Valadain

But it sucks. It will always suck. Therefore, it should be minimized to a utilitarian purpose. It serves a role, but should never be the main role, because it sucks and isn't fun. The best implementation of melee combat I have seen in an FPS is from Far Cry 3. Unfortunately, it was "take-down" based, which doesn't work in a multi-player game. I don't mind melee as the "oh crap I'm out of options better twitch-punch a guy to death", but as the primary combat, not something I'm interested in. Therefore, my opinion, that the best way to make melee better is to minimize it and focus on the strength of the game play. Shooting is the strength of the game play. If you want people to do things other than shoot, don't make them combat things.

Even if the random dude washing up on shore is a former helicopter pilot? If they make dealing with them sufficiently difficult, you should have no problems with realism. Interestingly, they can actually make helicopters realistically difficult to fly, but they can't make bows realistically difficult to craft. So... Which should be added again?

I'm not being subtle or evasive here, but I'll try again. Melee in FPS style games is terrible.

You know what would be sweet? If they removed the zombies, added more military gear and vehicles, and had military missions you could play cooperatively.

I'm not suggesting DayZ isn't innovative, but it is still constrained by FPS mechanics. My screen is flat. My movement is WASD. My view is first person. Works great for shooting. Works terrible for melee.

Yes, KoS = Survival Challenge There. Fixed.

There are a lot of reasons you'd find guns about in working condition, even brand new guns. 1.) Gun storage. You can still find many unshot Mosins packed in the original cosmoline. Weapons are manufactured in bulk and the military particularly will keep stores around just in case they need to surge troop enlistment. 2.) Manufacturer storage. Guns are manufactured at an incredible rate and stored, waiting for buyers. They are not perishable goods. 3.) Gun stores. Sellers keep stock for purchasers. 4.) Gun Nuts. Assuming many people were able to flee, some people have far more guns than would be practical to be carrying with you on the run. 5.) Dead People. Not everyone is going to make it. People who don't make it aren't going to get to go back home and get their guns. Or they may have their gun on them when they die. 6.) Out of Ammo. People may drop perfectly working weapons simply because they don't have ammunition and don't expect to find more. Not everyone in a zombie apocalypse is going to sling a dang rifle on their shoulder and carry it around for days or months, particularly if running constantly from death.

"normal guns" would be revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, semi-automatic rifles, hunting rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns. I think people would be surprised by just how many guns are non-military that look and function just like military weapons. The only real difference you will find is the selective fire, or rather specifically, automatic or burst firing will be absent on civilian models in most countries.

The best way to enhance melee in an FPS is more guns. The less you have to deal with clunky and jerky fighting with no real body mobility, a rather fixed view, and a lack of peripheral vision the better.

Just a point here, you don't fire rounds directly out of a magazine. They are fed by the magazine into the chamber, then fired. I think the better differentiation is that a clip is a guiding and loading device while a magazine is a storage and feeding device. Or if you want to get to the very lowest base, a magazine has a spring and a clip does not.

I'm generally against artificial time-sinks. They just aren't necessary. I'm not against having larger caches that are harder to get to, primarily to reward group play (which right now is somewhat hindered by sparse loot creating a situation where it is better to split up and loot more places). I don't have a problem with automatic rifles being more common behind such obstacles, but not entirely absent elsewhere. Honestly, automatic weapon does not equal best. Strategy and aim will beat automatic fire nearly every time (luck being the exception). Lock picks would generally annoy me implemented in this fashion as I know too much about locks and picking locks. I could tell you numerous methods to improvise your way through a lock, having no manufactured picks.

Agreed. I have some concerns about this game, but honestly, I'm not even close to ready to start getting frustrated. Maybe come summer, if there hasn't been some significant progress, I might freak a little. Right now though, is way too early. I think Star Citizen will likely be a very successful development model. They've got an old-hat at the helm. I have the feeling that DayZ will also be a successful model based on some of the things I've seen so far. The decisions about what they are putting in the game right now, while confusing to some, seem spot-on to me from my experience. I may be wrong as I am outside looking in. I hope I am right.

The whole concept is fake, so trying to find some realism in it will be terribly difficult. The system should be based on care. Clean or not. The result should be jamming or breakage, not "wear". Guns do wear down, but it takes a long-damn-time.

Where's the gun-shot and sudden silence?

