pillock

There's too much ammo available, and server hopping is too effective. Those are the two most important changes that will alter player behaviour towards survival and away from combat for its own sake. I guess the devs have decided on the current balance of loot (and its effects on gameplay) at this stage of the process for a reason - they must actually want a combat-focussed game, possibly in order to keep hold of a larger player-base for testing purposes? I don't know, but this'll surely be adjusted somewhere down the line, or else the game will probably just get swallowed up by all the other arcade zombie-themed shooter games out there and fade from people's attention.

Maybe he had a friend sniping in the treeline, and they were trying to mess with people's heads?

I chased down a chicken and stabbed it to death with a screwdriver. I feel like a true outdoorsman.

Speaking personally, my Steam browser runs slightly slower than fuck, and is therefore slightly more useless than fuck, as well. I'd still prefer the in game maps even if it weren't mind you.

Admittedly I haven't tried this in .52, but you could definitely heat yourself up using gas stoves before that. It was slower, mind.

No! Don't use the 3rd party maps. Use the in-game ones. When you find a piece of map, open it straight away (drag to hotbar; press corresponding number key), and it will be centred on your current position. Zoom right in and look at the layout of buildings marked nearby, and the lie of the land. Then go outside and try to match what you see around you with the map. Then you'll know where you are and what direction you might want to take. Kepp referencing your surroundings against the map as you move, and you shouldn't get lost. If you have a compass, even better. The maps you find on websites force you to alt+tab out of the game, which is crap. Plus it's more fun to use only the in-game tools.

What argument? That people band together in disaster situations? I agree with that, but it doesn't apply to DayZ, and is therefore irrelevant.

Explore! Check all the buildings and try to get to know your immediate vicinity before you move on - that way you'll recognise it better if you ever stumble across the same place in future. Take your time and just try stuff out. If I'm somewhere unfamiliar (this applies to the real world as well), I usually head for high ground to get a better view of the wider area and the lie of the land. It's probably more enjoyable, too, if you avoid using 3rd-party maps on the internet to navigate, as it takes away from the experience of discovering new places.

The servers are set to a time of year, which changes every now and then with updates. I don't think it can be set by server admins yet, or if it ever will be - there might be a plan to have the (main hive, at least) servers set to real-time seasons to match the real world eventually. So, it might be that it's currently set to a particularly wet time of year. Or it might not. But either way, you can change servers if the rain is getting too annoying, or you can deal with it. It takes quite a long time to actually get serious effects from being wet, anyway - it's not as if it's an instant killer or anything and you have plenty of time to dry off and warm up if you do get wet. At the moment, raincoats, wellies and boonie hats seem to be very abundant in the little boats that spawn loot along the beach, so get yourself togged up for wet weather and just play.

I don't want to meet the dog that lives in that kennel.

No, no, yes, no.

The only way to find the thing you are looking for is to have it in your inventory already: then you will find millions more of them.

Can't hear a word you're saying on that vid. Do I understand correctly that you can work around the bug where the stone disappears when you try to craft a knife with it by pressing F11 at some point?

Footballs don't make very good melee weapons. People in Britain have baseball bats just to hit a ball around with their mates in the park. Maybe some keep them as home defence weapons? I don't know, really, but they're not that unusual here. But people very rarely have hockey sticks lying about unless they actually play competitive hockey. And these are ice-hockey sticks, aren't they? I haven't found the Chernarus ice rink yet.

Baseball bats are pretty common in non-baseball playing countries, I think. The hockey sticks are more puzzling though!

But DayZ isn't like real life. What people would do in real life is completely irrelevant. In DayZ you have no history, no connection with the place nor with any of the other survivors (unless you are playing with friends from outside the game). You have no future, either - no way of restarting civilisation or building a family. There's no motivation to band together, since approaching strangers is such a risk (this is mostly due to wonky character movement and combat mechanics). When you join up with other people in DAyZ, it's for the sole purpose of making combat situations easier, since there is no necessity for shared survival tasks. Because DayZ is so far removed from a realistic scenario, you can't really compare it in that way. Not yet, anyway.

In principle I agree. But there's a couple of issues you'd need to get round. One is server performance. When I suggested locked open mics a few weeks/months ago in another similar topic, I was told that it would put a lot of extra strain on the server due to the increase of data. So there might be technical reasons for it not being feasible. Also, there would probably need to be some way of muting your mic without exiting the game, or else it would cause problems for people who don't want to broadcast background noise such as private or personal conversations with their family, etc.

In an ideal world, everyone would use in-game comms (especially now the walkie-talkies are working). But unfortunately there is just no way of preventing people from using 3rd party software. This topic came up a while ago, and I suggested the idea of perhaps locking direct proximity chat in-game to 'open', so that anything you said over teamspeak would also be broadcast in-game - but apparently this would cause too much strain on servers (plus there would still be ways to get around it). It does go against the spirit of the game to an extent, but it's just one of those things, I guess.

