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OK guys, I see tons of posts about there being no loot, canned food is hard to find, etc. I was also frustrated at first, until I got to playing and seeing what it took to survive. First off, APPLES! Find an apple tree and work your butt off gathering apples! I spent 1.5 hours picking apples at one point, but was fully energized/hydrated and my pockets were full, so I was able to run around finding loot. OUTHOUSES! You would not BELIEVE what spawns in those little places. Barred window structures near guardhouses; the ones with a covered small porch that you cannot enter. Amazing loot! Just get energized/hydrated and head inland, guys. If you get hungry, find berries or apples until you have the materials to make a garden or the supplies to kill an animal(or player?), skin and quarter, cook, and eat. It's not all that bad, guys. If you have Zeds running after you, just keep running; they get tired. Or just melee them with fists; hit them in the face! Seems to work better than even swinging a fire axe at this point. This game was *never* meant to be pvp-oriented. It is SURVIVAL oriented, and survival is TOUGH. Suck it up and explore; find what you need to survive. Throw all your loot information out the window; times have changed! Devs: Please, PLEASE fix these friggen tents! :P

Great job!

Never a worry; I hope you enjoyed the mayhem!

bensound.com has royalty-free, no-cost music to use in videos and such, as long as you give him credit for the music. I gave credit at the end :)

You appear to lack the ability to think logically. First off, while an apocalypse is happening, the survivors would go for weapons right away, and they would start dying in firefights over food, zombies, etc... That would bring some reality to the current loot spawns: Anywhere and everywhere except the obvious places! Also, it did not take any "skill" to go to a military base and get loot. You always knew where the loot was, every server restart. That's not "skill". That's exploiting known drops. Now that the loot is all over the map, the real skill lies in surviving and finding what you need through trial and error! As for your numbers, my 99+% figure is the population a few years after a major event. Perhaps only 60% of the population died at first, and the other 39+% died from starvation, or fighting each other, or zombie bites, whatever? Alas, the 39% could easily loot every major building, especially considering grocery stores, for example, only have enough food to feed the surrounding community for a few days at any given time.

But the game is based on survival. If you want to PvP, best of luck! Personally, I have more fun surviving, hunting, growing veggies, etc to survive instead of spending 8 hours looting just to die in 5 minutes of gunfight :) If I want to PvP, there are games I play for that, where I respawn fully armed. For basic survival, DayZ is finally challenging!

...as for PvP, set up camp somewhere; maybe you will find someone coming to raid your stash! Much more realistic, in my honest opinion. In an apocalyptic situation, who would actively go out looking for people to kill? Pretty sick folks; that's who! You are now forced to use your brain, not just wait for a server restart to loot a military, gear up, and PvP. Now, you actually have to scavenge and fight to survive!

You should have read the details before purchasing the game. And yes, we still have some PvP; just not as much; this is, once again, a SURVIVAL-based game! Read the actual information on the game before you buy it! Also, being in alpha stages of development, it IS a work in progress. It was far too easy to survive. Now, survival is #1 and PvP is somewhere in the background; no one wants to get in gunfights because they are still figuring out how to stay alive :)

Consider this: A couple years after mass hysteria and 99+% of the population dying or becoming zombies, people would initially run to military bases and police stations for weapons. What happens after those are looted? S*** falls where people end up dying, right? That could be *anywhere*. Realize, the vehicles are rusted-out wrecks. Cities are overgrown with vegetation. DayZ is not based on the day an apocalypse happens; it's based a few years AFTER said apocalypse. So yeah, loot can be anywhere. It's more realistic than being organized by genre, years after whatever apocalyptic event occurred. I'm lovin' it.

DayZ was never intended to be PvP. If you like PvP, hit up ArmA or something ... DayZ has *ALWAYS* been intended to be hardcore SURVIVAL. Now, we actually have to work at survival before anything else! That's what I expected when I first bought SA, and was relatively disappointed to see rampant PvP going on but survival being stupid simple. The game is now becoming what it promised; hardcore SURVIVAL.

