rickyriot

Two words; experience and logic. First: Experience - the more you play the game the more you get to understand where people are likely to shoot you from on certain parts of the map. Where this falls down is against a new and inexperienced player, as this negates the assumption you make in that the shooter has positioned themselves so that they are in a safe position before they started firing, but in general you should have an idea. Experience also tells you that if you are near somewhere that spawns weapons (obviously airfields, but also fire stations and offices). It's certainly not uncommon for someone to find a weapon and immediately want to try it out. Of course experience is also one of the best things to use in not getting shot at (don't walk out in the open in the city on a busy server, for example) but then sometimes you just have to accept risk as part of the game - and a fun part too! Second: Logic - this is where basic maths comes into play. Essentially if you are being shot at once, it's probably likely you will be shot at again. If you are shot at immediately think of what cover you have at that moment. That tells you where the shots didn't come from. If you are out in the open then that's not going to help but if you have wall to one side them logic decrees that the shot did not come from the other side of the wall. The sounds in DayZ are pretty poor as most will agree although you should have a rough idea of the general direction. Mix that with where they can shoot from and look to cut down the available angles. For instance if you take a typical square based building. If you get shot at and you are standing on the South West corner that means that the shots didn't come from the North East and most likely not the North or the East. If you can somehow find something that blocks the line of sight from the South and/or West then you will be reducing the chances of being hit. Obviously every situation is different, with a different location, different enemy (and all that entails - weapons/experience/desire to kill you/etc) so there is no hard and fast rule, and until there is a decent sound system built into the game where you can spot an enemy simply from a single shot (my favourite was MoH:AA where the sounds were so good that surround sound headphones you could pretty much tell where anyone was walking let alone firing!) you have to rely on these two things; experience and logic.

I have to admit I don't really get the whole point of jumping between servers. I am lucky in that I have quite a lot of free time with which I can do some proper looting and I am able to jump on servers when they aren't too busy. Not that it is an intention I tend to use the same server as I was last on and if that's not up or is full I find the next available one that has the lowest ping (hc/exp only). So perhaps for me finding loot isn't such an issue, but even then I doubt it would take me more than 20 minutes to find a decent setup and a weapon of some sort. The problem with the game is that there isn't much survival, and no building or hoarding and with the limited weapons and 40 people max on servers it just doesn't seem like there is much point in PvP. I suppose that shows the flexibility of the game even in the Alpha state it is now. I choose to play it as a recreation thing, rather than a PvP, others clearly not, which perhaps explains why the whole jumping between servers in order to loot up is a bit lost on me. The bottom line? Even if I was to go out PvP, the fun of doing that would be fighting against the limitations of what the server provides you as well as the people on that server. Jumping between them takes away some of that fun, imo. Tooling up somewhere else then dropping myself in to a server and wreaking havoc seems to remove a distinct level of the challenge, but then perhaps that's why people do it. In short they simply aren't good enough to do it from scratch.

I guess that the integration with your environment will change somewhere down the line, meaning less of the mouse wheel selector menu, but until that is done a really simple and bloody useful (imo, anyway) addition would be to have a key binding that only operates doors. It clearly wasn't an issue in the mod but now almost all buildings are enterable and as the "door interaction detection area", for the lack of a better description, is not that reliable and I am getting a little fed up reloading my weapon whenever I mean to open or close a door.

Which is the reason I raised this suggestion thread. As opening and shutting doors is a key (no pun intended) action, it makes sense it can be raised up in the binding to allow it to be bound separately. Any experienced player will run through buildings opening and shutting doors as quickly as possible. In many cases it's imperative that you pre-empt the 'door action icon'. I do believe a lot of it is to do with lag, with my FPS dropping to low 20's and lower inside some buildings there is a noticeable delay between reaching the door action area and the icon/action being available.

In the real world I understand what you are meaning, but there are 3 points I'd like to make in relation to that. 1) We don't know what this "infection" is. Is it airborne, is it waterborne, is it transmitted via close contact, etc, etc.. Until that is defined you don't know to what level the water table could be affected. This was why I questioned in the previous post just what it is we are purifying the water from. 2) It's a game, in order to make the game more challenging I think making the concession to all water to be in some way affected is not a bad thing as such. Perhaps limit it to only Hardcore servers perhaps? 3) Dread demonstrates a perfect example of why water pumps could be infected... There is a famous study by John Snow about the London cholera outbreak in the 1800's - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak - although that would suggest that only certain pumps would be infected.

