ColdHeat

I don't want to rain on anyones parade but ain't this just a made up story to make fun of the canadian stereotype to apologize for absolutely everything?

It's nothing groundbreaking but a bit more variety to the brown wild west style chest holster would be great. A variant in black leather would be great for the beginning or even spraypaintable with green. Yet in the end whenever I have a chestholster I trade it as soon as I find a west. So since a lot of police uniform stuff is coming with the next patches, how bout a simple belt holster or even a leg holster?

As the OP asked for our opinion: I don't regard these guns as rivals. The M4 currently only does a SMG job to clear buildings at great efficiency while the SKS is inbetween the two extremes of the M4 and Mosin. You have a versatile weapon with the SKS with a quite good caliber. Personally I love a green painted SKS as it looks suddenly so modern yet whenever I can, I pick up a Mosin and a M4 and switch between those whenever I'm in a City or in open space. So to me it's just an interim solution but a reliable one.

I welcome any move that modern firearms (especially military gear) become much more rare. Primitive weapons are obviously the way to achieve that and still maintain a possibility for armed conflicts. Regarding the primitive weapons: It shouldn't get too much "Lord of the Flies" like but not too much hollywood like either. Even though I'm a practitioner of swordfighting myself in real life the last thing I want to see is people running around with a katana or any other sword. Even chainsaws are too much cliche. It would totally kill the postapocalyptic atmosphere. What we have right now regarding close combat weapons is already fine for me and the thing I'd like to see the most is, that they actually become useful. A knife in your hand should place you in a clear advantage over a Bambi, which all seem to be Klitschko breed and can knock you out with two hits to the head. A baseball bat or crowbar should turn every zombie into a twitching picture of misery in no time. Don't get me wrong: A makeshift spear or a spiked club are certainly awesome and add some mad max flavour but they aren't 100% necessary currently while DayZ is facing a shitton of more basic development problems right now. Moreover I'm not sure if Arma has even the best engine to implement close combat with spears and other weapons in an actually satisfying way. To make my day: Give us the possibility to make our own ammo and make hunting rifles like the sporter or the double barrel the most common place modern arms out there

The fact that it's so easy to aquire gear - with suddenly nothing else anymore to achieve - is one major reason to me why there's so much KoS. Sometimes really the journey is the reward. To me they did everything right and only because we now know the "high risk/high gain" shortcuts doesn't mean, that we play the game any better or even have any more fun doing so. I sometimes ask myself if I don't actually kill all the exitement by taking these shortcuts but then again, when you know where the good stuff is and which houses you can ignore, you'd be a fool not to act according to it. Goddamn dilemma

In this game, unfortunately, everyone is a bandit. Even those players which don't want to rob others kill on sight preemptively for self defense purposes to not take any risk and not rarely heroes get shot because they are in a firefight and others think they are bandits. Since there's no real advantage in cooperation with unknown players which can deceive the trust you put in them with one single bullet you could say we play Diablo with guns. Everybody wants to grind and grab good gear and then do everything to keep it. And of course they want to use their precious guns as long as they have them.

Despite having a fully equipped character in normal mode and just loving the ability to see yourself I only play Hardcore by now. No looking over walls, no wall glitchers. Much more fun overall. It could be even more hardcore for me. Like server persistent equipment so you cannot server hop and things like that.

Since the latest change I barely go into close combat anymore. Against players I rely on my fists as you can aim so damn precise to the head with them and against zombies I tend to avoid confrontation as the increased time of fighting them only makes you vulnerable for KoS Bandits. If I find a fireaxe and a spraycan I take it with me for good old times sake but that's almost purely cosmetic.

Nice story. Personally I have no problem with bandits only with KoS when they gain absolutely nothing from it. Still it would be even greater if cooperation would be more rewarding.

Have you heard about the rising demand of 7.62 for afghanistan, because at the distances they fight, 5.56 doesn't suffice anymore? The real drawbacks of 7.62 are the blowback which will effect your rate of fire and accuracy as well as the lower magazine capacity. Yet on the bright side, you can shoot through the tree behind which your opponent is hiding. Regarding the M4 discussion: I'm no fan of it and think it is only still in service because of reasons from the "lowest bidder" over to "a national symbol". The latter point is possibly also the reason why we have one in this game despite the clear east european scenario. The breech block is under extreme pressure and the stopping power leaves something to be desired on close as well as larger ranges. I'd prefer the M16 over it and realiabilty wise a lot of other weapons even over the M16. The M16/M4 ain't as bad as it's reputation anymore regarding reliability in more extreme conditions when confronted with sand, biting cold, mud or water during a conflict but why take it when you can have guns that are even better? Yet the biggest drawback in regards of jams is still the gas piston to me. But that just aside. The M4 ingame is a disgrace to it's real counterpart and should be severely buffed once we have more makeshift arms in the game, so they can lower the rate at which firearms can be found and where EVERY firearm is already something incredible valuable.. even a Sporter, IZH or Blaze.

