ace5762 (DayZ)

So. I think we're all quite aware of the situation by now. Now, I'm going to throw my opinion in here and say that I found the game fairly challenging when I started in the 1.6 version. Now don't get me wrong, challenging games are excellent in my book, they're a breath of fresh air over all the molly-coddling games on the shelves these days. But I really have to say that the new 'updates' are just ruining the experience. The game is no longer challenging, it's just frustrating- and as others have said, increasingly inaccessible to new players. So, let's just run through some of the things that have implemented recently: -Now spawn with no weapons, no food, pretty much barren supplies. -Zombies now see you a mile away, unless you crawl EVERYWHERE. And even then, you're pretty likely to get swarmed if there's a zed less than 10 metres away. -Hiding from zombies, which sounds great on paper, but has proven completely worthless, being either ridiculously easy, or useless as zombies hang around blocking the exits. Oh, and zombies can still see through walls on a lot of occassions, so. -Hopping zombies are now as fast as regular ones. Great. -Zombies are now built out of bloody steel. It may be a glitch, but I've unloaded entire damned clips into the chests of zombies and barely staggered them. -One zombie attack has the chance to knock you out, drain 10k blood or break your legs: difficulty rant aside, how is this even possible? Do they have invisible sledgehammers? Also note that the chance for bleeding is so much now that it's practically guaranteed. I don't know, maybe people will just say 'oh you're whinging, if it's too hard, find something else to play' But to me, I really do want to enjoy this mod, it's got great base mechanics, the way the world works is great, and building that on the huge amount of content that Arma 2 & Operation Arrowhead offers in terms of weapons and whatnot, I think it's great. The problem is that I think someone on the dev team has wrongly made the assumption More Difficult=More fun. And it's just not true. I find, or rather, had found previously the game fun because it's unique, it gave a rather oversaturated genre a new lease of life, with tense moments of panic, the thrill of stealth, combat and scavenging all set in a huge and varied world, not to mention the huge asset the community provides itself, where encounters with other players are completely based on the reaction and thoughts of the people playing- bandits, team-mates, traders, even players who treat you suspiciously from a distance and both of you end up giving each other a wide berth add to the world. But with these latest updates, now once you spawn, the best you can hope for usually is getting your head bitten off (and your legs apparently broken) while you're getting your first supplies, instead of before. It just completely undermines any immersion, reward and overall enjoyment of playing. It's much more fun, and a lot more intense to be chomped on by a handful of zombies, run a mile to escape and survive on afterwards, knowing you need to be more careful and play conservatively from then on, than to just be one-hitted by one zombie and bleed out. All that evokes is just frustration at being dead, again. Difficulty is far too greatly outweighing reward in the mod currently, and I hope to see it remedied in the future.