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Will third person be removed in SA or will we still have to handle this via server splitting still? If third person isn't going away, will we finally get standardized difficulty levels? i.e. -Rookie: third person on + w/e other aids needed -Veteran: third person off - other aids I'd do more of an in depth discussion but I think this topic has been argued over long enough anyway. If Rocket hadn't allowed third person in the first place, this problem wouldn't have existed at all.

This may be a very hated idea but I'm gonna post it anyway. Background and goals for the idea: To address the prevalence of KOS mentality. Necessary disclaimer: I'm not against KOS and I've practiced it many times myself. However, I do think that KOS player behavior is a bit too common (even in myself, and I admit that I could reduce the problem but I don't because I simply do not like to die to another player because of misplaced trust). I think in the long term, the amount of KOS might lead to stale gameplay and reduce the success of the game. I don't want to advocate for hardcoded methods of limiting KOS because I definitely think it is totally valid and makes the game more interesting. Rather I prefer methods that naturally alter the players' mindset. A lot of things have been suggested to do this such as increasing the amount of team work needed to do certain things, making survival harder, or increasing the zombie threat but I think one idea we have overlooked is the idea of a player controlled zombie. Assumptions and rationale: Generally, I believe that players have shifted to a KOS mentality because of how easy the survival component was. Once zombies were well understood they ceased to be a major threat and the food/water/shelter component of survival had never been a strong factor in player deaths. This type of generalization stems from my experience in the early mod days when players spawned with revolvers, ammo, and flares. In these initial days of the mod, it was not uncommon to see bands of strangers in groups as large as 20-30 people running down MSRs tossing flares, searching for supplies and killing zombies together. I believe that the main reasons that this was even possible came from several factors. In those days almost all of the players came from Arma 2 where gameplay modes (coop, TvT, CoTvT) were well defined and ROE was clearly reinforced in mission briefs. Thus in the early shift into DayZ, people tended to play it like a coop mode mission since they had not been led to believe that it was more than that. More so, I believe an even larger factor was that because the game was so unknown at the time, working together in groups made it easier to survive and figure out the constraints and possibilities of the mod. However, as the game became better understood and the mechanics were documented, players outgrew the challenge of surviving against the environment and naturally shifted towards PK-ing as the main challenge. Coupled with the massive influx of players who learned of the game only as this hardcore zombie mod where players were the biggest threats, the KOS mentality began to progress as the de facto standard of gameplay. Because of these reasons stated above, I think the major factor in the KOS mentality was the lack of environmental threats being supplanted by the pervasive human threat. The Fix: 1. When humans are killed, they respawn as a zombie in a random location within 300m radius of their death location or any location with zombies (both player and AI which should be clearly denoted in the spawn menu). Maybe this should be tweaked to a percentage chance instead of always occurring. 2. As a zombie, their speeds and stamina should be the same as an AI zombie. Player controlled zombies should be allowed all the same movement options as a human including up right movement, crouched movement, prone movement, ability to lean, roll, toggle between walk/run/turbo speeds, and climbing ladders. 3. Player controlled zombies' hp should be base zombie hp + additional hp based on how long the survivor lived (this needs tweaking for balance, maybe they don't need higher hp at all or it should be capped to a limit). 4. Player controlled zombies interaction options are limited to opening doors and melee attacks (until barricades are properly implemented, in which case player zombies should be able to smash barriers). 5. When player zombies speak, their chat can only be heard by other nearby player zombies. To a survivor human, zombie player chat will be heard as zombie moans and groans. Player zombies will not moan or groan unless they are speaking on chat. 6. Player controlled zombies have an ability which they can toggle on or off to have nearby zombies follow them (# of zombie AI should be capped at some limit). This should be configured such that the player can determine where in the group/horde they wish to position themselves (front,middle,rear, etc). 7. When a player controlled zombie dies, they respawn as a survivor as they currently do. 8. Players have the option to never respawn as a zombie if desired. Why I think it will work: Firstly I believe a human zombie would typically be more threatening than an AI zombie. The attack patterns will be less predictable and the ability to draw in a horde will make coordinated zombie attacks much more dangerous. This will satisfy the need for a more threatening environmental component by improving the zombie threat. On a larger scale, I believe that player controlled zombies will be able to dynamically adapt to player driven behaviors and interactions and make the environment more responsive than the current system. Instead of having a constant amount of environmental threat, areas of increased human activity will have increased environmental threat to match and thereby reducing the likelihood of KOS since KOS only makes it more dangerous for someone trying to survive. Additionally, I think this feature would appeal and be enjoyable to someone who was killed by another player by offering a chance at revenge. On the other side, I think it would reduce KOS behavior because of the concern that player you just killed might come back as a zombie and either kill you or make you waste resources killing him/her again + any other zombie friends they might have brought along. Some considerations: -Zombie metagaming - i.e. abuse of the feature through zombie-human cooperation by either having humans controlling zombie armies to fight their specific enemies or simply walking a horde of zombies out of a town so their survivor allies can loot freely. This might be avoidable by having a timer on being a zombie, slowly increasing the chance of becoming a zombie increase as the survival time increases, limiting the feature to engage only when killed by another human, or when dying ungrouped, etc. I think this is my major concern in implementing this feature. -Maybe we're opening a can of worms - the impact of this feature is very much unknown (including unknown unknowns) and human ingenuity can make this a game breaking feature or one that requires so many limitations that it renders it effectively useless in achieving its main goals. In consideration of this, adding this feature may require much more time to fix it afterwards than simply going with other ideas. Let me know your thoughts. Constructive feedback, even if negative is welcome.

