emuthreat

Lots of players play exclusively on private servers, in which you have to wait or go elsewhere if it is full when you try to log in. It's a better solution than the hopper mitigation spawnpoints, but I'm sure there is some middle ground that they could try instead. No need for the harsh hyperbole and quasi-name-calling...

^^^This. Another unintended consequence of players server hopping as a hail-mary teleportation method. Just like spawn cycling, but you get to keep your gear. Maybe they'll fix that by randomly deleting stuff from your inventory to discourage abuse. I'm sure that'll really please new players who take a break or get disconnected, and then can't remember which alphanumeric official public server they were on... "No. I said meet me on TX-18, not TX-8, my mic must have cut out or something. Where'd it end up teleporting you?" "It doesn't matter, I'll be teleported again when I join back on 18..." Not exactly quality gameplay, that... It really does beg the question of OP's closing thoughts.

I don't mean to be fanning the flames, but maybe a little bit of outrage is in order... A lot of players could immediately foresee the unintended consequences of this 'fix' for normal players in innocuous circumstances. Many of us said as much. With a game like DayZ, time spent traveling is significant, and geographical progress is easily half of importance of what is saved when a player logs out. The ability to carry on doing what you were doing, where you were doing it, upon relogging, is integral to the DayZ experience. To have that progress stripped away arbitrarily, resulting in possibly hours of wasted time, is upsetting. It artificially changes the flow of the game. It could bring a player-life to an untimely end by forcing a player to travel through an area that they otherwise would not have, in an attempt to travel back to their last *intended* location. If somebody was dying of thirst and just made it to a well before having to log out, being whisked away to a random location would result in death of the character. Simply joining a friend's game on another server would mean that one of them has to suffer the inconvenience of losing their geographical progress. This system is poorly conceived, and never should have been implemented on the stable branch. It amounts to collective punishment. There are simply too many cases in which it would negatively impact non-target players in attempting to solve a problem that we had all coped with for ages.

I always did like a good Rube Goldberg machine.... But seriously, we are on the same page here, mostly. I'd like to see them use the forums as the primary means of communication too, but I don't have an ideological aversion to Twitter. And if we are being honest, it is very well-known and openly discussed among the DayZ reddit that the perception of these forums is a best a fanboy echo-chamber/draconian PR tool that squelches "free speech" about the game. Communication has gotten a bit ridiculous regarding DayZ in the past year. Your example posts above pretty much exemplify the problem with their lack of support for their own platform; and I'm sure you've seen me chime in about this same thing in the past.

I'm not sure where else to find this information, and speaking honestly, it might be just a tad inconvenient to find this same information on these here forums; as it would likely be buried in two or three different places. In this case, server issues, free giveaways, and console update status were all in sequence on their feed. Easy, accessible, concise. Now, I'm not saying that I support their move to twitter as a main means of communicating with the fanbase. I would much prefer that their tweets were a short descriptive header and a link to the full text on this site. Putting out short, informative snippets is in no way an excuse to not communicate more thoroughly and completely on these forums. They are not mutually exclusive, but BI seems to be acting that way at times; which is a shame.

A lot of the time, people will post a header with a link to a full article, or an image of written document, which you can read as you wish. Often people will tweet larger ideas by ending each 280 char with /1, /2, etc. It's not my favorite thing to see, but it works. But hey, the whole internet is just a fad anyways, I'm sure twitter will also go the way of color television and the microwave oven; new technology never sticks around too long. /s

I was initially pretty pissed that I *had to* start using twitter to get new information about DayZ. But over the course of a few months, random stuff on my feed slowly got to be more interesting and relevant as I followed things that caught my attention. Mainly journalists and comedians, and some random things like a PhD of corvid research. There is lots of information, all instantaneous; some of it bad, false, or poorly presented; incoherent or just trivial. What it is good for, is getting a consensus of the collective consciousness of participants. Yes, there is a trend of virtue-signaling circlejerks, hate circlejerks, and dogpiling on perceived offenders. What it is great for, is getting access to investigative reporting and grassroots breaking news on topics that the (US) media at large won't even acknowledge. i still think it sucks that DayZ communicates more via twitter than any other platform, and I don't find very much value in their tweets, but there is some good stuff out there. My two cents from someone who initially abhorred the idea of using Twitter. And yes, it is mostly morons and self-important people wanting attention; but there is some value to be found. Oops.

Well if drunkenness in game works anything like when I would play a marathon session and end up drinkin 6-12 beers throughout... ... it would blur your vision, but make you notice movement more quickly--"hey, that blob isn't swaying at the same rate as the rest of the world; I smell danger" ...it would create a 50% chance of making you turn in either the wrong direction or too far in the right direction while navigating in trees or densely built-up areas. ...It would increase your luck with item spawns, but make you randomly drag the wrong thing into/out of your inventory, drop things on the ground instead of your hands or hotkeys, and your PTT would toggle on and off randomly. ...your ADS would be shitty to impossibly impaired at medium and long ranges, but hipfire would have increased chances of hitting medium ranged targets and a 100% fail rate at point blank ranges--gonna have to ADS if it's less than 10 meters. ...you'll miss the first two melee strikes against infected, but somehow land headshots more than half the time. ...you'll burn your food half the time, but always run into cows or wolves, even while cooking (burning food while mismanaging your inventory) in the woods. ...Everybody you meet will ask you "how the fuck are you even still awake, let alone surviving on this server right now?"

