emuthreat

This is all so interesting. And also moot. It's pretty easy to read between the lines. People complain about new features that they don't think needed adding or changing, and say the devs are just doing this to appeal to the console market. The devs say "no we aren't" and they are still telling the truth, because they feel the changes will benefit PC players as well... After 5 years of excruciatingly hard work for marginal visible gains (almost to .62 content pairty), who can blame them for trying to port all this new work into two new markets and get a much welcome infusion of cash? It's a no-brainer. You think someone selling sandwiches out of a truck is going to refuse service to customers in vehicles if they are both a larger market and they have seen their pedestrian sales plateau over the last couple years? Only if they WANT to leave money on the table. Which nobody in their right mind does. So all they gotta do is reconfigure a few things; like making pedestrians order from the rear of the truck and dine on the blind side, and get some safety barriers n place so the cars can drive by the main window. Sure it's a change, and maybe even minor inconvenience for the original customers. But who cares as long as everyone gets their lunch and the business stays afloat? It should be obvious what has happened over the last two years in particular, at least on a large scale. The minutia of the whys are perhaps less obvious and even less so anybody's business besides the studio's. Yeah, I'm still bummed about persistence being borked. Yeah I think it was silly to label it 1.0 in this state. And yeah, I think I understand why they needed to do it anyways.... it's not like they didn't have any feedback on the subject, and I don't think they did it as a big FU to their supporters. I'm gonna go dump some milk on my counters, and try to remain stoic about it.

@RaptorM60 Is there any truth to this, that official servers are running some kind of backup?

There are plenty of people who have adapted to the new conditions. On constantly full private servers with a queue, people have stopped logging off overnight, for fear of losing their slot. Even when the server is half full at night, people have stopped logging off just in this last week. The majority of experienced players have adapted already. What does that tell you about the group of players who still believe night is unplayable? Does a large portion of the player base have legitimate medical issues that prevent them from playing at night? I know a lot of DayZ players, and have only met two people who claim eyestrain or other discomfort in trying to play at night... I can only imagine how daunting it is for new players, but you refer to the good ol' days of the mod, so we can assume that's not the case. So what is the problem again? Do you have trouble getting from one place to another? Not enough flares and glowsticks? Bad luck with battery spawns? Flashlight field not far/wide enough? Too hard to find a compass? Other players don't glow in the dark from 900 meters away? Just be honest with us; you don't like night because it makes things harder for your preferred playstyle, and nothing anybody says or does to help you adapt to this will be good enough. Did I get that right? Just wanna make sure not to waste anymore time on an agree to disagree discussion...

I hate to burst your bubble, hombre, but the game has already had this mechanic for quite some time now. If you build a fire and look towards it, you temporarily lose the ability to see what is around you. If you turn your back to the fire, you regain the ability to see things in the darkness. What people want, is for this to be tweaked a bit, so players could see more in near total darkness, like our eyes do IRL. You response to pilgrim* tells us a lot. Nighttime spoils your search for players to shoot from afar, therefore it is garbage. I came to DayZ for a harsh, gritty, open world, multiplayer survival simulator with zombies. And I got just that. Maybe a bit too harsh, as I keep getting killed by being bugged in doorways while trying to fight off zombies with a glowstick...