Also the game takes place in the Czech Republic so don't know whats up with all the talk about Russia.

Definitely a good idea in concept but way too hard to enforce. This is a meta-gaming problem that cannot be effectively tackled by preventing people from chatting on other services. Perhaps if we could find a way to boost the value of in-game chat, we might be able to convince those players to use in-game chat over programs like Skype, TS, vent, etc, but until then it is too easy to circumvent to justify spending significant time on.

Ridiculous? Currently there are hundreds if not thousands of spawn points along the shore of Chernarus for new players to spawn in on and people roaming the shores and killing un-geared characters is already a problem. No one looking to PK needs to wait days right now, what do you think will happen when we bump players into a very well defined radius outside of the cover of a town/buildings? Think for a few seconds please. Who is most likely to unlog in a town, particularly the main ones along the shore? Mostly new players because they don't know what they are doing so why screw them even more by adding this completely illogical and unrealistic feature? Why should players who take cover in relatively unimportant buildings get bumped out of the town? Honestly, there is no real reason except to satisfy your feature. Are there better and less intrusive ways to fix server hopping and ghosting? Yes, and a lot of them have been posted already.

Just because you don't like the way he wants to play the game doesn't mean he shouldn't be able to play it his way! So what if there is a tank in game!? You don't have to use it! It doesn't affect you!

Awesome, now I can just scan nicely defined borders to pick off people logging in. You've just made the "everyone spawns at shore problem and gets camped by geared players problem" extend beyond just the shore. Instead of solely addressing the problem of people being able to server hop and/or ghost, you've designed it so that players who want to take shelter in a building can't either along with people who try to abuse the system. There are much better ways of fixing this issue than implementing some contrived system of bumping people out of their stored location.

Other than having your field of view limited by your monitor and not being able to hear breathing, everything else you described is in the game right now. The only thing first person lacks from third person is being able to 100% accurately judge your surroundings which you cant really do in real life.

There was actually some interesting mod work done recently regarding line of sight and third person. Here it is: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=23768 Personally though I think the mod is more trouble than its worth mostly due to the fact that it is hard to handle cases like interaction with objects and what type of objects should show up and which shouldn't when LoS is broken (the creator did some interesting things with vehicles that I don't necessarily agree with).

