Jesterarts

Something.... something has changed. I've been travelling for weeks and I only say the undead occasionally. But now, they are everywhere... and they are STRONG! Twice I've been stranded now with no way out. I've been much more quiet, and move much slower now. Can't take any chances any more... This is now the only way I feel close to 'safe'... In related news, MP5 mags FOR EVERYONE! Damn, finding them every 5 seconds now.

Back on the road: Places that where good, then turned shit, and now are sorta interesting again: I'm on Top Gear! Only used half a tank so far: Tight squeeze YAY! Made it to Novo And then decided to drive North. If you are interested, here is the view when you get to the edge of the map: And then this:

Menacing composition picture: Even more menacing! Rify: I decided to be a train for a while: Needed to stretch my legs a bit, checking out ma' ride:

Zombie friends: Found this guy, he just stood there with his axe up... so I didn't offer him a lift SO MUCH FUEL FOR FUN ACTIVITIES: Well HELLO there... That looks like a place I would rather be:

Camped out the night and then just outside Zenaskjkajs-blah-blah I found THIS: ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOADTRIP MOFO's At this point, I decided my journey was going to do the FULL coast run. Got some tunes crankin' in the form of this classic: And fit the road. So much freakin' rain! When you run over a zombie, this happens: This is the guy that got done by the zombie I ran over/through

The latest instalment in 'Diary of a traveler' begins with me finding a flare gun and flare in some shitty little town. I was also facing a challenge of being stuffer, hungry and thirsty. Pretty... oh wait! zombie... RUN!

So played a couple hours last night using my 'good' character that I have on a private server. The server is a private server with up to 30 plays, and usually has 10-20 on there. I've been using this server to play 'for real' and really being survivalist about it. I was coming out of Zelenogorsh running along the road that heads NEE as there was a truck depo or something on that road just outside the town. As I am running, BOOM, truck on the road ahead with the driver door open. Immediately I run into cover and wipe the mosin out as this is SUSS! I wait for 10min scanning the area for any activity as this has trap written all over it. Nothing. I finally make a move and get to the truck, jump in and drive. To my surprised, FULL tank of fuel. So at this point I am very excited as I will potentially be exploring the map in a truck. I drive along the road and come across a small village and pull over to check for clothes as my character is hypothermic as I was running in the rain before and for whatever reason I can't light a fire. I jump out of the truck and start walking forward, just as I noticed it's rolling towards me. Didn't manager to move in time. 'You are dead'

I think this happened to me at the Castle today. Looking at some shoes, 'You are dead'.

Well, so much for my grand plans of helping bambis and hunting bandits. I hadn't played for a bit since I got all the gear, went to Rog and walked up some stairs. Standing at the top looking at some shoes and 'You are dead'. Respawn within running distance but something ahs gone wrong and it's like my old body is next to me. I have that little gun and ammo icon and can 'view contents' of my body as well as check pulse. Just that the inventory only opens for a split second. Manage to run back to my actual body, get there and can't pick anything up off the body. Just will not pick it up and when I right click I get 'receiving'. Fark... Log out, log in and I'm in a field, naked and my feet hurt.

