Tonyeh

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.

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.

I came back to DayZ in 1.08 after a couple of years away. Some of the changes are great, like stamina etc (before players were sprinting everywhere which was dumb). There's some crafting mechanics are good too. I couldn't give a fuck about cars, so that nonsense doesn't bother me in the slightest and base building is rather pointless (as it indeed would be in real life in such a small area) and the whinging about it is beyond tedious now. Other mechanics, like the "count_in" flags, are an appalling addition and very close to game breaking IMO. Plus there's been some musing about regular server wipes which has many people unenthused about where the game is going. There's also far, FAR, too much needless tinkering by the developers in every patch. Little, mickey mouse, things that don't need touching get altered for some bizarre reason. The durability of knives and boots, for example, is at a bloody stupid state at the moment when they were perfectly fine before. They're unreasonably flimsy now and it's ridiculous. The majority of the player base are still massive cunts, it had to be said. But that's nearly always been the case. You will die repeatedly from a number of cowardly ways...sniped, ambushed, getting shot for saying "hello", or simply just shot in the back. Half the time the player that killed you probably doesn't even take any of the gear you have. A lot of the time you won't even have any gear worth taking. This is DayZ combat. Nature is cruel too. It bloody freezing everywhere, even on custom maps like Deer Isle and especially Namalsk, which is a real test. Frankly I think there should be summer maps as well, but that's another story. Wolves, too, can have you for breakfast and bears can knock you into the middle of next week. Hopefully the devs are looking into more dangerous animals. There are diseases that will catch out the unweary or the desperate (drink that water at your own risk). The infected have been given a boost too, in 1.12, and they are more dangerous than they've ever been. Where before they were a nuisance (albeit one that could get the better of you if you were complacent), now they are a bigger threat and something to be really weary of in even small numbers, which was much needed. You will, on occasion, come across other players that are cool and helpful and in some cases end up running with them for a while, which can be a great experience. However, the one thing I will say for the game - and it's an important thing - is that no other game will give to the experience that DayZ does. It takes a long time to build up your toon to a decent state and all of that can come to nothing in an instant. That leads to extremely tense moments, which I have never experienced in any other game. There's times where I have finished a session sweating and my chest heaving. Plus, the game is completely random, so it's what you make it. There's no endgame, other than survival. There's no tasks, other than the ones that you do to keep you alive. But bear in mind that this can be boring for some. But it's the uniqueness of DayZ that keeps people coming back to it time and time again. ...one more thing. The game is as clunky as fuck. I just joined my server and immediately got attacked by wolves. I killed three of them and ran out of ammo for my USG45. Then about 5 zombies appeared, alerted by the gunfire, so I tried to change to my pistol...but the game wouldn't let me, as the hotbar was unresponsive, and I died. Thanks game. That was after spending, literally, hours building up that toon on one of the most difficult servers out there (Spaggies Namalsk Hardcore 1). 🤬

When you die, it just says Respawn as far as I know. I've tried multiple ways to try and get the custom toon to appear on modded servers (like Namalsk) and to no avail. Every time I join a server it's a random. Absolutely mind boggling to think that a game that's been in development for the better part of a decade can't get that right.

Sure, I get it. But the main thing standing in the way of something like that is the count_in flags. All that will happen is that one or two groups will sweep up the map and stash all the top tier loot denying it to everyone else. Eliminate them and I could see it possibly work.

But, then that will probably piss off the PvE players who look for lower pop servers.

^ This would only be a good idea if (A) the count_in_cargo, count_in_hoarder, etc was done away with and (B) if the server was well populated. The "count_in" flags are a scourge on the game and it wrecks it for many players. And if folk are stuck on a low pop server and can't server hop to somewhere with some more people without having to start all over again as a freshie, I can see many players just giving up.

Right so. Made no difference in the end anyway as I just got shot by someone...so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can anyone explain this? The health cross dropped all the way to red and is still dropping despite my hydration and food being in the white and I have no injuries. This is on Spaggies Namalsk server.

It that what it is? Never got that cold before I spose.

Does anyone say "hello" any more?

Namalsk hardcore is just too much IMHO. Tried few times, but there's just no fun to it. Might give the regular a go.

^ This should be the new Ice Bucket Challenge or something.

And I would.

A couple of shots from a .45 weapon should be enough to bring any man down. Having people run off after you've hit them a few times with a weapon of that calibre is dumb AFAIC and I've seen it happen. But TBH if getting rid of the "count weapon" flags increases the availability of AR weaponry I'd still do it in a second, because I hate those idiotic lines of code. In any case, if I had my way, I'd have no military grade weapons in DayZ at all. It would all be handguns, shotguns and civilian rifles. But they would be far more lethal than they are currently (shotguns aside of course). The military tents would be for medical items. Perhaps heli crashes might spawn the odd military gun here and there, but the ammo and mags would be super rare too.

It may end up being the case that every one can end up with an AKM, but so what? At the moment, we have a situation where the vast bulk of players never even see those weapons, because a handful of people on each server can just eliminate them from existence. That's not a good gameplay mechanic no matter what happens if the "count weapon" flags are gotten rid of. And if players do want to grab an assault rifle and head to the nearest scrap, again so what? That type of player is going to do that anyway. They won't ever be stopped from doing that. It's been a thing with DayZ forever. The same as players who only play as snipers, which I have never understood. But there are plenty of people who play DayZ like me, who generally avoid other people and/or firefights if they can. But like to have access to decent weapons, of which the AK and AR families are, simply because the increase your chance of survival, which is the point of the game. The next best thing to an assault rifle to carry is an SKS, which is a poor alternative indeed. I have an AR at the moment (which I found just lying around ironically) and without it I would have been bear food last night. The 30 round mag I put into Mr. Bear is what helped me win the day and the 10 rounds in an SKS wouldn't have cut it. Neither would the .45 rounds in the USG I had before I found the AR. However, if people are uncomfortable with getting rid of the "count weapon" flags, the other option is to make weapons of more common type actually worth picking up. At the moment there is ZERO reason to even bother with something like .380 because it's so rubbish even against zeds and bambi's. Even 9mm is crap. I'd like to see all the damage values of ammo increased to actually make them something to be reckoned with, cos at the moment shooting at anyone/anything with below .45 calibre is next to pointless and, frankly, no player should be walking away from several .380 bullets pumped into them, which is what regularly happens in DayZ.