emuthreat

Wait, so the anti-server hopping solution is to just have every player spawn on the coast at the usual respawn points??? How long until it becomes painfully obvious that the new meta will be to camp spawn points hoping to assassinate a non-bambi who has just come back the next day after successfully looting a high reward military zone and logging out safely in the trees halfway back to camp. I was looking forward to playing some DayZ this weekend to check out the 1.04 additions. Guess I'll just go walk my dog and then plant some more tomatoes and peppers this afternoon instead...

Could anyone blame him, after the last few weeks/ months of abuse? Granted, it may have been longer in the pipeline, but gee whiz, the hate...

Suggestion for a fix: Add sandworms. But seriously though... Rubber, such as that found in car tires is an IR absorbing material, as with "carbon black" pigmented neoprene. There ARE NVG countermeasures available, which could be seamlessly implemented with the addition of wetsuits which could be worn to make the player invisible to NVGs, and also allowing them to be cut into strips and made into a "night ghillie." In this manner, if the first shot doesn't hit and kill you, there is a chance you can find cover and drop non-essential gear to make the switch to your more stealthy wetsuit, or throw on a IR cloak. The IR emitters of NVGs can also be detected by a passive RF sensor calibrated to the correct wavelengths, and would be conspicuously visible to a handheld thermal imaging sensor; but that last one just introduces a new problem... Maybe a good fix is to have a passive IR detector wristband that would light up and beep if someone is scoping you with any NV? Edit: carbon soot from a poorly tuned oil lamp or acetylene torch would also make a temporary "black hole" in the NVG's field of detection. Haven't tested it in game, but wouldn't a flare REALLY hurt to look at through those things?

I got my first and only involuntary vacation from the forums by tactlessly explaining how there is an implied responsibility to maintain stable and constant individual official servers for an online game which features world persistence and stashes as a key feature. Especially for new players who may not know that it is okay to join any community servers without an invite. Aaaaaaalllllllllllllllllll the way back in 2015..... Yup.

I'd been suggesting this for a couple of years, even as soft skills were announced and later implemented in such a poor state as we've seen so far... My take, is that they don't want to add too many RPG elements or stat-chasing mechanics, which I see as a mistake. The avoidance of grinding was used as an explanation for this, but it seems like a copout. The current soft skills situation is a joke, plain and simple. It splits the skills into two groups, of which only one side can be improved at a time. It is arbitrary and meaningless. It would make so much more sense to divide up the various tasks and corresponding skill specialties by category, and keep all the progress and aptitudes behind the board. In this way, players would only subtly know by experience and outcome, which skills are more developed. This would add a sense of achievement to the mundane tasks of day-to-day survival. Let's just start with all the things players could do in .62: Hunting, fishing, horticulture, bushcraft/tanning, weapon repair, tool repair, clothing repair, medical, cooking; add in basebuilding from 1.0. How many of these things are fine tasks and how many are rough tasks? Pretty much everything is a fine task, aside from preparing garden plots, harvesting bushes and trees, and basebuilding tasks. The current skills system is rubbish. It makes much more sense to assign the different tasks to basic skill category, allowing for some overlap in skill between individual tasks: Natural, practical, medical, technical, mechanical, architectural. Natural skills would include hunting, fishing, gardening, tanning, and harvesting raw materials. Practical skills would include cooking, and repairing clothing, tents, and simple hand tools. Medical skills would include bandaging, taking blood, administering saline, duration of CPR for effectiveness. Technical skills would include repairing firearms and electrical equipment. Mechanical skills would apply to repairing cars and generators. Architectural skills would apply to basebuilding and barricading. Depending on the specific action, the skill level would either affect the percentage quality of the outcome, or the speed of the process, or both. For example, a player with a practical skill rating of less than 50% of the maximum might only be able to repair clothing to the damaged state. A player with a medical skill rating of 25% of the maximum might need to use 3 or more bandages to stop severe bleeding, and would have a 75% chance to cause minor bleeding when administering a saline bag. I love the idea of new spawns starting out with a randomized set of skills and aptitudes. Certain skills would be present at certain levels of competency at spawn, and every skill would have an aptitude--which would basically be a % modifier to competency growth. No modifiers for caps on skills, but each individual player-life would have a different outcome in proficiency gained from the practice of different skills; resulting in a varied result in the case of grinding for mastery at each skill. This way, it would be impossible for a player to know that they just need to spam 20 bandages to get medical skills maxed. Each instance of performing an action corresponding to a skill category, would have a base increase to that skill; and the aptitude modifier would multiply the increase by 0.5 to 1.5 of the base value. Lets say that each bandaging act would, as a baseline, increase the medical competency level by 5%, and each instance of giving of saline by 10%, with an aptitude modifier of 1.0 A player should never spawn with less than 10% of each skill, nor more than 50%. Give them 150 percentage points distributed at spawn, so each player starts at 25% aggregate mastery. Correspondingly, 6 aptitude points would be assigned randomly at values between 0.5 and 1.5 In this manner, a player might spawn with 50% medical competence, and 10% competence of all other qualities; along with 0.5 aptitude for medical, mechanical, and architectural, and 1.5 for natural, practical and technical. This player would need to apply 20 bandages, or 10 saline bags to achieve 100% competency. The variance in bandaging skill building between the minimum base values of competency and aptitude and the maximum values, would mean that a player spawning with 10% base competency and a 0.5 aptitude would need 36 bandaging practices to max out. A player spawning with 50% competency and 1.5 aptitude would need 7... This would create a very diverse set of conditions for player lifetime progression and value; especially if outcomes are weighted by skill competency. Even a 3 man killsquad might want to see if a player can repair their plate carriers back to worn condition, before killing them; hell, they might just pressgang them into coming along for the ride. Anything that drives player interactions beyond simple KOS, is an extremely valuable asset to the game. ADDING INTRINSIC VALUE AND UTILITY TO PLAYER LONGEVITY IS WHAT DAYZ NEEDS TO SURVIVE WITH A LARGE AUDIENCE IN THE LONG TERM.

