mrperson666

At the game start now, if I don't have morphine and I get a broken bone, then for all practical purposes it's game over, time to respawn. And unfortunately, because of the likelyhood of having no gun or a gun with no ammo, broken bones are common. And having no morphine is also common. I'm tired of games where I crawl around carefully for an hour searching for guns and ammo, finally getting a gun and a little ammo, and then getting a broken bone from a zombie attack. I can be healthy, have some other great stuff, but an hour of effort is down the drain. The broken bone mechanic sucks when you spawn without morphine. It'd be much more playable if you spawned with morphine instead of painkillers. Shaking a little is fine, but reducing starting players to a crawl when they're already at such a huge disadvantage makes no gameplay sense.

I think it's good having a chance to run away and lose them. Used to seem a bit stupid running across two fields, only to have a zombie from 5 minutes ago suddenly turn up still hunting me. Now it isn't too hard to lose them if there are buildings around, but it's still risky since you might end up attracting even more. Given the lack of starting weapon, the ability to lose zombies is pretty important. And the zombies can still deal out the bloody death when needed. I've been in several situations where unavoidable gunfire has attracted too many zeds and trapped me in some corner. One thing though, their collision detection is a mess, so they are going through walls and obstacles with monotonous regularity. And the increased hit range isn't great. They hit from distances that just don't look like they could reach you. If I'm more than arms length away, it doesn't make sense to take damage from a zombie attack. And they detect and attack through walls too often.

I'd put these a lower priority than zombies hitting through walls and excessive broken bones.

So, we all know that a broken leg means respawn unless you have morphine. So after managing to scrounge together a decent kit, next stop was North Cherno hospital. Got there, picked up a bunch of blood bags and found one all important, sacred morphine shot. Had a great gun, ammo, food, morphine, figured I had a rosy future. Decided to loot the apartments next door. But a zombie heard me somehow, I shot him but suddenly they were swarming the place. And now they start hitting me THROUGH THE FLOOR FROM THE ROOM BENEATH ME. I have plenty of blood, but they break my legs. I use my precious morphine shot, only to instantly have my legs broken again. They just keep laying into me from out of sight. I crawl up the stairs, into other rooms, but the invisible attacks from underneath keep coming. It is fairly obvious that these are not some disease infected "28 Days" type living infected person. With the sensing through walls, attacking through floors, and teleporting through any obstacle in their way, these are quite clearly zombies of a supernatural origin, possibly an "Evil Dead" nature. Someone, somewhere, has read passages from the Necronomicon and infected the dead with evil spirits. The new attack range and/or attack collision detection is screwed. It allows attacks through any and all obstacles, and needs to be fixed desperately.

Well, you know, it's the standard thing, it's an alpha. I can kinda sympathize though. I'm running out of reasons to play 1.7.1.5, too many broken bones and deaths due to zombies hitting me through walls or floors. Tired of building a character up for an hour only to have it die from something stupid and beyond my control, so might give it a rest until the next update hopefully cleans things up a bit.

From the interviews I've read, Rocket is trying to elicit a certain emotional response, like he has experienced when doing military training. "Realism" won't necessarily always be the best way to get that response, and nor is being more and more "hardcore" (i.e. super hard for beginners and unfun for all but a few.) For instance, I'm finding 1.7.1.5 has pushed things so that newly spawned players find things much more difficult, while clans and well stocked bandit teams find it much easier. This is probably quite realistic, but it isn't necessarily going to evoke the kind of emotional response Rocket is aiming for. So I don't think the "hardcore" crowd necessarily understand what Rocket is trying to achieve any more than anyone else. Especially when 1.7.1.1 came out, I saw a lot of the "hardcore" talking about how great the new zombies were, and how the people complaining were just wimps and bad players. But actually the zombies were totally broken, which Rocket made clear in his posts and subsequent fixes. So I take the "hardcore" opinions with a big grain of salt.

