pilgrim*

Just a thought following JBURNS489 - the survivable (for beginners) spawn points can be extended with some thought - for instance 2 or 3 points along the 'great E-W Northern highway. It is almost as good as a sea coast for orientation and there is access to various 'assets'. Then the wooded hillside overlooking the supermarket right down in the SW of the map (ok that is a coast spawn, true) but there are assets not too far away - with some thought a new dozen of "not crazy" locations could be added that would be quickly recognizable ? Any suggestions of where a newcomer would stand a 'reasonable' chance without being totally discouraged? - off the top of my head eg a hillside with a good viewpoint over something useful?

" If you want a backstory, make one up and roleplay " - that's one attitude, it's a controversial subject. BUT: On Topic Yes - Good resume of PrOS and CONS, JBURNS489 your PROS are good : - But you must add "takes longer to find your friends" in with the PROS - Group players have TeamSpeak so they already have an enormous advantage over the base DayZ 'lone survivor' scenario. Accept that as a serious advantage and play the game. If you are a team who can communicate anywhere across the whole the map, that's enough to give you a huge head start. (damn - that's all the Army gets in real life. Deal with it, play the game, don't ask for more.) your CONS should include: - A big increase in difficulty for newcomers - this "pseudo-random" [I know you don't intend it to be truly random, but ...] across-the-map spawn will destroy and strongly discourage newcomers to the game. It reduces their chances of finding out what the hell is going on by around a thousand percent. Calculate the difference between current spawn areas (in their Dev-selected locations) and the total of square miles around those spawn areas, Compared that figure to the surface area of the whole map. Calculate how much less chance you have of spawning with eyes on something that makes sense to a newcomer - the chances are weighted strongly towards no sea, no town, no road marker, or you spawn inside a base, or in zombie area, or possibly far from water, no recognizable features, no clues to where you are, or you spawn right inside today's hot PvP area... All beginners ATM die plenty times before they start to get the hang of game possibilities.. drop them in "nowhere" and you multiply beginner difficulty enormously. This means (bottom line) that even a clued-in newcomer would START by suicide multiple times until they found a location that seemed to give them a chance to survive. Result: [official DayZ handbook advice] = Beginners should spawn and suicide and respawn and suicide - until they reach the coast or a town and start play from there. The numbers of newcomers to the game would drop sharply..or suicide travel would become the official everybody-does-it startup technique. Both these are bad options. (just a note: This is why the original "on the beach" spawn was very useful for first time players (remember?) - it gave them a simple scenario to explain their arrival (some like that) - but most importantly it provided a simple learning process to discover map features, and very easy direction finding, until you are experienced enough to branch out on your own). Spawning at locations scattered "anywhere" on the map means beginners will have to gen up on direction finding techniques, and learn chunks of the map, before they even log in for the first time (and pre-game learn other things) just to begin to have the slightest chance. Also they are not likely to find player help, or any players at all, if there are 50 spawn points on a 40-50 max player server. * [ Off topic: It really should NEVER be assumed that DayZ is a game designed for Teams with Teamspeak, and that solo players are "playing wrong". It was never set that 'teams with TS' is the only real game. ] :)

1 ) Sometimes I do use gentle irony because it is better to remain polite, but just now I am not using "irony" - I am using your own argument exactly, to show how weak it is - by me pretending to be the spokesman of the community instead of you. I am not the spokesman of the community. 2 ) I am not the majority of players, dude, I am one player. - How many players are you ? 3 ) you quote me saying " I don't know what the majority of the community wants - but you tell me you do know ? " now Laugh Your Ass off Again. What have I said that is hypocritical ? I usually try to be polite - I try to be logical - I try to understand that other players are not me. I will appreciate the same effort from you - and accept you have a level of comprehension, and we can have a useful discussion. :) My own suggestion linked earlier, aims to reduce suicide-travel metagaming. I strongly dislike respspawn abuse. My link is to a thread where the OP's and other spawn suggestions are mooted - this thread should usefully have been merged with that In-My-O (this is my individual one-off, solo, opinion, out of my own head: take it leave it, or put it to the vote. I am not a "god-told-me" fanatic, or the voice of the people, nor a demagogue, I'm just a dude passing in the street, ya know?)