Try switching to betas under the steam options, wait for the download; then check to see if you can see and join them. Switch back and try again. If that doesn't work, try to join a friend off steam, and see if it lets you into the server.

Check your server browser filters one more time. Are any of your community servers starred as favorites? Is the friends playing box checked? Do you have the ping filter set too low? How long are you waiting for them to show up? Sometimes it can take a minute.

Are you sure everything is right on your end? The 1.03 update just went stable on Wednesday. You might check to see if you are still opted into the experimental branch in your steam settings, as they updated 1.03 before the push to stable. There is also the possibility of your in-game server browser settings excluding community servers, so you might give that a double-check. As always, verify game files. and if that doesn't work, try to reinstall.

I'm, a big /fan of e. e. cummings But.... this; is not , it

@ICEMAN-FMCS I tried to read your post; I really did. I want to understand what you are trying to say, and I might even agree somewhat. But in that presentation, I just can't. We know that your period key (fullstop) works correctly. This is because you have used them in an attempt at ellipsis on a few occasions here. I've never seen such a liberal use of commas before. It's kind-of amazing, but not in a good way. Good luck. Also:

Making great games is hard. Developing yet another new in-house engine for an already great game, and splicing it in while still under development, and already released to millions of consumers is crazy hard. Crazy like a fox.... The sad part is waiting to see how long it takes for them tell us when they realized that the "oh shit" moment happened, and what it means for .62 content parity in the long term; and how long before we know which "legacy roadmap" features are a strong 'nope' for 1.XXX I've gotten the impression that despite their want for guarded openness, there are many things happening behind the scenes that nobody can predict yet, with any degree of certainty. Like they are trying to do their best, but still have no honest idea what that best entails. I don't want to sound too jaded, but this seems an awful lot like that period of around the mid 0.5x patches when they decided that the old engine couldn't do everything they wanted to do. Maybe some idiot is out there still working on how to fix 0.62 to the best of its capabilities...

