‮spacecaps

It's not realistic to have invisible monsters, handheld railguns and psychoactive events on a distant Pacific island either. It's not realistic to eat and drink every hour, it's not realistic to have to fuel your car every 10 miles, what's up with all this realism crap? Namalsk (and DayZ in general) is all about hardcore survival, and it's not exactly logical to break it with top-level gear. The need to keep your hands steady nicely spices up ARMA's shooting part, especially for those boring and predictable sniping sessions. I love Namalsk for this priceless discovery. Having to pay something for using the top gear would be nice, in my opinion. I understand you indeed, but with all due respect maybe Chernarus would be better for you if you don't like the Namask body temperature system that much.

Also, I think that warm clothes and APSI in their current form aren't the brightest ideas either, because once you found both (or just warm clothes in most servers), Namalsk is turning into Chernarus, losing its survival-centric nature.

There's one little problem with manual control of EVR events by players: you can trigger it within a couple minutes after spawning. Even with an 1 hour cooldown and someone camping the place all the time, abusing it by low-level players would be imminent. Alternatively, you can make triggering the event require some item in the inventory. It may not be super rare, but it should spawn somewhere else (in Vorkuta, in the hospital etc), or at least require a gun and surviving a random encounter to obtain (killing some monster or another player, maybe?). In other words, give them something to lose. Also, perhaps triggering EVR from inside A2 and concentrating too much in one place isn't the brightest idea, since there are always some autists camping the ladder 24/7. ...Wait, I have an idea! Make EVR triggerable directly from A1, and make A2 campers vulnerable as if they were on the surface. That way players will have to pay for opportunity to loot A2.

They exist in Namalsk Crisis btw (single player campaign). I'd love to see these too, and probably some other NC features like the heavy fog.

Namalsk is heavily... "inspired" by STALKER, if you missed it somehow. And most custom assets (buildings, models) are ripped from it.

Yay autism!

And still he continues to balance the game, removing all thermal sights is the obvious example. Because there are words you say on public, and there's just plain common sense you need to really get things done. Rocket is the drama queen, you should've see him at some hackers forum after the first ever DayZ banwave. Yes, some ACE features were supposed to be integrated into DayZ, iirc

Another problem is that it's hard to not to find an AS50 after a couple hours of wandering around Stary Sobor, because of the shared hive and 4-hour server restart schedule. And it's quite easy to find a camp with a spare .50 by running along the map border. In practice, M24 is the rarest sniper rifle in the game, I love it and I usually can't find one.

By the way, rate of fire doesn't mean much in ARMA as it does in real life. IRL high RoF is almost always better than a precise shot, for lots of different reasons. In the game, you don't need the balls of steel to risk your life under the inaccurate fire. While the tactics itself is good (have one guy distracting the sniper), in DayZ reality the sniper will just shoot you while you're trying to spray your 7.62s. In ARMA, a single precise shot is almost always better than spraying, that's why many people choose Lee Enfield over AK or M16.

All right, in that sense I agree that those guys who camp A2 ladder 24/7 are the fittest. How exciting. Enjoy the ultimate world of autism. Sure, I live in a pretty cold place and I own some thermal clothing myself. But in a game I prefer the diversity and balance over realism. It's just my opinion, of course.

Well, when the realism conflicts with balance, I'm choosing balance. Cutting features obviously isn't the only solution, but adding features that make the choice non-existent (ALICE vs Czech packs, .50 vs anything else) isn't helping either. In fact it's opposite and it needs to be balanced. Inability to wear backpack and to use M107 at the same time made M107 a specialized weapon and created a new feature, contributing to game diversity. Killing this specialization didn't introduce anything new into the game. I realize that it's just my opinion, of course. Why not? This is an objective of any sane game design, and DayZ already did a lot in this direction. It's a game, not reality. Many things that are essential IRL would be just plain boring in a game. By the way, Namalsk did an awesome job with its coldness in balancing the sniping (and any camping in general), and I think this is far more interesting, hardcore and survival-centric than the situation in Chernarus.

Zombies aren't a challenge. I'm sniping people with Lee Enfield (a "dinnerbell") from any rooftop and I don't give a fuck about them. Regarding .50 vs smaller caliber sniper rifles: why M107 and AS50 are compatible with a backpack? There were times when this wasn't the case. You had to choose between backpack and M107 (and AS50/AS50 TWS couldn't be obtained legitimately since helicrashes were broken). IMO this was awesome and balanced. Today the choice between M24 and M107 isn't really a choice, in terms of effectiveness. You just recieve a better gun for free; that's a poor design decision I suppose.

