Beizs

I kinda wanna get on some Canadian servers now... See if the 'nice people' stereotype holds true for DayZ. :D My Canadian step mother certainly is evidence for said stereotype, though she doesn't play the game, unfortunately.

There is plenty of loot on this game. Even on experimental servers, which have significantly less than on stable. I honestly do not have any idea how you could possibly be finding no loot whatsoever. It's virtually impossible, assuming you actually look for loot. If you search large cities that have a tonne of traffic, of course you're not going to find much/anything. Everybody else already looted it. Try looking where people aren't constantly going. Your example is worthless because, as you stated yourself, it was a major town. The game needs work. Loot needs work. But it's actually pretty damn difficult to starve in this game. It's difficult to die of dehydration. It's impossible to find no loot, if you actually look for it in any kind of logical way. Don't expect to get fully geared going in to a single city. It's really that simple. However, I am inclined to believe that you are grossly exaggerating, as literally everywhere has loot that people don't pick up. Books, syringes, IV starter kits, etc. That's all loot. That is most certainly there. If you venture out of the major cities, which have already been looted dry, you'll have absolutely no problems finding items and surviving. It always bothers me how many people complain about there being literally no loot, or no way to survive. The vast, vast majority of the player base has no real issues with either. You are the outliers - and you are doing something wrong. We are all playing the same game. Claiming that there is no loot then complaining when we point out the fact that we all know that's entirely wrong is just silly.

Oh, I should point out, I think they've disabled it in exp. Still active in .55, I believe.

I think they've disabled that. In the past, it was possible, don't think it is any more.

Not quite /thread. I don't mind taking a break from DayZ, personally. My concern is more what's better for the development of the game, but yeah. Then again, it's kinda /forum.

Persistence its self hasn't been linked to any performance issues. Lootsplosions have been known to cause problems, but they've not been that bad in a fair while. Again though, the issue there is despawning items, not persistence. Persistence and the CLE aren't interchangeable at all. The fact that you don't see that kind of makes me inclined to ignore your post entirely. The performance issues they were talking about were coming from infected AI. They're removing persistence to 'work on loot'. The issue with this is that the CLE doesn't work. Even without persistence on, it'll not work well. Once they turn it back on in the future, it'll completely change how it works again. Disabling persistence isn't a good idea.

They're not disabling the CLE. They're disabling persistence, which works fine, to shoehorn in the CLE. So... Yeah. Again, they'll learn nothing. Initial spawn testing is piss easy. Just set up an internal server, set it to be verbose in the logs and reset it after completing initialization. Rinse and repeat. There you go. All the data you could possibly want on how loot spawns on initialization. So no, that's not anything to do with it. I agree with your first point. However, I can't quite agree with the rest, honestly. The issue is despawning of items when it comes to lootsplosions, etc. That's not an issue with the persistence, but an issue with the CLE - the CLE should be handling the despawning of loot. The fact that lootsplosions happen is proof that persistence is working as it should. I don't think that there's any way, at this point, they can introduce people to the CLE without any issues. Disabling persistence, which is a core aspect of this game and is really required for the CLE to work properly, is definitely not the way to go about it. Once they enable persistence, the CLE will almost definitely work pretty differently, meaning that people will have to get used to it twice over. Honestly, I do agree that persistence and the CLE, as pretty funamental parts of the game, should have been focused on and finished very early in development. From a coding perspective, neither should be that difficult to get working (also, once the CLE is finished, along with duping all but removed from the game, it'd be pretty easy to avoid needing to do wipes constantly). The main issue would be optimization and regions, though both, again, shouldn't take a whole lot of time. They might be designing it in a way that I'm not thinking of, but really, it's just a loot table with locations, timers, weighting and regular checks. Persistence is saving the servers loot to a file, fundamentally. Sure, stability etc requires more, but there's not really any reason I can see, from the outside, that they should have left it this long. Don't get me wrong. I think they're doing really, really well with the development of the game in general. It's just smaller things like this, ordering and PR especially, that bug me about it. EDIT: Just one last note, I don't see why they couldn't simply disable loose item persistence and leave the rest enabled (except maybe helis & police cars so, basically, tents, vehicles & barrels). Wouldn't interfere with the CLE (still has the issue of changing how the CLE works on enabling it again) and wouldn't be as shitty for gameplay.