Hit Shift+tab, under the friends box on the left side, click "view players"; take a screenshot, scroll down and take another, repeat until you have documented the whole list. Save these to a separate file in a place of your convenience and choosing; label it "fuckery" or something to that effect. Do this every time this happens; you may need to create sub-folders to separate instances of fuckery by type, server, time and date, and location of the map. Once you have built a sizeable database, you may cross-reference names on these lists to narrow down a list of likely suspects. Make a notepad file or google docs to share with your friends. You may then use this knowledge to counter-troll these suspected lame-ass players in a manner of your choosing. Some of the best fun I've had in DayZ has been acting in the capacity of a park ranger on official public servers. If you play the same hours and stick to the same servers, you may eventually get to know the habits of your neighbors. I find this to be a much more fun and rewarding angle of metagaming than the ubiquitous private server community dedicated discord meta of getting to know your neighbors. If you're lucky, and put in the time, there is even the chance of finding the bases belonging to some bad actors, and perhaps you can leverage that into a truce. Just be careful to not spill the beans, and let a gang of asswipes know the locations of bases that may not belong to them. Be careful, and do good recon. If possible, use a partner to scope out one of the suspected bases after you kill a group. If you've put in some hours, and use stashes yourself, then you should know how long the run inland might take If you only kill half the group or less, expect them to run back to meet their buddies to reclaim their better gear. If the suspected base is closer to spawn points than the incident killings location, perhaps expect them to run to the base and regear instead; especially if the survivors had more basic guns. It's a bitch to pull off, and may take you weeks--and that's assuming that you have a group who sticks to one server. If that's not the case.... Use the steam tools to see who logs off after you shoot them. If you spot a suspicious group, and are planning to snipe, pull up the server list and snap your screens beforehand; if you see a number of players leave the server which corresponds to the number number of people you just killed, your cross-referencing just got some strong probable positives. Take some snaps after the kills. If you are lucky and skilled enough to get any of them to communicate via text (you can pretend you are having trouble hearing them during a stand-off to trick them into using text chat), and their name is anything other than Survivor(N), you can feed this name into the search bar at Dayzspy.com or another similarly functioning website, to get hits on which servers they frequent. If they are official public server deathsquads, you might get a large number of hits. Use common sense to narrow down their favorites by searching the in-game name every hour during the suspected players' playtimes. (keep in mind that players may change names both frequently or never, and ignore the dead-ends) If you are lucky enough to get two or more in-game names that hit on the same dayzspy servers, and suspect a link to suspicious steam names you see logging off after you kill them, you have a strong chance at unraveling the sweater, so to speak. You can then check these servers when you see a suspected bad-actor target log-off after you kill them, and pull up the steam list of players to see if anyone from your distillation of cross-referenced suspects is on the server. The more confirmation evidence you have, the stronger the motivation to search every square acre of that server for bases. Be smart about it. If they are coastal killers, grid search the areas that are both easy to get to from spawns, and in between popular spawn-killing locations. If you find two and kill both, get a good vantage point of the highest number of spawn locations/overwatch on coastal roads. Watch for players making a beeline, and follow them. Players who stick to the coastal roads and run all-out in the same direction, are likely going to meet a buddy they are talking to on TS/Disc. You might get lucky. If someone goes for apples and wells, and only hits about 1/3 or less of the houses in a village, you got a good candidate for a base runner. They might use more buried stashes than hidden tents or barrels, so it is important to try to catch them on the respawn to get leverage/the perfect opportunity for the sweetest revenge. If it's a consistently low-pop public server that they use to respawn, then the chances of a mother load mega-base go up a bit. This takes a lot of determination, patience, and note-taking to pull off with any sizable chance of success. Your chances of success start to get more into the feasible range if you have a group of 4 well-organized players who can put in 4-6 hours during the target time. And you'll notice I made a lot of "IF" statements.... I just figured that if you were mad enough about it to make a forum post, then you were mad enough to try to do something about it. Nobody is gonna wipe your nose for you. The specific style of fuckery you described is fair play... But now you at least have the tools to do something about it. Knowledge is power. Happy hunting. Or helpy helping. Whatever; you get the point... : ]

If you want to recover it, and have exhausted all the options of squirreling around and trying to grab the prompt, you are probably out of options. But if you just want it gone, hose it down with bullets until ruined, and the CLEanup will take it on the next server restart.

Thanks. Really. This should have been said months ago. It's been fairly obvious, but never confirmed directly. Many of us were under the impression that 1.0 was going to be more like a direct port; but as the iterations dragged on through the .63 experimental cycles, there became a sense of dissonance between what we expected and what we were seeing. 20/20 hindsight... Call this DayZ SA 1.0 Alpha. Please don't underestimate the capacity for understanding from the core supporters. Openness and understanding go hand-in-hand. Many of us would have been much more understanding if 1.0 was called a re-start rather than a release.