No - it is not what most people want Why is this difficult to understand? Speak for yourself but please don't tell the community what they want - If you do this, I will in turn tell you that the community 100% thinks you are wrong - then it will be your turn to tell me I am wrong, OK? does anyone follow this ? (I am not most people, you are not most people, he is not most people ..) and anyway, it's a very poor idea [ed: to modify respawn locations based on previous spawns] and it won't work, (whoever wants it) - Think it through. It is totally open to abuse and it would wreck the game. good grief! :)

My feeling is that a lot of what you say (is very true) and is caused directly by many public servers being run as "private" servers. (leave aside the true private servers - they have their own game on their own server and make their own arrangements) But because so many "supposedly" open public servers are in fact owned by kick-gangs who roam around other public servers to loot up and fight (no skin off their noses), and stash great quantities of gear on their "keep out" server - the game has become greatly unbalanced. DayZ is now far from the original intention and far from the current stated intention - many (most or all) players are very far from being able to play on public servers in the manner intended. Some clans are on private servers BUT many, if not MOST, are on public kick servers. This is a large percentage of players. It seems the standard way to play. This strongly influences and changes the whole game concept from the base up. Players who habitually play as a group are often based on a kick server. so gearing up and death are meaningless to them. The "fun" players who want to interact and goof (no harm) all clump together on the very few 50/50 public servers. The rest of the player base - who have to compete with those things - have a number of fairly deserted public servers to play on if they want to play the "normal" game. They make "fair-play" stashes and loot on low pop servers, but they are outnumbered and totally outgunned, so what else can they do? They can't much search for tents and stashes, because 80-90% of stashed gear is on kick servers. If they go to the 50/50 they meet the geared up gangs who are there to PvP. If they die they have to start over again (it's serious for them), the geared up gangs do not, because those gangs have plenty of gear back on their kick server. So what is left for them to do? - run around on a medium-high pop beach and try to survive, find an axe, make a joke of it ? go have a bun-fight in a police station? My understanding is that BI (aware of the problem) has decided to ignore it in PRACTICE (I was taken to task for saying this previously) because BI is aiming for modding, not for balancing the vanilla game across server-availability, and not by aiming to make server rules effective. they have had meetings on this, they have decided on their policy - of course - and so far the only word that has come out from those BI discussions that has anything to do with this subject is = in the future "modding" will alter the balance. No wonder that the game attracts "indifferent" players who don't "care", who "cant be bothered" - by not addressing the problem, the game is in the process of remodeling itself FOR those players. With this state of play, what other players would it attract? * For me - it is clear that Alpha is the time when major game-changing and game-breaking problems and exploits MUST be addressed, they must not be allowed to continue into 1.0. But it HAS been decided NOT to address this problem (although BI have techniques available to them as owners of the public hive, to re-balance, to make kick-serves non profitable, to use the loot economy to impose 'economic sanctions' - there do exist techniques and possibilities) I think, most seriously, this disastrous situation will (must) change the nature of the game. It already has. I think it is too late to recover from this, even if the will was there to attempt it. Great pity - it WAS a good game. the best you can hope for as server moderator - on the public hive - is by 'chance or cunning or skill' - to become one of the three or four (very few) 50/50 servers that attract "anything goes" players, fun beginners, and PvP gangs (attracts them because they ARE full). I worked out the AVERAGE number of weekend players after 5 pm is 5-7 across the board (I did a weekend of statistics). So ATM 10-15 players is already a 200% above average population. If the many 1-2 player Server Exploit kickservers were taken out of the public hive (or encouraged to play fair or leave) - these numbers would about Double, with a much greater fidelity to each player's regular server. * As a kind of proof - notice how people talk far less now about "hoppers" as the great metagame gameplay-destroyer - the game has changed. hoppers don't count any more - kickservers have wrecked it, kickserver players have wrecked DayZ. As for the future "SA mods" - look at the original DayZ mod = open modding there brought fragmentation, loss of players, finally, a tiny minority game for a very few specialist fans. A forgotten game in fact. Why send SA the same way? the decision is already made. xxp Before you go Private, Woody2 - drop in on Helpy Helpers - there are not many folk about at the moment (they are mainly playing other stuff, waiting for 0.6 I think) but there are good people on this server and they run it honestly, you might make a couple of contacts - share some ideas or directions, or just fun ? _________________________________________________________________ 173.199.94.27:2302 << = THE HELPY HELPERS: FOR MERCY OR MAYHEM >> Play on an honest public hive server. Enjoy