Not meaning to pick on you or your post in particular: rather, the general argument about how people would or might or do behave in real situations. It's pretty much irrelevant. DayZ doesn't simulate that situation - at all. Notwithstanding the presence of zombies and all the unrealistic mechanics currently in the game which may or may not be changed later in development, the scenario is just not a representation of the thing people are arguing about. Namely, there are no vulnerable people to protect. No children, no elderly, noone with disabilities. Everyone is a (relatively) fit, able-bodied 20/30-something. There is no distinction or variation of physical ability or attributes. Maybe (maybe) we might get a more detailed, longer-term injury system so players might want to look after their mate(s) while they heal, but that's it. Furthermore, in DayZ there is no future. There is nothing to build towards. There is no escaping the apocalypse, neither by relocation nor the rebuilding of society. You cannot have children. You're stuck there, you have no hope and you will​ die. If DayZ is a simulation of anything, then it's the bit of time in between the initial panic and destruction of the outbreak, and the later organisation and rebuilding phase which would inevitably develop. We don't get to play those bits of before and of after, though - we just get that "in-between" bit, the time when noone knows what's going on, noone has a plan and noone knows who else is out there or what their intentions might be. In reality, this part of the process might be only very short-lived - but that's all DayZ gives you, over and over. Bandits or murderers or man-hunters or KoS CoD kids or whatever you want to call them - they're not going away. What's more, they will probably remain the majority of the player base, no matter what else the game lets you do when it is more feature-complete and balanced. Are they a bad thing? Yes, absolutely. Fucking hate the bastards.

I think it'd really help if there were more variety in character movement animations and appearance: specifically, if you're injured or sick or exhausted, you look like it and are suitably limited in your movement. That way, people could gauge each other's level of potential threat more easily, as well as making fresh spawns less able to do the Punchy-running-bollocks thing successfully. A more realistic character movement might go quite a long way towards reducing the rampant "shoot first ask questions never" mentality, because it would give the armed player who has the drop on someone more advantage - and therefore less risk in making verbal contact. Blowing away everyone you see as soon as you see them is the safe option now, because as soon as you speak to someone they can suddenly become a human bluebottle, zooming around you with random, rapid changes of direction, which makes them difficult to hit. They wouldn't be able to do this if their movement was speed was less and they couldn't make 90 or 180 degree turns on the spot with no loss of momentum.

I voted for the prison complex, because I believe that's in the works anyway; I also voted for the sports stadium and the coastal pillbox. I don't think the other suggestions in the list are appropriate for the general environment/setting of Chernarus, frankly (especially an upper-middle class enclave in a former Communist country!) and I would be actively against their inclusion. Overall, I think the map is good. More variety is always good, but I'd most like to see the focus placed on a greater opening up of and expansion of access to existing buildings - doors that are not real doors really get on my nerves! I also think things like usable cupboards/fridges (in the works, to some extent, I think?) will add a lot to the atmosphere, making the buildings feel less bland.

I think the lighting effects are something that the devs talk about fairly often - I'm not in the least bit worried that things like this won't get fixed in due time. The clothing degradation is pretty far from being authentic, I agree! But again, I think we'll see improvements somewhere down the line - I don't get the impression that it's as prominent in the devs' thinking at this point, though.

Pedant

The fact that you can change direction on a sixpence while sprinting flat out without any loss of speed or balance or anything. And the fact that you can run at about 40mph.

I think the most important thing is that DayZ and BI don't find themselves falling foul of any lawsuits. Whatever your personal beliefs on freedom of speech, it is illegal to use abusive language in the public sphere (racial, religious, homophobic, etc) in some countries - including the UK. Furthermore, people have been prosecuted and given custodial sentences for doing so on media such as Twitter and Facebook (for example). Therefore, the internet is deemed to be a public space where national laws do apply. This is a fact, whether or not anyone on this forum agrees with the rights or wrongs of it. I'm sure BI have adequate legal advice regarding this, but I wouldn't be that surprised if development studios or GSPs do face the occasional legal challenge over these sorts of issues in future. It's not something that should be ignored or dismissed, even if it is difficult to police. In fact the difficulty of policing the problem effectively makes it an even more important issue to discuss, I'd say. The apocalyptic scenario and depictions of violence in DayZ (or any other game) are utterly irrelevant to a discussion about verbal abuse between players via the comms - the violence and murder are purely fictional, while the verbal abuse is real. Personally speaking, I don't want to have to put up with listening to some moron spouting bigotry over in-game voice comms. It won't stop me playing DayZ if I do hear it, but I definitely think ways should be explored to eliminate it as far as possible.