rickyriot

I genuinely hope that BI do not put out a paid DLC for DayZ, certainly not at present anyway. Even if it added lots of content in, I feel the vanilla game should deliver on it's "promises" first before dealing with any paid content.

I don't think @op has played the mod. Carrying a rotor blade for hours across the map to fix your heli was a rite of passage for many. Trying to actually fly the bugger without hitting the ground or the buildings while your passengers scream over teamspeak. Yup, another rite of passage. In fact the very things @op has detailed as being negatives are the very things that endeared aircraft to the DayZ community! My only issue regarding helicopters is the map boundaries and how to handle them while keeping a level of immersion, that applies to other vehicles too. In the mod you could effectively fly off the map and keep going until you got bored and the landscape below you would repeat (just plain texture like it is now, if I remember correctly).

* bump * Has the way you manage what is in your hands changed? I've not played the game for a few weeks but now it seems I cannot swap between weapons with a single key. Let me explain: Previously if I had a melee weapon in slot one and a pistol in slot 2, if there is enough room in my inventory I can simply swap between these items by pressing the relevant slot key. So if I am holding the melee, pressing [2] would remove the melee and replace it with the pistol. Now, it seems that you need to manually remove the item from your hand, then select a new one. So instead of just hitting [2], I now need to check what weapon is selected, what slot key is assigned to it, then hit that key, then hit the [2]. This, for me at least, is just adding an extra step that is not needed. I appreciate the nod towards realism, but the vast majority of times when you need to swap to a weapon you are likely to be holding a weapon already - not sure about you but I never wander around without some form of weapon in my hand. Realism, if this is the reason for this mechanic's introduction, is not improved by making it awkward to swap weapons. I'm all for making other things far more complex but not weapon swapping, that is the key element of keeping you alive.

Ah... inventory management. Ok, so I had a pistol, a knife, a shotgun and a rifle amongst other items and I had a mountain backpack in order to store all this loveliness. I had hotkeyed all the items. My problem is that when swapping between two items, say for example the knife and the shotgun (both contained in the backpack) the game seems to choose the first possible location for the item to be stored rather than either the best or the last slots it occupied. This can lead to "weapon locking" as the game places your knife into a set of slots that stops the long barrelled item being stored despite there being another set of slots that the knife could take up which wouldn't block the shotgun being stored in the backpack. I'm not sure if I've described this that well, but people who have encountered the issue (and I would expect just about everyone has) will know what I'm meaning. There is a side issue here in regard to having two long barrelled weapons. Let's say for example the rifle is on my back, the shotgun in my backpack. When I take the rifle into my hands, then swap to say a knife, then to the rifle, there is no guarantee that the shotgun will remain in my backpack in fact on many occasions it will shift to my back. Now functionally that's not an issue, but we all know that visually it's a big difference. If you wanted to hide your rifle, for example, you can't guarantee it won't appear on your back rather than your backpack. On another side note, I personally think you should be able to store long barrelled weapons in the backpack but you shouldn't be able to take it to your hands as easily as the one on your back. If we are going for realism my suggestion would be to take the backpack into your hands first (or lay it on the ground). For me, running along and taking a long weapon from a bag on your back without breaking stride lacks realism and breaks immersion. One final thing, could I just say well done on the improvement of the UI. Finally we can tell the difference between ammo without squinting at it. A revamp of the UI has been needed for ages and it's a very welcome change.

I suppose the devs will point to the current state (and as it is it does look, sound and play very well) and say "that's why we had to change the engine". It's certainly frustrating from a player point of view seeing what seemed like a massive step back, although as a programmer I can see the justifications. I've held the position that BI had missed the boat somewhat with the "backwards steps" although, to be fair, playing though 1.02 there is still a hook for me so perhaps people will rejoin the community as features are added. Especially if the console version(s) gain some traction. My main concern just now is the classic phrase "scratch the surface and all you find is more surface".

Yeah, I don't think anyone was fooled by the "1.0" label. Base building is pretty far down the list for me in regard to stuff I'd like to see done. More survival; such as hunting, fishing, farming would be one major element along with making zombies an actual threat. Base building would only be useful to me, as a solo player, as a way to persist your gear after death. The idea of big grand compounds as shown in some of the teaser pics really isn't relevant to my style of game. That said, I remember DayZ struggling to get over 30fps in Cherno, with a clunky UI and poor graphics and sound environment. It's certainly better now, I just wish there wasn't so much missing as it is now.

Are locks of any value? I get that we are nowhere near a 1.0 release (regardless what it says on the tin) but I've always assumed they are no deterrent what so ever. That said I've done no base building, and as a solo player it will probably be some time before I do as I guess BI will be working on the large showy bases first then the less snazzy but ultimately more useful one person base.