When everyone shoots first anyways, who is to say what is a bandit? Got a Solnichny spawn today, ran to the single civ barracks. Saw a geared player in the first door, and he podded off a shot before I had time to say hello. Miraculously, I managed to knock him out with about 5-7 punches, depending on how many actually landed. (his helmet did some good work, I guess) Took his MP5, tried tying him up, but he woke up too soon. Came after me with his axe, refused to be reasonable, so i closed a door and shot him through it. And all he lost was all his gear, the time he already spent on that life, and the chance to run with a pretty entertaining group for an evening (or even just backstab at the right moment). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you still have white dots, that means there is still something set too high on your end. try tweaking your Nvidia settings,monitor settings, and turning down in-game brightness slider until static just barely disappears; this will give you the cleanest, highest contrast night experience possible. I swear, some of the people still having such a bad time at night are just not using optimal settings, and it makes things easily 3x worse than seeing a "clear" pitch black screen. My baseline is on a clear night, to stand in an open field with a paved road, rail fence, and nearby houses and treeline. You SHOULD be able to make out the rail fence and lines painted on the road for up to 10 meters, see some faint outline of a house from 25 meters, and easily distinguish between the tops of the trees and the sky. If this is not the case, continue tweaking your settings. And if you are playing in a well-lit room, that may also be part your problem.

^^^THIS^^^ This is why you get attitude from me. I explain that the changes to how nighttime works were daunting at first, but that with some tweaks to your settings to rule out obvious errors, adaptation and effort, they can be managed. I provide examples, in video form, and take the time to explain that I put on a filter so my stream and recordings won't be as black as what I can't see while playing. And. You. Both. Accuse. Me. Of. Cheating.... Let that sink in a bit. I try to help, offer tips, provide video documentation of how it is possible to play at night. Instead of taking this info, and focusing on what you can change about your own approach to darkness, maybe asking for more clarification, we get this lovely discussion instead. Thanks. You know what? Just add me on steam and we'll work this out in a server sometime. Flares give great illumination now, but I prefer not to use them, as that is how I spotted a guy from about 150 meters away last night. Glowsticks, stars. and compass all the way. And for the record, someone who asks to dumb down the game because of their own difficulty to cope is acting a bit entitles IMO. And a person who openly accuses me of gamma-boost cheating in public is most definitely a gobshite. Yeah-yeah. Sorry Max, I'm done now. There's enough people who are at least willing to try, who are online and in dark servers for now. I'll direct my efforts where they may be of some use to someone. You could have at least called them on accusing me of cheating, to be fair...

It's not so much about PC or XBOX players. New players come from games where the only thing to do is shoot other players. They are used to things like bragging about K/D ratios, or (gasp) having their uncle play on their account for a few hours so they can brag about their new stats. People come to DayZ for all different kinds of reasons, but it all eventually devolves into kill to live mentality, where so many people just shoot, that everyone assumes that they MUST. And here we are... On PC, there are private servers where people looking for more diverse interactions will go, and eventually they shift the balance of what the average player does, and how they react to encounters. For you XBOX guys, maybe figure something out like only playing on servers that end with 5. After enough of your kind of players are clued-in, you might have a chance of getting a better quality of interactions.

False, both of those are pacifists. Nice try. Maybe ask some Mormons to help you with the raking out back?

You won't make any friends with that attitude, and nobody will care if you find the game too hard and need to cry about it. We probably mostly hope you quit, so there will be one less entitled-feeling gobshite running around Chernarus asking to be spoonfed because of failure to GG. Sometimes I have trouble distinguishing between people who want to improve their experience, and people who just wish to lash out because they are frustrated. Then I sometimes get a bit snippy after realizing I had mistaken the latter for the former. Mea Culpa.