In defense of previously defending the process: Many of us were, and still are, very disappointed by the decision to slap the 1.0 label on a version of the game that didn't have even 50% content parity with .62. Many longtime players and supporters have stepped away indefinitely. What many of us considered to be core survival elements are still held back pending animations and physics implementations. Fishing, bows, wire snares, etc. have all fallen by the wayside for a base building rollout that is lackluster at best, and needed modding to make work as most people would have liked to see it. Even the modding community is disappointed with the lack of tools and documentation at this point. It was a big dissappointment; still is...

@fuzzy_chimera I know the place. I was just wondering how you ended up with those coordinates this recently.

What map are you using? I can no longer reach the DayZTV or DayZDB maps, and iZurvive has a whole lot more digits than I remember

Locks on barrels would be cool, even if you had to craft a lockable lid with a hasp, prepped by a hammer and nail, and fastened with a screwdriver. That way, someone who found your barrel would at least have to remember where it was well enough to come back with a hacksaw or crowbar--the latter having a chance to ruin the lid for them. Padlocks, I'd like to see...

The Lada test servers were also known as the NWAF PVP stress test servers. Having only 1 or 2 servers with condensed spawns, new loot, and ready to go cars might get a bit hard to test for the few people actually looking to do so. Just sayin'...

Woody.

The overly altruistic highwayman with OCD... Find a nice spot with lots of foot traffic, preferably lone players or small groups, far from prying eyes and sniper vantages, and good enough cover to be relatively secure for ten minutes at a time; must have a suitable area for storage of a couple barrels or a tent. Fill the tent and barrels with useful survival gear, plenty of food, batteries and extra flashlights, and even a few highly sought-after weapon accessories. Wait around looking for survivors traveling or looting, or ideally stopped at a well; and then approach them and let them know that this is a hold-up, but that you have no intention of harming them if they cooperate. Usher them into your bandit hideout. Make sure to swear at them profusely, while also saying please and thank you; and don't forget constantly apologize for the harsh treatment, and alternately insult their mothers. Tell them to strip off all their gear and face the corner. Give them cooked steaks and zucchinis to eat while they wait. Insist that they eat one steak, followed by two zucchini, two more steak, and one last zucchini. If they forget and ask, act gracious and forgiving. If they eat out of order, have a total fucking conniption fit. Don't forget to apologize. Go through their belongings while constantly commenting on how rubbish all their gear is. No matter where you are, always ask how they made it out of Solnichny with such poor taste in equipment. Don't forget to insult their mother. Make sure to apologize after a brief awkward silence. Now would be a good time to let them know how disappointed you are with their organizational skills. Berate them for keeping food and water in the same pack, because solids and liquids need to be separated. If you find peaches, you may have a minor meltdown because this item fits both categories. Tell the victim that their gear is garbage, and not worth your stealing any of it. Really try hard to let them know how disappointed you are... Make them build a fire and ruin most of their gear that you know you can replace. If you like, you can also employ the person to help tend a farm plot or cook some meat. Send them packing with a full belly, and better gear than you found them with. Insist that they open and close the door 5 times before leaving. And don't forget to insult their mother again before apologizing and bidding them farewell. And let them know if you find them with such a disorganized mess of garbage loot again, there will be trouble

Yeah, I totally have no interest in NPC AI type quests, but environmental type random opportunities would be cool to see. Something along the lines of having all the weapons and ammo in police stations locked in closets or lockers, so you have to go search the town and kill the infected to get their keys. It might be a bit harder than it seems to prevent trolling by players killing all zeds, and tossing the keys in a swamp. But I could see a state-check of the locked areas, and reassigning keys every time zombies respawn as a viable solution. Every server restart resets the locked states and new key spawns on infected inventories. I don't have my heart set on it, but it would flesh-out the sandbox a bit more, and add a bit more challenge to looting. Your quest suggestions were tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. I tried to envision my version in the least gamey way possible by basing them on natural scenarios that happened during the outbreak. In case you missed it, my scenarios came with stipulations of the notes being random spawns, and each subsequent clue having a conditional spawn based on the player holding the first clue coming into the target area. This would keep grinding and griefing to an absolute minimum. Note *randomly* spawns in Balota, in the big green mustache house across from well, laying on the table in the corner of upstairs room. Note indicates Pustoshka as target area. Player carries first note to Pushtoshka, which triggers spawn of second note (this is the important part to prevent grinding/griefing). Player finds second note In yellow house with pink roof near southern well; note indicates that a key, which opens the medical cabinets in back room of Novaya Petrovka med clinic, is left in car that ran out of gas in front of the orange brick house in Vavilovo. Player X loots designated car in Vavilovo, but finds no key, because they aren't carrying the note. Player arrives with note, retrieves key. (This is the only really "gamey part" of my scenario) Player is killed by Player X at well near Sinistock lumber mill; they did not discard the notes. Player X takes key and goes to Novaya Petrovka and retrieves medical supplies from locked cabinet. You've got the same idea as me, with common sense environmental sandbox features. Part of making the gameplay a bit more hardcore would involve perhaps looking for a specific infected uniform of the supply sergeant, so you could retrieve the keys to the armory. Imagine looting athe ATC and finding a shiny new FAL sitting untouched behind a wire cage. Now you gotta go killing zombies to find the key, or sit there for 5 minutes with a hacksaw and risk your life with your back to the door. None of this stuff seems too elaborate for a sandbox game, just a bit more of a rich environment for the player to explore, evaluate, and overcome.

