pillock

Footsteps need to be louder. If someone's running down the street, you can hear them a hundred yards off. And it's very difficult to run through a forest quietly, too. Heart pounding when your shock level is high or you've been running. Once the cold and wet actually have an effect on your character, it might be cool to have random sneezing?

I've never seen one in my 150 hours. I'm beginning to believe that talking about them on the forum is a running joke about an item that doesn't exist.

I thought this thread was about how you wished you'd never had children.

I agree completely with the general sentiment of your essay, I think. However: Having laggy, unresponsive controls is not the way to achieve human-like reaction times - it's just annoying - but player movement in general does need to be slowed right down. The ability to change direction so quickly on the run is especially unrealistic, frustrating and problematic. Melee fights are a complete farce. With the introduction of ragdoll physics, we need realistic momentum. And I don't agree that weapon complexity is more important than the complexity of the health system. At all. I am the absolute polar opposite of this view. I want the guns to be effective and believable, but I highly doubt that anything approaching a majority of DayZ players have any real experience of firearms whatsoever - whereas we all have a lot of experience of things like fatigue, illness and injury. The health mechanics are something we can all relate to from real-world experience, and I'd like to see them take centre-stage in our decisions in-game, personally. This is what can set DayZ apart from the arcade shooters it will be competing with.

I had 7 pristine copies of Hamlet. Was thinking of starting a players' company. ...until some fucker axed me in Svelto.

Is the entire uselessness of bats, machetes, crowbars, shovels, hammers, spanners and pipe-wrenches also a bug? Or is that just wonky thinking on the part of the person who decided the melee damage values? Edit: Screwdrivers, kitchen knives, bayonets... fire extinguishers... did I leave any out?

Does anyone else think that it's more than a little bit stupid how taking a bullet sometimes has no significant effect? I'm no weapons expert, but I feel like I'm playing an arcade shoot-em-up from the '90s where you had "health" points, and could afford to just soak up hits and then replenish later by finding health pick-ups. And the Sporter is a total joke - what is it, an air rifle? A bullet - any bullet - does you serious, lasting damage if it hits you, surely? Even a flesh wound would require treatment and hamper your mobility while healing?

Another unjustified, unjustifiable murder. The world is full of bastards. I do despair.

To the dead guy, it doesn't matter if you were following a "code". All they know is that they got killed on sight. My month-and-a-bit-old character got one-hit dead by a zombie the other day, so I took the opportunity to spend some time in Berezino and Svetlo as a visibly low-gear character and see what interactions I could get. It was just KoS after KoS after KoS after KoS. Pretty disheartening. Were these people following a code? I don't know. The conclusion I got was that most players are anti-social cunts. So I went and rounded up a group zombies and played with them instead. It was nice rolling with a group I could trust not to kill me.

I know it is, at the moment. But it's got to be the goal, surely, to increase player capacity on all servers in the long run? Otherwise why would it even be in experimental?

Svetlo is a good spawn. Lots to see and do and find there. Lots of people there, hiding behind the door of the upstairs room of the piano houses, with their axe drawn, waiting. Bastard. If you want to play with your friends in a group, the objective should be to keep each other alive. I'm in favour of forcing people to change servers when they die so they have to start from scratch properly. Lock them out of their 'death' server for an hour or so. Your friends can swap servers if they want to carry on playing with you - but you shouldn't be able to re-gear off of your own corpse or rejoin a gunfight you've already been eliminated from. New life should mean new server, new loot positions, new players whose locations you don't have prior knowledge of. Stop chucking your life away and start playing the game properly. Edit: I'm hoping that this is somehow worked into the scenario, so you discover clues as to the "what happened" as you go through the survival experience. Encourage people to follow a trail of information, perhaps, that will take them to different places and find new things and new clues. This wouldn't be an over-arching "objective" of the game - just something you could get into if you wanted.

I've not played experimental, but I'm excited by the prospect of 100-player servers making it to stable branch - whenever that may be. With 30 or 40 people in Chernarus, it's much, much too easy to gear up. There is loot everywhere. There is no threat of starvation. There are guns everywhere. You have ammo coming out of your ears. There are pristine red woolen coats lying about in tin sheds (how did that get there?). And if you move inland, you never meet a soul, and you have large, high-loot towns to pick over all to yourself. More players per server please. Yes.

How about, if you use 3rd party comms, the game gives your character dysentery?

Fair enough. I wasn't thinking beyond that for the simple reason that I don't have the technical knowledge to do so! But you are the first person to give a legitimate reason as to why it would not be preferable. "People could get around it" is not a legitimate reason.

Aaaaand the flashlight goes to...

I think the point about the crowbar is valid. There is a certain threshold above which it doesn't really matter what you hit someone with - it's lights out regardless. This applies to axes, crowbars, bats, pipe wrenches and probably shovels too. An axe is more likely to kill you outright, but it's a bit silly that we're able to take multiple hits from the others without it really affecting us much - especially given how powerful fists are. I mean, even holding a spanner or a screw-driver in-hand should be more effective than using your bare fists.

The idea is to remove the option for push-to-talk for DayZ's direct chat. You either have it locked always on, or locked off because you've disabled it. And you take your choice. I think it'd be better.

I don't see a downside of locking in-game proximity chat open. I really don't. If you're using 3rd party software for your comms, then you still can - it's just that people in your close proximity in game will also hear you. This makes the game fairer and more realistic. And what's wrong with that? If you want to maintain a private, outside-of-game conversation, you could mute the in-game comms altogether by selecting a different input device in the settings to the one you're using for your 3rd-party software - but you'd lose the ability to use in-game direct chat at all if you do this, and that'd be your choice. You could still use the text chat, though.

Why not lock proximity chat open? If the missus starts talking to you about your hemorrhoid cream in the background, you could mute the mic altogether!

I don't see why there would be an uproar? For locking proximity chat open? Why? It would make the game more realistic - if you're talking, people around you can hear you. Ok, so there are ways to work-around it, like selecting separate input devices, but not everybody would do that. Locking proximity chat open would at least get the message across that 3rd-party VOIP is regarded as an exploit. Or is that not the case? And if so, why even have in-game comms at all?

Walkie talkies are slightly less common than excrement from a rockinghorse.

I have a magnum inside a holster inside a protector case inside my backpack. And I can access it in the blink of an eye by pressing "5". It feels like a cheat.

Character movement speed. Changing direction on the run is hilariously fast - hopefully we can get some realistic momentum in the new physics; plus stamina effects want adding asap. I think the whole game could do with a big slowing of pace in general.

Who's Lee?

I get what you're saying, but I still quite like the map pieces. Some I've found are quarter-sections of the whole, some are half. Yet to find a complete one, but they might exist? I think it works quite well. You do get localised maps in reality - I don't know what you mean about that. But I agree they should be in cyrillic. Think about this: if you're new to the game (and haven't discovered the on-line maps), you might find a map of SW Chernarus, for example. You don't know where you are, but decide you'd rather be somewhere you have a map for, so you head SW if you have a compass, or you could follow the coast, checking town names as you go until you reach one that's on your map. It adds a different dynamic, and encourages new players to explore.