So, new approach to playing DayZ. I have one 'serious' character on a private hive which I play my regular, 'lone-wolf hermit', style. Cautious and more about survival than guns and ammo. However, this style does have the drawbacks of lacking interaction with players and also keeps me from exploring the bigger, higher traffice towns. So I also have a character on the public hives who dies a lot and I actively seek out people. The most I usually get kitted with this dude is maybe a jacket, hat, a bag if I am lucky and a melee weapon plus a 'bluff' weapon, aka a gun with no ammo. The other night I am playing and I get killed by some guy that I teamed up with. This time I had two sawn-off shotguns and find him alone and no kit. We team up and I give him a shotgun, and w go off on an adventure. Outside the Balota airfiled we are in the bushes seeing if we see anyone when he shoots me in the back. You are dead. Spawn back on the coast, near that spot where there is the house, jetty and a couple boats on the beach. I hide in a bush and I see about 4-5 people all running right, towards the factory area. So I follow them. Along the way I find a dude who gives me a heads up about a drybag in a house and I also find a hat and machette. Keep heading to the factories. I almost pass through the factory area when I noticed that there is about 5-6 bodies all littering the ground. I find some cover and watch. I finally notice one guy moving. I run over so see what the G.O. is, expecting to be dead pretty soon. He tells me that all the bodies are a 'hacker', and when I ask why he things it's a hacker he said that it's because he can't loot the body which makes him believe this. He takes me to the 'body'. The weird thing being that where he is standing and saying there is a body, I can't see anything. I do noticed an actual body about 20m away and investigate that. JACK-F'IN-POT! Silenced M4 with all the toys including the double mag things, and a pack full yellow boxes and ammo boxes. Also gear wise, high cap vest (ruined unfortunately), russian helmet thing, military top and bottom, axe, etc. So I am pretty excited and grab what I can, the stuff I can't grab I strip off the player for the guy who lead me to the body. I left him the bullet proof vest, but I probably should have grabbed that in hindsight. At this point I am a bit nervous as I have gone from fresh spawn to fully geared in 3min. So I run off without checking the ammo box or the yellow case. I find a quiet spot to chill out on the hill and start digging. WOW! The ammo boxes are clearly hacked, each one contains another ammo box and a yellow container. Each yellow box seems to contain another yellow box and usually 3-5 bullets for the M4. Once I have finished unpacking everything, which takes me moving location a few times so I don't get lost as to what I have and haven't looked in I have: - 62 bullets for the M4 - 4 flash bags - 1 grenade - Skull face bandana - 2 full mags for a sub machine gun - 4 blood packets - 2 morphine injectors - 25 can's of opened peaches - Full outfits in green, black and autum camo - 80 rounds of mosin ammo - Various compasses, lock pick kits, etc The list kept going. From all this stuff, I grabbed what I could that would usually fit in my bag and left the rest to disappear with the server reset. By the end of it, I think there was about 20 ammo boxes and about the same of yellow cases. So given I had all this loot almost literally fall into my lap, I've going to use it for good and hunt down any bandits who are killing fresh spawns.

Not die

Not going to lie... I was a little bit excited by this thread. I've found a few lock-pick's in the last few days but discarded them as useless. But now that I know I can lock doors, my mission will be to lock EVERY door in a small town. So awesome.

Next time you are logging in as soon as you see the 'please wait' screen SPRINT! Essentially, the player is spawned into the world before the other objects, so you actually exist in the world for a short moment while the buildings are still loading. It might take a few goes, but when you are in the game, work out which edge of the building is the closest to and face it. Then log out, log in, sprint during black screen, rinse and repeat until you get out. This has worked for me 3 times now. Good luck!

So I played for the first time in a while yesterday and I noticed I am having some issues with magazines and canteens. For whatever reason, I cannot for the life of me fill a canteen from a well. I tried the same thing I always did before and the action of 'fill canteen' never appeared. Standing, crouching, laying down, pointing at the handle, nozzle and shaft (hehe 'shaft') but no luck. In the end I just filled it whenever I found another bottle of water. The next issue for me was trying to load a mag into an AK. In my game time yesterday I found 3 individual AK. A regular AK, a short stumpy one and one that was missing all of the wooden bits. I also had a drum mag and a SMAG AK mag with me. For whatever reason I was unable to load either mag into any of the AK's I found. When I dragged them to the gun the icon remained red. Is anyone else having these issues? I'm mostly interested in the AK issues as water is easy enough to find, but I ended up leaving these AK's behind as they where no use. Thoughts?

At the moment I am still possibly putting it down to user error more than a bug since others have been able to work around it. Going to try some of the suggestions and see how I go. It's not that critical and if it is an issue, I'm sure the devs will address it in good time.

Thanks for the feedback! I tried in a pond and the result was one empty canteen and soaked pants. :)

Soooooo after not playing for a while I've gotten back into the game a bit. And... I finally found a grenade! Haven't worked out if I will just use it somewhere random in a forrest, or if I will hold on to it until I actually need it.

