pillock

Redcurrants, I'll give you. The berries in DayZ are clearly not strawberries or raspberries or grapes or tomatoes (which are in the game separately, in case you hadn't noticed.) Those are blackberries. The darker ones are BLUE, and they are very edible; the red ones are unripe, and not good for you. What on earth are you talking about?

There are both poisonous blue berries and edible red berries that resemble the ones in DayZ. But in general, there are more poisonous red types than blue ones. What I find strange about the berries in DayZ is that the former inhabitants seemed to enjoy deliberately filling their gardens with neat rows of the poisonous berries, while the edible red ones are more usually found growing wild. Anyway. The thermia conditions are a welcome addition, as far as I'm concerned - but I'd like to see side effects introduced (narrowing/blurring of vision, shivering affecting weapon aim, etc) and a lengthening of the time it takes you pass out/die from cold, so that you have to put up with said side effects over a period of time.

I think you'll find the correct expression is down the shitter. Otherwise it means something quite different.

Curiosity is a cowardly thieving double-crossing bastard. But you have to trust him sometimes or else you end up bored and alone forever.

From what I've seen of 0.49 so far, neither persistence nor loot respawn appears to be working - it's just server resets that repopulate the loot. This is just an observation on my part, but that's what my impression has been based on my experience.

I believe that they have said that paid-for DLCs are a no-no, because they don't want to 'fracture' the community into different sections that can't play together because of owning different content. Mods are another thing entirely, though.

You'll never know. It could have been a hacker, or it could have been a genuine player who you didn't see. It's not that unbelievable that you were both at Balota - after all, you chose to be there. No point in agonising over it, in my opinion. A death's a death's death. What I would be genuinely interested in knowing, however, is why you play on empty servers when you obviously enjoy the tactical/stealthy side of the gameplay. Doesn't this just remove any challenge and tension that you might otherwise have in full servers?

For me, this is the first patch where I've actually given up playing until the next one is released. Mostly this is because of the server crashes/restarts that occur within 10 minutes of joining. But I've also been getting massive FPS slowdown/freezes at random intervals, plus the odd character reset and naked Vibor spawn. If the stability issues are fixed this week, as I've heard talk of, then I might give it a bit more of a go; but to be honest, until persistence actually works there's not really much in the game to keep me interested in putting time into it at the moment, unfortunately. (Pink balaclavas, excepted, of course.)

This poll is about group sizes for the early stages of the game, yes? That's the phase where you are still hungry, cold and lacking decent gear? The thing with DayZ in its current form is that group size has very little bearing on this; what matters is where you spawn. If you're at Novod, Elektro or Cherno, it's a piece of piss to find food, clothing and equipment; if you're out in the sticks at Poxycoastalnowheregorsk, it's a bit more challenging. This says to me that come 1.0, all spawn points should be a significant distance from a major town - and with the inclusion of more stamina/fatigue/sickness mechanics, plus more zombies and dangerous animals, it should be made impossible (or very difficult) to survive a run there straight from your spawn. Being in a group makes it even easier in larger towns, because you can watch each-other's backs, pool bandages and loot faster. Being somewhere smaller, on the other hand, can make it harder, since the little food and clothing you find has to be shared between several needy survivors.

I'd go with "it disappeared". (that's what you meant, yeah?) Persistence doesn't seem to be working. I don't know about tents, because I haven't found one yet, but everything else I've dropped (including backpacks) has been vanishified upon a server restart/crash.

Yep. I'm currently carrying about 5 pairs of cargo pants, just for the extra storage you get. They're like Protector Cases, except that you find them everywhere. If it's a deliberate change to allow you to carry clothing with items in the pockets, then it's a very, very bad idea.

Yeah, it's pretty much unplayable. One of the crashes/restarts reset my character as well. Didn't Hicks say that 0.50 will be a hotfix? Hopefully it'll be soon, that being the case. I'm probably not going to bother playing again until there's some news on this. It's just not worth anyone's time.