Somehow, I heard about that recently; probably from a Simon Whistler YT video... DayZCore was a somewhat short-lived hardcore server that did pretty well with increased scarcity, and they would have airdropped aid packages with the location broadcast as a server message, which was neat. But we're getting kinda off-topic here, with discussion of scripted events. I just thought that a really hardcore server could keep things interesting by having some sort of events for players to seek out as part of the daily grind. A really hardcore server would end up playing pretty tedious without something to keep players moving. Without bow and arrow, it really just turns into a slow crawl from house to house, playing resource/risk management.

I kinda with they would have more environmental narrative type flavor in the map added as dynamic events. Like little scripted scavenger hunts. It would take a little event trigger scripting to make it viable, but I think it would be cool to see. For instance, make desk drawers searchable, and have the possibility to spawn a note as the beginning to a scripted quest. These notes can be found anywhere from homes, to businesses, to military and police structures; and be correspondence between family members, friends, colleagues, or even between civilians and emergency services. The notes would contain information to send the player looking for a specific item in another area of the map, triggered only by the player holding the note coming within a few hundred meters of the target location. Oftentimes, these could work by having the first note say something like: "My dearest Irina, I have been called away to Novigrad to assist in blockading the port during this crisis. My colleague, Pavel, has agreed to ensure you get a package I have prepared, to help you weather this crisis at home. He is the mill operator in Gorka. With all my love, I shall return. Andrik." So the player treks to Gorka, assuming the blood stains on the floor in the house containing the note are a good indication that Irina didn't make it. Upon reaching the mill, the player would have to either search the mill for another note containing Andrik's instructions to Pavel, or kill all the zombies in the area and loot the note off the one designated as Pavel. Pavel's note might be Andrik's instructions for where to pick up the package, or a draft of confirmation to either Andrik or Irina, explaining that he has the package, and has left it at X location, to be delivered after his shift. In this case, Pavel's note was in his desk, addressed to Andrik. "Andrik, I have taken the package from your locker and stored it in my van. I had stopped at the market in Svergino on my way to deliver it, when they declared an emergency. There was a mob forming at the market, and I was recalled to the mill immediately to process all of our stock for emergency preparations in Berezino. I am so sorry. Please tell Irina she can take the package from my van if she can make it; it's on the west side of the lot at the market in Svergino. But tell her to be careful, some of those people were crazed. I fear I would not have made it out of Svergino if it weren't for Damir seeing me while driving his lumber truck back down from the Nagornoe cuts. He had to drive through a section of fence to get to me. I'm just thankful that I left my radio on my vest after today's shift." Show up in Svergino with Pavel's note, and find that a van in the lot now has a drysack with a loaded magnum, speedloader, and 2 boxes of bullets, as well as a water bottle, a can of peaches, and three cans of tuna. These scenarios are endless, relatively easy to make up, and would add a lot of backstory to the outbreak, as well as provide believable motivation for players to travel to certain areas for rewards. In the case of KOS instances, you may loot a player and find yourself on the last leg of a quest as a bonus. Now, I know this isn't exactly what makes a hardcore experience, but it would be a nice flavor feature in the midst of one. And I feel that this scenario appropriately addressed your question, without the use of any new NPCs or serious deus ex-machina aside from the conditional spawn of non-primary clues and rewards.

Sooooo. I guess it's my job to do this here... Come on guys, please maintain your own in-house platform. Pleeeeeeease.