Tonyeh

It will only end up with people getting ragdoll'd into space.

There seems to be a lot of folk at that. Last night I opened the doors to one of those large, one roo,m barrack buildings and there were about 10 zombies in there. Someone must have conga lined them into the building and ran out. They all turned toward me, when I opened the door and went "huuugh". I shit myself and ran up a tower.

The problem with all of that is that you literally just make yourself a target for other players to shoot at their leisure. The infected AI is so thick that they'll be focused on you, and only you, so that the other player can just run up just pick you off while you're trapped in your sardine can. If the AI could be made to shift focus to other players too while they are agro'd on you, so that anyone in the vicinity of an agro'd zombie mob is a target, it might work. As things are at the moment, it'll only end up being an irritation rather than exciting. Plus, if the infected are all busy banging on the front door and you can slip out the backway, it'll become another way to cheese them. It's a good idea in theory. But in practice, with how the game is at the moment, I can't see it working terribly well.

I'm not sure if this is the case? Last night I was wandering around a large military base and night fell. I ran into a barrack and I was nearly face to face with a zed and he didn't react. I was squatting though. He still got a bullet in the face.

I'm playing without a map for the time being, so I have no idea where the choppers are. I found one on top of a snowy mountain beside a cross. But there was bugger all there except infected. Found plenty of headstraps and helmets. But left them.

I'm in two minds meself. On the one hand the increased darkness on Namalsk is good for ambiance. On the other, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face so getting anywhere becomes impossible...which can kill the game TBH. Unless getting to a shelter and hunkering down until morning is part of your game that is. While this is ok if your toon is relatively geared, clothing wise, it's near to impossible if you've just spawned in. Night time means a freeze in that case and I can see why people just log out until daylight comes. Torches are also crap in the game. I used my pistol torch to try and find my way around the underground bunker in the centre of the Namalsk map (which is pitch black at all times) and it was a nightmare. It just doesn't act like a real torch which would light up a room. Instead just merely get a circle of light to find your way around. It just isn't good enough really. Somewhat atmospheric, but annoying after a while. Not going down there again until I manage to find a NVG set...which has proven impossible so far on Namalsk.

It's one of the most bizarre changes that I've seen in the game. I mean people eat spuds all the time with their jackets on. And in a time of desperation, you could easily chew down on a potato with it's skin still intact. It wouldn't be terribly tasty, but it would fill a gap.

I dunno. All I know is that on the vanilla servers for Chernarus I can see at night pretty fine, once my eyes adjust. But on Spaggies Namalsk I can't see my hand in front of my face.

How long does it take to trigger the stones. I had times when I've been running up and down forest paths and they don't seem to spawn at all. Is there a timer involved? Or is it totally random?

I find Vanilla nights on Chernarus and Deer Island easy enough to see in and I am never going too long without the NVG for Cherno anyway. On Namalsk, though, they're so dark that most of the time I find a spot to stop, especially now with the infected buff. They're short, though (the nights that is), so it isn't that much of an ordeal. I have to admit that I've logged off myself at at times during the night, because the game becomes a bit pointless trying to run around in pitch black. And I play this on a pretty small monitor, so everything gets compounded by that as well. As for the fruit you start with in the beginning on Chernarus, I agree. I'd rather have the increased energy instead. I end up just scoffing the fruit immediately upon starting anyway.

Yeh. Namalsk is excellent. I cannot pimp for it any better. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't tried it to do so. Spaggies is probably the best because it has the least amount of mod stuffing going on. I tend to find that community servers go over the top with mods and basically kill the game. Food there is tough...and into the bargain bloody frozen as well. So you have to collect it....then thaw it before you can eat it. Plus the starting areas to collect food are exceptionally dangerous places. Although, I will say that I have had some of the most friendly interaction with other players that I have ever had on Namalsk in years of playing. One guy traded water with me for some food. Something like that hasn't happened in Cherno for god knows how long. There's plenty of people shooting each other in the back though. When you get south, canned food is almost nowhere to be found. So down there you absolutely need to either hunt or fish. Neither of which is easy to do, due to the scarcity of animals. There's times when you hoping for a wolf attack so you can get a bit of meat off them. My current toon is pretty well geared and insulated. I found an AK too, so I'm happy out. But, my food meter is starting to go down and I've nothing to eat, which has now become my main worry. But sure you know all of this already. 😁

I've always thought that a toon should start off with a fuller stomach, so the crazy dash to not starve at the beginning is eliminated. BUT...food sources should be rarer throughout the entire map making your nutrition stats actually something a player needs to monitor. As things stand, the only time a player is worried about food is at the start of a toon's life. But once you get a knife and kill and eat 500 chickens you're grand.

On average a man does well on about 2 litres of liquid ingested AFAIK. But as I mentioned earlier, most of that will come from the food we eat. We don't actually need to guzzle down bottles of water etc. In fact, drinking a lot of water can have the negative side effect of producing more urine much quicker and end up dehydrating you. Although in the game this is not modelled. But yeh, the hunger/thirst situation in the game is way off. It's a mad dash to not starve at the beginning and then you never have to worry about it again.