Why is it that anyone expressing their disappointment with the current stable build gets their posts removed or topics locked? Are you so concerned that you just lost a good 50% of your player base that you have to hide the truth? Persistence is BROKEN. It should *NEVER* have been forced due to its unstable nature. Maybe if tents worked, it might be viable? Zeds: While I like the new difficulty level, why overpower them while they still glitch through buildings and locked doors? Not to mention desync in the middle of zombie fights; they jump from position to position unrealistically. I'm not whining about the OP zombies; they need to be more of a challenge. Alas, when they can one shot you or ruin your gear with one hit, why would you implement them when game mechanics are so screwed up? Loot: What loot? I have found some stuff; know the nice places to get ammo, PM63, etc. I have not even seen a box of matches and food is *very* hard to find. While trying to pick apples from a tree that shows dozens of them, I died of starvation. Cannot go fishing or hunting because I cannot make a fire; no damn matches! Either implement other ways to start a fire(rubbing sticks together, magnifying glass, 10% water in a bottle, etc) or make the matches more available! Yes, the zombies are difficult, and that's part of the game. I can take them down with bare fists and not sustain too many blows. That's fine. What sucks is I cannot cook food that I hunt. If I can even get equipped to hunt/fish before dying from starvation under an apple tree that has apples all over it. Yes, alpha this, alpha that. Stop being unfair in forums and deleting/locking topics like you do. People don't like to be controlled and rendered unable to express their frustrations to a company that has made a LOT of money from them and shows sluggish progress as a result. Don't force persistence that does *not* work. Have apples readily available on trees; they don't fill you up much anyhow, but at least a ratio where you don't die of starvation while trying to pick some would be nice. I have almost 500 hours on DayZ. Was that time completely wasted due to the devs intentionally making the game unplayable for most by implementing absolutely broken changes? At least make this playable! And yes, I know there are those who say they love it like this; that's great for you! You are maybe 25% of the player base of DayZ. Shouldn't the 75% MAJORITY have their say as well?

For clarification, I'm not trying to sit and whine. I'm GLAD PvP is much more difficult as I did not buy this game to PvP. Frankly, I was sick of fully geared folks running around killing people, and the zombies are refreshingly more of a threat. What bothers me is with the current nature of the zombies to glitch through walls and doors; hit you through stairways from a floor below. Or those that hit you 5 times before you even SEE them! Why make them more powerful when there are longstanding glitches like these? As for food, it's now the #1 thing to look for. If your graphics show apple trees that are full of apples, make it realistic to pick them! I've never encountered an apple tree that was full of apples but impossible to pick from. I'm still playing, and surviving longer each time, it seems. Alas, I'm tired of dying of starvation while staring at a loaded fruit tree.

Funny, considering we are much more than 5%. Get off your high horse and take an English course; it would do you good. As for bugs, the devs KNEW the loot system was absolutely crap, but forced it on everyone anyhow. Maybe if they had fixed it before forcing it things would be different? Frankly, I'm tired of seeing people put others down for expressing their opinions! If YOU don't like it, don't go to the forums! I'll play what I choose to! You have absolutely no right to put down people for expressing their personal opinion.

I actually found a 75 rd drum mag yesterday. They are still around, just much more rare.

Ever since I first played DayZ, I noticed that the Mosin Nagant ammo was 7.62x51 in game. Being the owner of several Mosin rifles, I know it to be 7.62x54R ammunition. Is there any way to fix this minor but OCD-flaring error?

I understand the public hive concept. What I do not understand is in order to host a server, our choices are very limited to a few companies that are allowed to gouge prices at their will. I pay almost $80 a month for a 30 player server, whereas the resources actually used would fit on a $29/month budget dedicated server. These companies GOUGE the players! The prices are HORRENDOUS. So I pay my $80 to admin a server for a month. Even though I pay my own hard earned money to play a game I bought on my own server, I am only allowed to restart regularly, kick abusive players, etc. If I pay the money out of my own pocket to host a server, I should be allowed to essentially do as I please. If I don't like a bandit that keeps killing players, I should have the right to ban him. I should have the right to declare PvE if I choose to. I should have the right to password protect my server if I so choose. It's MY money paying to host this. If the development team has to have such strict rules pertaining to hosting, then pay to host your own servers. Not like you have not made buckets of money already. If these rules are this strict in a game with no rules, maybe you should host multiple servers yourself instead of screwing the gaming community admins over with bloated pricing and zero control. Obviously, I will not renew my server, which has jumped up in rankings quite quickly. I love playing DayZ but frankly am sick of this totalitarian regime. About a dozen friends and I are moving on when this server expires. Not because we have problems with gameplay. Because we have issues with the overpriced servers and ridiculous rules. It's MY money. I'm renting MY server. I should have the option to do essentially as I choose. DayZ is cracking down on anyone not following server rules as stated by the dev team and shutting down any servers that are not within the guidelines. Meanwhile, we have ghosters, folks using aimbots and wallhacks, etc. ruining the game for folks. Instead of pointing the finger at server admins, find a way to keep people from cheating. That will exponentially improve the DayZ experience.

