Zombie Milkman

lol. Tonight I was mostly kitted, hit the town next to novo, and was in a bit of a hurry so I did not check around like I usually do. I surprised a guy. said "friendly" three times, put my weapon completely away, and he says nothing... just walks up slowly to me and blows me away. Not even witty dialogue. I don't know exactly what I want to be in this game, but I can tell you.... I do not want to be that. He was just a Rick.

Am I reading that right... 25000+ ammo in the mag?

This reminds me of that time my youngest child broke something just to get attention.

All I can say is, I am thankful they don't have any schoolgirl uniforms because a few some many most of you would wear it, which would force me into therapy.

Holy *****. I wish I could give you money for that, but for now, here's my beans! I love how the cheat tries to gloat in the end and you totally called him out.

I think in general there is a split between two camps of players. There is one group which I think you are a part of which go total immersion and try to logic out exactly what their toon would do given the environment and backdrop as 100% reality. I liken it to an actor taking on a role 100%. Keith Ledger played the murderous nut job the Joker to a T, however, he himself was not a murderous nut job and likely abhorred violence in general as most thespians do. Your camp takes pride in playing the exact part as well as you can. In the other camp are the people who see this as a game first, and while playing a toon in a miserable situation, see a very distinct chasm between their toon and the computer geek at the keyboard, and play the game from the perspective of the PC nerd who is still under the obligation of being social, and playing at being this character, this distant character who is no more valuable than a peg on a cribbage board. The toon itself is practically meaningless in this regard and upon death the nerd will simply engage another toon and try again all within his concept of fair play. I identify with this group and wear the title of socially concerned pc nerd proudly. There are likely many meta camps in between, but that is what I see so far, and I believe both camps are fundamentally perplexed at the other camp for their sense of enjoyment. Both of these players are intelligent, and take pride in how they do what they do, which is why I respect both camps, even the one I do not identify with. Then there is the group of 5 year olds who simply kill because they have not formed any pride in play. They KOS for the same reason they would pee in your bushes - just to do it - like the kids who hop on a game's insta chat board and scribble parts of anatomy just to be rude because it is the most freedom they have in their life where life is just a bunch of rules handed down by square adults. They have nothing to do with this conversation though and are a normal hazard of any game that can be played by anyone over the age of 2 with $30 to spend. The obvious answer to the friction between the camps is servers geared towards each. The bad part of that though is that both camps lose something in the process. The total immersion group would lose the easy victims that assuredly would exist to some extent in their world otherwise, and the "it is just a game get over it" group; would lose the thrill of random encounters in a world of crazies. Imagine servers with nothing but friendly players in a world with a tiny, I mean TINY frikkin population of zombies. Seriously, where is the fun in that? Every encounter with players becomes "Morning Fred, kill any zombies today? No, Scott, but I almost got slaughtered by a mean ladder on Green Mountain. Cheers mate, let's meet at the NWAF for an easter egg hunt later!" Yuck. Just... uh, bleh, YUCK! We more or less need each other. What would be nice is if there was one extra element that steered the total immersion, totally mercinary group a little more towards being a few % points more friendly, and I think that would totally be answered by the makers of this zombie apocalypse game actually adding in a few more ******** zombies. I know, DARE TO DREAM.

Huh? Not west coast servers... My preference would be to play Hardcore, but when I filter for lag alone I get 3 Hardcore under 60, and but 20+ standard servers...

On flashlights, I may have found a use for them. I had gotten trapped up a radio tower on a coastal hill with a zed at the base of the ladder. It was dusk, and getting darker, and while I had a gun/ammo and an axe I did not have a sightline on the zombie. So I could risk a slow descent and get whacked at the bottom, or could a risk a 99% certain death by jumping. Or stay there until the thing got bored which I don't think it would, and I am not going to log in and out, period. After trying many things, like throwing items, I turned on my flashlight and pointed the beam at the ground out away from the tower, in front of where said Z was looking. Yes, it chased the glowing disc of light on the ground. Unfortunately, there is a point at which it stops following, the runs back to the base of the ladder. If you can use this to your advantage let me know. I never tried throwing the lit flashlight... maybe it would act like a flare and attract them?