Your kid is not everyone else's problem. If real life is getting in the way of playing the game then you have to either give up the game or be okay with the consequences of having a life outside of it. That being said, a timer solution is not really adequate since it doesn't provide any real solution to server hopping. For combat logging it has its uses but needs some improvement in order to be actually useful. With regards to server hopping though, someone previously suggested a really good feature which was overlooked but it went something like this (I'm expanding upon it to make it clearer). 1. Upon new character creation, the character is assigned to the server it is on as the "home" server. 2. A player can switch their designated home server once per day. 3. If a player joins a non-home server, they spawn in a random location. 4. If the player is in a non-home server and they setup a tent, they can have their location stored by logging out within a 30m radius from the tent (30m was arbitrarily picked but sounded reasonable). 5. If a player logs out outside of the specified radius of their tent in a non-home server, they will spawn randomly on the server should they rejoin. They can manually return to their tent and log out properly to store location again if desired. 6. The stored location feature on tents can be shared with others specified by the owner of the tent (person who placed it first). For it to work, those other players need to logout by a tent they are authorized to use. 7. The login location storage can be disabled by another player that stumbles upon the tent. It won't destroy the tent but effectively wipes the stored location of players using that tent. Any players that stored their location by logging out by that tent will spawn randomly upon joining the server and need to manually move to the tent and logout again to re-establish a saved location.

Just to help explain this in the context for Arma2 -For the correct mil-dots you have to be at the most zoomed in level possible in an Arma2 scope. So if you are using a rifle with 2 levels of zoom, the outer level won't have the correct magnification and scaling for the mil-dots. -Approximate height for a standing human in Arma2 is about 1.7 or 1.8m. approximate heights for crouched human is 0.9m and prone human is 0.4m.

It's totally possible that they found it earlier but didn't take anything from it until you guys stocked it full or they got someplace setup to place it. Speaking from personal experience, I've found tents with some stuff in them but nothing valuable so I didn't take anything so as to not tip off the owners that their camp has been compromised. Even did this with a tent city. Also 200m apart is not very much distance to hide tents.

Not sure how you could have played for 5 months since the mod is barely 4 months old.

Long time Arma player here. It's not about the size of the map that is the problem. The problem is the RV engine simulates and handles every instance of objects spawned into the map meaning that a tin can at NWAF is in your game while you are on the shore. This isn't important for a lot of games that runs on UE3 or CE because they aren't simulators, they just want to make a smooth gameplay experience. Now you might be wondering why its important to simulate a tin can km away from you that you can't see or interact with. Well that's because if you play Arma2 as a mil-sim and not a zombie mod, then things like artillery batteries several clicks away, air support thousands of meters up in the sky, AI movements and actions where you can't see them all become important. In a mil-sim if someone blows up a building 10km away from you, it better look exactly the same as when you get there; if someone places an IR strobe on the ground at NWAF and a helicopter is coming from a carrier on the south east corner of the map, the strobe better be at the right place when the helicopter pilot gets there. Its not easy handling the synchronization of that many things and a lot of larger engines have never found it to be a problem because the games made on them don't require them to do so. Its hard to imagine this being computationally complicated because we tend to think of scenarios including only a few of these things, but if you have to scale it up to fit a server of 50 players each with a different set of entities spawning around them and interacting then you get a bigger problem. Edit for clarification: the size of the map does matter if we're talking dynamic entities. I was referring to the static map (terrain that doesn't change for anyone).

