amadieus

Spend this weekend trying to build a base on 'The Village' server. Witnessed a few server crashes, probably some more when I was offline. Still, nothing vanished and my base has multiple walls, a tower, medium tent, large tent, car and a barrel. So far so good. Happy with the server performance as well, even with almost 80 players online the infected were never lagging and came after me with full speed. I also got cholera from drinking pond water. Prior this experimental patch, the disease would go away after a while of not drinking pond water. But now it won't seem to go away, even though I clean all my water with chlorine tablets. Already threw up countless of times. I think that when you eat/drink large portions your character is more prone to throw up when having cholera. Because usually after eating a whole can or drinking a whole canteen I throw up 5~ minutes later.

This goes far beyond my understanding of game development, but I am actually pretty interested to know why a lot of games have no problems with persistence and DayZ does. A simple question with probably an in-depth answer, but I am curious to know. Would love to devs to try and explain it.

Haven't seen any complains so far about people losing their barrels/tents, which is a good sign. Would be better if the server would auto-backup for more then just every half a hour though.

Currently there are two ways to get sick: 1) Stomach sickness: Drinking lots of pond water. It is pretty safe to drink a few sips, but when you take 10+ sips a bacteria icon will appear in the right bottom of your screen. As long as that icon stays there, you will have a chance that your character will start to throw up and lose hydration (energy?) as a result. I had this a few times with my toons. 2) Common flu: I never experienced this one before, but you should get it by being cold (and wet?) for a prolonged time according to other people. Now you character starts to cough and sneeze all the time. Not sure if it has any other downside effects. Food that you are carrying will be contaminated and thus needs to be cleaned before eating with disinfected spray or alcohol tincture. If you take sips from a bottle the water will also be contaminated. If you will give it to another player he will get sick as well. Same goes for people that hang around you for too long. The coughing and sneezing makes people sick near you. I think that the masks and headgear give you some form of protection against this.

Aaaah now I understand what you mean! It was first unclear for me if you were talking about literally artificial Intelligence or the AI in the sense of NPC's/PVE hostiles. But now I know you were talking about the latter. In general I agree with your points. The animations they have are fine in my opinion, what bothers me is when the infected turn when they stand still. They walk, stand still, then in a sort of floating movement turn 45 degrees and start to walk in that direction. Looks very odd and it surprises me that the dev-team did not add a proper animation for that. Their movement in interior environments is pretty clunky. Fighting them has some problems as well, like when they teleport right through you. But I am sure this will be fixed! Personally I also think that the future addition of ragdoll effects will help to increase the feel of fighting them. The reaction animations could be better when you fight them, now it feels odd when you hit them with a fast weapon and sometimes they do not even react to your hits. I hope the devs improve the infected in the points you and I mentioned as there is enough room for such improvements. Of course this should be done with 1.0, but there are still so many things missing or not working properly that you cannot actually speak about a 1.0.. It is still mind boggling that they even called this 1.0.

Quite a lot actually. The first stress test version could barely be online for an hour due to poor server performance, constant kicks and crashes. Nevertheless, they made some good progress over the year. Putting a game on a new engine is not the easiest task. Still, they have a lot to do! Enough content and features are still missing.

Just wondering, but what are you exactly expecting from the infected regarding AI? Personally I think the AI is good. They could tweak some parameters as I found stealth to be sometimes a bit to easy to walk around them, but that is not an issue of the AI.

They said that more dangerous diseases are coming. So I guess the impact of eating raw meat with that as well. I hope it will be soon! Want to cook my meat again before I can eat it

No, I already expect that reality will different from my expectations. Like having a functioning core game by Christmas :P. While I am disappointed in how stable the current game is, I can't really complain about the rate of content patches we received. I still think that they come with decent rate. So far it was most of the time between 2 and 3 months, and each patch had various features and content. But we will see, I hope they can keep a steady pace in 2019.

