DocWolf

That's a pretty good statement in theory. But sadly DayZ (like every other software around on the market) cannot be defined only by the developer point of view. The moment they decided to go public with the game marked the point from wich the "developer point of view" have to be integrated with the "customer point of view": DayZ in not in a closed alpha, it's an early access: a product of a closed/private company that decided to put it on the market. With a disclaimer of course, but that counts only if you're an intelligent customer, and a lot of people don't go full logic when they have to decide if a product/service/whatever is good or not...there are bookstores of marketing tomes on that. Everything you do (and everything you don't do) in an early access game is visible to your current and future customer base and you should thread very, very, VERY carefully every time you write down what kind of features you want to introduce in the next patch or what kind of bugs are defined "non critical". Because everything stops being just "development" and becomes "development AND marketing" Using your example: the infected AI is not a critical issue? If we're talking about DayZ closed alpha you're right, no one knows that apart from those directly involved in the development of the game and such a problem can be solved later. But in DayZ early access? It's a mind boggling problem because now everyone knows that your zombie game have pretty sub-par zombies and you don't fix it because it's not really a priority. Not only the early access players suddendly know that, but also people who don't play, the press, the web, everyone. Marketing, my friend. The moment you go public is all about marketing, PR and community management - not only technical milestones and deadlines.

Not quite. BI is a company, not a group of friendly modders doing stuff in their spare time. They're doing this to market their product to a wider public and as far as I can understand that's quite a sound business strategy. So, DayZ with a single player option it's quite far from being useless. It's amazing the number of people on this board that take their personal preferences about features so seriously to think those represent the only way to create this game. So naive.

You really should start reading the posts you want to comment, instead of glancing the first few lines and then rush an hasty (and quite haphazard) answer. "Whiny inconsiderate"? Dude, I'm suggesting giving the developers feedback because I like the game and I want it to hit good sale results at release. If that's whiny and inconsiderate...ah, wait, no. You simply read a few words, jumped at wrong conclusions ignoring the rest of the post and then posted an angry response. Nothing new here, standard interwebz procedure. Move along folks, move along

We've already payed them a good amount of money for their product and we're still doing what is essentialy a completely free massive alpha test. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a doom sayer nor I'm trying to disrespect the work of the developing team...I'm just stating a fact: we're already showing them both apprectiation for their work and trust in their ability to deliver a good game. They had (and still have) a very uncomplete and (in certain areas) unappalling product. We bought it anyway because we trusted them and we're helping them testing and refining it because (again) we trust them and their capabilities. They don't need a pat on the shoulder, they're not an amateur modding team working on a free, part-time endeavour. They're professional that are working full-time on a commercial project. They need feedbacks, they need people who test and point out issues and faulty mechanics, they need people who are able to give them constructive criticism. What they don't need, at least IMHO, is virtual hugs, "good job, son" statetements and (again) pats on the shoulders. On a side note: I understand why so many people are concerned about the "negativity" of the boards, but honestly...step for a moment in the shoes of a developer. Would you prefer a community that is always enthusiastic and keep popping up appreciation threads or a community where people have the insight (and the spine) to point out mistakes, issues and present them to you? I'd prefer the second option. In my line of work feedback (especially negative feedback) is essential in understanding what is going wrong, and also in forcing you to see your solutions and ideas from a different perspective. I imagine that's the same for a game developer. Just sayin'

Good idea. For the contents, I suggest you to add some screenshot of plants and trees in order to help newbies categorizing them (i.e. from that bush I can obtain edible berries, that tree will give me an ashwood stick and so on). An "how to" section dedicated to crafted items is crucial: you've downplayed a lot the difficulty of crafting stuff necessary for in-game wilderness survival...if you add lists of what you exactly need to create item A, B and C and an evaluation of how common the components are people will greatly benefit. For the format, I suggest you to use this thread as a test/feedback gathering method and then create a new one with only the guide in the first post/first few post. Some sort of "Guide thread" and "Comments to the Guide thread". Keep up the good work

Many DayZ customers are...what again, exactly? Official numbers put the customer base of this alpha above the three-million figures. As in, more than three million people payed and downloaded it from Steam. The majority of people on this forum are former mod players. Everyone else is just a "simple customer" and in absence of any kind of hard evidence we're forced to consider that "simple customers" outnumber greatly "former mod fans, because there is no way at all that the old mod had more than three million supporters back at the time. And just to remain on the topic of discussion...why exactly should a videogame development company sell a polished, updated version of a free, outdated mod? Don't get me wrong, I like DayZ the mod. But that thing is completely different from DayZ standalone...or it better should be. Because DayZ standalone is a product that is going to be marketed to customers, not an add-on freely downloadable by fans. People tend to forget that the development of DayZ standalone is not some kind of in-house amateur project, made by gamers for gamers. It's a business venture. It's a honest-to-god product that has a price tag, is going to be pushed by PR specialist, is going to be sold to people. That is the reason behind the "DayZ should step aside from the mod and ARMA legacies"...a lot of people are not going to pay money for a polished version of a mod, or for a simulator heavily influenced in game mechanics by other simulators...even if the game it's good.

