pillock

Literally

turn your jog-mode on. use the side-step keys. dont try to escape them, or to fight them: just dodge the lunges, run circles around them. after a while, you'll realise that you don't really even need the jog-mode on. You just avoid them. after that, you'll be able to pretty much ignore them from now on. you can carry on looting with a group of 5 or 6 flailing uselessly about you. they can be a pain in the arse if you're in a gunfight, but a bit of random-direction sprinting usually gets rid of them, I find. the zombies are a fucking joke, an insult to the rest of the game. But they will get better - they must get better

I found a Sporter .22 yesterday! With a magazine and 18/30 rounds already in! And 3 loose rounds next to it! Someone obviously left it there for me to find out of the kindness of their heart (or maybe they got fucked off with it and just ditched it). Anyway, in trying to insert the spare bullets into the magazine, I had to detach it - and it disappeared through the fucking floor. I was so angry that I jumped to my death off the nearest bridge.

The zombies are not worth their place in the game right now. I find the best policy if you aggro a zombie is just to continue about your business. They don't hit you as long as you keep moving and aren't really careless. It's not worth fighting them while the melee damage values are so fucked up, and it's not worth wasting ammo on them, given the instant respawn. Looking forward to improvements! The sooner the better!

I think I might try this. I don't even like gum.

It's not worse than the .22, surely? That thing is slightly less dangerous than an air rifle.

Yes. All they have to do is open up the .txt file where they have the code, type in "fix zombies" and "add vehicles", then release the code into the internet. Then we'll all be be playing a much better game. Why don't they just do that?

It won't be stagnant forever, but it does feel so right now. It seems like a long time since the last update, and this most recent one hasn't actually improved the gameplay experience - if anything, it's made it worse! Until we get hunting, cooking and - especially - persistent storage, I think the game will continue to feel stagnant because there won't be anything fundamentally different or new to actually do in the game from what there is now. At the moment, the only real appeal of the game is the urban tactical combat - in terms of apocalypse survival, there really isn't a game here at all, yet. -Killing zombies is not a satisfying mini-game, because of their glitchy behaviour, the crap melee mechanics and the instant respawning. This has to change, but it seems a long way off right now. -Exploration can be fun, but only for as long as it takes you to get to know the map (for many players, this appeal has long been out-lived by now). -Looting for looting's sake is not fun in itself - much of the kit you find is useless because the mechanics for their intended purpose aren't ready yet. Because of the tactical combat focus of current gameplay balance, player-to-player meetings are inevitably skewed towards hostility - and this exacerbates the frustration of people looking for a more survival/interaction-based experience. Being able to throw objects doesn't change anything - it's useless in itself as a gameplay feature (even when it works properly, which it doesn't currently). Being able to shoot bows and arrows and crossbows doesn't change anything - it's just another weapon to do the same things with as before. Being able to build fires for cooking won't change anything on its own, either - it provides a bit of variation and distraction, but doesn't change how you look after your character. Food is food, and it's plentiful already; cooking doesn't provide any benefits over and above eating stuff cold. I think the game will continue to feel a bit stagnant until we get the really juicy features like hunting, vehicles and persistent storage. Being able to set up "home" - and to defend it - will give you a reason for the PvP beyond "it's fun" and "there's nothing else to do". Building and maintaining a vehicle will give players a project to work on, as will barricading and base-building. Hunting - if done well - might prove to be a viable mini-game; zombie-killing might even evolve into that, too. Having deeper and more complex health/injury mechanics will force on players a change of focus in terms of what they can and can't do with regularity. The issue is not what the game is now: the issue is whether DayZ can keep pace - and therefore media coverage and player interest - with the emergent competitors. If it gets left behind in terms of player numbers DayZ will die, regardless of anyone's good intentions.

I haven't been arsed to read every whinge, slag-off, gripe, correction and insult on this thread, but I just wanted to say this: The current version on Stable branch now is probably the least fun to play that it's been since I first downloaded the Alpha in January. It's the controls, the zombie behaviour, some of the graphical effects, the frame-rates and the weapon damage values, I think. There may be other things, too. I won't say these features have been "broken" by recent updates - they were never "fixed" or "finished" in the first place - but I think their current state makes the overall gameplay experience less fun than it used to be. Does that matter at this early stage? I don't know. For me, personally: not really. I will probably continue to play the alpha and follow its progress. But I think there is a wider point here that has some validity: making the stable version worse - even temporarily - can have the effect of putting some people off playing. There is a general perception - right or wrong - that the alpha is not progressing very satisfactorily or quickly, and there are rival/copy-cat games taking over some of the hype. Does this maybe have a detrimental potential effect on DayZ's future? I think probably not, but I'm talking myself round in circles here, so I think I'll shut up...

I ticked all of them! And yet, I've never shot another player before. Only ever killed anyone with an axe or pick, and only then because they attacked me first. I always try to talk to people before being hostile... and this always leads to me being killed.

I just ignore them. As long as you keep moving, and you are not spectacularly careless about keeping an eye on where they are, there is very little chance of them hitting you, or disturbing a loot run. Why bother killing them, when it's more hassle than it's worth? Snipers, on the other hand, I can imagine would be inconvenienced...

sheds and barns, sir.

When have you seen a zombie?

It isn't fixed.

Walkie-talkies need to be more common! There's a lot of potential fun to had by using them, yet they seem to rarer than rocking-horse shit at the moment. (And they range ought to be extended.) sort it out, devs!

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?