Question: is this someone cheating? See below. Two days ago I am in the military base just south of NWAF. I emerge from the northeast barracks at the same time someone else emerges from the one west of me. He saw me, and before I can toggle my mic, he splits around the corner. So, I boogie to a bush that has a clear line on that same barrack entrance and wait, crouching. The guy comes back, does not see me, and strolls to the entrance at which point I say ,"Hi friend!" Well, this is when it gets weird... He goes into a crouch and looks like he is fumbling for a weapon. Meanwhile his toon moves around flawlessly at hyperspeed over about 100 game feet between the barracks and the north compound wall. He seems to be unable to get a weapon in his hand, then his toon starts glitching in and out and he disappears again behind the barracks. So the speed he moved at was beyond a fast run. He went into glitchy mode which I assumed was lag. Those were suspicious. However he did not go right at me (maybe he didn't know where I was still), and he ran away. I know lag is an exploitable issue on some games like BF4 and I have seen guys totally exploit it, but usually it shows itself as an all the time thing, and you can tell from the user name and a connection speed chart next to the names who is lagging in the red zone and who isn't. Is it possible for someone to initiate lag on purpose with this game? I would think it would be constant or nothing. The guy clearly was not lagging in the beginning. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Because a vest with a full set of plates can go anywhere from 30 to 50 lbs alone, depending on manufacturer and model. The lighter gear is also going to be more rare. Does that make more sense? Interesting on the rootbeer part. I always assumed it was beer.

The vest should tire the hell out of you. But drink Rasputin beer, and get energized. Sure...

One question: I have been on servers with as little as 2 hour restarts (I don't like this, I do it because I can't get all my server choices on a longer spawn time server under 50 pngs) and had it restart like every 30 minutes, or something crazy short. So does this basically mean the admins are taking liberties just to gear up their toons? If so, that is ******** lame.

That is lame, but what is funny to me is that they actively destroy the joy behind the game, or just plain "don't get it." Think about this, this game is not even close to the pure joy of the better 1st person shooters out there. Whatever your passion, be it COD, BF, hell even Half Life 2, they offer more if that's your thing. So one would think that the pure 1pp shooting experience is not the main draw. Is it the zombies? How could it be? There's like max, MAX 4 zombies per town/base/area. So right now who can honestly say that they play this game because of zombie hunting? So really, what challenge, what interesting thing is there to lure someone to give up their final moments on this earth to play this game? The challenge of the PvP part of the game would be my answer. But, now introduce cheats and hacks so you hit the easy button on that part of the game and what does it leave you with? Really, what does that person get from the game at this point? They have rendered this game nothing less than a romp through a broken sandbox where their joy is apparently to step on other people's daisies. In effect, they have turned this game into choosing to press a [0] or [1] for hours on end. It does not get any lamer than that.

Lol, great story. I crawled through a zombie over ridden military base with a busted leg trying to find all the parts of a splint. The tension is awesome. The players who kill medics with no weapons... not so much.

Not even an axe? That is sad.

I do not play Hardcore for two reasons: 1) Even on a regular server I never use 3PP. It eliminates some fear, and the fear is the main reason I play this game. 2) It is near impossible to get all my server choices on a hardcore server (normal day/night, ping under 50, 30-40 pop, and LOW server resets). The only consistent Hardcore server in my time zone/server lag range does a server reset so often all I have to do is go to a high loot respawn point and just camp and get everything with little fear, little effort. What a waste of time it renders this game.

Diamond/Spade but with a low KOS chance. In fact I have never killed another player.

Yeah, it annoys me too at this point. It is like a cheap horror sound track being played in the bathroom of a movie theater. My first few days of playing though I didn't realize the zombie sound was just canned crap and spooked me into running away. lol

I agree with this. I have no interest in killing a bambi. Along those lines I've wondered if it is safer to play a character wearing non-combat clothes with just an ax for the zombies if I really have no desire to get into a firefight. And for the record most of my encounters have been friendly.