Fixed that for you. Don't worry, I used to be a coward too. Eventually grew out of it; never had the chutzpah to brag about it; but to each their own... I too, prefer to talk to people instead of shooting them. I even manage to talk to a fair percentage of people after we shoot each other. It's the most rewarding way to play, IMHO. But don't brag about combat logging or server hopping, because most players who would talk to you in game, would also stab you in the back if they read this, just to give you what's duly yours. The logs for PC show player login/out timestamps, and player hit data. Recording is encouraged, but not quite as easy on console. Rumor has it that logs will get *better* if better means exponentially more noise to signal ratio... Combat logging is easy to identify with a simple report. It's pretty interesting coming here to watch this all play out again with a new batch of players coming in at the same time. I spent my first 500 hours hoarding loot and avoiding anyone I didn't already know. Then I started actually playing the game... A point of advice: No matter what your preferred playstyle is, make sure to change things up. If you like being a hermit/walking loot pinata, take the time to go on some full servers and get your licks in on the coastal chaos for a couple hours here and there; it'll help reduce the jitters for when it matters, and get your aim and evasion motor memory established much more quickly than tromping through the woods with no stamina left. If you primarily KOS and are usually very successful, take that advantage to get the upper hand, and practice getting the jump on people and controlling the situation. You might meet someone you like and would rather not kill; or at least you might get to make someone take off their pants and jump off a roof so you won't have to worry about ruining any loot or wasting your bullets on a sure thing. KOS is pervasive. Some players can't get enough notches on their belts, and others just wish they could accomplish one little goal in a play session without a random black screen out of nowhere. Combat logging robs both types of players the rich interactions that they come to this game to have. Some of my best experiences in this game have come from encountering players in military zones that most regard as KOS zones. Sometimes I make a new friend, and sometimes get too comfortable and hang around long enough for the person's friends to come and put me down. One time at Tisy, I ran towards gunshots and met a couple of Russian players, of whom only one spoke English. They had just killed a pack of wolves, and were more than a little entertained when i came around the corner and said "Hey, are you guys gonna eat that? Mind if I collect the meat?" Another time I met a guy from Brasil and talked to him just long enough for a guy in his party to tell him to just kill me. My group eventually found their bases, and rearranged the loot to spell out our names. We eventually made contact again, and I had a great time trying to PVP with a group of mostly non-english speaking players later on. Once, I picked up a hitchhiker, and trusted him long enough for him to but a bullet through my brain after we stopped to drink from a well. Once I tried to run over a guy because I had a friend in the truck, but missed, and she told me to stop and talk to him; and we made a new friend and invaluable asset to the group. Do the hard thing, take the road less traveled, put yourself out there and take the big risks. Don't log out at the first sign of danger. Be bold. Don't be a coward like I was for far too long. You're just wasting time you could be spending strengthening your game and making valuable contacts. Do the hard thing. It. Is. Worth. It. And just a note to finish off with here... do you XBOX guys not know about the beanz?

Well, at least you took everything you wanted. That's much better than just dumping it all just for the kicks.

The edge of the map is among the worst places to hide things. Everybody thinks of remote areas, so people going shopping for used goods knows where to go. Game has been out for a while. Everything has been done before. Try trying the things you have never read anywhere ; )

It took me seven shots, point blank, to down a cow elk with a shotgun last night. There is a house in the southwest, near a radio tower, that is always swarming with zombies. Logged in and out there a few times over the past couple weeks, and it was always surrounded with multiple zombies. Kinda neat, but for a lone house in the wilderness, it seems a bit much. They must be guarding the Lada. In related news: Ruined Denim Shorts now come with a sporty new ruined legs texture. Unfortunatley, this is all I had time to test before getting frustrated by wasting write cycles on my SSD every other time I try to log into a server. One more thing. The cooking pot now makes noise while cooking on a gas stove, and the sound changes when boiling/braising is finished. Unfortunately, dry baking/frying in a pot gives no audio cues, and resulted in burnt chicken breasts. I don't know how long this has been in the game, but I'm super stoked about it.

