bad_mojo (DayZ)

I think it'd be a neat addition to add some different types of cameras to DayZ. They would serve no real purpose in terms of gameplay, but they could be used in role playing and also for their zoom capabilities. It would be cool if you could tie the ingame camera to saving screen shots some how. When you click it takes a picture. Maybe even have a flash for night time pictures. If possible some post processing effects could be used to give the image a fish eye or out of focus look to further the immersion and make the screen shots look unique. Different types of cameras should be added, everything from a disposable film camera to advanced digital SLR cameras requiring batteries. Maybe even make different lenses that can be equipped, so if you want a fish eye shot of your group or want to scope in on a possible bandit, you can do it with the same camera and two lenses. Another thing to make them more useful would be basic night vision capabilities that some cameras have. If they were added I'd want to see many different varieties. It wouldn't feel right if you found professional grade DSLRs all over the place. Huge telephoto lenses should be as rare as GPS and NVGs.

OMFG they changed it? In an alpha! How dare they.

PDW - It's all about the ammo, that thing will take just about any 9mm magazine, even the mp5 30 round magazines that go in the normal primary slots. So, best case you could have 8 pdw mags in the secondary and then 12 mp5 mags in the primary area, giving you a whopping 600 rounds at your disposal without even having to open your inventory. Magazines it'll accept.... m9, m9sd, pdw, g17, mp5, & mp5sd. The only down side is the caliber is worse than the m1911 and revolver, and the sights are a bit wonky, but up close and personal it's easy to pop some zeds heads.

Obviously, but the OP didn't state how he wanted to play the game, so I'm giving him all the tips I can.

While I agree with keeping anti-biotics on you at all times, I disagree it should be carried on the backpack. In DayZ people can access your backpack so I NEVER put anything of value into my backpack. A good rule of thumb is to never put anything in there you wouldn't be willing to give to the next person you meet.

Death is inevitable in DayZ, embrace the journey. I've had no more fun surviving for months than I have surviving a few hours. It's always a roll of the dice, and to me running away from people is like not rolling them at all. (Unless they've given you a reason to run)

Don't listen to the guys who live the paranoid 'trust no one' life. It's more fun to give people a chance. There aren't many games where you actually have a chance to run for your life, don't rob yourself of the experience.

Yeah my bad, I thought you meant that losing zombies by breaking line of sight (in a realistic manner) was considered an exploit. I didn't think you were talking about that exploit. Breaking LOS is easy to do the proper way, you don't need to run for "miles". I still think your video shows how 1.7.7.1 is still really easy, I got bored of watching you throw yourself at zombies and shut it off half way through. In a situation like you showed, I want the first zombie you get close enough to have a 50% chance to knock you down(or more depending on the situation), and then all the others immediately rush over and try to eat your brains. If you don't have a weapon to start killing them all, or get damn lucky and somehow get up and run away, you're fucked. What you showed, should have been a quick death. In your vid, you get hit six times before one finally knocks you down. After running to the bush you stand still and take two more hits, and nothing. You again aggro the 4 zombies and take 6 more hits and start bleeding, 3 more hits while trying to get back into the bush, and you're finally infected and blood looks about half way. Point is, I could make the same video and run away after 15 hits, lose the zombies without exploiting and either find antibiotics or maintain my blood level enough not to die. You made the video with the intention of letting zombies kill you, it was clear from the start. You put yourself in the worst situations and it still took almost 5minutes for the zombies to kill you.

I found most of the custom map servers to be riddled with "enhancements"(over9000 vehicles, starting gear, safe zones, side chat, donation perks, etc), at least the populated ones anyway.

I've always seen comments from people about zombies 100m away spotting you, it's nothing new to this patch. Nor is it actually credible. Show me video evidence of this zombie being turned the other way and suddenly chasing you. From my experience zombies don't randomly spot you behind their backs, something always causes them to see you. Perhaps the zombie was at the end of its path and systematically turned around to walk back, and then spots the player. So, while it appears that the zombie randomly decided to turn around and chase you, he merely turned around while you were behind him. Or maybe the zombies are running on another players system, so the desync is bad enough that you don't notice them turning until they're already chasing you. Really, for a bug like this we need some solid video evidence to analyze. I've personally had little to no issues with zombies seeing me behind their backs. I've had more issues with zombies behind objects out of the line of sight seeing me. But, I'm not demanding they remove viral zombies until that shit is fixed. I just live with the bugs and enjoy the good that comes with progress. Your video just proves how much easier it is now, playing like that in 1.7.7 you would have been infected and probably dead before you even reached those bushes. Oh, and nice exploit of the line of sight system, and way to go posting it on youtube so others can exploit it too. I know it's a pretty well known exploit, but it seems like it's a part of your play style, and you're encouraging others to do it. I consider that just about as low as making videos while using scripts.