Really? Which servers (in general) are you playing on. I am using UK Hardcore experimental ones and I am lucky if I last more than 20 minutes without the session being lost.

As much as it pains me I think this will be some time down the line. Which is a shame as even though I have a decent enough rig I still struggle to get any decent FPS. What makes it worse just now is where you spawn. Most of the time I tend to be up near Svetlo or the other new town I don't know the name of, and both of them are killers when it comes to frame rates. The reason I think that client optimisation will be some time off is twofold; one of them is just down to sheer necessity of it. Currently it's Alpha and by implication that generally means those who are play testing it are going to be those who either have decent rigs already or know how to squeeze the most out of what they have. They can accept the situation and get on with it. In that sense the need to "fix" the client is negated, as it's all about getting the game framework right just now. There have been FPS improvements as we know, but that's probably more the case of them being discovered as the cobwebs are cleared out of the old engine. The second reason is that I am not sure if the client side rendering engine that is used just now will be the one the move from Alpha to Beta will be on. There has been quite a lot of chat that has gone on regarding the decoupling of the rendering engine and game logic. It's passed by without too much discussion (or at least not much that I have seen) yet I think that could be huge thing. A shift to a different rendering engine and a move, say, to Dx11 could see the game ramp up the client performance massively. I'm not saying that is going to happen, but the current rendering engine is a bit chunky and could certainly do with a bit of a lick of virtual paint. I presume the assets that are being created could be ported over to a different engine - although that is just a guess. Anyway, if, and it is an if, the engine is changed why would the devs spend time improving the client that they will (possibly) be throwing out?

The rubber banding is not fixed. As I said in a previous post it does feel like it's been lessened but it's definitely not been fixed on the experimental branch as I write this. Back onto the topic of the Session Lost and the game crashing, the more it happens the more I think it's related to loot respawn. Every time I rejoin after being "kicked" the loot is back and what has appeared is not necessarily the same stuff as before. For example I've gone to an untouched police station - no really they exist! - and just as I was about to pick up some loot I've lost the session. Upon rejoining the loot I was about to pick up is gone, although it tends to be replaced by other loot albeit perhaps in a slightly different position. The problem though seems to be that if you drop something (say a rifle for sake keeping) pop off to do a task and are on the way back to pick up your stashed gear and you lose your session, on rejoin your stashed gear is gone. So I am still none the wiser whether the session lost is just the servers restarting, and it has to be a bug if they are as it's an almost constant thing (5 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins, any random timespan between them), or if it's the respawning of loot the devs are working on.

Not sure what it is you are trying to say here. 1) I am in 1PP, I've already said that. 2) Expecting the door to open when I have performed the key action only to find it's performed another action is what I am trying to avoid. For instance holding a loaded shotgun or rifle and having a snap loader in your inventory will cause you to reload the weapon. 3) I am not saying anything should be replaced with anything else, simply the option to bind the door opening to a separate key. It wouldn't affect others who don't suffer the problem but would help those with.

I don't know what CQC is, but in term of melee combat (many moons ago) in one of Rocket's Twitch streams he discussed the idea of implementing a similar close combat style to that used in Chivalry. How, when or even if it ever gets to that point is obviously based on many things and to be honest the devs clearly have a lot to do before that however just for those who haven't seen Chivalry here is a you tube..

Now that's an interesting one the app itself suffered this some time ago, many revisions back to be fair, where it would drop like you described. However this was resolved in a further patch. From memory it was all to do with the clouds and turning them off (disabled) resolved it for the client. However as I say the actual issue was many patches ago and was subsequently sorted.