Experimental works just as well for this without removing a core feature from the stable branch of your game. This will not help troubleshooting at all. As the current system stands, the CLE respawns items once something is picked up (or should do). The items that are not picked up stay there, meaning that new loot is not spawned if nothing is picked up. Every now and then, they do a wipe to see if stuff is spawning where it should be on initialization (though an internal test will check this just as well. In fact, on internal tests, they can completely remove specific pieces of loot and test is much better). To see if stuff is respawning properly, they can look at the logs - anything that has been picked up should trigger an item spawning. The way it'll work without persistence? Exactly the same, except it'll wipe every time the server restarts, preventing a proper economy from emerging and not checking dynamic respawns as well (not giving it enough time to respawn shit). There's no benefit here. All it will do is cause shit when they disable persistence, then cause shit when they re-enable persistence, changing how the CLE works. Disabling persistence will give them absolutely no more insight into how loot is respawning. None. At all.

In order for your claim of lootsplosions and items that don't despawn being a problem to work, persistence has to be working... Otherwise those issues could not exist. The only issue with persistence I've seen (ignoring despawning, because that's not an issue with persistence, but the loot economy) is the fact that servers can claim to have persistence on, but not. Once on reliable servers that don't crash constantly, I've literally never had something disappear when it shouldn't. Persistence works. Servers, however, are not particularly stable and, in the past (not sure if they can now) could lie about having persistence on. That's the only issue with persistence its self. The fact that crashes wipe it. How to fix that? Fix the servers. Not persistence. The only reason they're removing persistence is so that they can push the CLE. The fact that they need to remove persistence in order for the CLE to work is a sign that the CLE is broken, not persistence. Again... They're removing a working feature (and it is working) to implement a feature that's not working. The feature they're adding requires the feature they're removing to work properly.

No, persistence isn't part of the despawn issue. The despawn issue is important for persistence, but saying that persistence should be removed until the despawn issue is fixed then saying that the CLE should be implemented before persistence is perfect is just stupid. Despawning is important for the loot economy. It's not important for actual persistence its self. The CLE shouldn't be implemented at all until despawning is working. Again, disabling persistence is just imitating a despawn system poorly and isn't going to be a good experience for anybody.

That's not an issue with persistence, that's an issue with loot respawn & despawn. The literal only issue I have with the development of DayZ is their rollbacks to appease the crying children. That's it. Again, they're disabling a working feature to shoehorn in a broken feature. It's that simple. The CLE will not work anything like it is supposed to because of that, making the CLE implementation in this stable update all but pointless. I know how software and game design work. I'm a computer sciences student and a large part of my course is game development. I'm not an expert, sure, but I do know, for a fact, that most programmers (the vast majority) would instantly tell you pushing a broken feature to a stable branch of software and disabling a more important feature to imitate a working system is just not good practice. At all. It's a terrible idea. It sets you up for whining users when you do the initial push, then screaming users when you re-enable the disabled feature, completely changing how the new feature works. That, as well as decreasing the amount of reliable testing information, is just a recipe for disaster. On .55, they pushed a broken system and were forced to roll back. They're trying it again, with a (in my opinion) worse approach. We'll see how it goes, but simply crying 'alpha' isn't constructive here. It's just childish at this point. In order to work correctly, the CLE requires persistence. Removing persistence to implement the CLE makes no sense from a logical or developmental standpoint. It makes even less sense from a PR standpoint.

I'm not bothered about wipes. That has nothing to do with it. Wipes are a pain, but they're not a big deal - those are to be expected, as loot distribution changes and anti-hack/anti-duping methods make it so that items acquired illegitimately are reduced and there's a more pure game experiece. I'm talking about them completely disabling persistence. To shoehorn in a broken feature. Persistence works fine and is more important than the CLE. Your response, putting this as respectfully as I can, has nothing to do with the topic. Persistence isn't just about hoarding.

Alpha isn't a valid argument for everything. It does not apply here. We have a stable branch and an experimental branch. Alpha is about getting the game as feature complete as possible. When you have a public (stable) branch, you provide the most feature complete experience you can on there and then do the experimental shit on the experimental branch. Disabling a major feature (persistence) that works fine to shoehorn in a new, unfinished feature is bad practice on any public branch, including on a public alpha. This isn't about shit breaking. It's about pushing an unfinished broken feature to a stable branch at the cost of perfectly fine, more important features.

