emuthreat

I had an article about DayZ pop up in my news browsing over lunch today, and decided to give it a read. https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/lirik-receives-instant-karma-after-teaching-a-harsh-lesson-about-trust-in-dayz On it's face, it was a retelling of an adventure on a prominent stream. The last two paragraphs added a bit of editorial content: "DayZ started out as a mod for the ARMA series but soon became its own title. It’s since been abandoned by its developers, but the game is kept alive by the modding community. Lirik soon woke up and the hijinx continued with multiple other players. DayZ might not be what everyone hoped it once could become, but the modding community and streamers like Lirik help keep it exciting." I was a bit perplexed at the mention of it having been abandoned by development, especially in the weeks after another update. It got me wondering what would make an electronic entertainment journalist something publish like this; lack of due dilligence, salty about development, maybe inside information? Maybe he was just looking for a segue to pump up the role of content creators in the popularity and longevity of the game. But in any case, I'd think this is an oopsie that requires a correction, or maybe a lead that warrants explanation straight from the horse's mouth.

Thanks. I'm still following development and playing a bit here and there, but the lack of leather tanning really keeps me from getting too into the game. How are you liking the latest updates?

Are you asking this question in earnest, or have you just recently awoken from a coma brought on by massive head trauma? Of course they are this poorly maintained. I boggles my mind that they haven't allowed volunteer admins for public servers just to create some semblance of trying to maintain them. Their public hive is the equivalent of throwing a potato out of a moving vehicle every half mile, and calling oneself a farmer.

This is an odd thing to interject into the response. Are you able to elaborate on this any further?

With all the complaints about hacking in the past month, perhaps it is reasonable for BI to see that they need to do something about it. It's an online game, the enjoyment that people are paying for by purchasing the title is contingent on their experiences in servers populated by other players. Cheating ruins those experiences. Ruined experiences from reasons outside of intended game mechanics results in a loss of value. Telling people to use community servers comes with a laundry list of problems. Any player can be banned at any time, for no reason, from community servers. Investing time into a server and ending up in such a situation would equally result in diminished value of the product to the player. Community servers can "gift" loadouts to preferred players who donate, or use admin tools to do anything they wish, which results in unfair play; and again diminished value to the average player. Public servers are having problems with hackers, which diminishes the value of the paying customers agreed upon intended experience. Perhaps bohemia should pay for an effective anti cheat service to maintain the intended experience and preserve the value of their product. Here's the really unpopular opinion part: perhaps DayZ should start a paid subscription service for a block of properly administered public servers. If and when they fail to preserve the integrity of the paid server experience, they could just refund the subscription fees for the affected party. The people who feel they have lost something by getting killed by hackers would get refunds, and maybe not feel as salty. The portion of subscriptions not refunded could pay for the admin staff, and processing the data of capturing hacks. Perhaps some things can be learned and applied to other other public servers to stop the hacks. Everybody wins. except hackers. BI gets funding to develop their own anti-cheat department which they so badly need in this market. People who want a safer space without going to community servers, can pay for a service that issues refunds if not delivered adequately.

First of, props for working magnanimity into your post. : ] While I can't disagree with your statistical assessment, it's notable that this is limited in scope to instantaneous outcomes, which is a bit of a shame. Your reasoning here is guided by the presumption that the only thing gained or lost by these interactions is your instantaneous in-game progress. Under those terms, your flowchart for shoot on sight risk/reward pencils out. But if you factor in long term gameplay, where character position and loot progression is averaged out over dozens of in-game lives, the only thing of value gained or lost by interaction with players is the ability to find future allies. All of your math was done with the assumption of 1 on 1 meetings. In practice, it's as common to run across two or more players at once, just as often as a lone player; and even in the cases of lone player meetings, there is often at least one other person who is called in via discord or steam chat. So I would argue that focusing on statistical outcomes of 1 on 1 meetings would trend against the player in the long term, as a portion of instantaneous encounters that are won by shooting first, may be priming them to be shot on sight by companions of the person they initially saw. I've had numerous encounters that started with shooting each other out of a quick fright, which were resolved by talking through a closed door; and a portion of those meetings resulted in regular cooperative play after the fact. Sure then, it might be instantaneously safer to shoot everyone first, but you might be killing the guy who has your back for the next three encounters, thus reducing your odds of survival over time.

