Tatanko

I like having a character with 20+ hours under their belt where you've got everything you need to travel freely without the burden of needing to collect supplies all the time. I love, love, love exploring the map and doing random things in-game with my friends, and being a new character distracts from that because it refocuses all my energy on simply staying alive and looking for the next meal.

Right now, in the absence of formal motivation from the game itself and its developers to do anything specific or be driven in a particular direction, all we have is what we make of the game. We have been given a sandbox, and we all want to play in it a little differently. Personally, my group of friends is handling things in a very military-like fashion, but what each of us does in our solo time is entirely different. Instead of crying about how other people enjoy the game, get back to playing it yourself in your own way and enjoy it for what it is. I am quite thankful to have the opportunity to play around in this world and do as I please. Games like this, good ones, are few and far between. Some day, when the game is farther along and being released to the general public, you'll look back on days like this and tell crazy stories of people forming book clubs, creating hunting settlements, and having burlap sack boxing matches (look it up!).

I agree with this. Can anyone confirm how this is working now? It makes no sense that I would be unable to wear a ballistic helmet and a gas mask together... that's very reflective of reality.

Inland can be fun when you're fully geared if you've got areas to explore. The map is so huge that I'm always finding excuses to travel all over. This past weekend, two friends and I made a giant loop around the map and hit every major town, all 4 castles, etc. in one sitting (like 7 or 8 hours of play). We hardly went any place new besides the castles, but travelling together and going so many different places resulted in a lot of good stories :) The advantage of being geared is that we really didn't have to fear anyone or anything, nor did we need to worry about collecting supplies... we just stopped once in a while to rest, rehydrate, and eat and then we would move on. It was all about the experience, not what we were doing. Well, the town is fairly large and does have a lot of potential sources of loot according to the maps. Unfortunately I can't speak from experience because almost every time I've been there it was looted already.

True story. Real life military tactics in general pay off greatly in this game, particularly when you work as a group and everyone is on board with the system.

The concept of reading books in this game is fascinating to me. I haven't yet done it myself, but I really, really want to. The hard part is finding one I actually want to read, then finding the time to read it between the game's attempts to kill me :P Any books you guys would recommend I be on the look out for? I see them lying about everywhere I go, but I never think to even look at them let alone pick them up. Also, and I know I'll catch flack for asking, but is there a particular spot (or type of area?) that you guys generally go to get some peace and quiet for reading? I imagine one of the little islands would be great for that. EDIT: I happen to own a copy of Art of War in real life as well. I should break it out!

This is why I need to play in full servers more often with my friends. I never have epic encounters like this! All my adventures usually involve 2 or 3 other "randoms" at most.

This sounds like a trap by the OP, but thank you to everyone in this thread for giving me ideas of my own to use with my friends later :)

I saw a similar sign at each of the four castles on the map that read something like "Historical [somethingorother]" when I used the Google Translate app on my tablet to take a picture of it. I assumed it was a historical landmark in that case, but it's got different wording on it than this sign does.

I definitely think the OP had an ulterior motive :P I see people in Svetlo almost any time I go there, even if there are only like 10 people in the server. The towns toward the center of the map are more dead than anything. Pusta, Staroye, and Msta particularly.

As the sniper of my group, the Mosin is a no-brainer for me. I need that long range scope! For anyone who isn't a sniper though, it's hard to recommend the Mosin over the SKS unless you're like me and never find SKS ammo (for some reason).

I really only ever play the game as part of a small group, and we're generally very careful, so we have no problem making an attempt to be nice to people. It helps that we usually outnumber them and have the upper hand by default, but we also tend to approach them one at a time so that if one of us dies the others can immediately exact revenge and recover any stolen items to minimize the loss of the character. In other words, we take a very cautious and heavy-handed approach to being friendly. For the most part, it has protected us from harm at the hands of other players and we've also had a few rare moments where we have met some genuinely nice folks. No permanent additions to our group because we have trouble trusting outsiders, but friendly encounters do happen and without great risk if you're willing to make it happen :)

Me too! I haven't been playing the game for all that long (a few weeks now on and off), but one thing I'm happy about is that they're making guns a more scarce resource. As it is, I find way too many pistols around and ammo is relatively plentiful if you know where to look. Once they start curbing military-grade weapons and weapons in general, people will be more conservative about how they use their ammo and hopefully PvP encounters will require more strategy rather than he-who-shoots-first-wins.