Except that doesn't solve the whole problem, it only mitigates it to an extent. The reason it doesn't solve it is that when you put away (rather than swap) an item you are not guaranteed the item will go into the slot it came from. We need that sort of certainty. What's more in terms of immersion you would actively choose where in a backpack (or clothing) you would place the item if storing it in real life. I might give the "remove then select" rather than "just swap" option a try until this gets resolved, but it definitely needs looking into.

Thing is, I believe it would be a fairly easy fix and I can think of two obvious methods. The first would be the simplest. Just remember the slots the item came from and when swapping it from your hands it knows where it's going. Obviously if you pick up stuff, filling those slots, then you'll be blocked like before, but then I'm not looking for a silver bullet rather a level of certainty that I can then plan around. Another solution would be to allow you right click an item in the inventory and select "store here" (or similar) which would then force the item back to that location (perhaps even shuffling other items to fit) when you empty your hands. You could even represent the location in your inventory via a dotted red line around the area the item would be returned to. I'd extend this so that when you picked items up they would actively avoid the slots you had already identified as "store here".

I found an olga that was missing several parts, one of them being the radiator. I found that at a nearby garage but every attempt to put it into the slot failed. At best it would simply put it into the vehicle's storage. Am I doing something wrong? I take the item, drag it over the radiator icon (that has a circle/stripe over it to signify it's not already present) but the outline of the radiator stays red. I could take wheels on and off using the same technique but not the radiator - which was in pristine condition.

I'm trying my best to like DayZ in it's current form. Many things are going for it but also many against and I've now wasted 10+ hours of gameplay due to game breaking bugs or unexpected results. To be fair the unexpected results could be filed under "stuff I should have known", but to say it's not endearing the game to me is an understatement. This time I got punched out by a zombie. I had full health and full blood, no cuts and was using an axe to defend myself. The zombie aggro'd then ran towards me, I raised my axe, swung and got a hit but at the same time the zombie hit me too. Ok, that seems fair enough, but the result of the hit from the zombie put me unconscious while my axe to their head did absolutely nothing to impair it's movement or attacks. Now don't get me wrong, I want a hard game, I wish for zombies to be rock hard*, my question is whether what I experienced is genuinely how people expect the game to work? If it is? C'est la vie, I'll just deal with it, but in the scenario I just described does it seem right? * I also want melee to be a solid and enjoyable part of the game, perhaps even key, but I've been asking for that for years and it's never arrived and I doubt it ever will.

Dayz is online. Sure there is an offline testing mode, but essentially you need other players to make the game worth playing - unless something happens to the zombies to make them a credible and frequent threat. This is a screenshot of my server browser. It was taken less than an hour ago. I am based in the UK so the lowest IPs will be UK/EU based. I may be wrong here, but the weekend will see the highest player count and certainly at Sunday midday you'd expect a reasonable number of players. If the above does not zoom for you, use this url: https://i.imgur.com/peym2O4.jpg That is 5 pages of servers. My filters are set to show everything - even though I only play 1PP which in turn reduces further the number of populated servers available to me. To be fair there are several locked/passworded servers listed. I would have removed them but while there is a "show/hide passworded servers" option it doesn't work - or at least not for me. Bottom line? Online games need online players. There are no players, or at least very few, so I ask again the title topic: At what point do we consider DayZ dead online?

I don't think there is anyone here who doesn't like DayZ, any disparaging comments tend to be borne from frustration than dislike, but the second part of your comment is obviously good news. I genuinely think there is an audience for the game, but it needs to match what people want (and what is offered by other games). Ultimately developers don't work for free and I say that as a dev (albeit in a different sector), as adults we have to accept the financial realities of things and if the product is not selling then there is no income. Merchandise can help with that, and DayZ has branding that has remained strong despite the age of the title, but it can't cover over the cracks. To me, fairly empty servers suggests that people are not buying the game because they are not playing the game. You might have had a bump in December due to 1.0 but even that across the whole year and I can't imagine it's enough to sustain the title. Consoles are a different revenue stream and I have to say I have no insight into the numbers on those platforms. Out of interest, and in regard to the "virality" comment, do you feel that the way 1.0 was framed was perhaps not ideal? You look at the stats and a lot of people "came back" to test it but those have dropped off somewhat and I feel (although only conjecture) it's the divide between expectation and delivery that has seen that drop.

I'd say most agree with you on the exact way beta/1.0 has been framed.

Tell you what though, if you want doom and gloom, I've often held up Miscreated as a game that if it just made some serious jumps forward it could match much of what most of us want from DayZ. Within the last 6 months or so they've improved quite a lot, added dynamic weather including a rather nifty snow effect and updated the UI yet have a look at the stats compared to DayZ... https://steamcharts.com/cmp/221100,299740#All DayZ in green, Miscreated in blue.