If he spent months farming NVGs on his chosen server, and it was private or 3pp, all of his investment was made to be instantly wasted away by an arbitrary design decision. Make the hardcore game we were all promised from the beginning. Let modding dumb down the settings to arcade mode if they want; or label such public servers "easy mode" and let the market decide.

File a bug report and make it private. I had no idea this was possible, and neither did many other people who might read this. Now you've told the world how to do this thing that is intolerable... SMH

STOP SPRINTING! If you take your time for the first hour, search every area completely, and maybe backtrack a little bit, you'll have better luck. Don't just sprint a beeline to your favorite spot. And seriously, backtrack. Your presence in an area will likely make apples or mushrooms spawn behind you, as well as new zombies and possibly refreshed loot spawns in houses.

I think much of this was covered more in-depth in interviews, than in actual textual postings; as far as the gameplay loop and decision to go to beta before the feature backlog was fulfilled.

Everything you posted is good feedback, and things I am sure that everyone wants to see fixed. Except for this quoted text above... While I don't enjoy the current way that you have to take the magazine into your inventory or to the ground, put away the weapon, pick up the magazine, load it, put it away, get the weapon back in hands, and finally insert the magazine; I believe there is some middle ground that doesn't involve magically teleporting bullets through metal. DayZ was never intended to be the kind of game where you could fill a magazine without removing it. That being said, it would be nice if you could remove the magazine to hands in one action rather than 3. After all, they do let you hold both the magazine and gun while inserting it to the gun. Gun in hands: right click on magazine--remove to hands.---->Gun goes to back slot or inventory slot that it normally occupies. Drag ammo to magazine to reload. Drag gun back to hands, still holding magazine, and receive prompt to swap or combine. Player animation of digging in inventory, magazine goes to pocket, gun goes to hands and normal reload animation is performed. It's still a few steps, but definitely better than the convoluted mess we are currently forced to deal with.

Remember when these threads would get locked and buried within 12 or so hours maximum? Tegridy Farms remembers...

I think we'll have a better feeling for how all these mechanics work out when the bugs get fixed. Most of my issue with the inventory come from not being able to successfully do things on the first try, mouse latency, drag and drop interruptions, misplaced item icon with respect to cursor, etc. All of these things make a somewhat involved inventory interface seem overly cumbersome and double, if not more, the amount of time it takes to perform a simple task; which is not too welcome at certain time-sensitive moments. As for the overall ethos of survival simulation, I agree that the game is taking the right steps towards this unique niche. There is nothing else quite like DayZ out there, and I feel it should stay true to this. I play DayZ because it is hard, complicated, and unforgiving, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, quality of life tweaks are certainly welcome. I'd love to be able to remove a magazine from a weapon in hands, and not have to make three extra steps before dragging the ammunition to it for reloading. Right click the magazine attachment icon and select "remove to hands", and the weapon is holstered/shouldered/put in inventory. Things like this seem intuitive, and welcome. Nobody reloads a magazine by removing it, putting it in their backpack, putting the weapon away, retrieving the magazine, and then adding bullets; it's not a breakdown of simulation to just assume that the rifle goes to the shoulder after removal of the magazine. There's lots of things to iron out. But that doesn't mean the entire ethos of the game should be scrapped.

I keep wondering what it would take to make all of South Zagoria areas into on playable map, like we see on the posters throughout Chernarus. But then, like drgullen said, I get back to wondering how much more robust server hardware allocations it would take to make what we have been seeing for the last few years run 'correctly'. And then I get sad...

Did you wash your hands?