I am not so sure. I have been kicked from a server with the Session Lost message and on the rare occasions that the game didn't crash I could go back into the sever browser and see the server I was just on still full of people. I've watched it for a minute or two after that to see if they finally dropped off but they didn't - in fact the number of people increased. So while I am not definitively saying it's not a server restart, from observation it doesn't look like it. However... ..what Big L mentions certainly rings true for me in regard to getting back onto a server that has Session Lost and finding loot respawned. The problem is that the it's not just loot but also things like doors. So, for example, I get "kicked" I rejoin and the police station which had a door open the last time now has it shut. So in many ways it looks like server restart, but as mentioned above it doesn't look like everyone gets kicked. Thoughts? "Bloody odd" that would be my thought. Either way it's not in a state to port over to Stable if that was to continue. From personal experience I would say it's lessened. I am not sure if the comments on the dev blog about pathing and the mismatch between the server and client was specifically meaning rubber banding (it certainly seems that way, but they stopped short of using the term which is a little odd as it's very much the best known phrase for the symptoms), but if it does then the way they were talking about it was a problem that could be resolved, rather than just lessened. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, and maybe the rubberbanding is as bad as it always was in this new patch just that I've learnt to avoid it better. Either way you are right, it's not quite ready for stable yet. IMO anyway.

Considering the rubber banding is still happening on experimental I can't imagine it'll be released to stable. Granted it seems to have reduced a little, but certainly it's still evident. The biggest problem I have with experimental just now is the Session Lost / game crash issue. On a regular basis I am dropped from the game with no warning and shown a Session Lost error message (no red link, timeout icon/text is shown). Most of the time when this happens the game will either crash to the desktop (or crash without dropping to the desktop forcing you to alt/tab out of it) or it'll crash as you attempt to rejoin the server. On many of the occasions I find myself losing my character data, resulting in a fresh spawn. If the experimental goes live on stable and the Session Lost / game crash issue is still happening you're going to have an awful lot of unhappy bunnies.

Are we working on the assumption that the "infection" is in the water or is it just stagnation that we need to purify it from. Personally I want all water from pumps and ponds to be tainted, forcing you to filter or purify it. That said the water you get from rain should be potable. If you have an empty tin can or better still a pot, stick it out in the rain and it'll fill up. I believe you can do this with canteens although I've not tried it.

Are you trolling? Seriously? So I pay £20 (or whatever) for a game get killed a few times and the game is unplayable? Nah, seriously you are trolling with those suggestions. Now in comparison this is very sensible idea. Not a bad idea, although I think you would need to combine it with some sort of audible feedback too as you won't get the physical feedback. It also depends on whether injuries are contextual. ie: if you get hit on the back does it only bleed from that point. Again not a bad idea. It can be a little difficult to tell how damaged an item is from just looking at it though. Some things are very easy (bike helmets, for example) camouflage pants less so.

I suppose I should put in a caveat here. I am playing in 1PP and despite having a 7770 coupled with a 8320 (Octacore @ 3.5Gz) the game runs like a dog both in cities and inside buildings. Lag is certainly a problem in relation to opening doors, even running with low specs and a 1280x720 screen res I am down to the low teens in Svetlo. The sooner they optimise/change the client rendering engine the sooner this problem will be resolved.

And here is the rub. I don't wait for the icon to appear. Any experienced player, and I'm not suggesting you aren't btw, tends to pre-empt the icon appearing. Because the "door detection area" is so niggly it's difficult to guarantee that when you do perform an action it's going to be opening a door.

For me it's mouse wheel up then [F] and you are right it is second nature but when working your way through the building it's just all to easy to expect to be in the "door opening activation area" (if you know what I mean) when you aren't and doing the action (mouse wheel up & [F]) results in another action happening - normally reloading a weapon for me. Totally agree, I do wonder just how easy a fix this would be though. If it's simple then it would make life a lot easier for some. I'm not asking for the whole UI to be altered, just one task made bindable. Oh, the gates, the fucking gates... * waves fist in the air * ...when being chased by a zombie (who simply ignores the gate and runs through it) you have to dance left and right in order to get the see the "arrows icon". Especially the large gates you can't jump over.