First off, the rules set by Bohemia for game service providers are the sole reason the pricing is as it is. These companies have to host a large number of servers at their own expense It forces these companies to take a loss from the start so they have no choice but to charge 15x cost on services, because a majority of servers are awaiting rental in the early stage of hosting. Once the servers start filling up, however, it makes for extremely high profit. If I make the choice to start a gamehosting company, I have to provide x number of servers at my expense for x amount of time. If, for any reason, I do not get to 50% capacity immediately, I'm on the hook for a lot of money every month. The pricing nightmare is initiated by Bohemia solely. As for rentals vs ownership, I could OWN a server easily enough. Which blade shall I pick first? Each blade can easily host what, 8 DayZ servers? I have plenty of resources, but the unique set of rules prevents me to own my own, unless I wish to isolate an entire cluster to start with and dedicate its entire resources to DayZ at my personal expense while forming yet another corporation. It's an unethical business model. Yes, I could profit, as the resources to start a gamehosting company are sitting idle right now. I could OWN my own DayZ server(s) without a problem. The rules still apply, even to equipment I own and maintain. The rental status does not matter. It's the fact that when someone pays to host something, they should have some control over what happens on the resources they pay for out of pocket. I expressed a willingness to provide 16 gameservers from the start, and always keep the proper ratio of rentals vs self-sponsored servers. I can scale nearly infinitely with datacentre access in over two dozen countries. Unfortunately, the rules require even more investment upfront; hence the ridiculous server price points.

Actually, it's a simple database that requires little processing power and bandwidth considering the application. My $59 monthly server could handle all hive requests and storage. Automatically, with little to no user intervention. The hive server is only a database; one which could run somewhat efficiently on an old Pentium 4 computer and only use perhaps 10mbit of bandwidth. To put that into perspective, my server has guaranteed GigE(1,000mbit)

My buddy's EA affiliation aside, his statement was from an educated, experienced software developer. He does not enjoy his job at EA and is looking for new work. Passed on Bohemia due to the DayZ nightmare alone. Alas, until he finds new employment, the salary is huge and he will continue drawing it until he finds new work; I can't blame him for that :) I do understand the potential ramifications of public server admins having more ability, but when you rent a gameserver, you make it yours. In any game I have ever hosted(dozens) I have had the ability to essentially do as I please. DayZ has the most stringent rules of any game you can host. With rules that stringent, they should host their own public hive servers. What's the point of paying a ridiculous amount of money for a server that you can't really do anything with? Add to that the 10-20 minute warning this morning in email stating that all servers not exactly abiding by rules will be shut off, and only will be restarted if you furnish absolute proof of your inability to abide within 10-20 minutes. This comes after I agreed to a 3 strike system through Vilayer. They just reneged on their end of the contract I agreed to! PLEASE REALIZE: My server was not shut down; I DO abide by the rules. I'm frustrated that rules have been overlooked for so long and were implemented with no warning whatsoever, and the 3 strike system was not being used as per contract. If Bohemia wants to force the hand of the hosting companies, then they should start banning those who ghost or use wallhack/aim exploits too. Fair's fair. Ban these exploiting fools immediately; don't just focus on server admins who pay personal money to host a game.

It's my opinion and I will stick to it. I do understand how admin control could change gameplay, but also understand that those who invest their own funds should have control over what they rent.

Almost 20 years ago, I was on the development team for this new thing that was to be called the "Microsoft Network"(MSN). If our alpha testers had received such buggy releases, they would have trashed the project from the beginning. Since we were able to provide our concept with few issues, the MSN became elevated to the level it is currently at. While not personally a Microsoft fan, I did learn a lot in my time with them. There was not a huge budget to work with from the start, but we provided exceptional code and related services. While I do understand DayZ is essentially community-supported, I do understand the public hive concept; I still realize that not only is this an overpriced lump of development nightmare, I see hosting companies exploiting the fact that they are a minority, so these ridiculous prices and such stick. It is not considered legitimate business practice to stick paying users with so many bugs, bugs that could be ironed out quickly under the right circumstances.. I spoke with a longtime associate of mine, who currently designs 3D items for EA Games. I asked him about DayZ and he cracked up laughing, saying DayZ was a total fraud. He frankly said that by design, this game will ultimately fail once the right pockets are lined. Take it or leave it; I'm just giving the perspective of a retired developer and his peers.

The engine the game is based on has major issues. Physics are far too inefficient to implement. It is a nightmare taking something written for an entirely different purpose and attempting to bend it to your will; a more modern engine would have made for a better foundation. SO essentially we have folks trying to patch the walls on a house whose foundation is collapsing. It makes no sense, even from a development standpoint.

People already get unfair advantages because protections against wallhacks and aimbots are not decently implemented. Why focus on the server admins when the real problem is folks using exploits to gain advantage? I just think their effort would be better spent repairing what's broken instead of focusing on admins. If you don't like a server, don't go to it! Simple stuff..

The funny thing about your accusations is I don't do that. I don't take advantage. I would like the ability to run my server how I please, considering it's my PRIVATE FUNDS paying for it. This company either needs to run their own servers or allow those who spend their personal funds to do as they please. Simply stated. ...as an addendum, please consider taking an English class. No, I'm not 12. I'm 37. Unfortunately, your grammar is shameful even for a 12 year old.