Pretty nice Status Report! I was especially happy to see that the first platform update comes in February, as I personally was even expecting it more around March. Now I still have to see what this update brings, but it is already great that it includes two new weapons. However, I do hope to see vaulting/climbing and fishing in it as well, since these features were already in development before the feature freeze. Hopefully this patch will see the solution to the persistence problem as well and with a noticeable increase in server performance. It is a pity that the roadmap is not finished yet, so I do hope/expect to see it at least next month. Nevertheless, I do hope to see some steady content and features coming this year! It would for example be pretty disappointing if we had to wait all the way till spring for vaulting/climbing and fishing, as these were supposed to be in 1.0. In one of the streams you mentioned that the current goals still will take till 2020 to be completed. This worried me a bit, as when looking at the features and content from the roadmap released back in November 2017, I would expect to see all that or at least 90% of it in this year. Thinking about the possibility that even at the end of this year we still won't have two-wheeled vehicles or planes annoys me.

Damm, yeah it is a huge issue. Dissapointed that it is not fixed yet.

They fixed issues with that twice before the 1.0 release. But I take it from your comment that this is still an issue?

With this stable update I noticed on two occasions that when relogging on a different server my character has a roll back. First time I spawned back on a road that I walked on 5 minutes ago and I lost the gear that I looted in a tavern. Second time I got killed, quit the game and then logged back in a few days later. Till my surprise my character was alive as he was in an area that I visited prior to my demise.

Oh just one month? Welcome to game development. Feel free to show me a game developer that delivers fixes faster for a similar game.

Where does it say that they take all of January off?

Point 6 sounds excellent to pass the very dark nights of DayZ. Too many times the atmosphere became pretty romantic during those rainy nights in a small house near Dolina... with the fireplace turned on to keep each other warm......

They just started working again last week Wednesday.... Give them some time

While I can see the potential in hives, I do agree that locked servers offer a fairer game and the pluses that come from it easily outweigh the negatives.

I think that the additional loot we spawn with was for the free weekend and holiday week. At least I expect it to be gone in January, but who knows.

What is that uniqueness in your opinion, if I may ask? Of course, the different aspects of DayZ on its own are no match against other games, as you stated. There are enough PVP games that are better, as well as games that offer a better survival experience. But if you take all these things into one game and then compare that full game to other similar games, then there is no other that really surpasses it. Anyhow, the devs have a ton of work to do and I do really wish them the best with it. I personally hoped to have a better working 1.0 right now and i'm disappointed that this is not the case, especially during these holidays.

Well to be fair, there is not really any game similar to DayZ that is significantly better.

Get rid of each and every server crash is pretty difficult. Adding new features can re-introduce new server crashes as well. They said that they are looking for a long term solution, which sounds to me more than just fixing each crash that there is. But then again, there are plenty other base building online games that do not have their bases wiped. So it should not be like re-inventing the wheel.

I'm actually looking forward to 2019 and all the stuff that will be introduced to the game, as well as all the improvements to the current game (which it really needs). Looking back on 2018 I can say I am both disappointed and satisfied. The communication was not always spot on, calling the current version 1.0 was ahum... a pretty dumb decision and the overall stability of the current version is disappointing. I mean, I hoped to play a stable build during these holidays but so far I got killed by a flying car, the infected do not work and driving is impossible because of the poor server performance. And don't get me started on the persistence issues. But, I do acknowledge that they made some big steps this year with the introduction of the new engine and all that came with it. And I think that they came pretty fast with new content and features throughout the second part of the year. I have a hard time understanding when some are actually afraid that BI will just drop this game in 2019, because I am pretty confident that 2019 will be an amazing year for DayZ. We can easily expect to get more vehicles, guns, working persistence, good server performance, more advanced health system, fishing, climbing, helicopters and better visual additions to the game. Plus all those mods and Namalsk. I'm pumped for 2019!

I usually play on the Village but I got to ask, is there currently a Village up and running?