By numbers apparently. Maybe even through increased infection rates. That's the way even those "slow walkers" from the old movies were made a frightening force. The last patch was rather a makeshift solution in my opinion but if zombies suddenly outpace you, even if you're a bambi with no gear, if they can take a shitload of hits with an axe to the body or when the only solution they see to increase their numbers is to make them insta respawn, they only become a nuisance but it doesn't aid the immersion exactly, nor does it force people into teamwork. Even the War Z zombies did their job much better in this regard, where running all alone into a city was a hopeless undertaking. I agree on the tandem by the way. An unforgiving environment, where you actually have to work for survival and cannot find your beans pretty much everywhere as well as a common thread that drives people to work together to get the good gear and be able to survive is what it takes imo. Now I have no idea how the knife topic has been brought up but regarding that topic: Have you tried knife fighting arts? There are quite some italian styles for example out there to be learned yet I bet 90% of the people which own a knife are laymans with it, exept maybe for hunting purposes, as knife martial arts are rightfully regarded as quite shady nowadays. I wouldn't go for the chest. Hitting the aorta is very unlikely as you have the ribcage in front of it, the sternum and other organs as well. A pneumothorax is the most likely outcome and while wounds to the belly are usually the worst you can get in regards of pain and lethality when hit by blunt force or bullets (since the belly area has a shitton of blood vessels and so much room that you can easily die from internal bleedings) I would rather go for the armpits, the arterias in the arm or the arteria femoralis in your legs in an attempt to quickly weaken your opponent before you go in for the kill.

I honestly don't see the problem here as you can always join a Hardcore server. Regarding the crossbow: I think this weapon has so many drawbacks (long reload, limited ammunition, limited range) that they felt in order to not make it entirely useless, it at least should kill with one shot to the chest. OR they did it so people actually give this weapon a try and test it during the alpha. That this is rather unrealistic when an M4 barely does damage is true but balancing is the least thing I'm worring now as you can change that drastically in the beta, when all the stuff is hopefully out and weapons will not only be way more rare but also serve a different purpose.

Logistics as well as reliability are whole different scenarios that should be taken into consideration in your choice if you only have one gun. I was talking from a "my favorite weapon to go on a raid when you have a full rack of guns at your base" level. On the other hand while my active time of duty I had a G3 assault rifle that was 50 years old and has served generations of soldiers before that shot with it every week or so. I bet the same applies to an AK or a SCAR. M4 (and M16) on the other hand wouldn't be my choice of an assault rifle for the end of dayz. I think it all comes down to maintenance and a bit of luck that the gun you have aint a lemon and you should be fine with an semi or fully automatic rifle.

I absolutely share your opinion OP yet it all breaks down to a single point: Will the devs be able to implement hoards of zombies? Zombies that pose a threat. Yet not by walking through buildings or being uber strong as the hulk. Currently I got my doubts. The lack of progress Dean and his team has made in this issue really leave me disenchanted. I'm still waiting for the breakthrough but I'm not necessarily expecting it to come.

It's a survival game not a Counterstrike round where one group has to win and fight to the last men. He did right to run and live another day. The guilt he felt is a great part of the game but better then trying to kill someone and to likely die in the attempt.

@OP: Balancing I suppose. Unfortunately. Personally I find the current state absurd. The M4 not only barely does lethal damage with every shot but is incredibly inaccurate for an assault rifle on distances longer than 100-150 meters even if every part is pristine and you have an ACOG. In reality a semi automatic or fully automatic rifle would be everything I want in a postapocalyptic scenario. In DayZ I rather tend to equip both a Mosin and a M4, because the M4 works well at an "SMG" level while the Mosin is the real deal for everything outside of cities. In my opinion they really need to buff the M4 while making ammo much more rare. On a side note they really need to add a 7.62x51 assault rifle.

I don't care if you do KoS or not. This is no public pillory. Regarding the other gibberish: Of course people care - the devs do as they want to sell the game and every mature player does as no one wants a game as empty as "the WarZ". Only a fool would say that's it's not the best interest of anyone if this game actually delivers what it promises. Your fatalistic analysis is fortunately wrong. People WANT to play cooperative as much as they enjoy the competetive part of playing against each other. Games like Star Citizen, WoW or Ultima Online show that. All that's needed are fitting mechanics that encourage you to do so... which currently are lacking. So if you got nothing productive to add to this discussion, please keep your 2 cents to yourself and troll away.