Wellllllll. Since we're here. Let's do the necro-danse

After getting back into the game for a couple weeks, I've noticed a couple things that make PVE a bit different than in the past. Wolves don't constantly howl when you are near, and often the first warning you get before a bite is the pitter-patter of foreign footsteps all around you. I like this. It makes you experience that moment of panic when they are near, instead of running from the howls and barks and having time to prepare. Zombies have much better hearing for nearby footsteps and even better for chain aggro. BUT, it is too easy to avoid the ones you can see; even if they are only 20-30 meters away. For those who say that PVE can never be made challenging, I tend to disagree. Maybe the disagreement is on the terms of what makes difficulty; inability to survive, or loss of time, or opportunity cost balancing. I've died a fair number of times trying to melee my way through military areas, and chain-aggro'd more than I was expecting and got cornered and died. I've also decided to avoid looting areas completely because I didn't want to deal with the density of zombies I'd seen. I lost half my blood the other day looting a lumber mill, because I axed one zombie who alerted another, and another, until I had a pile of 6 ded zeds and a ruined backpack. I only heard two sets of footsteps when I started. So from what I've seen, zombies can definitely be a scaleable difficulty modifier. Increasing their hearing radius and triggering aggro off any perceived noise other than footsteps would be an easy way to do this. Their sight is also pretty limited, as you can sprint straight past them in broad daylight with as little as 40 meters between you. If they made zombies see you from up to 150 meters straight-on and boosted their peripheral vision, it would definitely make surviving looting a town much more difficult. I remember back in .55-.57? When zombies could spot you from very long distances, and would almost never lose aggro. They still weren't much of a threat, but i'd been surprised a number of times stopping to sort loot or eat food in a bush and get run up on and slapped out of the blue; so it is possible.

What server is your character on that you wish to move? Perhaps I should be asking what HIVE is it on? 1pp characters can never go to any 3pp servers, and likewise, private server characters cannot go to any other server. Please double check to make sure these aren't the conditions messing you up. It should tell you in the server browser if your server is 1pp or 3pp. And I should hope that you can tell the difference between official and community servers, and remember that characters are not shared between the two. I know when I first started playing, it took me weeks to even realize how to switch to 3pp by pressing enter. Now I believe the key is "V" by default in most cases. Log into the server with your character that you want to move, and hit "V" to confirm if the camera switches or not, if you can't figure it out from the server browser. Hope this helps.

Maybe a fire that is just on the verge of burning out? or try hot swapping the pot for 2 second intervals?

Honestly, I'm not too well-practiced lately with how cooking works. I have 4.3 hours in the last two weeks, but it may as well be months. If the under 100 degrees part is accurate, I'd guess that it means don't cook it too long. I remember that it used to be VERY easy to burn your meat trying to dry it in previous patches--to the point that I'd never try doing it. I have noticed while carrying around a pot after cooking with it, that they retain heat for a long time, so maybe you can just use a hot pot not on the fire? IDK, try it out.

The current wiki entry has a max of 5k units of hydration, and 20k units of energy. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it feels like the difference was greater in .62 and before. My group would routinely take a few vehicles out to a herd of cows and load up everything we could carry, bring it back to base, leave two people behind to cook and restock the food tents and tan leather, and the others would go collect the rest. IIRC, it took about 2 hours to collect, fully process, and store the average herd of cows. We ate and ate and ate until it seemed pointless, and we could run around the map for hours and hours over the course of a week without ever getting an indicator of hunger; topping off opportunistically, of course. So to summarize, eat everything, and then eat some more. Roasted meats pack the best punch overall, because of the water content, but dried meat has a better calorie to volume ratio, if your' not too concerned about hydration.

Did you get out of the car before you logged out? Or did the server restart while you were in the car? Both of these cases can result in your position data reverting to when you entered the car. It's a known issue since the beginning of vehicles in SA...

How about not resetting the position until the third server switch within an hour, or if the player switches to another server and then back to the first within an hour?? Hey, how about instead of resetting their position, you just lock them out for an hour or two? This way they can't abuse the ham-fisted mechanic for a free ride back to the coastal areas with all their high-end loot; bypassing the threat of other players as they exit a dangerous area with practically no stamina... If someone wants to scour every inch of Tisy base, and then do it again on another server, they aren't hurting the game or other players very much. If they want to do it twice, and move to a third server, they still aren't hurting the game or other players very much. At some point, they will have more loot than they can carry... Which server are they gonna put it on? This might be a good point to step in and determine that game mechanics are being abused; if, and only if, they are stockpiling it nearby the base. If you move them across the map, they just saved time getting back to their coastal re-gear stashes. It's a poorly conceived system, and creates new potential for abuse, while punishing innocent players who may want to play with different friends throughout the day. Saying that there's no other way... Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

This is about the only reason I could agree with being worth using the current fix; the other stuff could be fixed with timers or a less harsh relocation system. And this is yet another unintended consequence. Making it back out of Tisy or the Airfield or Western Roadblock is just the other half of the challenge. Triggering the godhand to move you to a safer location after you've gotten the cheese is some pretty greasy tactics...

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...