Ok so here's what happened. Back in the day, word got around the Arma communities that there was a cool zombie mod featuring MSO style persistence (FYI DayZ was not the first mission/mod in Arma2 to allow persistent sandbox style play). A couple of servers came up and all the existing communities got on it. This was back when you spawned with food, water, medical gear, flares, and a revolver + 6 packs of ammo. Since no one knew what they were doing, people tended to group up and play together. I remember running with a pack of 20 strangers on the first day I tried the mod. Another reason why players tended to band together was because the majority of Arma2 multiplayer is coop style missions and TvT/PvP missions are usually clearly labelled as such. The mod got more popular as word spread and I think the first burst of non-Arma players came after a youtube video became popular (forgot the name of the guy). At this point, players had already explored a good portion of the game and quickly realized there was no penalty for PK-ing. I can't say for sure exactly when KoS became the dominant meta, but it was around this time. The combination of lack of things to do + no PK penalty + influx of players meaning more player-player interaction led to more PK-ing. From then on a vicious cycle of distrust broke out and more and more players started to PK. When even more players joined, they were warned about PK-ing so a lot of them got it in their heads that PK was a part of the game. The other effect from the large amount of players joining was that information about loot spawns and how to deal with zombies became more widespread and common so players were reaching a fully kitted out stage (or at least military grade weapons) much faster and were less afraid of the zombies which led to more PK-ing.

If you have the bandwidth and HD space, try downloading Arma2 Free and play that. If that runs then DayZ will 99% likely run.

Don't really need a lot of statistics to realize that 2 data points are not enough to draw a generalized conclusion. If we really wanted to get into detail, we could probably even question how the database entries are obtained and which SQL queries are actually generating these stats. Also, ITT and forum in general: too many people with an anti-intellectual mindset.

The problem here is that your analysis was performed in such a way that the data assumes a massive influx. As I said earlier you need to perform a rate analysis at constant periods to accommodate for increasing number of players, not a 2 point analysis which is too general to claim a trend. I am also not arguing for or against whether banditry rates are in fact increasing or not because the figures are useless IMO since they don't present enough detail to discern any actual information. They have been counted because the figures posted on the main page are cumulative and not figures for the currently playing population. Anyone who has ever tried DayZ and quit or are currently taking breaks from it still have their lives and deaths figured into the main page's stats. That is part of the reason why I think the main page's stats are not that useful unless you collect them over a period of time for rate analysis. I should have been more clear in indicating they might be dying too soon to experience PvP and/or PvP incidents might not be detailed by the statistics. This doesn't necessarily mean that the rate of PvP has decreased but could just indicate that new players are dying to things more experienced players would not die from and are not living long enough to experience PvP. I made a mistake with these stats because I realized afterwards they reflected the problem of including the total population's numbers and not just the numbers of currently active players (by active I mean playing regularly and not taking a long break or having quit DayZ). I removed these in a later edit. For verification purposes it doesn't matter that you don't know as long as you state the assumptions you were working with. That's how it is done in research so that others can follow along and either A) point out mistakes in assumptions or B) understand how you are getting to the numbers you are getting to. As I said earlier, the only conclusion we can validly conclude from the numbers you presented are: "The numbers you have gotten are a comparison between survival percentage ending in murder WITH a bunch of new players versus survival percentage ending in murder WITHOUT a bunch of new players." AKA the data just isn't there to validly draw further conclusions. To accurately give an idea of PvP you would need a lot more detail that just instant present in the broad sweeping figures present on the main page. Not to mention I'm pretty sure bandit state is still as convoluted as it was before meaning people could lose bandit state over time which makes it even harder to figure out what is actually happening. With the generalized numbers on the main page, its pretty hard to obtain a figure representing the true occurrence of PvP incidents with a reasonable confidence interval. Something more useful would be, players active in the past 24h, murders in the past 24h, survival attempts in the past 24h, players taking (hit or not hit) fire in the past 24h. That kind of data collected over the period of at least a month or so would help determine the actual stats versus some back of the envelope calculations.

