pillock

Ditch the military shit is my advice. The only things you actually need are rags (for bandaging and making splints if necessary) and something to open cans with. If you've got those two basic items, you don't need to worry about the game killing you - you only need to worry about other players. If your intention is to interact with other players on friendly terms, then you're much better off NOT looking like a commando. And you really don't need to carry very much. You've got your can-opening tool and some rags: a compass is useful if you don't know your way around yet, and binoculars will enable you to to check out towns from a distance. Carry a gun for emergencies, by all means, but bare in mind that if someone sees you before you see them, a visible firearm is used by many people as justification for shooting on sight. You don't need to carry food or water ever (unless you want to give it to people you meet) because you can find it everywhere - and you don't need loads of ammo for guns that you don't have or any medical supplies. As a general rule, the less military you look and the less high-end gear you appear to have, the more chance you have of friendly interactions.

It doesn't look like tents are going to be a requirement for persistent storage. But anyway.

That's fair enough comment. And although Chernarus isn't a desert, I guess it's still likely that animals would venture into deserted towns. But for the game to restrict their presence to only within close proximity of towns seems a bit bizarre to me, given all the suitable (and quieter) habitat available in the playable area. I also think the fact that players and zombies can run down wild animals and batter them to death needs fixing - you would NEVER get close enough to a deer or a rabbit to do this, and a boar would probably go aggressive and batter you to death if you threatened it.

Surely that should be not within 1000m of towns? Deer an boar don't tend to come close to human habitation if they can avoid it. But yeah, I saw a zombie chasing an animal just outside Lopatino earlier today. Didn't see what it was, but the zombie caught it and beat the shit out of it before it spotted me from 100 miles away behind a bush.

Careful your knees don't jerk themselves loose from the rest of your leg, chaps.

I think people are overreacting to this global restriction on certain items. We don't know how rare these items are going to be yet - it's likely that the devs don't even know yet. Part of the development process will be balancing this rarity, and our feedback will surely be taken into account? I find it very unlikely that they'll go with ratios like 100 items to 1,000,000 players on anything, because that would be detrimental to the game. Having global control over item count allows the developers to maintain the rarity balance over time, and this should be a good thing.

I perhaps didn't mean to sound so dismissive as it turned out, so apologies for that. But my main objection to this idea is the very concept of the game defining players as 'heroes' or as 'bandits'. I don't see myself as either of those things, and I don't agree that such a distinction should be made at all. To me, we're just survivors in a scenario: we can do whatever we want because, in an apocalypse, there is no authority to pass judgment over our actions. We have to judge another player's trustworthiness according to how they behave and from their voice. For the game to make this judgment for us would be fake, as far as I see it, and I don't see how the game could possibly depict facial expressions or body language clues accurately without first deciding by some artificial mechanic whether we are 'good' or 'bad'.

Sorry, but I think you just have to accept the limits of the available technology on this issue. The game cannot simulate realistic perceptions of other people's body language or nervous ticks - it's just too much to ask. Without some arbitrary - and in my view detrimental and pointless - definition of what a 'bandit' or a 'hero' actually is, the whole concept of identifying players' 'humanity' is doomed anyway. Just forget about it and move on, I reckon. "Without some way to identify bandits from heroes, everybody will KoS"? Don't agree there's much truth in that, personally, and wouldn't see it as a problem even if there were.

igor-vk done a wee-wee in it.

When I'm a fresh spawn, I want there to be people hiding in the woods taking pot shots at me - if there aren't, then there's no tension and the game is too easy and no fun. If we aren't forced to be paranoid about a constant unseen threat (snipers), then DayZ is not really worth playing. The only people I will always take a shot at are bambis who sprint around in the open, seemingly without a care in the world - these people deserve to be shot. They need to learn that Chernarus is a dangerous place. I want Chernarus to be a dangerous place to be, and it's up to us players to provide that danger because the game mechanics sure as shit don't do it yet. Sniping bambis is a necessary evil - nay, an obligation - that all geared players should participate in.