Every time I pull the trigger.

I'm all for fixing the bugs associated with zombies and Dayz in general, but why this stubborness about not adding any more difficulty to them until they're completely 100% bug free? What if the problems with zombies are just part of the arma2 engine and can't be fixed? Why would a lesser difficult zombie be any better than a difficult zombie when they both contain bugs? I mean i understand your reasoning, if they can clip through walls and hit you, a zombie that hits harder will suck more, but that's stupid. Being hit at all is supposed to be a bad thing in this game. This isn't COD/BF where you are supposed to take damage and keep fighting. That hit is supposed to have harsh consequences, if you can't stay away from the walls while they hit lightly, you shouldn't be rewarded with a second chance. I was hit a couple times through walls when i first started playing dayz, then I learned to stay away from walls where zombies are arrgo'd. Adapt and overcome. Just like when I installed 1.7.7 I didn't read the changelog I just jumped right in, I got knocked down and almost killed, got infected, and that shit gave me a boner. Because I had to adapt to new things, my comfort zone was removed Point is, if you throw a fit and give up and blame the game when things don't go how you expect them, you'll end up missing out on all the great thing this buggy game has to offer. Breaking line of sight to lose a zombie is not an exploit. That feature was added in one of the last patches Rocket worked on.

No game can ever be fun for everyone. That's an idea that has ruined many video games. In fact, DayZ was born out of rejection of that idea. Rocket tried to sell his game idea to big companies and was told nobody would play it. Well, he made the game HE wanted to play, the way HE wanted it to be, and look, over a million players and counting. I may be a huge fan of DayZ, but don't get it twisted, I'm no fanboy. I'll be the first person to criticize something I don't like about it. Just because I want the game to be more difficult doesn't mean I look down on people who want it to be a casual game. To each their own. Edit: Very well said, sums up the whole situation nicely.

Seeing a zombie run around obstacles blocking their sight or through the darkness, homing in on you like they're a bloodhound was immersion breaking and didn't add anything of value to the difficulty. You could still lose them all the same, it just took a lot more repetition. Coming from previous versions where it seemed natural and logical when you lost zombies, I couldn't help but notice and be annoyed.

Just because some people want DayZ to be more punishing doesn't mean they're wrong or should be talked down. We're all free to decide how we like our video games and voice our opinions when things aren't the way we like. I'm really fucking sick and tired of this whole "hardcore" or "real dayz fan" etc bullshit. It's such a stupid notion that people would want to turn a video game into something more difficult just because they feel they would be more hardcore because of it. That's just messed up logic. I personally want a difficult dayz because I feel like difficulty in games has gone downhill over the years. Difficulty in mainstream games these days usually means a frustratingly annoying amount of aim bot type AI who player faster than a human can. In other words, they stack the odds against you, and you have very little hope of victory. Think about a Call of Duty or Battlefield game. Is it humanly possible to complete a campaign for those games on the highest difficulty without ever being shot? Obviously no, because they spawn enemies behind you and shoot through objects like they weren't there. That's the difficulty we get these days. Then there's DayZ, where the difficulty isn't having the deck stacked against you, it's the severity of the punishment when you screw up. But, that's the great part, YOU have to screw up to feel the difficulty. If your a perfect player, it'll seem easy, if you make lots of mistakes, the game will feel like it's WAY too hard and impossible. My point is, while DayZ might be impossibly hard to some people, someone somewhere can overcome the odds and be victorious. Sorry, I doubt that made any sense, but it did in my head.

I wonder if side chat has killed more people than it has saved.

That proves nothing. We're contributing to the development by playing it and giving our feedback. I might dislike changes, but I'll never play on an older version.