Well, short answer, I don't. It is possible to play on numerous private servers concurrently, with a character for each. It's been a while since I checked, but last I knew, community public servers are largely populated by people with a very predictable (boring) playstyle: Spawn on low pop, gear up without resistance, hop to high-pop, kill until you die, Repeat. Some of these folks even like to do silly things like keep one player in the AO on a low pop to hop in to your server at just the wrong time so they can "pwn Nuubz" like a pro. Most players will roll in big groups, all telepathically communicating outside the game from the safety of their TS or Discord server. These players will almost never talk to you, unless it is to stall so their friends can witness the killing. The ONLY interaction these players are interested in are shooting, teabagging, and perhaps some good old fashioned slurs through in--game VoIP if they catch you alive. So my question is why do you prefer to play on servers that are so geared towards abuse? Why do you prefer to know with 95%+ certainty, the outcome of any interactions you will have in game. I played low pop official servers until I was familiar with the game. I played hi pop public servers until I was utterly bored with the lack of variety, which took less than 100 hours; it was like going to the driving range every day, but never playing through a course. I started playing on private servers and noticed the same people from time to time. Sometimes I would meet someone whose name I recognized from pulse checking a corpse, or vice versa. All of a sudden there was a community out there with real people with diverse motivations and moods at different times and places. There was a chance for interaction besides killing whomever is not in your VoIP server at the time. And there was no ghosting. If someone wanted to come get you out of a hidey-hole, they either needed to have a grenade, or risk getting blasted as they come inside to root you out. Believe it or not, many, if not most, have absolutely zero rules. Some are even ran by absolute shitbags that will give you as terrible an experience as you could wish. And did I mention no ghosting? ; ) You never did answer my question about Official public servers on single, insulated shards. Still free-range, un-moderated, absolutely no rules, wild-west of servers, just without the possibility of someone ghosting or coming in loaded up with loot from another dimension.

Carry a compass. If you don't have a compass, then just enjoy being lost, stay put until dawn, or play another server for an hour or two... Dark and stormy nights are, shall we say, difficult and unaccommodating. Am I missing anything? Are your sound settings not working correctly??? Maybe you need to turn down your brightness to 50% or less. I know that helped a friend who had a washed-out screen. On an overcast rainy night, there simply will be a period of total darkness, carry a glowstick so you know if you are running into a fence; and be very careful if you are in an area with cliffs. If on a partly coudy night, you cannot tell the difference between the sky and the treetops or horizon, then your settings are borked. Restore your monitor to factory defaults, and adjust the brightness slider in game options to best contrast possible at night. Then tweak you monitor a bit for your own preference and room lighting. I actually turn off my lights when possible to reduce room glare on my screen. And please don't call us trolls just because we have learned to cope with an increased difficulty level in a game, which you may find too daunting to want to play in such a state. It's...Unflattering. If anyone is interested, here is the VOD from my session last night. You will notice that it is grainy and a bit lighter than what you might expect; this is because I increase the gamma in OBS to the maximum possible before washout, to make viewing possible. Skip ahead to the 2 hour mark to see how I play in the dark.

What about public official servers operating on a private shard? What is it about privates servers that turns you off? Do you prefer server hopping over a more "natural" experience?