Hey - really nice evocative screenshot I know a place like that in the ardennes - except the gun is gone off an old sherman in the undergrowth next to the shack deja-vu

OK emuthreat so you favor the "alternate earth" theory and not the "alternate timeline" theory, that's orthodox. I guess Hawking and Spock could argue it out. The DayZ theoretical and ONLY "semi-official" backstory takes (the easy way out) Tom Clancy approach (ie don't give a damn as long as the technology is ok and the Hero is in it). though trends in mainstream steampunk and speculative/militaristic "future history" indicate a move against this bland approach. Or let's pretend the backstory makes sense as exemplified in Star Wars VII ( a lip-service trope). .awkwardly agregating fragmentary references and spurious parallels so that the more sense made by any non coherent splinter the fewer fans can agree with any discrete alienated part of it. Usually - however - a quick survey of current (worldwide, literary and Hollywood) popular Dystopian and Post Apocalyptic fiction shows us that the mass of media consumers accepts there is no particular a priori reason and (deeply) no interest in how the dramatic narrative focus "came about".. it "just is".. Witness the arguments still ongoing over the Mad Max franchise. Bottom line - we all know the human social construct is crap - now crap has happened (the premise, unquestioned because inevitable) - and (roll the film) here is the survivor-hero.. He must be the person who could have stopped the crap by his upright and sane (therefore fringe) mentality, unlike the destructive normality, and can now get on with surviving the aftermath - as he is uniquely placed to do. This being the necessary case, the less we know about his previous life the better, as knowledge makes it more difficult to avoid the (rationally present) core taint of complicity with the massive and widespread human stupidity that caused whatever disaster and destruction we are now a "victim" of. ie Hero as non-victim, by definition. But any past knowledge of the Hero's pre-apocalypse action marks him with the Cain-brand that destroyed his own and all other lives and society itself. (we are not going for Christ-as-Hero, ok? - perish the thought, let's take the Jungian road) If that is the case, he has already NOT survived in the meaningful sense, which destroys the Hero premise. He must be an antihero carrying the seeds of destruction, remaining by chance after his own personal and his own-kind's deliberate (if not rationalized) destruction of human values and institutions. But game-players want to enter into the Hero mythos, not identify with a surviving villain who is known consciously/unconsciously to have fucked up before the start of the game. (vis the popular disappointment in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where the vicarious observer cannot identify with the central character). this MEANS - you have to ask Brian Hicks WHO you are, and then accept that (like it or not) or Decide for yourself. If you decide for yourself there is no reason anyone should agree with you. In fact to the extent that YOU decide, they shouldn't. xx pilgrim REFS (thre are plenty but here's one) : http://www.paforge.com/files/articles/pa_essay1.pdf http://postapocalyptia.tumblr.com/ or read Brandy Danner - 'Dark Futures: A Guide to Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic, and Dystopian Books and Media' :)