In the Twitch stream that the Hicks chap did last week, he seemed to suggest that player-built structures would be very limited. From what I gathered, even log cabins are way beyond what's planned. There may not even be any 'building' at all - just barricading existing structures and putting up fences around your campsite. I totally agree with what you say about cutting down trees. Chopping down a tree with an axe is one of the most exhausting things you can do in DayZ's context - it should take some time, and once stamina is in the game, it should tire you out a lot.

It's not meant to be an "improvement" in terms of gameplay. It's just meant to add new features and mechanics. Creation of new bugs and problems is inevitable; fixing of existing bugs and problems is not a priority. Because it's a public access alpha, they will keep it playable; but actual "improvements" to the way it feels to play (as a game) are not really on the cards until next year.

It will allow them to release limited edition books. That's all I care about.

That's quite enough about your tip, thank you.

I wouldn't know about that. I thought we were talking about machetes?

Never had any complaints!

It's not the size that matters, but how you use it.

I was slightly disturbed by this particular sentence.

No, certainly not yet. But before v1.0, I hope! While we have server hopping, you can't effectively have permadeath. The two things are just not compatible. But things can be done, in time, to try and make character deaths more of a blow to the player than they are now, for sure.

The game looks nicer on 3rd Person view. I quite enjoy just walking around in the sunshine admiring the scenery (with me and my stuff in it). Perhaps if they made the inventory system more visceral, so you had to remove you backpack and look inside to access stuff, and hold items up in front of yourself and look at them in order to examine/inspect them or carry out actions (rather than doing it through a clunky inventory menu), then it'd give first person view a greater appeal?

Right. There's several aspects that could/will go a long way towards solving the trivialisation of permadeath. These are some: (of them) - Dangerous animals. You spawn in after death and b-line towards the nearest military base? Get attacked by wolves or a bear. No weapon = no defence + can't outrun them = dead. Start again. - Character progression through physical fitness. Fresh spawns could be made weak and feeble, low stamina, low sickness resistance, slow injury recovery, low hunger/thirst/cold/heat tolerance. You might then build up on all these things over time by carefully managing the health and well-being of your character. Death = start again with a shitty newspawn character. - More debilitating effects, slower death. Dying of 'natural' causes (ie. not murdered) should take longer, but have a significantly drawn-out process of increasingly debilitating effects on your character. This helps slow the game down a bit, and adds variation to the experience (rather than just having hunger/thirst/sickness/thermia as ticking clocks towards unconsciousness). As your condition gets worse, so does your character's performance. If you manage to survive the ordeal and recover properly, you could be rewarded with better tolerance of that condition. -General slowdown of movement speed. If you want to go from the East to the West, it should you take a long time (on foot). You should need to prepare for the expedition. You should need to collect supplies, specific to that journey. Travel light and fast, or slow and better-prepared for mishap? Slower pace means greater opportunity for the unexpected to happen: more decisions to make, more variation, more replay value. - Server lock-out after death. Maybe 24 hours? So you have to change servers (unless you rent it yourself) and start again in a new world of unfamiliar player and loot locations. (This would help mitigate "regearing" from your own corpse or your loot stash.) Some of these things are already planned, I think (at least to some extent) - some are just suggestions. But that's what springs to my mind reading this thread.

I want a bigger version, too. Mostly so's I can wear bandana cap + striped T-shirt + short canvass pants and hang around Riffy pretending to be a pirate with a cutlass. The sawn-off mosin looks a bit like a pirate pistol, but you need to be able to hold it one-handed for the right effect.

Pens should stack like bullets do. and paper should. Weight & volume would be far better, but the grid is ok, just about. There's a new UI in the works, anyway (or there will be once the new renderer is in, or something). The craziest thing is how you can put pitchforks inside backbacks, when visually they're clearly at least twice as long as the backpack itself.