Firstly, the fanatical projections get you nowhere. People have all sorts of motivations and playstyles, and all I ever want is balance between constructive and destructive activities. Which is not an unreasonable thing to ask for in a game. It's more to the point of making the game as free of exploits as possible. For instance, back in .62, it was possible to glitch through tent walls, even though realistically, one would just be able to slice through the walls with a knife. But as the game was in that state, tents should have acted as barriers. Exploitative play was to glitch through said barriers. Sometimes you could even glitch through concrete walls that are part of the natural map. The developers recognized this as unwanted behavior and disabled loot spawns in those buildings to try to prevent abuse. Similarly, constructed base walls are now able to be walked through, defeating the purpose of building walls. There was even a post about players possibly being able to drop through some roofs recently. Driving a vehicle up to a wall and using the vehicle as a ladder (why can't we craft ladders?) would provide some visual and audio cues that a wall breech is imminent. Dismantling a wall from outside should make some noise. Ghosting into a base should have some barrier or penalty. It sucks that they scrapped the idea of companion animals. Petting and feeding the guard dogs before logging out inside a base, to ensure you are recognized upon returning, would be a good way to punish people ghosting into bases. I am assuming that you mean this in a practical sense, as within the intended mechanics of the game; rather than the extreme of flying hackers raining down grenades, or invisible speedhackers with infinite ammo SMGs. To the point of ghosting/combat logging. Once a player clears and secures an area, it is outside the scope of reasonable gameplay to have someone phase into existence behind you and shoot you. To the point of private servers banning people who do this constantly and purposefully, it is the best option to ensure fair play, short of the Developers finding a solution. Players with access to an exploit, can make the game unenjoyable for a majority of players. Server owners and the developers have an interest in mitigating destructive and disruptive abuses of the game mechanics that diminish the value of the game for the majority of other players. I imagine they will never allow wildfires and arson in a game like this, as a handful of dedicated players could effectively ruin every server, every day, as fast as the admins could reset them. That speaks volumes towards the verifiable need to balance against purely destructive gameplay I don't know why we keep butting heads on this issue. Perhaps walking a few miles in my shoes would give you an understanding of what it feels like trying an already impossible task, and having to deal with abuse of game mechanics on top of that. There is a reason that most of the threads about ghosting and server hopping seem to end at the same conclusion; play on a private server; because the public hive servers are prone to numerous exploits which allow unscrupulous players to gain an advantage that a reasonable person would not physically expect to be possible. Get pinned down in a corner pub second floor, and watch the stairs, only for one of the guys to show up two minutes later behind you. Most folks would regard this as cheating. Cynical folks might chuckle and say it is possible, therefore okay to do. Developers might say we don't know how to fix this without unintended consequences. If you don't want to die because people are abusing the game for an unfair advantage, stay off or public hive servers for now. Play DayZ with whatever motivations or strategies you wish, but the idea of fair play and intended mechanics vs abuse of exploits still stands. I sure as hell wouldn't play chess with a person who decides that they could switch the properties of any two pieces at will, and I won't play DayZ on a server where glitch abuse is rampant. Imagine if someone could remove their queen from a chess board for any number of turns, and replace it at will in the same position. This is effectively what combat logging does on a private server, and it is perfectly reasonable to want to exclude such players from the community. I think the only really viable solution for new PC and XBOX players is for BI to operate a handful of curated official servers in the same manner as private servers, and assign admins. If they actually had some skin in the game, as far as responsibility for processing tickets for glitch abuse, it might incentivize them to fix some of these issues.

I had a bit of trouble with nights for the first few days after the gamma fix. Then I finally started carrying a compass, and always making sure I had at least a glowstick or two. I'll admit that having good spatial memory helps a lot when looting at night, but I still get lost or stuck without a light sometimes. It really adds to the experience, in my opinion. Those times when I log out near a military base, only to log back in complete darkness without a light source; well I find that pretty fun. The trick is that you can use single entry tents or shipping containers as a safe box to retreat into when you get aggro, and then hit the zombies when you see their outline in the doorways and footsteps on the wood or metal texture. You can see a compass dial at night, but in my experience, you always feel like you have traveled farther than you actually have. It is not unplayable. It takes adaptation and planning. Stop whining and learn to play. You'll be that much better for ti if and when they adjust night to be more conducive to your visibility.

