pillock

Think about it: You trespass in abandoned buildings; you go camping and build bases out in the woods; you play games of "goodies against baddies" with pretend guns; you make fires and put random stuff in it to see what will burn; you kill or maim defenceless wild animals; you catch fish with improvised fishing rods... It's basically a digital version of what 10 year-old boys do in the summer holidays.

Kind of a "Woodland Ninja" look.

I guess my concern stems from the timing element of it. It irks me that it only takes about 5 seconds to chop down a massive tree with a fire axe, for example. And I'm worried that overly-accelerated crop harvesting will further detract from authenticity. In a scenario where I'd have thought mobility would be of prime importance, in order to escape bandit attack or roving zombie hoards, would people really faff about trying to grow spuds? The time and energy investment is quite high when you're growing food, and doesn't really happen in reality unless you have a stable society to support it. And I don't think of Chernarus as a particularly suitable place to be setting up a long-term home.

Well, I think of DayZ as more of a hand-to-mouth scenario. You're scavenging the leftovers of society just to get by another day. Once you start investing time and energy into setting up horticulture you're re-establishing civilisation, and I think that removes us too much from the apocalyptic setting. It becomes less "survival" and more "settlers".

I always thought this was a bit of a strange idea for DayZ. I guess I'll reserve judgment til I've seen it working, but I'm not convinced the concept really fits the scenario.

It sounds like the new town north-east of Novo - begins with K. The big red barn full of hay bales, overlooked by rock formations, the military building down the road, near the coast.

Yes, it is!

Hopefully they can get 100 up and running on stable before all that much longer. Then we can all see how it works out for a while. On the face of it, it doesn't sound too many to me - I'd like to see if 150 would work if that's possible from a technical standpoint.

Epilogue: 7.) Logged into the official forum to discuss the game with the community. Received nothing but sarcasm and vitriol in return. Logged out in disappointment?

Maybe DayZ should stream commercials on to the "You are unconscious" screen? Y'know, give you something to look at while you wait?

Did these things all happen one after the other?

Ok, fine. Agreed. But it can still make your in-game character be unconscious without allowing you to end its life and respawn, and such a feature might be said to add to the feeling of realism in the game.

If you can't spot the obvious flaw in that argument, then it's barely worth trying to persuade you of anything. But just in case you're being deliberately obtuse, the word "Alpha" covers all your points except for zombies - and even in their case, you can still have a somewhat believably authentic world (in which unconsciousness is a thing) with the addition of fictional elements such as zombies.

"Oi! Hold still! I want to look you in the eye! Right. Ok, thanks." BANG

Snipers make the game interesting. Especially Novo, which is surrounded by near-perfect sniping spots, in a highly populated server it really makes going into the city to loot it dangerous. And that's how it should be. It might be "cowardly", but it's effective and it keeps people on their toes in high-loot areas.

Have you still got them?

I don't think walkie talkies are functioning at the moment. But the best place to find batteries is near to where bambies spawn and dump their jeans/torches.

I actually think it should take much, much longer to cut down trees, and damage the axe more than it does. It should also be really noisy, and when stamina is a thing it should completely tire out your character. Cutting down a substantial tree with an axe is fucking knackering. Perhaps later they will introduce dedicated whetstones to sharpen your axes/knives to better levels? That would balance well with standard 'stones' only giving a minor benefit.

If the melee hit detection is fixed in Experimental then that's good to know - whether it makes into the hotfix (just using the dev's words) for Stable this week is another matter, I guess, but I'm not having too many problems using my pistol to take out zombies for the moment.

Could be a zombie that you didn't see?

Ideally, your character's life would be worth waiting out unconsciousness for. Maybe someone will find you and patch you up; maybe you'll just regain consciousness and be able to carry on. The problem is inextricably linked to the character health mechanics, and how they effect the your gameplay. Currently, they don't affect anything very much - loot, instead, is the important measure of progression - and consequently, there is no benefit to be had in keeping yourself alive if your kit's been robbed. In the long term, this has to change. The only way to get people to value their character's life over the loot they've collected is to give some level of progression to your character's physical ability. If a long-lived character gave significant advantages in actual gameplay terms over a new spawn character, then people would be more willing to do things like wait out unconsciousness (and possibly try harder not to get into situations that render them unconscious in the first place).

I don't know. The game can't stop you from logging out, can it? That would be ridiculous. Once you've logged off a server your spot might be taken by somebody else, and then you might find that the server's full and you can't play at all because your character's stuck in that server. Given that the game currently allows you to log off and swap servers at any time while you are alive, I don't think being unconscious should be any different - you are still alive when you are unconscious.

I think it should be like this: If you are unconscious, you cannot respawn. You can log out and swap servers, but when you log in you will still be unconscious. When you are unconscious you drop all your gear: if you wake up in the same server you fell unconscious, you can gather up what gear hasn't been stolen and move on; if you log, you'll wake up naked.

The hotfix they announced for this week is to activate the persistent storage and loot items. I haven't seen anything to suggest that there will be a fix for the melee combat. But I could be wrong. I also haven't seen anything to suggest that the hotfix will be out today.

Binoculars! Where the fuck?