pillock

There needs to be some way for the game to tell you when you are injured and where you are injured without looking at the inventory. The greyness and blurriness + "fuck that hurts" every 5 seconds is very far from being good enough. I think text is probably the best way - it's clear, it's obvious and it allows for variety.

Quite an entertaining story. I enjoyed it. I believe your playstyle can be accurately describes as "Complete Bastard".

I think the game is progressing nicely. It's bare bones right now, but the feel of the game is great. Survival does need to be harder, and I think should be your main focus while playing - for it to be a genuine challenge just to keep your character from succumbing to cold, wet, hunger, thirst, tiredness, sickness and injury. If we get a good grounding in those things, then the rest of it sits happily on top. The player interaction, gunfighting, crafting, building camps, character/gear customisation, etc: they're the optional bits that make up the sandbox and give us ways to form objectives for ourselves. But the survival bits are the basis of it all - and it should be as difficult to succeed in that as they can possibly make it, while maintaining a level of intuitiveness.

Surely if you want a humanity system, you'll be able to mod the game after full release and use that on your server? If such a system is implemented into the vanilla game, I will stop playing it immediately.

Next time you find a disinfectant bottle, take it with you. If you ever run out of sticks or morphine and then break your legs, there's your suicide option.

I don't think KoS players really give a toss whether or not they're ruining someone's day. They have guns: they want to shoot stuff. They don't see you as a player, they see you as a target. It doesn't matter if you're geared up or if you're an obvious bambi. You are in their gun sight, and they will take the shot. I generally think that 'justifications' such as, "They might gear up later", "they might sneak up on me", "they might be a bandit looking for quick loot", etc. are just excuses. There's no moral justification for it one way or the other - a kill is a kill is a kill. And that's what they're playing for. The more you shoot, the better you get at shooting: they're just practicing the game the way they want to play it. I think they do the game a service, personally. They keep the rest of us on our toes.

This is true, but there is still a gameplay balance issue with the fact that freshspawns can be successful doing this. The reason they try it on is that they have a decent chance of success. The game would improve, in my opinion, if it was easier for geared-up survivors to fight them off. If the success rate of bambis boxing with armed commandos was less, they would try it on less. I think.

Tramp. I generally just womble, but I have also tried sitting down on Elektro High Street and asking passers by if they have any spare change. I got shot though.

Respawn timers are a very heavy handed solution to this. The way to prevent freshspawns from behaving aggressively towards visibly geared-up players is to make it much less worth the effort: that is, improve melee combat. It shouldn't be so easy to knock someone out with your fists - it should be much easier to defend yourself if you have a bat/shovel/crowbar etc. Melee weapons should give you greater reach than someone fighting with their fists, so you can break their arm (or their skull) if they get too close. Also, freshspawns should be tired, hungry and thirsty until they've spent time looting and sorting themselves out - therefore their fist-attacks should be weaker than a healthy, hardened survivor, thereby putting them at a big disadvantage. This problem doesn't need an arbitrary punishment like a locking-out timer for people who die, because that would affect everyone - not just the brawling freshspawns. What it needs is some gameplay balance to discourage such unrealistic behaviour. Hopefully, this will sort itself out as new mechanics are introduced and fleshed out. In the mean time, you can order them to keep their distance and shoot them in the leg if they don't!

It would give the forest hermits something to think about!

I've only ever found food tins and hacksaws, maybe the odd hoodie or beanie hat. And even they were pretty few and far between.

Yes. Hopefully they'll introduce a 'limping' animation somewhere down the line. And then make it so broken legs take several game hours to heal. I'd also like to be able to make a crutch out of a shovel, or something like that.

While I agree there should be infinite sticks in the woods, splinting you leg probably shouldn't restore you to full sprint mode.

I want this:

Fine. I'm sure they will, eventually. Posting when you're angry is usually a bad idea, though, because you're guaranteed to receive a shitstorm of abuse in return!

Yeah, but if you know how the game works, why are you deliberately going into danger without anything to bandage yourself with? The injury mechanics need a LOT of work to bring them up to speed with the overall level of depth that's planned for this game... but until then, you have to use the mechanics as you know them to be now, and adjust your actions in a sensible way. Rage posting about it on the forum is bound to bring you in for flak. The game isn't retarded, the game is unfinished - as you well know.

I usually taunt people before they kill me.

They should make driving realistic - so you have to use the clutch and change gear manually and stuff. And if you put a wheel on the grass at speed, you spin or roll!

Then we are all agreed! What a happy place this is. Now I'm just off to run around Berezino firing my Shotgun in the air and shouting rude things into direct chat.

I used to live in Scotland, and the Munchy Box is one of the things I miss most about it since I left. Being the heart-attack capital of Europe is small price to pay for such innovative and tasty cooking!

All of it is useful - in no way would I dispute that. The only reason I felt compelled to reply to this thread in the first place was that I consider the overall theme of these 20 rules of thumb to be promoting a particular sort of playstyle, and some people were touting it as a definitive list for all new players to follow - and I don't agree with that in principle. I just wanted to point out that there are other ways to play the game that don't require following these suggestions at all.

As an admirer or Scottish cuisine, I just need to be able to deep fry everything in batter. Most especially: Mars bars, pizza, ready-meal lasagna.

I'm not dismissing any of the 20 rules of thumb as useless - I'm just saying that I don't follow very many of them and I haven't died to other players very much. I don't think they are all particularly necessary unless you are deliberately going looking for gunfight action in the populated towns and airfields - and that is only one of many ways to play DayZ. Things like "Don't stand still for long on top of a tall building" are obviously sound advice. Getting to know the map and where the hotspots are is sound advice. But the main thing I would emphasise from the whole post is this one single point: That is, you don't know what other players intentions are - they are strangers in a lawless scenario. You don't know what they are going to do, and you should never expect anyone to conform to any particular standard of behaviour, because there is no reason for them to. That doesn't mean I never trust anyone, but it does mean I'm on my guard if I'm particularly worried about dying (and, to be honest, dying is not much a set-back as the game stands currently). I've only died at the hands of another player twice in my ~110 hours. The first time I spawned in the middle of a gunfight and found myself standing next to a guy with a shotgun within about a minute. He told me he'd protect me, gave me some food, then inexplicably blasted me dead a few seconds later. The other time, I met a fellow fresh spawn on the coast, talked to him for a bit before he suddenly said, "I want your pants" and punched me unconscious before I could react - I chose to respawn rather than wait until I woke up. The whole of the rest of the time I've played DayZ, I've managed to avoid getting killed by other players, and I've barely followed 2 or 3 or Etherimp's 20 guidelines. I just wanted to point out that you don't need to play at being a commando in order to avoid being killed. You just need to be aware of your surroundings and not take for any situation for granted. Also: it's more difficult to hit a moving target. I honestly don't think it's any more complicated than that.

I don't want to sound too critical, because I know this is a well-intentioned thread, but I don't agree with or follow very many of your rules of thumb. I think they're only really relevant if you're playing as a gunfighter - and not everyone does. The great thing about DayZ is that you don't know what other players you meet are up to - you don't know their motivations or intentions. If everyone's following these bland guidelines - or any specific guidelines at all - , then it diminishes the potential variety. As I said, I don't want to criticise too much, as I'm sure these rules of thumb work well for your playstyle - I just wanted to point out that they are in no way necessary for everybody who plays the game, even if they are new to DayZ. EDIT: I do like this one, though:

I've tried doing this as well, but the server resets are too frequent at the moment. Leaving all your best kit amongst the trees when you go down into town to talk to someone is ok in theory, but once you lose it all to a server reset it becomes a lot less appealing to do it ever again.