This is not a hate thread, purely a question to the DayZ masses. I feel the need to point this out at the start as perhaps this thread could be seen as a hater thread. It's not, I love the game for all it's flaws, and done so since the early(ish) days of the mod. Now onto the question... How long will it be before we see non-free DLC's being offered for DayZ? And if/when they appear what will they do for the community in terms of affecting the balance of the game. I am not discussing free DLCs, as they will be by implication available to all, just the paid for DLCs. The premise... DayZ got a lot uptake at the start of it's alpha, more so than anyone expected. This leaves BI with a bit of a 'jam today' situation in terms of revenue. I fully expect them to deliver in regard to taking the game to Beta and hopefully Final, however where do they make their future money? Game sales will naturally increase as the game gets more feature rich and more stable, but what about all those players who have paid a relatively low price (in comparison to other games) for what will soon be quite a heavily developed title. The easiest way? Monetise those who have already paid for the base game by offering DLCs. Why is it likely... Looking at the progression of Arma3 it holds some parallels to DayZ. Both open world FPS games that were developed by the same company, started out as an Alpha and both are sold primarily through Steam (which allows for easy DLC selling). In fact, have a look at this: Arma 3 DLC Bundle and it will show that BI is not against offering paid for DLCs and ones that offer quite a significant addition to the game. If that sets a precedence then it seems almost inevitable that BI will offer pay for DLCs. The problem... So what would a DLC offer? New clothing? New weapons? Always starting spawn with a baseline of certain loot? Looking at that link in the previous paragraph the things offered could be seriously game changing; better weapons, better vehicles (obviously vehicles in general would need to be implemented first). The core issue here is the balance of the game. I am not inherently against DLCs, per se, so long as they don't alter that, but there is the rub - I don't think that you can. The minute you offer people the choice to pay money to gain an advantage you will ruin the balance. Granted it's unlikely those who are fairly decent in the game are going to pay for content they can loot for but then that relies on the content offered by a DLC being available without DLC. It also opens up the situation where BI may restrict those without the bought DLC from using the content offered by it. For example, offering a vehicle that you cannot enter unless you have paid to do so. So there we have it, to summarise the question; when will we see paid for DLCs, if ever, and what will they mean for the game in general. TL;DR? DLCs - will they happen, and if they do will it fuck up the in game balance. (edited: to amend the poll a little to offer a n/a option in the second vote)

Reloading a fucking sawn-off. It's my preferred spray and pray indoor weapon so tend to get it cut and stuck in my rucksack until I get inside. I'll normally have a snap loader in my inventory It's a clever idea, but the first option is not always open the door. It is if it's available but if you are just outside of the door "trigger area" then you have the same problem as I have now.

Personally I want the text removed completely and replaced by icons. The text is annoying, counter intuitive and restrictive. What can't be demonstrated via icon should be relayed through feedback. So, if it rains you should see an icon of a raindrop, the opacity or the size of the raindrop would show the level of rain you are being exposed to. The whole "you are getting wet, you are no longer getting wet" is just shit. I understand why it's there, but it needs removed. For non-icon based contextual things, for example those mentioned in the first post, if you have cold fingers you should drop things, or if an explosion/gunfire happens next to you your hearing should be affected ideally with a ringing in your ears too. All in all, having the text is wrong on so many levels.

This. I checked all the replies and Calibre here is the only person to mention it. I have no problem with not knowing the number of people on the server, but don't turn the player list off while also removing the ability to mute annoying troll cunts.

I've seen them just fall over as if they have been hit, yet no-one was near it (not even another zombie) and they weren't moving and no blood animation was visible. As glitches go, it's hardly a bad one.

If we are to judge on their actions, then perhaps we could look at the precedent of purchasable DLC for Arma3. I am not trying to pile on the hate, I've been very clear about that on this thread, but it's the very existence of that purchasable DLC that had me create this thread. That and the logic of how to generate revenue from those who have already bought the game. Oooh, look at you and your obscure Dune references.. ;)

From the rain? Can you? I have to admit I had never tried, although when rain was first introduced it was something that I had said should be possible. It was met with a somewhat lukewarm reception though as I had extended it to then meaning all ground based water sources should in turn be infected - not many liked that idea at all. Still if you can refill the canteen from the rain I'd be happy. On a side note I don't think the water purification tablets work. I have drank straight from what would be stagnant pools in the mod and had no side effect so I'm guessing illness from infected water is not present - or it's not been "turned on".