I absolutely agree with you OP and I think it's also important to agree that KoS is a harmful phenomenon to the game and not something that has to be a part of the game like bandits do. Bandits =/= KoS. While some sort of danger & risk that emits from other survivors as well as conflicts makes out a big part of the attractiveness of this whole post-apocalyptic-zombie scenario, so does teamwork for the sake to survive. Unfortunately both contradict with each other and if one side has too much weigth the other suffers under it. As currently a felt 80% of players KoS, people usually quickly learn that in order to survive you better either avoid people or KoS as well. That's when we have a downward spiral that changes an open world survival horror game into an open world team deathmatch game. We can only hope that the team manages to make zombies the way they should be: a challenge.. Only when zombies become a challenge and when you have to face them in order to get food or good stuff in order to help you survive you have a good reason to actually team up. The other option to survive would be settlements where you have to actually grow food - which is hard enough by itself to actually live from it and then you have bandit groups to defend against which you can barely do alone... because these bandits actually might do their name justice and want what you have instead of just killing you for fun. So a system could be: You can barely survive by hunting with selfmade spears or bows or the remaining few canned goods that you find in single houses and villages -> cities spawn rare guns but are a high risk to enter yet would make hunting much easier -> you need some buddies and wits to make it into a settlement and out alive with full hands. Being unable to run away from a zombie horde while fully loaded because you get mighty slow would help. OR You farm your stuff but you're a stationary target and therefor you need people to help you defend that settlement which profit from it by getting a somewhat realiable food source and safety as well -> in order to defend you the best you can against bandits or roaming zombie mobs you might need weapons, tools and materials from a city. In both cases having a car for example and maybe even pimped in the A-Team style as further upgrades (and if you're really lucky a helicopter) would help you greatly to get that gear.. and also make you much more attractive to bandits which therefore makes you want to team up again with a selected few in order to defend what's yours as good as you can in order to survive. This would be some sort of an upward spiral and those are the things that I miss currently. Some might come and some might not as we're still in an alpha but this is the best time to talk about what we really want so it can actually make it into the game and the thread of zombies is possibly the most important not player related variable in it. So let's hope they get the problem with the zombies done and don't just try to fix it in a rough-and-ready-manner like making them unbelieveable fast or powerful. TL;DR: Fix those zombies, add important survival aspects, make good guns only available through teamwork (the better the gun the more effort required) and that should be it

Because it's better to actually search the forums for an existing thread instead of opening tons of it all dealing with the same topic.Regarding the "deal with it" aspect: No neither I nor anyone has to deal with it. The alternative would be to simply not play or even not buy it (which can't be in the interest of anyone) as people might lose interest in a game that tries to sell itself with a lot of survival immersion in the wake of a zombie apocalypse when in fact it's just CoD death match on a really big map but with all the ARMA flaws and barely some zombie extras. You shouldn't force people to stop doing something but you can discourage them or encourage them to behaviors that would make the game more interesting as currently - with ~80% of KoS players - the best way to actually survive in this survival game is to stay away as far from survivors and towns as possible...which is plain boring and doesn't require multiplayer either.

I just had that moment as well where I get disappointed and bored by the game because I like to play a zombie survival online game, not a FFA Deathmatch in a large map. Bandits claim there role is a part of the game but just as the OP said "Kill on Sight" =/= Bandit roleplay. Especially not when all they do is killing bambis around the spawn areas and when 80% of the players in this game all KoS. The thing is that I'm actually looking forward that this might change in the future. When zombies would become lethal while finding food and guns would become really, really hard and when people need to help each other to raid a village or reach some other endgame goals then they wouldn't get bored so quickly but I wouldn't mind if the Devs still think about some quicker solutions to stop this KoS plague.

So guys I finally have a character that has all the stuff that I ever wanted. I see not much sense anymore in looting military bases for the kick only and am currently on a sightseeing tour through every village of chernarus, looking for opportunities to make beautiful screenshots wherever I can. I'm a DayZ excursionist. That's the sort of adventure and entertainment I found for myself yet still it's often dull and it won't last forever. Despite of being an overall helpful guy I often feel tempted to go bandit but then again feel that a short moment of thrill and entertainment is not worth to make someone suffer under it. I'm really torn of what to do to actually play DayZ and enjoy it in the endgame state I'm in. I know that this is still an alpha and the devs are working on endgame content but what does your current dayz endgame behavior look like? Do you avoid playing dayz after you got all the good gear because you lost interest in the game or don't want to lose your stuff again? Do you just wander around, avoiding city death zones and people in order to simply stay alive? Do you go hero or seek a friendly chat with everyone you meet or do you hunt other survivors as you see most entertainment in the current endgame in PvP? No one gets judged here, I'm simply curious what people make out of the current situation, which is undoubtably no challenge by itself if you only take surviving as a goal as you can achieve that if you only loot remote houses for food.