Setting aside the overly dramatic nonsense, which nobody has suggested, your point has some validity - there are more servers so in essence that will spread out the player base. I think it's fair to assume that the weekend will be "peak users" and that lunchtime on a Sunday would in itself be one of the most active times within peak. It might very well be the case that some of these servers need consolidated a little, fewer servers but a higher user count overall. I have a hunch that you might have interpreted my OP as being one calling the game dead online, when I was more querying at what point do we make that general call. No game really "dies" of course, that's a judgement call rather than a literal one. Yeah, the hype train never really set up a regular service. It's not all bad of course, looking at the overall stats: https://steamcharts.com/app/221100#All It's noticeable that the ~30k users they managed for the 1.0 release shows there is still some interest in the title. The way it trailed massively off is telling though - even if it's now almost double what it was 6 months beforehand.

It's a fair point to raise. I'd counter that my first post is subjective. Those are the servers I see and the pings I get. I don't mind playing on foreign servers, it just needs to be a decent ping to do so. The second post with the link to the Steam stats is probably a fairer judge of player-base. As far as I am aware those are global, but I could be wrong.

Ah, now, I suppose I should have included the Xbox and PS4 versions into this mix. Apologies for being so "master-race" about it! I'm guessing if Bohemia can make money from the consoles perhaps there is still a motivation to continue to support the title.

Out of interest are they meaning official or community? I used to play on the official UK servers, some of which used to be 1PP (or at least I thought so) but now there is not one that is. If it's the case of reducing the official servers then job done as far as I am concerned as there is no decent official 1PP server within a decent ping range of the UK. There are two NL ones, but their ping is normally 75+ As for community, I'm not sure Bohemia would want to restrict the number of those. Hiring and maintaining a community server is clearly an act of someone engaged with the game and to restrict that would be counter intuitive.

More stats, this time from Steam, showing the number of players: https://steamcharts.com/app/221100 I'm not sure what anyone's guess would be, but I'm going to assume those figures don't match it. Don't get me wrong I wish it was not the case, and you could make a case that there was a spike in December when 1.0 was released but it's fallen by over 2/3rds since then - albeit there are more players in Feb than there were in over a year stretching back from before 1.0 was released. The sad and obvious reality is that it's a bit of a death spiral; less people playing > more empty servers > less people wanting to play > less people playing > more empty servers > etc, etc... Edited to add one other thought. Considering the number of players will generally dictate the sales of the game, and sales of the game go towards paying Bohemia staff just how long is it financially viable to support/develop the game? Aside from the finances the vast majority of people in the forum bought the game as EA, now we have 1.0 that's effectively the "promise" complete. There is now no longer an "ethical" reason to continue supporting the game.

Are we talking in real life here? If so I could explain both the logic and physics of why you would want to hit an oncoming opponent rather than dodge them. As for in game? There are probably several successful strategies, and as I say the one I was employing before was fairly successful barring the odd hit. I think we'll both agree that the melee combat is some way off from being fluid and it's only then will we have a true picture of how to interact with the zombies.

Apologies in taking so long to reply to this. I was unable to capture the one-hit knockout, but the fact that others have reported it is good - it means it's not just me and that it will get worked on at some time. In terms of behaviour, I'm well aware of just how difficult and complex coding the AI is. Many things have unexpected outcomes. I'm glad you don't think what happened should happen in general although I will fully accept that ultimately you do need RNG within the system and that RNG can sometimes lead to harsh outcomes. Is it possible to one punch someone unconscious? Of course it is. Could it be I was just unlucky in this instance? Extra unlucky considering I had full health. I take on board your comments, but up until now I've been managing to time my swing (whether weapon or just my fists) as they come at me. They'll get a little knocked back allowing me to engage in melee. I don't mind taking the odd hit, albeit close melee doesn't feel like anything except spamming the hit button and hoping for the best, but in general that one or two hits they get do nothing more than damage my clothing or perhaps cut me. Just wasn't really expecting a full out knock down. As for your "think about it" comment, in real life if someone bum-rushes you then the odds are far more in your favour if you do take that risk and hit them first rather than dodging. I understand why you'd think otherwise but it doesn't actually get borne out in real situations. That said, I appreciate you were only mentioning it as an analogy, and in the game perhaps you are right.

For me, as a solo player, the only reason to base build is to have somewhere to stash items. Repairing cars is just a means to an end. I certainly don't want to create some sort of fortified base or a car pool of vehicles.

They were a great idea but in the grand scheme of things, I'd be more concerned they turn their attention to the many things missing that actually affect the game. No harm in asking for an update of course, not at all, but I'd be worried if this was in any way a priority.

Ta. Seems obvious when you think of it. I see a small update dropped, perhaps that's solved it.