But persistence, for the most part, works just fine. The issue isn't with persistence, it's with the CLE and loot despawn & respawn. So, it makes more sense to fix the part with the issues, rather than disable the part working well to imitate the unfinished part working well. Again though, isn't that why we have experimental? So people can choose whether to use the latest version or a version as feature complete as possible? The CLE is far less important than persistence. The old version of loot, while not perfect, worked a lot better than the current CLE with persistence on (can't say how it's working in .57 exp, as there's not been enough time for the initialization dust to settle). Persistence shouldn't be disabled just to shoehorn in an unfinished feature. Frankly, .57 has been a bit of a letdown for me. Granted, we're expecting to see 2 more updates to it before it hits stable, but the biggest part was the optimization for me and a lot of other people. After some testing I can pretty confidently say that, for me at least, the game performs about 5fps better at an absolute maximum.

I've not really had much of a problem with persistence other than on exp, where servers crash frequently. That's really the only problem when it comes to persistence.My issue is that this sort of thing is, really, stuff that should be done on experimental. Isn't that why we have the two separate branches? So stable provides the most whole experience that can be thrown together, while the bug testing, refining and rollbacks can be done on a separate branch? It's considered pretty poor practice to push updates to a stable branch of ANY software if it requires you to disable a feature even half as important. Same really goes for hordes & the disabling of zombies, honestly.

That is incredibly weird. Probably should put that in the bug tracker.

So, here's my first video on my brand new channel (been on and off YouTube for about three or four years now). What's special about my series, I hear you guys ask? Why should you watch my DayZ Let's Play? Well. There is absolutely nothing special about my let's plays, in my opinion, when comparing them to other Let's Plays... However, decent lets plays, of the old-school solo commentary-speaking-to-the-audience-directly type videos seem to be all but non existant for DayZ, for whatever reason. Maybe people find it difficult to commentate over. I don't. I speak. The whole freaking time. Too much, honestly. I'm recording DayZ, in this series, exactly how I would normally play it (though slightly less stealthy, due to wanting to actually get shit done in 20ish minute videos). This, again, seems to be lacking a lot. It's really all just tactical groups screaming at eachother and the guys they're fighting, trolling videos, RP and two minute heavily edited videos. Those are all nice and all, but I, for one, far prefer the (maybe outdated) Let's Play style... And I try to make videos I'd like to watch, if it weren't me in them (and I have to, because I go through the entire video to make sure there's no issues I can fix left in). So, yeah. This isn't anything original, but hopefully it can give some of you guys who like commentaries/let's plays something to kill some time with, or some background noise while you go to sleep, clean your room, build your computer or whatever the hell you want to do while watching my terrible videos. Enjoy! :) http://youtu.be/fZOtNrUd In my videos, I'll talk about all kinds of things. Sometimes I'll talk about DayZ. Sometimes I'll bitch about it. Sometimes I'll go all fanboy over it. Sometimes I'll give some advice/tips/'education' on DayZ. Sometimes, I'll talk about completely different games. Sometimes I'll talk about music. Sometimes, I'll talk about my day. Sometimes I'll talk about Game of Thrones, Vikings or The Walking Dead (a lot, I've found, after a new episode airs... Go figure). And sometimes, well, most of the time, I'll talk about absolutely nothing at all and ramble on (hopefully somewhat entertainingly) about random shit. I'm going to try to get some more edited videos too, including some clutch type stuff and all that... But that's not my main choice, as, well... I kinda suck at PvP, honestly. (Also, I posted this before the video finished processing, like an idiot. If, by some miracle, you're actually interested in this video from my rambling topic and can't access it, try waiting ten or twenty minutes)

I've found that motion blur and FOV are the main causes of motion sickness in 1pp. While I've never experienced motion sickness from gaming, I've helped a bunch of my friends get over it. I'd recommend disabling motion blur entirely (it's ugly AF anyway) and then playing with FOV settings. I generally like somewhere just under 3/4 in DayZ, though many people prefer it a fair bit lower.