Not half as boring as spawing in the middle of nowhere and having to run down the coast ten minutes to get anywhere worthy of looting. As far as I can see, if I don't spawn near balota, cherno or elektro, there's not much point in continuing. I mean, I'm going to balota, cherno or elektro anyway, so why spend ten super dull minutes running when I can just respawn? Doubly so if you're playing with some friends. Game would be better if you could choose where on the coast to respawn.

Yeah, that's fine if you spawn anywhere near a hospital, and it isn't being camped by bandits after the giddy thrill of killing easy targets. Those are big ifs.

I heard that really short lives, for spawnpoint hopping, don't count toward the stats. Anyhow, I agree with the poster who said it was broken bones. This is my main gripe with the game now, starting without morphine. Good chance you'll get hit and get a break, and then there's not really anything to do but suicide and start again. Had many games ruined by this.

I've always played lone wolf, with occasional short collaborations with a stray survivor here or there. Was starting to get a bit bored of the game, then yesterday ended up in a group of 7 that when from cherno to NWAF. It was the most fun I had in ages. Even though there's less resources since you have to share, it usually turns out that someone has what you need. And you feel a lot safer versus bandits. On the downside, the chance of alerting zombies seems to go up, and once the shooting starts zombies pour in from every direction, since odds are there'll be some loud weapons in the mix.

Was with a group of 7 yesterday, at Stary. Up on a hill. We were reasonably well equipped and of moderate health. Saw a guy running through a field chased by zombies. I'm not a pker so I thought we might help him, we had obvious numerical advantage. Instead, one of the group decided to shoot him. So he died and we took his stuff. Oddly, the guy who shot him didn't seem to think of himself as a bandit/murderer. In chat later on, he was saying how the guy was running toward us and could have attacked and it there was no time. Wasn't really like that, but it made me wonder how many others up north kill quite happily and don't think of themselves as bandits. He shot a guy in cold blood and then took his stuff... seems pretty bandity to me. Yet this same team had been perfectly friendly when we stumbled into each other in Cherno. BTW, I said nothing at the time. Even took a knife from the corpse. Think that makes me an accessory. Felt a bit horrible, but I didn't want to risk making a fuss and putting a target on my own head. Made me think about how I might behave in real life. Anyway, I needed a knife, the corpse didn't have use for it anymore ;)

I'm not a player killer, I'm always friendly. I don't mind player killers. They're a vital part of the game, it'd be dull without them. Problem is, I'm finding there's no satisfaction to be had being friendly. I spend ages crawling around, and then suddenly I'm PKed and lose everything. Usually not much I could do about it, except maybe only hang out in the forest and get totally bored. If I was given the information of who killed me, it'd be a lot more fun. I could then try to hunt them down. As is, I simply have no info and can't do anything. It's getting boring. I don't see that PKer's have anything to lose. It's pretty easy to be a player killer, since you always get first shot. If people know who you are, it'd add some challenge to the game for them. As it is, they just have a pretty easy ride. It's make the game more fun for them, knowing that whoever they killed knows who they are and is coming back for them. And it'd make it more fun for me, since I'd have a very clear goal on my next respawn. I don't like the idea of bandit skins or bandit sounds, since just because you shot someone doesn't mean you're a bandit. You might simply be someone who kills bandits. At the moment though, its just getting tedious. I've done the routine so many times... spend hours collecting stuff, then get shot in the back of the head. Losing interest in the routine.

"so since respawning isn't realistic should we just throw realism out the window and fly around and shoot lazers out our eyes?" Don't think I said anything about laser shooting eyes, but I'll re-read my posts to make sure. Hmm, laser eyes...

daze23: "if someone shoots you in the back of the head from 100m away, how would you know their identity?" If someone shoots you in the back of the head from 100m away, how would you suddenly come back to life again standing on a beach a minute later? It's not a different person either, check your name, it's the same as the guy who just got killed. ;) So, as I pointed out, realism is hardly a barrier. Redshift, yeah, I much prefer seeing the names too.