Yep 100% guaranteed Take all your gear off and crawl up behind a couple of zombies Don't worry if they see you, just stay lying down - they might make attack motions but they don't hurt you as long as you just lie flat with no clothes on If you are wet it is easier to get closer Enjoy

duh .. there is NO system for preventing this.. READ the THREAD dude.. that's the whole point = when X barrels have spawned on a server no more barrels will spawn BUT nothing stops you bringing MORE barrels in from another server You can BRING AS many AS YOU like. Nothing "happens" to the barrels already on that server. you really ought to read the thread and THINK about it a little SKC.. before asking the SAME question again. (now go to the back of the class and stay quiet and listen) sigh you are one Bad sausagekingofchicago and you ought to hang your head - Bad! Bad ! Now roll over and play dead ! Go back in your basket. Go !

(like I said twice already in this same thread) NO - not everybody You really want to claim your play style is the only way to play - and want to change the game to fit YOUR play style But you are wrong, it ain't the only way to play. Say what you look for in DayZ but don't say that's what everyone wants. No - they don't.

Could make a passable Davy Crockett hat with those ?

Yeah - the mil-sim dudes and the PvP fans who need Teamspeak to even play - they really MUST get into that immersion mood of <<Shit where am I? I am a lone survivor with my tents full of gear stashed up-country, so I'll must suicide now to join up with my mates before it gets boring>> they need backstory otherwise they can't get that lost survivor IMMERSION sensation while they're chatting. If you REALLY DO need a reason to regain consciousness somewhere in Chernarus with an Official Canon Reason why you are there - Then you must ask someone else (but not yourself) to INVENT one for the players to use. I guess this would be Brian Hicks ? Unfortunately the Backstory has to include how the players are wearing headsets (implants?) connecting them to everyone they ever knew who is on this map ( AND on a few other copies of Cherarus that look just the same). And the implants let them talk to dead people too (that's cool!) I guess we could all be members of some telepathic HALO team that got scattered by freak winds (hey, has that been done already?) with artificial brains that work after your body's been blown to crap. When I respawn I just pretend I'm "there" and have to DO stuff to survive.I don't worry too much about the past, My survival skills tell me thinking about the past is not good for me and it takes away my edge. Ask Brian for an ex cathedra statement on How Did I Get Here?. There really is NO other way to know. xxp

Might be the server memory problem that has started to come up with servers on private shard. According to at least one SP (Multiplay) "the game takes up too much memory". - IF this is true, I guess you will most likely have anomalies when you have a lot of tents and stuff stashed ? - see if it continues, no one heard back from shane-uk about his problem

It does Not matter how you get there - totally not important, meaningless, irrelevant

A quick roundup for you info: A short summary of the state of play: If any of the above facts are wrong or badly stated, I will be very pleased to correct them, and to apologize to the parties concerned. If any Service Provider has a different position to that stated above regarding "the rules", I hope they can make this clear on the forum?. It would take any SP staff member only 5 minutes. If BI's position is not as stated, or if they expect any alteration in the current "rules" stalemate, a single comment will suffice thanx DUDES :)

yo Salty You want to take the players away from the PvP high-action, death-a-minute, "spawn towns" and scatter them around the country so you will meet more players when you are out in the distant corners of the map? OK... well.. Point is - there are NOT any "spawn towns" there are just various scattered spawn locations and many of them are within running distance of big towns (and one are two are real close to big towns) And a lot of players RUN to get to those towns - if they ran the other way for half as long they'd be in the wild country (like you), but they don't. And a lot of players who think they are too far from towns suicide until they get closer. If you want to explore - go solo explore far off places but don't EVER assume there's no one around.. you will die. If you want to interact (kill, goof with no-pants-and-a-bible, be a bandit, or run around laughing or dissing) stay on the COAST - if you want to PvP deathmatch go to the "spawn towns" you talk about. If you want to explore AND hang with players, join a team or a RP server.. And NOPE I wouldn't load up Battlefield and expect a huge map, where anything can happen, including solitude, agriculture, hunting, sudden death, chance meetings, starvation, teams of armed raiders, navigation by the stars, hidden camps, fishing, zombies, stampeding cattle, sunrise and sunset, half-repaired vehicles .. If I loaded Battlefield I'd find a fight in a half-minute, right? And if I loaded DayZ I know where to find a fight. And then sometimes a fight drops on you when you don't expect it at all. If you want "the looming threat of players around any corner that could be your best friend or pack of ruthless cannibals" then stay on the coast. (if you go inland to the high loot places you meet players but won't make any "best friends"). Find a quiet place inland, stash some stuff, hunt, cook, get gear - then go down to the coast to make friends. Comparing DayZ to Battlefield is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. :) xx pilgrim