Fuck! RIP 1.7.7 :( Seriously tho, I actually died to zombies for the first time in at least 10 months. Why did you have to give in to the whiners? People whine after every freaking patch for this game, doesn't mean things should be made easier. Usually a few weeks later people have gotten used to the increased difficulty, I didn't even get a week to enjoy the difficulty. I was feeling like playing dayz tonight, but now I'm just gonna go play some TLR and hope the next hotfix makes things hard again. BAH!

Also, I'm hoping the hotbar will not be visible until you press a button. Kind of disappointed to see so much on the screen, but I know it's still a work in progress.

How long have you played DayZ? Back in (roughly) august of last year there was massive issues with hackers "nuking"(killing everyone) servers constantly, and even some DDos attacks on the main hive database. At that time Rocket didn't support private hive servers and because of that the game was in a bad situation. People were quitting because nobody wanted to play when you lost all progress every hour. Administrators had to abide by strict rules about banning and kicking players only when solid evidence could be found. So even when a server admin had a gut feeling that someone was hacking, they couldn't do anything about it because of the main hive administration rules. So, even though Rocket didn't like it, he let people host private hive servers. Admins were free to kick and ban people for whatever reason. It also opened to the door for servers to start customizing their DayZ experience, deviating from the main game & development. I play mostly on main hive servers, always have, always will. So take my word that hacking is no longer the issue it was last year. In fact I can't remember the last time I was victim to a hacking attack. In fact I've experience more hacking on the few private servers I've tried. So, when I say private hives aren't needed anymore, I'm saying the hacking situation doesn't require them. Admin tools have given server administrators much more control and a better means to collect evidence. If all private hive servers switched to the main hive again, I do not believe it would end up in the chaos we saw last year. I don't believe the game being played on a lot of the private servers can even be called DayZ anymore. It has changed so many core aspects of what Rocket is creating. Private server are catering to people who don't actually want to play the real dayz, so it really annoys me seeing people claim private servers are the lifeblood of dayz. It would be like saying highly modified fast n furious style civics are the life blood of the Honda Civic. You need to realize that many people still prefer the pure form of dayz, even if they're joining your private hive because they're bored. The progress of the mod has been painfully slow. Which in my opinion is partly due to all the talented developers who are busy working on the same things on twenty different private hives. That talent could be helping Razor and the other mod developers improve the official build. When things like self bloodbag(for example) are given to people on private hives, the people who want that feature suddenly abandon the main build and their thoughts and desires go with them. They're no longer on the forums asking and debating about potential changes, they're not open to having their mind changed about the topic anymore, because they're already used to having it, and no matter what amazing things happen in the main build, they'll hold off because their desired feature isn't in it. Point is, it's easier to modify a private server and add in a feature you want than it is to get it implemented into the official build. But, when you take it upon yourself to do that, the main build suffers, and so does the dayz community. I'll be interested to see how things pan out with standalone and private servers. My thoughts are that Rocket will initially want to lock everything down, so a private hive will only have the option to set a password, and maybe a difficulty setting or two. Perhaps nearing the end of the development he'll open them up to more modifications. I think if you're hoping to seamlessly transition your modified private server to standalone, you're in for some disappointment. But, for your sake I hope I'm wrong.

I like pretty much all the changes in this patch. The increased difficulty of the zombies is a welcome change, and the rarity of loot is really shaking things up. My only complaint would be the terminator like persistence some zombies seem to have now for chasing you. Even if you weave through some bushes or objects and break the line of sight, some of the zombies still seem to home in on you, ignoring the obstacles in between. I used to be really good at losing zombies, to the point it was second nature, but now I seem to have to lose their sight at least 10 times before they stop. But, it's not all zombies, only a select few that have this uncanny ability to chase me down and stay on my tail, perhaps they're Kenyan?

Things are shaping up nicely then.

You're essentially running/playing a hacked version of DayZ server, when the real game updates and things in your hacked version break, I can't sympathize. Private hives were a savior in times when Hacking was ruining a strictly main-hive dayz. These days, I see private hives as an option for people to modify dayz to their liking. I don't think it's a big deal if private hives are broken after updates, since private hives aren't actually needed anymore. If you want your own private version of DayZ, your gonna have to live with it breaking when the real dayz updates.

Perhaps, but they DO care if they have a makarov or not.

Something that bothers me about the PAX footage is the new inventory system kind of negates the searching for loot. Why would you look under the bed if you can just hit G and see the "hidden" stuff in the 'ground' section of the inventory screen? Or do you have to highlight it with your cursor before it shows up?