True story, bro. Just wanted to note that this otherwise excellent hardcore map is losing a LOT of its appeal with 3rd person enabled. Especially at Vorkuta and Old Hospital, they suffer a lot because it enables easy-mode camping at rooftops, and these two locations are basically bottlenecks. Take out the 3rd person mode and warm clothing, and it will be great (except maybe A2 entrance). Unfortunately, the number of hardcore namalsk servers with forced 1st person is next to zero.

Changing clothes teleports you at the sea far to the south, not back and forth between three very typical sniper spots. Also, if this tool would include realtime replay feature and reveal players facing directions, it will be far, FAR more useful at spotting hackers.

Seems familiar. Oh wait...

You can still play with the old version (1.60), Lee Enfield does the same old damage with it. It's 12000, not 10000, by the way. Lee Enfield is a fucking railgun, but it's more like a bamboo stick for a shaolin master, not a gentleman's rifle.

Well, Namalsk is certainly a hardcore map, for example. I'd love to see something similar, but larger and with obvious bugs fixed. But for some reason I have yet to see a populated Namalsk server without this awful side chat, Shift+LMB markers, and with forced 1st person mode. Most servers even seem to have player marking and distance meter enabled, which completely diminishes the whole point of DayZ.

Unless nobody's playing at official hive servers. The center of mass in the playerbase does seem to be shifting towards easy mode and GTAMP-like experience. I used to play at hardcore servers, now can't find anything even remotely hardcore worth playing at.

IIRC the trigger pull weight for USMC DMR is quite high, and the hysteresis is a bit high too, for it to be more useful as a sniper/marksman rifle. So its rate of fire in ARMA is quite unrealistic compared to real life effective RoF when used for mid- and long-range combat. I might be wrong on this one, of course.

Just install ARMA2 1.60 instead of 1.62, then beta on top of it, and you have old damage: Lee Enfield will one-shot again, etc. This update was bullshit and game-breaking anyway. Also, M24 is significantly worse in close combat (<200m), and it's quite difficult to scope on target sometimes.

Seems that War Inc is quite prone to hacking, I wonder what they are going to do with it. Currently the scene is almost inactive since War Inc isn't very popular, but this surely will change if the WarZ will become popular. And a simple passive map/wallhack/ESP can ruin a survival sandbox game completely, as we all know from DayZ experience.

The problem is that DayZ concept is based on novelty, and it's usually wearing off after a couple weeks or turning into Cherno/Electro PvP fest, especially when half players are cheating; you just can't take the game seriously. If WarZ won't bring something totally new and brilliant to the scene (and it most likely won't), or if it won't have MUCH more diversity than the original, it will fail hard, and even then it'll fail after a couple months when novelty will wear off. BTW, the same applies to DayZ standalone, of course.

Short answer is no. Long answer is... well, it's long.

Of course it does. You just can't make it the main feature for detecting ESP as op was proposing, just a small neat addition for catching really simple hacks. Why? The problem is that you can't take a trusted screenshot at all. For example, a hacker can draw anything he wants on his hardware overlay, and you cannot read it at all. If you will take a shot of hacker's screen with HW overlay ESP running, everything you'll see is just a normal legit picture. So the only thing left for you is to rely on low-level methods to detect hacks trying to draw something. And this part is really tricky, because there are lots of very clever ways to do that without being noticed, and there's no generic way to detect many of these techniques, especially without false positives. It can be done to some degree, but it needs tremendous amounts of work compared to just "sending a screenshot to admin". And hardware overlay is just one of many techniques to feed anticheat system with a clean screenshot, of course. Even more, every anticheat system needs something similar to antivirus lab: the people who'll buy private cheats or search for public cheats, and create a signature that will make them detected. This requires a lot of work, and this is most important part of any good anticheat system, since you can't rely just on heuristic detection because of disruption the low-level magic can cause to players systems, and because of large amount of false positives. BattlEye doesn't have all that (situation is changing, but they are still failing hard on every step). Most importantly, it lacks the vision, and ArmA devs lack it too (compare them to Hi-Rez, for example). This is a problem, not the lack of some features, especially such simple as "sending screenshots to the server" or crazy ones like OCRing them on the fly.

The problem is that maphacks will always be there. They're passive, they're almost impossible to detect for sure, and they can do lots of damage due to game mechanics.