AKS-74U would be my first guess and hope as well, the Bison my second. I'd love the look and feel of having an AKS-74U hanging around my chest with an PBS-4 silencer attached to it.

Right now all you have to do after spawning is orienting yourself and running towards Cherno/Elektro. You will be well equipped by the time you reached the military airport behind Cherno and after looting the airport itself, you're equipped like a elite soldier. If you still miss some goodies you simply switch servers. This procedure only takes around 30 minutes and exept for the server switching it's already my standart behavior to "get into the game" as quickly as possible even though the most awesome time that I had was when I had no clue about everything and stumbled through the map for hours, cheering at every jacket, schoolbag and crossbar that I'd found. Yet once you know the deal, it is way too easy. After 30 minutes you're already in a stage where neither dehydration, starvation nor zombies will pose any threat to your survival anymore. Congratulations: You just lost the game by beating the game. When bicycles get introduced, you possible can make the trip to the military airport even in around 5-8 minutes. It's a huge waste of immersion and "survival feeling". The possibly greatest part of the game is the time after your spawn as an unarmed PC and until the moment you are equipped to the teeth. After that time all that the players seem to do is to hunt for players for fun or to avoid the game in order not to lose everything again. So to prolong this "seeker and survival" episode and to make it a real accomplishment to get good gear, I feel a few pressing steps have to be taken as when you give players the option to beat the game too easily and fast, they will exploit it even though it somewhat ruins their gaming experience.. simply due to impatience and greed. 1) Position the spawn points as far away from the awesome loot places like military bases as possible. The longer and more troublesome the journey gets to these equipment nirvanas, the more awesome will be the experience as players will feel tempted to actually invest time to loot even smaller villages for the sake of survival. Those awesome loot places should really work as high reward/high risk zone for those who actually made it that far. 2) Make the spawn points less calculable. While it appears to be logical that military bases and even ordinary police stations are likely places to find guns in a postapocalyptical scenario, it's actually too predictable which house is not worth to look into and which one will almost guarantee you a weapon at which specific spot. Chernarus portrays a world that is already devastated and almost looted dry to the bone. The supermarkets are virtually empty and in such a scenario the military bases and police stations would be the very first places to be looted. After that stage the most ordinary cabins could be your best bet to find a gun as the decendent of a former civilized world, where every farmer and peasant possibly owned a gun for hunting or home defense reasons. I think gun spawns should become at least possible even in ordinary houses and the fancy guns should most likely spawn on military bases, even though in much a less extend as they do now, where 3-4 guns are almost guaranteed to be found on a military base. City houses could have a slight chance mostly for handguns, police stations a mediocre chance for more fancy handguns and shotguns, village houses a chance mostly for hunting rifles, firefighter stations, hospitals and schools a chance for fire axes and military bases a chance for all the awesome stuff. 3) Make guns way more rare. Even a B95 or a Ruger should be an awesome discovery and not something that will be only a waste of slots after you visited the very next promising station to loot. To give players still a chance and more of a survival feeling, self-made gear and improvised weapons could become much more important to fill the gap of hunting/self-defence until the moment you find the good stuff.

No hard feelings but you got quite some flamboyant logic errors here and I can't but agree with weedz. Someone explained earlier that the 5 years story is from the devs. It appears to be credible. You can also guess that by taking a look at all the buildings and cars. They don't turn like that over night. Also mankind has survived for thousands of years even before agriculture was even invented. Guess how? By hunting. All the canned and preserved food can realistically last that long. There's enough food around for 5% of the population to last 5 years. That's far from being unrealistic and as you can see the supermarkets ingame are looted dry so the moment we "spawn" appears rather to be around the time when the supplies begin to run dry. You can create your own story how your character has survived those 5 years. Last but not least no one knows how civilization works after a zombie apocalypse, especially since the devs clearly don't aim to present us such a pussy zombieapocalypse that we experience at the current unfinished state of the game due to performance limitations. @Traveler: Please care to read the initial post next time before you reply. It's all in there. It appears too many here only read the title and then sense a opportunity just to unload their opinions, no matter how offtopic they are. Btw: There are already plenty of diseases in the game. Cholera will be added but it's impact is questionable as long as ponds remain 100% safe.

Interesting idea. Could work with a respawn timer that get's increased whenever you suicide within 10 minutes after spawn. Also you would have to spend effort to even orientate yourself.