Your reading comprehension here is somewhat lacking. It isn't a judgement on the way Star Citizen is being developed, it is a comment on reality. That when you start with a plan and a small team, then suddenly get an influx of money, you can't just throw the plan out the window and triple the development staff and make things go faster. It just doesn't work that way. Increasing staff is an investment in months just to get new people productive. When your entire development schedule is in months, you are doing little more than distracting your current staff who are already producing. Basically, you have diminishing gains when injecting staff into a project over the short term.

I think it is easily a sixty person project. This isn't entirely new ground, there is a lot of code to leverage from the existing Arma game. Honestly, I think on some things they are getting in their own way (rebuilding gun physics from the ground up, when they are already solid in Arma). Yes, some things need to be torn up and rebuilt to get the feel they want. That is actually where they are starting and where they need to start. Fixing the bugs isn't the hard part and should be lower priority. All-in-all, I've encountered less bugs in this game than I have in some released titles, even at the stage they are at right now. The bugs are few, just rather jarring as they tend to be lethal. I've worked with people like Rocket before. What tends to happen is that it seems like everything is going slow, then stuff starts trickling in, then pouring in. I think people are jumping the gun pretty heavy with the judgement, primarily because they are so invested in the game. They see it almost where they'd want it and get frustrated. The fact that anyone is trying to play the game is a credit to the project as in alpha they should really only be testing.

I'm old. So I've been around for the casual/hardcore debate long enough to watch it generally evolve. Originally, the debate was over time-involvement, not game difficulty. The difference was between those who were willing to join a team of 30 or 40 other people and spend nights and weekends for months to get rewards, versus those who wanted to be able to log in and log out on a more casual schedule, but still have content to play. Under this argument, DayZ is actually a casual game. You don't need to time-sink your life into it to get content out of it. Challenge was not at issue. Where challenge was concerned, the word "care bear" was used. So, I'm a casual gamer. I play when I can and don't schedule my life around the game. DayZ is very friendly for this type of play. I do, however, love a challenge. To the OP, I would love to have helicopters. I would also like them to be as realistic as possible to fly. I wouldn't be upset if you dang near needed to truly know how to fly a helicopter to pilot it. That would be fun to me. I like the signs in Russian. I like that I had to get a basic grasp of Cyrillic to navigate around. I wouldn't mind (though I know it isn't really in scope or possible) if repairing a car required actual car repair knowledge or if cleaning a gun required actually disassembling it. In short. Bring on the guns and equipment, but also bring on the challenge. Bring on the difficulty. Make me learn new things.

M4 is 5.56x45mm (or .223 Caliber). You are correct on the Mosin though. Edit: It would help if I could read, you said M14, yes.

I'm a development manager. I currently oversee several products and teams. Orlok is absolutely correct. If you add 200 people to a 30 man project, you know what happens? Nothing. Either you halt development to train or the new guys sit on the bench and try to pick it up on the fly and you spend all your time fixing inadvertent bugs. Projects have to ramp up gradually to be efficient. Training is one of many infrastructure issues. If the game was going to develop over a number of years, sure, start hiring. With an expectation of less than a year left, keep on course, pick up a moderate amount of extra help, and focus on executing the plan in hand.

Text to speech. Then everyone can quit whining and spend their time trying to figure out what the heck the typers are trying to say.

I would agree, except for empty and full (so you know if you are going to be completely alone or if you won't be able to join) Also, to the OP, you wouldn't need to subtract locked servers I would think as those can only be private? I would assume this scheme is only for public hive.

Zombies aren't superhuman, they are human and an 8mm round is a big dang round. I think you might be confusing it with the 9mm?

I generally agree and don't mind non-Russian specific things being in the game. In a world economy, there's going to be stuff from all over. That players are using the cowboy hats has more to do with the player base than anything in the game. There are Russian hats in the game. For the guns, there are testing reasons they used (some of) the guns they did. The M4 takes attachments much more easily than the AK. The FNP takes attachments where a Makarov will not. The blaze is really the only mystery for me. It doesn't seem to have any unique mechanic.

Clown mask and cowboy hat, I agree. M4 attachments, not so much, it uses a standardized rail system, picatinny, that is used on many firearms. Magnum is a nonsensical name. It is not a gun name. Might as well call it "bullet" or "caliber". They mean .357 Magnum, which is pretty common. No real issues with that one. The chest holster isn't really a common thing here, looking like it does in game. There are quite a few Russian ones that look similar, but I couldn't say if they are common there. The design is suspect, but I don't much notice it.

Magnum isn't a gun, it is a bullet designation, generally indicating a larger or more powerful round. FN is not an American gun manufacturer. Ruger and Remington are American manufacturers, but export a lot. The M4 is the odd man out, but I think covered in the supposed Chernarus story.