I think a lot of the hate has been because this statement seems to feel less and less like their intentions...

I think their problem with giving lists of features they are working on comes in two parts. First, the history of delays and managing expectations and subsequent backlash. This pretty much speaks for itself at this point. Secondly to this; it has become apparent with the post 1.0 development cycle, that they don't really have any concrete idea what their engine is capable of with respect to bugs and unforeseen conflicts. It is entirely new territory. So when combined, the prospect of publicly stating what they are working on would inevitably lead to uncomfortable situations where they discover that some things are much more difficult to make work, or simply not feasible. And then everyone who knew about them would be disappointed or even angry. What still kinda boggles me, is that they presumably designed the new engine around the constraints of making the legacy features function correctly. To hear that some things from legacy versions simply can't, or perhaps just won't be done, is a little unsettling. Are we going to get fishing, trapping, writing notes, dyeing, crafting leather clothing, and bows? Just what the hell happened that they presumably had a new engine purpose-built for this very reason, but may still be unable to make some of these things work? I really wish they had relied on the experimental branch more heavily, and let stable wait for a truly playable experience. It worked just fine for the longer patch cycles of the .6x versions. So many of us were excited to play on experimental for months with seriously broken builds, until they got the issues hammered out.

Thank you for the Q and A. But one thing stands out, as I thought this was addressed just around the corner moving into .62 and beyond. Wasn't there a proposed fix for duping back at the start of 0.62, wherein items would be issued a unique ID number upon spawning, to reconcile with the database? I remember reading about *some kind* of measures taken to combat duping, and the practical experience was that duped stashed could be wiped. I'm armchair quarterbacking here, but was the new engine somehow NOT built in such a manner that each Item (or specifically gun/grenade/landmine, or other high-impact/high-value item) could be assigned a tag? Tag each item with an ID containing date/time/server/coordinates relating to when it is *created* and spawned. Upon server reset, the persistence database can reconcile all items against tags and delete all duplicate items. Yes, there will be collateral damage in some cases, but people will learn this and come to shun duping and dupers. Yes, accidental duping is a thing, but if you state all known duping methods, and work hard on fixing the most casually/innocently caused cases, the majority of the HONEST playerbase will come to understand that deleted character or storage inventory was an avoidable error. Is this is this not possible? Why is this not possible??!?? I really can't understand why this hasn't been fixed. Any further insight that doesn't compromise playability would be greatly appreciated by all.

I googled some stuff, and kinda felt like a goon for doing so. Tatanko did a great job with the wiki.

So, I'm guessing a hoagie is out of the question??

Instead of a tutorial or a help menu, they should just publish pamphlets and posters in appropriate areas in-game. Clinics should have posters about cleanliness and how to prevent and cure infectious diseases. Hospitals should have posters explaining the more advanced medical practices. Morphine and epinephrine should occasionally be found in boxes of 3, with an instruction booklet included. Holiday camps should have posters explaining water purification, lighting fires, and other survival-type skills. Construction yards should have posters explaining the materials and order of operations for base building. Garages should have posters explaining vehicle maintenance and repair. Hunting lodges should have posters about skinning and trapping. Pubs should have posters about cooking. All of these things can also be made into leaflets you can pick up and take with you, that can be found most likely in the appropriate areas and sometimes in random locations. There, problem solved. No tutorial, no help menu. Just some resources in-world, that explain the way specific things work in this world. Any questions?

Private servers have a much different experience. The consensus is that stored items are counted against the calls for spawned items. You could test this by looking up the values for each weapon (I've found them several places recently, like here) and start hoarding all you can find of each type. Or maybe just focus on the SKS, which should have about thirty per server. Once you have a fair stockpile of ten or so, you can do the same on a different server, then pick one more server, and find ten more; then migrate all the stashed ones to that same server and see if they've completely stopped spawning. By this time, you should know pretty well where to look to find a few over the course of a couple hours.

Most experienced players know not to waste too much time looting the high-rises. You'd have better luck speedrunning single level houses, and backtracking through the apple orchards between rows of houses to check if any apples dropped. Foraged foods like fruits and mushrooms tend to spawn up more if you stick around the area for a bit, so remember to go back and re-check fruit trees and hay bales after you loot, but before you leave the area. The game can be hard, and sometimes you can die to mostly bad luck (much of my bad luck is made worse by hasty decisions and trying to run too far too fast, with too little supplies) Take your time, learn the map, and which buildings generally pay out better. Good luck.

