket is still trying to make it work. It was one of the things that drew me to DayZ when I first heard about it. As for the whole contingency on population. I thought it was a database issue. Meaning they want to keep everyone's inventory on the main database, so if there are a million players, playing on a million different servers, that's 1000000*1000000, a lot of information to keep track of. So, if servers were 50 players or 150 players, it makes 3x the difference. I was confused by his comments also, and that's the only logical explanation I can think of.

Maybe spawning can be random like Rocket intended.

That's exactly what the servers need, 50,000 people logging in and out trying to fix their glitched characters.

The same could be said about eating and drinking. They're menial tasks we've done all our lives. But, DayZ is a survival sim, sometimes the most basic of tasks can become the most important.

I don't know what's worse, waiting for SA, or following this thread.

I didn't mean that in real life chopping wood is as loud as a pistol shot. I meant that the zombies in the game should react the same distance as they do for a makarov shot.(which isn't very far) It's not just chopping down a tree, you also have to split the logs & break smaller sticks. You're preparing firewood.

I suggest a health system based on a percentage of healthiness. 100% being perfectly healthy, 0% being dead. In order for your health status to fully regenerate over time, you need to have everything in perfect harmony. You can't be hungry, thirsty, sick, cold, injured, etc. or your rate of recovery will slow or possibly even turn into a rate of decrease. To give an example. A fully healthy player is shot and loses a lot of blood. Their health instantly goes down to 50% before they can stop the bleeding. At low blood, the player is struggling to stay conscious. His body temperature also drops as a result of the bloodloss, and possibly from lying unconscious on the cold ground. So, instead of the regular recovery rate of(for example) 0.5% per minute, his low blood level removes 0.2% and being cold removes another 0.1%. So, in his injured state he is only recovering 0.2% per minute. On top of that, if the player gets sick from the cold or from just being in a weakened state, and throws up his lunch and starts to get hungry & dehydrated, he might lose another 0.3%, putting him in the red. Meaning if he doesn't get better soon, he will slowly die as a result of his poor condition. Something else that could be done with a system of healthiness is to impose a cap for a duration after the player has sustained an injury or sickness. So, in the example above, the player might not get sick because he uses heat packs and his friend gives him medical attention. He might only be able to get his health status to a max of 75% for the duration of the healing process. Not only would this leave him in a weaker state percentage wise, but the health percentage could be used in other ways. For example, an unhealthy player might move slower. They might not be able to sprint. They might be more prone to catching a cold, or breaking a bone. Maybe they swing a melee weapon with less force. I feel the biggest asset to creating a system like this would be the mystery. The player could essentially be kept in the dark about his exact condition. Hunger and thirst would no longer be a black and white operation. You could give the player an indication of them being hungry, maybe a stomach growl sound. But, the player wouldn't watch a hunger meter tick down to zero and start losing blood. They wouldn't actually know when it starts to effect them. If they starved themselves, they wouldn't just lose blood and die, they would slowly become more and more unhealthy. It would be a domino effect on other things. It would lead to sickness and eventually death. Also, starving yourself would have a lasting impact on your max health. So, even if you do find food and eat again, you need to maintain a good diet over the course of a long time in order to get yourself fully healthy again. I know somebody has probably already suggested something very similar. I felt like my idea was probably unique enough that I didn't just want to post on page 20 of some other thread, so I started my own. Also, I know Rocket has some of this in mind, I just wanted to get all of my ideas about it out there. Edit: Also, fatigue could be introduced. Running for long distances might drain your regeneration rate. So, while you can run around the map non-stop, you are putting yourself in a much weaker state until you actually stop and rest up.

I really like the new way of chopping wood. It's actually really authentic feeling to chop up a bunch of wood and then just sit by the fire and add more as it burns away. One suggestion would be to make the chopping of wood very loud for zombies. I would put it on par with a pistol shot because in reality using an axe to chop wood is very loud and would attract a lot of attention from any nearby zombies.

Flip flops.

Sad thing is, I don't believe there has ever been a server that has been removed from the public hive, despite many claims with more than enough evidence. Hope it changes in standalone.

Keep in mind the people telling you not to waste your money already own the game and most have played literally hundreds of hours of it. If you're low on cash, I wouldn't, otherwise go for it. Even if the standalone is out in a week, you could have played a lot in that week. Also, the standalone is very alpha right now, the mod has had a lot of development, and has a lot of mods if you don't enjoy the vanilla dayz. If you buy the standalone and dislike normal dayz, you're essentially screwed until modding is introduced.