Simple suggestion, wouldn't take much work to implement, I don't think. Rope. Rope already exists in game and already has some great uses. However, finding rope can be a pain and while animal guts are an alternative, they're not particularly reliable either. Rope, so far, is only really used for a few things - tying people up, making bags, making fishing poles and making bows. Now, the first idea I have is literally just adding an extra option on the menu for a group of items, while the second is a little more in depth. The first is being able to take shoe laces out of shoes. Shoe laces are, generally, pretty good quality and could be used for any of the above tasks (though not many would work very well as a bow string, imo, but neither would just general rope). Removing the shoe laces either makes the pair of shoes badly damaged or adds a status effect to them (laceless), which gives the chance of them slipping off randomly (obviously there should be a message if this happens). Maybe could increase the chances of one of the many new leg injuries in the current EXP branch. The second is crafting rope. There's a multitude of ways that you can make ropes that are useful in many different ways and of varying strength. From woven grass, which can be surprisingly sturdy, albeit thick, to making twine. So, good idea? Rope is an incredibly useful tool in real world survival, and can be pretty damn useful in DayZ, too. It's also a very basic resource that can be found just about anywhere and I think we should get a few more ways of acquiring rope (as well as expanding on its functions, like for basic base building, etc). Bonus Round Lassos would be awesome for catching animals, as well as for setting up traps. Made with a piece of rope, you could use it to catch animals for hunting when you do not have a ranged weapon, or, in the future, use it for traps to snare smaller animals or even people/zombies. Tying zombies to static objects in game would also be nice, using it as a trap (tie a bunch of them up inside a building, for example), an escape method (lasso on either end of the rope, drop one end over the zombies neck, the other over a solid post) or, if we ever get them, horses. Nets could be made from a bunch of rope and could be used to catch animals or fish, ensnare players or even zombies. Nets could also be incredibly useful in base building (you can use a net to lay out the basic structure of a tent like structure then cover it with leaves etc to waterproof it and make it very, very camouflaged). Two rope could make a small net, which could be used to catch fish and small animals like rabbits, while four small nets combined to make a medium net could be combined for base building - and two of those combined could make a large net, which could be used to catch large animals, zombies and even humans. Trip Wires would be pretty awesome too. Could attach one end to a wall, using a nail or something, and the other to whatever you like. Landmine would be nice with this - the player runs over the trip wire, sets off the land mine. Could set up a trip wire with a grenade this way, too, tying it to the pin and securing the grenade in place. Hanging would be especially fun on RP servers, but could also be a useful way of killing somebody once you've captured them and don't have any means of killing them quickly/cleanly. Or you could even use it to kill yourself. Could tie it to trees initially, then to anywhere else that you'd be able to hang somebody from, if somebody went through and found everything and added in the functionality. Clothes Lines could also be nice once there's rain etc, as a method of drying wet clothes. Attaching things to things, or, more specifically, tying items to the outside of your backpack. Would need to be fairly limited to not make it OP, but you could tie an extra gun to the bottom of your pack, which requires and extra three or four seconds to draw. Could use this for tools, too, or whatever you could imagine. Base Building has already been mentioned, but just throwing it out here, too. Rope would be great for making small structures, as well as barricading (lashing things together). Speaking of lashing things together, Rafts would be awesome, too. You could either use an oar, which would improve your speed, or just use a stick to row. You'd use rope and logs to craft the raft. Especially awesome once rivers are implemented, but could even be useful in getting over to islands. There's a bunch more things that rope is useful for. Some of this is already planned, some of it isn't. But, for many things, we should need rope. Considering the fact that it'll be such a useful commodity, there should be more than one way of acquiring it.

Currently, the foraging system is pretty unrealistic and not enjoyable at all. It's really just a grind. What I would suggest would, in my opinion, be pretty awesome, though I'm not sure of the feasibility of it considering how many apple trees and berry bushes there are in the world (tracking every single one, though it could simply be a 1 or 0 for each one - 1 being foraged and 0 being unforaged, then a timer). Most of this has been suggested in various, fragmented areas. I thought I'd put it all together and put in some actual numbers. In stead of being able to search each tree infinitely and randomly getting an apple/berry every now and then, it's more like farming. So, each tree has a chance of dropping 5-10 apples when you search it. Once this has been done, searching the tree instantly returns the message 'there's no apples on this tree' - same thing for the berry bushes, with the words changed. Once a tree has been searched, it takes anywhere between one and three hours for the tree to regrow anything. This prevents people from just using a single tree to stock up, looting in between. Now, this would make foraging a lot quicker and not as much of a pain in the ass. But it could also make it OP. So, nerf the apples and berries. At the moment, they're not very nutritious. What I would recommend would be to increase the nutrition of both maybe 50%, along with the hydration, then double the stomach space. This prevents people from keeping themselves constantly in good condition with apples/berries, but makes it possible for them to survive on them fairly easy in the early game. This idea, in my opinion, would make foraging more viable for the early game, but not really worth it later on as you can't stock up with energy/hydration. Maybe, with a bit of balancing, it could be impossible to get second level hydration or energy with just apples or berries (numbers game). I feel like this shouldn't really impact server performance much, as only foraged ones would need a timer running.