This new set of coastal-ish spawns for switching servers is trying to solve one specific problem; people logging out in a military camp, and checking the same location in another server, repeatedly, to gain loot easily. While the system of deportation upon switching servers does fix this issue, there are unintended consequences for players who might choose to change servers for other reasons. Fuck, I've joined the wrong server a few times in a row, trying to meet up with friends, just because THEY were confused among the group, as to which server we'd all be meeting on. Not every instance of switching a server is abusive. You could be playing alone, trying to gear up a new life, and see a friend come online. Hop on over to try to meet friend A, who has to leave after an hour. So you switch back to your original server, because you found a car there, and were trying to get it running. But then friend B joins a different server that they started a camp on, and you'd like to go help with that; or maybe friend A comes back and messages you to come pick up where you left off. There are factors to consider here, such as where the logout takes place, how soon the player logs into a new server, the total geographical displacement between login-logout activities, the elapsed time between subsequent logout-login events, and if the next server they join is already occupied by a friend. I would assume that server hopping can be deduced from data with relative certainty, as the behavior is pretty constant and predictable; e.g. laps around NWAF, logging out in same area each time, running back and forth across Kamensk or Pavlovo bases and swapping servers at each end, cycling the evacuation roadblock tents a dozen times in an hour. The data speaks for itself. I'd rather they devise a way of flagging suspicious amounts of logging activity based on proximity to high loot zones, and issue increasingly long temp bans from the public hive. So instead of attacking other players' concerns as evidence of their abusing mechanics, or blindly rallying behind the changes, it would be nice if people could at least acknowledge that there are unintended consequences, and focus discussion on how to solve both problems adequately, with the least amount of collateral damage. I am appalled, simply appalled, at how readily some people can accept having their character randomly moved around the map via Deus Ex Machina in what was sold as a realistic open world survival simulator; because that shit is gamey as fuck....

At least read the damn thread, dude.... This post was from this thread.......

Ugh.... Keeping your geographical progress isn't an advantage. Losing your geographical progress to a randomized semi-coastal spawn point is a setback. That's the point here. They are trying to mitigate abuse of the hive system by server hoppers--which used to be mitigated organically, by players camping hot zones and shooting hoppers. They took a broad stroke, and did more harm than good with this change. Your example of switching servers to one where a friend had a car to pick you up is an extreme case, reliant on heavy progress and organization, and is therefore not a good example. it's a good idea, but the execution is shit. it needs more support, and a bit of effort to make the innocent cases of switching servers not have such an extreme impact on players' progress. That's all.

I wouldn't think it would be too hard to add a new set of "survivor spawn points" numbering somewhere in the mid 3-digits, and just let a bit of logic take over. The usable area of the map is maybe 150km^2. So picking 5 points per km^2 would give like 750 points to assign; easily crowdsourced for acceptable coordinates. I hardly play anymore, and had been mostly on community servers for the last couple years. But if they needed help, I would gladly take a batch of five 1km^2 grids, and pick out 5 places each that would be okay spawn points for logins. Can you think of any other conditions that should be considered/excluded of they were to do such a thing? Having friends that still try to create a presence on official public servers, sometimes members will log into different servers based on uptime/population/ping/who is playing and what sever they prefer, this could be a pretty annoying feature. If I just join the first generic server that has good ping, and run to where i know my peeps hang out, it will be a major drag if I get sent back to the coast trying to join up on their server. If I get sent to a town 15 minutes away, I'll just get to see some new shit along the way, no biggie. The idea is good, but the execution is shit. It's like feeding the homeless by handing out free pulled pork sandwiches, baked beans, and coleslaw; but serving it all up on a paper towel...

I can sprint dead-out from a northern spawn, and make it to Sverograd on the verge of death from starvation/dehydration within a bout a half hour. This is an extreme case. I did this a couple weeks ago and died to the first zombie that hit me in Kalinivka... I had died from a zombie after compulsively cooking a bunch of goat meat we had collected, while my friends looted KMB; I overheated from packing it all into a backpack while cooking on a stick, and got one-shot by a zed coming back from the cooling pond. I sprinted back, from a south Berezino spawn, in complete darkness, making a beeline through Khelm cabins, around the south flank of Black Mountain, and through the woods east of Gvozndo. I am an extremely experienced player, and only almost pulled it off by making way too many bad decisions in the interest of time. My post was trying to approximate the experience of the average player, playing somewhat conservatively, and having their progress reset randomly to the coast whenever they logged on and joined the lowest ping official public server. Which is a perfectly feasible scenario. On a good day, it takes me about 50 to 70 minutes to get to Tisy; in a still somewhat dire condition, from an ideal spawn point, with good luck on item spawns to keep me going along the way. I don't play infinite stamina, reduced hunger/thirst servers....

This is actually worse, as a player can spend a day swapping servers, and make a catalog of the new points at which they can expect to find ONLY geared players logging in. Oof. Doing this with a grid of "survivor spawn points" throughout the interior of the map would be a much better solution.

It's a fuckup. If a player has only a couple hours to play in a day, the chance of them making it to Tisy over the course of a week, by carefully progressing through the map, has just been arbitrarily ripped away from them. It'd be much nicer if they made a new set of a couple hundred spawn points scattered around the map, and simply chose one that met the following conditions: Not inside a military base, not within 200 meters of any player-built wall structures, not more than 2km from logout point, not within 200 meters of another player, not within 500 meters of wolves.