Current players: 14 I think it's safe to assume that since the player count went down to 14 they're facing some major bugs that will delay the release for at least another 14 weeks. If you follow these advanced statistical readouts as closely as I have been you'll know I'm obviously correct. Rocket doesn't want it to get out because it's a big conspiracy to sell more copies of Take On Mars.

I was never a fan of using 3rd party communication tools in DayZ.(teamspeak, skype) Or a fan of side chat, or even the player lists, player names and kill notifications. Time and time again I've suggested ways to remove(or minimize) those elements from the game, and mostly the reactions were negative and implied that I have no friends and am anti-social. Which is actually the complete opposite. I'm very social in dayz, to a fault. It gets me killed constantly, but I still keep going back for more. It's those rare times when I run across someone and strike up a real conversation and friendship, that I live for. Some would say I should get on teamspeak with this person, keep that connection alive even after we've left the game, or worse, someone gets killed. But, I believe it's that vulnerability, having someone to lose that makes the relationship all the more special & authentic. It even carries over into the game. I'm one of the friendliest players you'll ever meet, I never fire first and usually try to flee from danger rather than having to kill. BUT, if you fuck with someone I've become friends with, you unleash the beast within me. It's a purely emotional reaction and I love it. There's no way I would ever feel the same about a friend being murdered if I was still on teamspeak with them. Or if they pop back on side chat and ask where to spawn so we can meet. To me that's just not a real experience anymore, it's a freaking video game.

Just because it can't be enforced on everyone doesn't mean you can't do it yourself. I posted this to show people how something that might appear as a disadvantage "tactically" might actually be an advantage when it comes to your enjoyment. At the end of the day if you're playing dayz to have fun, then maximizing that fun is paramount, even if that means putting yourself at a disadvantage. (I didn't mean for this thread to start another discussion about removing 3rd party software, I just mentioned that for context.)

I feel like the melee combat code was changed in one of the recent patches. Back before these changes the melee weapons were reliable. You could dispatch zombies as they came at you without fear of being bitten. It's drawback was how close you had to get and only being able to deal with one at a time. Now, it feels like every time I try to kill a zombie with a melee weapon I always have to get bit first. It's like they get close enough for you to hit them, but for some reason the hatchet swings and misses almost every time, then they bite you and finally you can kill them. Am I imagining this? Was this changed for a reason? Is it a bug?

Thanks for the reply Razor, it was very informative. I see the direction you're going with it, I just don't think it's the best course of action. I hope I'm wrong and the game is better for it.

When you kill people like that for no reason other than their 'skin', you're only robbing yourself of possibly amazing times. Some times you gotta ask yourself if you're playing this game to be alone and safe, or to experience life no matter how short each one of those might be. It's never you or them, it's always up to you to decide how much of a psyco you want to become.

Yeah. Well reliable things are usually pretty boring since they're so consistent. Should we gives the rifles some messed up random trajectory? It would remove the boring and disappointing consistency of the bullets always flying straight. Point being, I don't play DayZ for the amazing axe wielding dancing skills. Dancing around a barn swinging an axe at a slow walking zombie is one of the worst parts of DayZ in my opinion. Just let me hit the damn thing and let my bad decisions be the thing that gets me killed..... not the difficulty of swinging a melee weapon.

I'm sorry if my post came across as disrespectful. I mean no disrespect and appreciate all the hard work you've done. I just have a passion for DayZ and can't help but speak my mind when it comes to its development. I might disagree with you sometimes, but I'll always respect your opinion and your work. I understand the whole "balance takes time" thing. I'm just a little confused as to weather you want melee to stay relatively the same(after balancing) or you want to ramp up the difficulty of using a melee weapon. You say it will be address in 1.8.1, but right before that you say it makes using them harder. Are they harder because they need fixing, or are they harder because you want them to be harder?

I wanted to add that the standalone will be an alpha release, it might contain many game breaking bugs on release. The mod, while still not perfect, has been in constant development for over a year now, so it's very playable and has already won over a million or so people. It's well worth the sale price of arma.

Yes. Play on the vanilla servers, not the mods. That way you won't get used to a lot of stuff that won't be in the standalone.

If the zombies can hit me before I can hit them with a machete, that's not realistic at all. I don't care what range the melee weapons get as long as the zombie attack is balanced accordingly.

You couldn't just add the "Add to toolbelt" option to get around that?

Can we get the ability to gut an animal with other things? Like a machete, axe, razor? Yielding less meat of course. It would be nice to have more blade options too. Kitchen knives from houses, scalpels from hospital, butcher knives from grocery stores, and keep the current hunting knife rare, but still the best for cleaning wild game.