It depends on what else you've been eating. Canned tuna, sardines or even dogfood will contain a lot of moisture to keep your body hydrated and eliminate the need to hydrate by actually drinking a liquid. If you were eating drier foods, your little bottle wouldn't be so white. My current toon has stuffed himself with boxes of cereal, bags rice and snacks of some sort, but my bottle was yellow despite that. Only got white when I found a water fountain. Also, I think the temp may play a part too, but I'm not sure if it's a mechanic in the game. But every server is very cold at the moment and you lose liquid much slower in such temperatures. I think if we ever see a July server for DayZ, actually staying hydrated by drinking a liquid will become much more important. Either way, I don't think the little water bottle thing is the worst issue with nourishment in DayZ at the moment. It's the outrageous amounts of stuffing that a player has to engage in to stop his toon from keeling over. But I agree that, in general, nourishment needs to be looked at in a better way.

@Kyiara Was there anything done to the backend of the game that would be more processor hungry? Since 1.12 my PC's fans have been whirring like crazy when I'm playing. They haven't done that before.

In fairness, you do actually get most of your hydration needs from the food you eat. Most of our foods contain a lot of liquid that hydrates our bodies. But aside from that, yes, the constantly eating thing is absurd to say the least. My toon can put away some amount of nosh. In fact, with the sheer amount of stuffing that goes on every toon should be waddling around like Jabba the Hutt.

Was getting that last night on Spaggies servers even though I had been on them perfectly fine a few hours before. I unloaded the mods and tried log in. It gave me the setup dlcs and mods..." as I expected. Then I resetup the mods and joined without an issue.

Don't try to put stuff in Christine.

Bingo. I'm on Spaggies Namalsk at the moment and there's a refugee camp in the centre of the map. It spawns around 20 or 25 infected (so I believe, I could be wrong) and you daren't aggro the bastards because they'll fuck you up big time. I'd love to see a situation whereby there are large numbers of infected in towns and whatnot on Cherno. That would make things more interesting. But this nerf on melee weapons is the cheapest kind of "difficulty" that I can imagine. It's the absolute worst thing about video games though. A situation where "more bullets to kill something" means "harder". No...it's just a pain in the arse.

I don't get that. I just respawn. Maybe it's a Spaggies thing.

I understand the need to make the infected a tougher opponent. But there are better ways to do it. For instance, give them a percentage chance of infecting the player with the "zombie" disease. When a player gets cut by an infected's attack, they have a % chance of contracting the DayZ virus. They then have a count down in which they have a limited time to find a cure. A new curing item could be introduced, to be found at military or refugee camps which they have to take over time to fight the disease. That would certainly make people think twice about engaging them in a blaise manner, or shooting off their guns at other players just to kill someone. Agreed that the tinkering that's going on with the game at the moment feels extremely arbitrary. But it's been going in that direction for a while. The messing around with boots and knives, when absolutely nobody was complaining about them, shows that.

^ I think everyone would agree with that. The nerf in melee weaponry is an extremely bad direction for the game to go. Frankly the devs need to reverse that decision pronto. If you hit a charging person, infected or not, with an axe to the face they're going down.

The infected in DayZ are like the infected in 28 Days Later. In other words they're just people that have been infected with some virus and they can die like ordinary people. They're not like George Romero or The Walking Dead zombies, that are the dead brought back to life and can only be killed by destroying the brain. But besides that, a whack to the head should still be sufficient to kill an infected person in DayZ.

On Spaggies, it's winter. Everyone's running around freezing their balls off. It's not as bad as Namalsk though. Everyone has to be a pyromaniac on that island.

Yeh. They're a massive pain in the balls...but in a good way. There's been times when I have just had to avoid a place cos there were too many and I didn't have a decent weapon to deal with them. I don't know how Spaggies Namalsk is going to work out when it switches over to 1.12 though. I find them difficult enough at the moment to be honest. They manage to get so many hits on me on that server for some reason, I don't know why. I burn through sewing kits like there's no tomorrow. I was down around the Athena buildings a couple of days ago, just exploring the map and I shot one with my suppressed pistol. He looked like he was alone. Then out of nowhere about 8 of the bleeders start screaming and running at me. I had to race away from them and up a ladder that I spotted that got me to the roof of a building. Then a load of wolves dropped by as well and night started to fall. I had to spend the night in a stair well calling myself a dopey fecker for breaking my stealth rule. Really liking Spaggies Namalsk at the moment. I've been just wandering around without a map. Just happening on things. I found some notes on something called Project Athena. Don't know what that is. Don't want to know either. I'll find out in the game. I think it might be tied into why the world has gone to shit. I had the scariest moment I've ever had in DayZ, too, on Spaggies. I wandered into a long train tunnel, in the dark with just my flashlight. I kept telling myself "this is really stupid, I should turn around and go a different way". All of a sudden I hear this high pitched scream, like nothing I've heard in the game before and this squidheaded thing is in the distance racing toward me. I nearly pissed myself. I put a full clip of my USG45 into it and then it was on top of me. So I whip out the splitting axe and start whacking it. This is all in pitch black no cos I had to drop the torch. I managed to cripple the bastard because I could see him on the ground. But it had hit me too many times and I was gushing blood. Ended up dying, but it was one of the most satisfying moments I've had in the game. That Namalsk map is becoming a favourite. I tried Deer Isle too, but I figure that that map would be better as a summer map, with summer problems like heat. I think they might have missed a trick there.