Well,considering that Chernarus' architects apparently were trained on designing only a dozen or so buildings that dot eerily identical towns and cities in the region...it's not so difficult to assume infected chernarusian were so unimaginative to kill and maim other people in the same exact spot in every single identical building of the country. Anyway, jokes aside...more immersive environment personalization is needed, that's a priority. They promised great things more than a year ago, and those promises remain on paper: that's a shame, because they're doing very interesting things with the environment (the revamp of the map, the northern development and so on). Agree on the "they need to add", considering that as I've already said they promised that more than a year a go. But "they are adding"? Did I miss something? Telling the developers to abandon the comforting features of ARMA is actually a quite sound business advice. DayZ originally was a fan-made mod, so yeah...basing technical/gameplay/environment features on ARMA was pretty much obvious. But when a company want to sell a product to its customers, it's better distance themselves from their previous products. They're trying to market DayZ as an innovative survival simulator, what's the point to link it with their dated, but still very good military simulators? People should look at DayZ because it was developed by a good development team who created good games, not because the environment, the gameplay mechanics and a lot of other things are heavily based on previous successes.

Concerned. Unless there are major upgrades to a lot of mechanics and features directly and indirectly involving combat mandatory first person servers would deeply concern me. Not because 1st person is unplayable (at the moment it just look ugly and not user friendly as hell) but because the game would suffer economically if at launch the only perspective implemented would be 1st person. Simply take a look at 3rd and 1st person servers: the community clearly prefer the first ones for various reasons.

But then the "bleached rags" explanation is not correct: if one contaminated item can give you chemical poisoning every other contaminated item (in theory) should do the same. Mmmmh...time to find some disinfectant and run some self-harming tests

If you used the "treated" rags after spraying them with the disinfectant that could be the very reason of your poisoning: the disinfectant description seems to be one of an household cleaner spray (maybe a bleach-based one?). That's something you definitelly shouldn't put on wounds of any kind. Excanto is right, the correct item to treat bandages in DayZ seems to be alcohol. Just a quick question: spraying something (fruit, open cans of food, steaks, whatever) with the disinfectant will make anyone eating that something ill? In the past I've found some opened cans in weird places (middle of forested nowhere, bus stops and such) and I always found that very bait-like. Avoiding suspicious opened cans is easy...but if you can kill people spraying random bananas and oranges around the tables of Chernarus...

Mostly 3rd person...some of the reasons (pictured not in order of importance) are: because I want to see my character (yeah, who cares if you don't believe it), because DayZ first person is awful (really weird field of view, virtual eyes positioned in the middle of the neck and so on), because third person lets you see the scenery from different angles. The two more important are, however, the weirdness factor of the PoV and the scenery porn: at the moment I feel DayZ has a lot of potential, but it's rather dull. I play 3rd person because I really can't stand to play a potentially good but at the moment frustrating game with a weird perspective and with a camera setting that limits the only thing that is truly amazing: scenery. No offence, but third person perspectives in games has been created exactly because a lot of gamers like watching their characters do stuff. In DayZ it could be used to gain an advantage (not an unfair one, considering everyone can play with camera angles in 3rd person servers) but that does not invalid a preference that has been in the videogaming community since forever.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree. At the moment we don't even have a 100-man servers...speaking of a massive multiplayer game with 50-75 people connected at the same time is quite incorrect. Even servers with a cap of 100 players aren't enough to define a game a "massive" multiplayer game. We can respectfully debate all day long on semantics, but let's not try to pass 50 or 75 man servers as a "massive" multiplayer experience. It's a little too much, honestly.

Completely agree. Considering what happened and the choices made by BI, yeah...DayZ development is more or less right on tracks. But considering what they marketed originally (and somehow still market with the rather optimistic DayZ development roadmap) they're lagging behind. No problem about that, better a good game than a rushed one, but IMHO they should redo their PR approach to the game and start giving out more realistic goals/deadlines - or they will hurt their sales in the future. Just my personal opinion however, a lot of folks would disagree. Another thing...DayZ is not a MMO. That stands for Massive Multiplayer Online (Game) and at the moment DayZ is just a multiplayer game...and considering the amount of players per server the devs are working on, it will remain a multiplayer game also on launch.

I understand that there's a roadmap already set and people are working hard to met deadlines, but the environment team should consider the possibility of re-work their first assignments. The northwestern part of the map, as someone already said, seems quite good and even with an increased urbanization the transition between wilderness-->settlements looks and feels good. The rest of the map...well, let's say it's not nearly as good, especially the first villages and cities plopped down on the map. Some of the "most used" parts of the map (the coast for example, but not only that area) could be improved greatly repositioning buildings, redesigning street and settlement layouts, rethinking rural areas and so on. Also, more attention to the quality (not quantity) of wilderness areas could be really a good thing: the trees seems sparse, there's basically no undergrowth...the woods looks and feels artificial, fake. Exactly like some (a lot) of the original towns and starting areas. Also...where are the characterizations of the environment announced a year ago? More signs of the collapse of the civilization, roadblocks, gridlocks, blood stains, trash...more stuff that helps immersion and erase the sensation of wandering in an abandoned TV-movie prop.

All you write is perfectly fine (and on some level, even correct) from my point of view. Except that last sentence. There are a lot of people outside the development of a game that look at a negative feedback and get all troubled about that. It's negativity, it's badmouthing, it shows lack of support, you're not engaged enough...yeah, well...just to use your figure of speech, there are people in the front of the hype train and people in the back of it. But there are also a lot of people that are not on the train at all, and simply evaluate the product and provide feedback. Feedback that can be positive or negative, and there's nothing more dangerous IMHO than picking up an early access product and getting all angsty on negative feedback about it. The devs NEED negative feedback to understand what their future customer base will not like, and plan accordingly. People "on the train" (it does not matter if they hype or bash the game) are not really providing a good service to a team working on an early access videogame. Personally, I don't like being "on the train" when I evaluate a game. I jump on it at a later stage, but before? When the Devs are ASKING us to provide balanced and in-depth feedback about their work? No. It's not really a good strategy, IMHO of course.