If you are really stealthy you can crawl up close behind a frozen zombie and stand up and head butt him before he susses you This only works if you are naked and your underwear is wet (so they can't smell you) Otherwise they turn round and jump on you however quiet you are This might work with goats too I tried once with chickens but they have 360 eyesight

Is this a new topic ? - I wonder why no one thought to ask this before ? The people who will be heading for the radio station are all on TeamSpeak already, right? (so what do they want it for?) - unless they like PvP capture the flag

When you explore, why do you want to see anyone else ?

There weren't any shipwrecks on the coast at the time: back when the game came out. You "washed up on the beach" - no one knows why, you don't know why. Then players complained about the beach spawn, so spawns were included inland to spread the gameplay. Good move That knocked on the head the "you crawled up out of the sea" theory I think it is GREAT there is NO backstory - When the game starts you ARE in a foreign country, you HAVE no gear, you MUST survive. The only backstory is a desperate mess of inventions by stressed hallucinating survivors, foaming-mad generals, crazed infected journalists, and hysterical dying military historians who can't accept that human reason, sense, order, history, and geopolitics have GONE If you want a backstory just imagine you cant remember who you are and you have no idea why you are here and there seems to be a bunch of dangerous ex-humans staggering around Or if you want a great backstory, just imagine you're a Special Ops Elite killer who HALO'd in and knocked yourself out in a tree and before you recovered the goblins ate your gear. But don't believe any of those "official" propaganda backstory lies you hear on these forums. As Robert Altman said What happens after the end of a fiction does NOT exist What happens before the beginning of a fiction does NOT exist So - say for instance - you wake up nowhere at all, you have no cloths plus a skin condition, you are clutching a bar of surgical soap. -Wow - why? you will never know - So you are in the game - now survive or die Who cares how you got dropped in the game? - the game STARTS here xx pilgrim

You spawn in "spawn towns"? - hell, I always spawn in the middle of nowhere - its a long time since I even spawned on a beach. I think everyone should spawn at random anywhere - in their underwear, with a bar of soap and some kind of skin infestation.

Yes - there should be a stagger effect or a short moment of wild-gun-sway when a player is hit. A couple of times I have shot first from close range with a sawn-off and then been headshot or sprayed down. The point of a shotgun IRL is you don't have to aim it a lot - you point it AT the guy and pull the trigger = In real life he does NOT just 'grunt' and go on drawing a bead on you head. I guess we all agree on this .

A simple thing would be a placeholder for the weight/stamina system : With a backpack you run slower than the zombies Drop your backpack you run faster than the zombies

no - NOT everybody The DayZ game bottom-line is that you start out as a lone survivor somewhere on the map. Metagaming lets you cut that out and turn it into a team PvP game, but not everybody wants that. No no - NOT everybody. Teams keep the body's gear for their friend, and plenty of players loot their own bodies when they can. Not everbody has special agreed gaming standards. No My suggestion:

In a real life Apocalypse - you come over the brow of a hill and look down on a town - you see zombies moving about and you see them closing in on some location in town you know there's some poor dumb survivor in there who got the zombies excited.. what do you do - go in to help him, or fire a couple of shots to draw the zombies off, or stay away because he's probably a psycho ? Or stay up high in cover to snipe him when he breaks out? ATM in DayZ you can make those same decisions. - how is that "magic" ? :)