At what point does it start feeling awkward to dig up powdered horse bones, only to beat hem in to an even finer dust? You only play solo, and from that perspective, bases are of no value to you but for something to disrupt or destroy. For others, bases might be a means of making contact with other survivors for the purpose of determining their motives and disposition. And others still, may prefer to group up and make a megabase and try to defend it from the non-stop flow of players who invariably come to destroy them just because they are there. Other players, who prefer to run solo or in small groups, will keep a little journal of bases that they use to drop by and steal just a few things; so the owners will not notice and keep putting nice things in there for them to take. It seems pretty reductive to view bases in the way that you do. It almost seems as if your mental image of a base is a walled-in area in a strategically poor location, with dimensions no larger than a grenade blast radius. And with this, I must question the extent, nature, and quality of your experience with bases in DayZ. Even in .62, it was possible to make a maze of tents to fill the gaps in an already hardened area. And barring sniper over watch (which a good base engineer would mitigate by placing a base in areas with multiple covered egress) the advantage is very often in the favor of the defenders; so much so, that bases should be built with hidden faults to assist in retaking them in the case that someone uninvited has made themselves comfortable inside. Back to the topic of this thread... Server hoppers can be frustrated by building you base with hoppers in mind. By picking the places one would feel the most covered in logging out on the other server to ghost in, and placing bear traps or land mines in those areas of your base, you can mitigate the threat of ghosting by anticipating predictable norms in player behavior. Heck, you could even build a wall around the good logout spots in your base, to make the hopper have to try again. Even on private servers, we have to deal with players who combat log in bases. Sneak in on low-pop and log out in a corner. Log back in at high pop times and kill a player or two, only to log off in a different corner and try again in a half hour or so. You might cringe when you hear this, but most communities prefer to ban these players, as it is considered abusing game mechanics. As for public official servers... Hopefully Bohemia will find their way to moderating a handful of these as the true hive of official servers, while leaving the 3rd person server hopping wild west to the heathens who prefer that style of exploitative play. As for Ghosting into bases, we can only wait and see.

Why would you think that?

Soooo, did anyone else catch Pilgrim's handful of Freudian slips in which he referred to the upcoming release as 0.1? Maybe he's on to something. Come Wednesday, we'll all be running around with just M4's and mosins with hunting scopes. I didn't come aboard until .51, so a hard reboot of this development cycle will cure my fomo for sure. Who's with me? Who wants to go through DayZ development all over again from the start? Who else thinks maybe that is maybe what it looks like is happening in the next year?

Nobody here is saying the future of DayZ stops at 1.0. Nobody. What I am seeing a lot of is people who see 1.0 as the beginning of the new DayZ we have all been waiting for. And as it stands, the new version does not have feature pairty with previous versions. Yes, everybody begrudgingly accepts the new status quo of games "shipping" full of bugs, only to be infinitely patched throughout the lifetime of the game. (Hey. Remember the 90's, when they actually shipped physical copies, and couldn't rely on the internet to disseminate patches for gamebreaking bugs? They had to have a working finished product before they released the game to the market, because it would be REEEEEEAAAALLLLYYYY expensive to have to fix things after the fact.) What the above post was concerned about, is the level of internal pressure to add the missing features, fix the bugs, and add even more batches of even more still missing features as time goes on past the official release date of the 1.0 version. I have faith in Bohemia's commitment, but it is a legitimate concern. I mean, they just announced the official release date, and we can't keep a base around long enough to even know if there are issues with persistence itself; because crashes (and even some regular scheduled server restarts--spooky, right?) are causing stored items to be deleted. Does that sink in? The first iteration of the new basebuilding systems cannot even be properly tested as of one week before the scheduled release, because servers are crashing and randomly deleting items from the persistence files. They are going to turn the game loose on new players and media journalists to play and review, by advertising it as finished. Yet just last week, I died after leaving Tisy with ALL THE LOOT, because I got stuck in the hinges of a door and was beaten to death through the wall by zombies, because I couldn't move. That is a gamebreaking bug. And it's not the only one. Have you hobbled a zombie yet, and had them crawl? Have you noticed how you can't hit them if they are on the threshold to some buildings, like those little towers with the ladder to nowhere. Certain death by means of poor game mechanics. Not ready for primetime, yet being labeled and marketed as such. Sure, they left out more than half of the guns and vehicles for post-release content. Who cares? I'm more concerned with new players and professional game reviewers losing progress due to broken game mechanics such as bermuda triangle doors, and randomly deleted persistence files... #feelsbadman

Sometimes you will need to hold the R key for a very long time. When they ran the exp patch with airfield spawns, I had a UMP jam that definitely took longer than 6 seconds to clear. It repeated the full unjamming animation loop more than two full times.