pillock

Thank you Mr Hicks! Personally, I don't think the hermit playstyle is particularly viable yet, sorry. Not while your tent/stash still gets wiped every week, and not until you can craft more stuff from the environment. I have experimented with it, and it's gets boring fairly quick. You cannot survive under current conditions as a hermit unless you go into towns to scavenge the necessary kit first - and by the time you've found all the survivor tools you'll need, you'll doubtlessly have found guns, ammo and canned food to last you forever, thereby negating the need (and most of the motivation) to go Into The Wild in the first place. Once we can craft clothes, rope, primitive knives/axes and fire-lighters from environmental sources, build shelters and have working, longer-term persistent storage, then it'll be worth it. For now, it just isn't, I'm afraid. I'm looking forward to when it is!

Funnily enough, I had a loot stash survive the Wednesday maintenance last week! I guess it depends on the server?

I would go further than that: I've suggested this before, and I still believe it'd be better if players got booted off a server when they died and locked out for 24 hours. New life, new server, new loot locations, new opponents, etc.

Machetes do the job of hunting knives, and are common as dog muck. Finding parts for a fishing rod is not that difficult, either. Hooks are slightly rarer, but I've never had much trouble finding them, even when sticking to smaller towns - try looting every last house, outbuilding and shed systematically. Likewise, the materials for crafting bows and arrows are pretty easy to come by. Pistol magazines, I agree, are absurdly rare. You have to spend more time in police stations and military areas to get these, which carries more risk. In general, I think the spawn chances should be altered so that anything can, in theory, spawn anywhere (except for loot reserved for dynamic vehicles spawns). There should be a higher % chance of military kit spawning at military locations and civilian kit spawning in houses, etc, but should always be a very slight possibility that any spawn point will generate any item. That way, you wouldn't be able to get used to which buildings definitely will and definitely won't spawn certain items, thereby making the game more dynamic and interesting.

"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." -Al Capone

"Attach ye not too much importance to thy gear, lest it doth get deleted by a random server wipe." -William Shakespeare.

Play the game.

I kill ladders when I climb them.

I know what you mean, but it does feel a bit artificial to me with the current spawn balance. Even when restricting myself to small hamlets in order to avoid aggressive players, I'll usually find a gun and shitloads of readymeals before I've gathered all my rope and matches and machete and stuff. And then I just tend to think, "Why bother crafting a bow when I have a perfectly good shotgun? And why hunt for food when I have tinned spaghetti coming out of my ears?" I recently found myself in a server with literally zero loot. The only supplies I could gather were berries, apples, sticks and other foragables. It was pretty boring, but I could just about survive if I avoided zombies. The problem was I couldn't hunt, or get warm. It made me really me want to be able to craft a knife or primitive rope from the environment so I could actually make progress in the game - the latest devblog made me happy:

the thing is, in order to make a bow and arrows and fishing rod, you need rope and a knife/machete and an axe. This means you have to go into towns. And this means you will probably find a gun and ammo before you have all your survival tools. Also, you'll undoubtedly find enough food to keep you going til 1.0 is released, thereby obviating the need to ever catch fish or hunt or food anyway. To me, it feels wrong to deliberately leave behind something that you know is useful.

I shot someone who spawned right in front of me on the roof of a building in Elektro once. Fair game, I reckon.

You can dig up worms and eat them

Damn you to hell. It's supposed to be about the misery of survival. Stop enjoying it, you cheater.

Man-hunting is a valid playstyle. What the game needs is for death to have more negative implications, such as loss of more long-term, difficult-to-acquire health statuses and abilities. Then the people who want to run around gunfighting from the get-go will be at a disadvantage to those who take time to build up their character, which is how it should be.

Fully functioning, long-term persistence will make a big difference. Probably the biggest single difference of any one game feature. I also like that walkie talkies work again - it makes for some interesting dynamics, if they become more widely used.

What have you been eating? Or should that be "who"?