You did the statistical analysis incorrectly. The numbers you have gotten are a comparison between survival percentage ending in murder WITH a bunch of new players versus survival percentage ending in murder WITHOUT a bunch of new players. That is the most you can accurately say without starting to make a ton of assumptions. What you need to do is collect more data or provide more data you have collected so you can do a rate analysis and see if murder rates are increasing or decreasing with respect to the increase of players. The reason you have to do this is because there are confounding factors that are hard to discriminate when presented with only 2 sets of data and changing population over time (some of which is not even counted for - e.g. players who have stopped playing). I could easily present the counter argument that your numbers demonstrate that new players die to other sources (bugs, falling, starvation, zombies, suicide, etc) than PvP. This is further backed up by the fact that new players know less about the game so are more likely to die to things that more experienced players can deal with. Another reason you need more data is simply that when presenting only two sets of numbers to represent the entire population you can easily misrepresent certain factors and numbers due to the fact that you only presented two snapshots of the system. Another small tip: you should try to state your assumptions with regards to what the numbers in the data set represent. (e.g. do survival attempts include currently alive players? dead bandits? and other issues of that nature so that your statistical analysis can be verified)

Have you even watched the video that the guy posted? His smoke is far worse than that video you posted of the real life M4. The regular in game M4 smoke actually looks quite similar to the video you posted. The guy's video shows him blowing smoke grenade style smoke clouds out of this M4 which is not how the M4A3 in Arma2 behaves.

If you send me a set of SS's showing your 360, I might be able to tell you where you are. Its a 50/50 though since you have no compass. I might also need you to move a certain direction and do a 360 there so make sure you know which direction those SS's are in if they look very similar. If you are worried I am trying to position you so I can get you, just don't tell me the server name.

alt-enter is a default windows key for switching between windowed and non windowed. Works for other programs too so its pretty useful.

You both started on the beach with no weapons. He ended up with a CZ on Stary hill. You ended up with a bullet in your head inside Stary. I'd say he was better. Also you claim that your entire squad/clan w/e is very well equipped. Why are you solo looting with a makarov? Why are you not looting as a team, clearing all dangerous areas and grabbing all the gear/loading them up in vehicles and driving/flying off? FYI, TF2 skills do not directly translate into Arma2 skills. Skills in Arma2 = strategy, tactics, leadership, teamwork, competence in marksmanship - fire discipline - landnav - communications discipline, etc.

Actually sounds like you aren't very good at this game. 1. You hear 3 gunshots, and you can't seem to tell they didn't emanate from your friend. You then proceed to look at his body and you see the smoke/dust from the bullets freshly impacting around him and you then think he shot those bullets. Then instead of asking to make sure, you pretend you know what happened so you aren't even aware that danger is nearby. 2. You can't seem to differentiate between your own dead body and a living person. You were less than 1 m from that body and still couldn't tell if he was alive or not. You checked the contents of your own previous pack and can't realize that the items are exactly the same. As if the position of the dead body (where you died) wasn't enough to let you know that it was your own body, you had to do all of the above and throw a grenade at a your own dead body to realize that it was in fact your dead body. Yes there are bugs, too bad. However, I have never experienced any of those bugs that you have mentioned so I find it hard to believe and relate to your story. Back in the old days I could loot my body from a day before if the server hasn't restarted so my skepticism prevents me from sympathizing with your story of failing multiple times to kill a bandit. And are you sure you didn't injure yourself as you threw that grenade causing shock which caused you to rejoin as unconscious? That is a feature, not a bug btw. The more I look into your story, the more it seems your own incompetence is the cause of your failures than the bugs that plague Arma2.

This has nothing to do with the starter kit, rather the fact that you can lose zombies more easily than before. In earlier versions of the game, if you caught zombie aggro you won't lose it until you kill them or die. The game was already easy enough when zombie aggro was impossible to lose making player hunting more interesting, but now it has taken a turn for the worse and made zombies into jokes that you can totally ignore because its not worth expending the ammunition on them. Also just because your personal feelings on having a weaponless starter kit makes you feel like the need for survival is gone does not make it true for everyone else. Back when everyone spawned with makarovs, all you'd see were pistol shootouts on the beach because players could start killing each other as soon as they spawned. At least now you see people running together or following each other even if it is only because they can't kill each other yet. Personally, I like the no weapon starter kit because there is a percentage of the player population that I don't feel a need to kill on sight and might even give them medical aid if they needed it because I can be assured they can't kill me.