Not necessarily. Too much berry and your body produces too much insulin, and too much insulin tells your fat cells to create triglycerides (fat). I believe in animal rights. All animals have the right to be tasty and in Zombieland the zombies call us "the walking jerky."

The title says it all. If you can turn after dieing, why not give someone the chance to be a zombie? Imagine the joy of an intelligent zombie hoard taking on a team of bandits who killed them. Imagine the motivation! I can build this one right into the game with ease, as fresh kills would have the most functional muscles, etc., and no pain to slow you down even with a few shattered bones. Why this adds an important dimension: Remember Dawn of the Dead (Original)? One of the group's members becomes a zombie, rises, then goes back to a place it vaguely remembers as a safe spot hidden behind the fake wall to cause mayhem with the survivors, leading a hoard of Zs to them in the process. That would suggest that there is partial memory retention by the Zs at least when they are new. Right now the camping sniping hoards of hideaway chickens own the cool spots on the congested boards. It is time to give them some motivation to move a little. If this has been brought up before please merge the threads and bump. This has to be included though. One last suggestion: you need to add Twinkies.

The hardcore gammers hate the players who exploit the gamma settings during the evening cycle. The good players who turned into exploiters mostly do it because they are tired of being picked off by the evil munchkin exploiters who use their gamma correction settings specifically to cheat. Both of the first two are good players, IMO, and they hate the last group, but it is the last group who are really steering the ship on this one. So how do you level the playing field on this so all the good/honest players benefit and the cheaters are strongly persuaded not to cheat? Simple, make the gamma exploiters' toon GLOW brighter and brighter with the higher gamma correction they use. If you use an in game correction method this could be done, and it would make them stick out like a sore thumb from long distances. You could even put a shaded area on the correction setting itself to denote the safe gamma area and the ever increasing "glow" area. Here's the beauty of it - anyone can shoot at a day glow spot in the distance, even with iron sights. Also, zombies love dat lighted spot! So exploit at your own peril. It won't help vs. monitor related solutions but it is at least a start in the right direction. Something needs to be done because many people won't play at night because of one group of outright cheaters who need their boo-boo baby blanket of gamma correction, and the other group who cheat, but who wouldn't cheat if the first group of babies were eliminated or solved. I realize it would not be a "natural" phenom in any game, no one glows in real life without radiation or black lights involved, but then no one has a built in gamma correction either, and that is a cheat totally being exploited by one group, and causing another huge pool of players to cheat in reaction to them. If you do this or something like it, you will see the good players gone bad come back to the fold of non-correction, and the cheater babies who lost their pacifier get pushed to the 24/7 day servers, where they belong, because in the end it is the cheater babies who have caused the problem. They should be the ones made to suffer and enjoy the game less, not those of us who want full emersion.

A question about what constitutes server hoping. My preference for servers, from most cared about to least: 1) 30+/40 2) png <50 3) Night & Day cycle 4) Long time between resets 5) Hardcore It is hard to meet all of those criteria on the west coast of the US, so I take some magic combo of most of those, but let's say I sacrificed the whole long time between resets thing. So I end up looting up fast because 1 hr resets yields insane amounts if everything, but it gets annoying, so a move to a server with long stretches between resets but still carry the gear from the load up... Would the ethical thing in this case be to kill my toon and start from scratch? I like starting with nothing as it has yielded my most fascinating, fearful moments, but it also yielded some amazing survival stories. Is that the best thing to do, or maybe just dump everything I own to see if I can make it back to fully stocked again?

Great story, and great signature.

Why not? It fits the backdrop just as well as the names of the towns. The absolute last thing in the world I would want is a gun that was unique or rare, both for parts (springs need replacing, for example) and ammo, in this setting. I would be surprised if you couldn't hunt up sales for the most likely guns from the region and assign values in game right from it. You would of course need to try and get an exported vs. domestic sales idea though.