The most important thing from my point of view is that they alter the way movement works in terms of changes of direction. The top speed for running needs to be slowed a bit as well. If you observe a reasonably high traffic area from afar using binoculars or a long range scope, the movement of players between buildings resembles flies buzzing around a picnic. They zoom from one place to the next and they have no momentum when changing direction. It's pretty stupid, and it doesn't lend itself to good gameplay. It's harder to meet people if everyone is in and out of a town inside 2 minutes. From my point of view, slowing things down is not about making the game more realistic for the sake of it - it's not about making people suffer just because. For me it would really tie all the gameplay elements together and make for a much more interesting experience overall.

Current movement speeds are ridiculous. The whole thing needs slowing right down. The majority of players want the game to be better, and slowing things down would make the game better. Stamina and weight systems are confirmed features.

Those green houses have been like that for months - since before the summer, I think. There was another thread about this last week or something (will look for it...[EDIT: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/215997-small-secret/]). I'm a little disappointed that the secret's out now, to be honest: they used to be reliable sources of food, ammo and clothes near the coast when everything else was looted!

I murdered a chicken with a screwdriver once. Then realised I had nothing to quarter it with, and had to leave it behind. Still, the chase was fun!

You got caught out by a classic distraction move by the evil murdering deer population of Chernarus. One of their number poses as harmless wildlife while the other sneaks up on you with sharpened antlers ready to attack.

Why should you expect to be able to travel the whole map in a single play session? If you spawn at the coast, you should be required to spend time searching for supplies at the coast before you start to make the journey in land. In the future, there are going to be a be larger server populations, more zombies, and dangerous animals to contend with. By making travel between towns an actual challenge, it adds depth to the game and more decision-making for the player. When you finally make it to the western side of the map, it'll actually be an achievement (unless you've been lucky enough to stumble across a working vehicle near the coast).

You have to place rabbit snares with the middle-mouse/use button, not just chuck them on the ground from your inventory. Even then, I've never caught anything!

I've got a very iffy internet connection at the moment, and it severely restricts my choice of servers - most of them fail to connect. I did manage to get on one yesterday called "Hop Team Server" or something, but it turned out to be populated only with 6 members of one clan, and they kicked me as soon as I spawned in (haven't got around to reporting the bastards yet, since I'm pretty sure they aren't allowed to do that on the public hive). The only other one I could connect to in the entire world was completely devoid of both players and loot. There was literally nothing anywhere I went, except for zombies. It wasn't much fun, but it was the only server I could play on, so I stuck around. It got me thinking: I was able to forage berries and apples for food, and pick up wood from the forest floor, because these sources aren't 'loot spawns'; presumably I'd have been able to find feathers in chicken coops as well, but I didn't try that. I'd also just read the devblog which mentioned plans for improvised blades and other crafting methods to allow for the "hermit" playstyle. If I'd been able to craft some rope (out of grass or whatever), find some flint in a stream to make a knife or hand-axe, I might have been able to craft a bow and arrows out of purely environmental not-loot pickups. Then I'd have been able to hunt for food and hide to make clothes and a bag. The only problem would have been lighting a fire: once you've used up your T-shirt rags, you can't craft a fireplace unless you can get hold of paper or more looted clothes/bandages. As it was, I fought one zombie too many and ran out of bandage material; but the gameplay will change dramatically when it's possible to survive successfully without relying on any urban loot spawns at all. That way, all the cowards who, right now, stick to low population servers so as not to get killed by wannabee-commando-types when they go to towns to look for supplies will be able to play in higher population servers and survive off the land without such a risk. Once that's the case, in terms of gameplay options, I think loot spawns should be factored according to server population, so that you can't just go on a low-pop server and have free reign over all the loot you could ever want: if you're the only person on a server, then there should be hardly any loot in there spawning.

Thanks. I've just noticed it says "sword animations" in the stand up notes as well... It's not something I think is particularly important to the game overall, but more variety is always nice!