I will play both, more or less equally, as I do now. I don't really distinguish between them in terms of playstyle; I just like being able to have two characters on the go at once - ideally I'd like to have more available.

Later in development, there won't be glitched ladders or bugged zombies. You're looking for the solution in the wrong place.

Why would it increase server hopping? You would have just as much chance finding the rare item in the server you are currently in as in any other server that you hopped to. Plus, you wouldn't know when the item limit was reached, so it'd be pointless to just keep hopping forever. If there is a "rumour" that so-and-so player has such-and-such item on this-or-that server, I don't really see, either, how this could create "storytelling" or "lore". That player could join any one of thousands of servers when they next log in? How the hell would you ever track them down? And what sort of idiot is ever going to risk leaving an ultra-rare item in their lootable persistent storage?

Easy solution: Lock people off the server they died on for an hour or two. (Exception: server owners on their own server.) This solves suiciding for a better spawn, it solves the running back to your corpse to regear; it solves players unfairly rejoining a gunfight they've been eliminated from; it makes permadeath mean more, since you wouldn't know the whereabouts of specific gear and other players when spawning post-death. You'd still be able to play with your friends after you'd died, because they could just switch to the new server you'd joined.

Didn't any of you know that you can collect fat from dead animals, heat it in a pan over a fire, then use it to grease up the rungs of ladders? The OP was assassinated by a cunning player who was doubtless waiting nearby for hapless victims such as Archer0n.

It's pretty much the same, mate. All they've added is jet-packs and underground base building. Apart from that, it's all the same.

I think it's probably outside the realm of reality to think that there wouldn't be.

Agreed. I also think cutting down trees should take it's toll on your character. Cutting down a sizeable tree with an axe is fucking exhausting, especially if you're under-nourished, and very, very time-consuming - not to mention extremely noisey. I'd also like to see stuff like broken axe-handles, further down the line. Lumberjacking ought to be difficult and risky.

I think it's probably true that "the majority" of the DayZ community "doesn't care" about different gun calibres. But this is probably because that majority has pretty much zero knowledge of using guns. I am one of them: I don't care. I certainly wouldn't miss these kind of details if they were left out, because I didn't know about them in the first place. However, I'm not going to complain if they do make it more complicated, and more difficult to use and maintain weapons - I think it would probably enhance the experience, overall - and this is from the PoV of someone who certainly regards himself as a "casual" player. Guns that degrade, get damaged, and need constant care and attention to keep in working order sound great to me, and if ammo is difficult to match with your gun, then all the better. Having said that, I don't regard DayZ as being all about the guns. Accordingly, IF they put these sorts of details into the fire-arms mechanics, I think they should certainly give at least if not more than equal weight to things like character health, driving and vehicle maintenance mechanics, crafting and so on. These things are all far more important to me in terms of the overall experience, and far more relevant to most people's general knowledge and to the survival scenario.

My hope is that all vehicles will eventually be highly customisable - so if they include big fuck-off military machine guns, you could mount them on to a make-shift gun turret you've built in the back of your Lada, or whatever. If they include aircraft, then the same rules should apply: if you have the materials and the tools to fix a gun to it, fine. But we can definitely do without any sort of useable military vehicles. Oh, and if the average-joe survivor comes across a working helicopter and they try to steal it, this should happen:

No to a specific log-in sound - but as soon as you start moving or adjusting your inventory in any way, you should make some noise that people in your immediate proximity can hear. Perhaps you could reduce your noise-making by crouch-walking and/or removing your shoes.

Leaving aside the fact that the above is complete bollocks, I'm pretty sure shops were invented longer ago than 50 years. I mean, there simply aren't enough amenities in Cherno to service the population, especially if all those flats were occupied.

In that case, what's communism got to do with anything?

Is the game actually set in the 80s?

Still, there aren't enough shops.