Ah, wow ok. I didn't realise there was that many calibres of AK ammo and magz Well there you go, that could explain that issue. Thanks,

Gave a guy a mosin and ammo the other day in electro. Though he wasn't totally a bambi.

1. Because this requires them to change something 2. Because this requires them to change something 3. Never been hit by a hopper form 20 feet away. My point is, the dev team have 2 options: 1. Invest time removing the hopper zombies, cranking up spawn rates for the regular zombies and increasing their speed, etc -or- 2. Invest time in none of those things and get the exact same testing data. If I have the option of not doing something or doing something and regardless achieving the same result, the choice is obvious. Any moment they invest in removing the hopper zombies is time they could use addressing something else. And then down the track they will have to invest time to put them back in. And based on this forum they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If the leave the zombies people like yourself with start threads like this, if the take the time to pull them out and put them back in later at the cost of faster development of other features, you'll start threads like your other one about how slow they are working.

You guys are REALLY struggling with this whole 'ALPHA Testing' concept. Yes, they absolutely will have functionality in internal testing that is not released to EXP or STABLE as they have bugs that would prevent further testing OR it makes no sense to put them in as there is not benefit from a holistic perspective. The issue described in this thread however, is not something that in any way prevent the zombies providing testing data in their current state. Thus why logically they would stay in. The thing is that zombies are just objects. Think beyond how these objects are represented visually but rather from a coding perspective what benefits are there to having more objects in the game. For example, the benefits of keeping them in are: 1. Testing server loads 2. Given they move faster, testing rendering performance 3. Since they have a different way of interactive with the player, testing that those interactions are occurring as intended. The zombie strikes and you get hit The top item is probably the biggest benefit as given server loads and the number of objects that exist in the game are both areas that need to be thoroughly tested, they can either introduce more other assets to replace the zombie objects or just save themselves the editing and keep them in. Pathfinding is a tiny, tiny part of the testing and given zombies are already rare and these ones even rarer. There is simply no point to removing them. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've covered my point of view and don't see any point to furthering this stupid argument as I will clearly be beaten by those with more experience behind them discussing things at that level.

Name and reputation on the line? *Cough* ALPHA *cough* No ones reputation is on the line because there is a screen at the very start of the game that you need to click 'I Understand' to acknowledge this is a testing version of a future product. And the zombie bug is hardly 'ridiculously broken'. It's a minor inconvenience at most. Ridiculously broken would be if every time you saw one there was a 50/50 chance the game crashed. This would be a reason to remove them as it would prevent people from being able to perform further testing both of the game in it's entirety and the zombies themselves. Just out of sheer curiosity, given you are quite opinionated on bug management and how software testing works. What is your experience in this space? And I will preempt you throwing the same question back at me and answer it in advance. I've been in the IT industry for just under 8 years, currently manage a 1.5 million dollar production facility at an e-learning firm and have spend most of my career working with front-end and design teams on B2B and B2C soltuions. No direct game development experience but I often work with freelances that are game development specialists, usually from a 3D and artwork background. That is the knowledge I reflect on when stating my opinions. Your turn.

My reasoning for attacking your posts are not insane. Try to comprehend this, YOUR experience of how the zombies interact with objects in the world is not the SOLE testing benefit of the zombies. Also, there is NO negative effect of keeping the zombies in aside from people like yourself getting your panties in a twist. On the other hand, from a testing perspective, there are MULTIPLE benefits to keeping them in. In software dev, you don't remove functionality that has a known bug during development to address that bug. You keep testing to see if there are any other bugs. Just because you cannot understand this doesn't mean my reasoning is insane. It means you are stupid.

The awkward moment when that's my point and reason for keeping them in but you are just too stupid to get it. As I said, if something is not causing CRITICAL issues with the game in terms of errors there is no point to removing it. Especially when there are SO many benefits to keeping it in from a testing perspective. If you can't understand that and I come of 'dick-like' to you, then that's your problem for not understanding the fundamentals of software development or my point.