"when you die, youre dead. Youre a new person so should have no grudges " I think that kinda fails the "realism test" too, though, since when you die, you don't suddenly come back as a new person, full stop. (Assorted religious beliefs aside.) So if you play the "realism" card, you should also never play the game ever again after the first time you're killed. If you do play again, then you may as well play with a grudge. Consider it re-incarnation with an echo from a past life.

I think there's a good chance the game will end up left just to the trolls/bandits. At the moment there's not much in it for friendlies after the initial thrill of perma-death.

Is it a server option? I've never seen it. I've seen the ones where you can see a player's name if you put the crosshair on them, but not one that tells you who killed you. Since I'm often shot in the back of the head while crawling, the crosshair name doesn't help much.

Just gave 1.7.1.5 a shot. Zombie behaviour was good, framerate was good. But was getting visual glitching how and then I haven't seen before, big white/grey polygons filling the screen, big triangles. Sometimes filled the whole screen. At a guess, it looks perhaps like shadow polygons, but that's just a guess.

Doubt I'll ever run into the individual, but I like the idea of bounties for taking out player-killers. Be neat as a game mechanic.

Side chat was nice, quite social, talking about the game, helping people either in game or with game mechanics of the "How do I...?" variety. On occasion it could be an irritant, but mostly it was ok. Less annoying than all the log-in log-out spam. I think a better option would be to allow players who don't like it to turn it off. But maybe have side turn up in direct chat if the talker is close, so that you don't miss vital "friendly?" questions.

the new beta for Arma2 (93965) or 1.7.1.5 has messed up night again. There was a brief moment with 1.7.1.4 and 825 where you could use gamma and brightness to see at night again, but between 1.7.1.5 and 93965 night is once again mostly pitch blackness except stars and the occasional roof silhouette. Not that I like the gamma/brightness "cheat", but it was certainly better than total darkness. Basically at any given time, half the servers in the world are unusable. The flashlight is useless, since you can't move at a decent rate or shoot while you're using it. Consequently all the day servers are full, the night servers are half full, probably filled with a few NVG users and people who just logged in briefly before realizing how pointless it is to try to play. NEED OPERATIONAL FLASHLIGHT ALL THE TIME. It would make night playable and actually quite fun, with the limited FOV and risk of giving oneself away to bandits. Fixing nighttime should be a priority, because the current pitch black option basically halves the time I can spend playing it.

I think either the zombies are broken or the goal is to remove stealth from the game. I just gave 1.7.1.4 a try and the zombies spotted me from a hundred meters even when I was crouched moving. They also seem to detect crawling pretty easy, though not as bad as crouched. They seem to have super hearing. I was crouch moving inside a building on the third floor and zombies were piling up outside and shrieking every time I moved.

"yeah, but you would still be limited to spawning at one of say, 10 locations." The coastlines are pretty big. If I was near Elecktro I could still be anywhere along 5-10km of shore, so I don't think camping is practical. Plus, as for returning for gear, you don't spawn with any so that's hardly an issue. Regarding everyone rushing Cherno, and server load, might be an issue when a server just starts up, but other than that there's only so many people respawning in any minute, the numbers are fairly low. Wouldn't be hard to handle the special cases. But the thing is, lots of people (myself included) are doing this anyway but just respawning until we start somewhere useful. So any problems with server load and the like already exist, and are worse. But the OP is probably pretty annoyed at me derailing the thread, so I'll stop.

I'm not a big fan either, especially when you start with nothing. So you crawl up to a barn, but it's full of zeds so you can't do anything. Then so is the next house. It'd be ok if it was a lot rarer, so every now and then you stumbled into a house zombie.

Ah, yeah, I guess the main point of the random spawn is to spread people out and cut down server load. I'm not saying to spawn in a specific spawn zone, just a general area. Like you'd choose one of the coastal cities, and spawn at a random beach location somewhere near that city. I don't think camping would be an issue, in the sense that you'd have to decide whether to risk spawning in highly-camped areas, or somewhere quieter but with less loot. Basically the same risk-reward dynamic as chosing to go into a major city now.