I'm looking forward to the reintroduction of rotten apples, but it doesn't really solve anything. It's just something that could be used to help balance out a better foraging system. I agree that there should be more forageables, with a wider range of uses (example, aspirin from willow bark in lieu of painkillers). While I agree, to some extent, with the overall tone of your post, I'm not sure about some of the points you made. 1) The suggestion I gave is, in effect, limitless too. There's a whole lot of berry bushes and apple trees in game. It'll never be particularly difficult to find one. Two, people can already chop down berry bushes and apple trees, and it takes longer for them to reappear (a whole server restart). Three, removing all of the apples/berries from the bushes/trees in any area, even a tiny one, would be incredibly difficult. Your stomach and your inventory only has so much space. Seems like it would take far too much time for anybody to bother - and a server hop (which, in this case, I think would be justified) would fix that. 2) Hence my suggestion about stomach space making it impossible to actually be healthy just from eating apples and berries. They just need to stop you from starving. Wouldn't be as much of a last resort, but also would definitely not be preferable. 3) Well, the same goes for my suggestion. 4) Can't wait for that. I want as much of a variety with as many applications (as stated above) as is possible. :) 1) Either that, or the texture on the bushes/trees should change to reflect their status. 2) Absolutely agree, RNG does not fit well with DayZ, especially with something like this. Actual loot makes more sense, as stuff would have been scattered about after the apocalypse due to looting, though I think that would leave more lootsplosions and more empty places. Also, there'd be just about no consistency to it (military bases wouldn't be where you'd find good guns), except when it comes to dynamic events like helis and police cars (I'm assuming they're supposed to be crashing 'currently', if you get what I mean. 3) While I think that simply having rotten apples would be enough, I would like ripeness too, which could maybe have more than just a food poisoning effect (less ripe = less energy, until its not ripe enough and poisons you). However, identifying and handling this could be a massive pain in the ass. I agree pretty much 100% with you here. I just think that foraging, honestly, should be more than enough to survive (though it'd be difficult to be truly healthy living only on foraged food, hence my suggestion with stomach space - forcing you to have some variety in your diet, without going in to specific nutrients, which would be overkill for DayZ). In all realism, with modern weaponry and knowledge of hunting, fishing, foraging and farming, it would only take a few books for somebody to completely avoid starvation in a climate like Chernarus, especially given free reign over the land. Really, the threat should not be starvation, or even dehydration (death via dehydration should be more likely than starving, but you should be able to filter water through a cloth then boil it). The only things that are actually likely to cause your death in this game should be the harsh weather, the people, the zombies, or the wildlife (sure, wolves and bears irl aren't actually that much of a threat if you're not stupid, but they'd probably be a lot more likely to attack you after being attacked regularly by zombies. Also, packs of wild dogs that are hungry as they can't do any of the above methods of gathering food besides hunting - and also the zombie thing would piss 'em off, too. I get authenticity in this game and all, but honestly, I feel like the difficulty to acquire food in this game is just too far removed from reality and doesn't really add that much in ways of gameplay, either. Avoiding starvation really is just a grind, whatever way you go about it (other than hunting - that's genuinely fun imo, though animals are a bit too rare still) and honestly, it just shouldn't be difficult. The sheer number of plants in the world that you can eat is enough to prevent you from starving. As for requiring knowledge of plants, well, we'll all have to learn what we can and can't eat in DayZ. So long as they add more things that can kill you and make it difficult to distinguish between the edible and inedible in some cases, I feel like that'll be reflected just about as well as it can be in a game. Would be nice to see time of year on a server reflect the plants that are available to eat, among other things.

Fair enough. I use twitter pretty much exclusively to check on DayZ. :P

There will be a report. Just don't expect it at the exact same time every week. And, like Tux said, follow them on Twitter. You'd know these things if you did.

Hey guys, how about we all make a compromise and play in second person? Really though, I'm going back to first person. There's definitely less people on the servers, but I just enjoy it more. More intense and whatnot.

Yeah, they've been talking about huge performance improvements both server side and player side in internal tests, so hopefully all should be great. Also, added Eugen's tweet to my first post, saying .57 should be out next week. :) I'm just hoping that we get .57 on experimental before it goes out on stable. Worried about the lack of external testing on it. :/