soapmak3r

Being a bandit in this game is the equivalent of playing it in easy mode. It's the easiest way to 'survive' without much of a challenge. It's rewarding for the bandits in a cowardly kind of way, because they can just shoot you in the back and take all the stuff you have worked for and taken risks to get. If a real Zombie Apocalypse was to occur and people got on this way, they might as well just put the gun in their mouth and pull the trigger, cause that ain't surviving. Not really. Basically what I am saying is that bandits are parasitic in nature... haha :P

I would equate that more as tribal warfare. It's going to happen. Groups competing for territory, raiding each other's compounds. Infiltrating camps etc. This is how the game should probably evolve and would provide the needed competitive aspect and hopefully give people enough incentive to pull their resources and build something together so that they don't feel the desire to just be another degenerate psycho. If groups/clans/tribes could build their own secured compounds and had to sustain their compound/people by performing regular raids on locations where loot spawned, then that would provide a battleground of sorts for survivors to compete on...bandits would likely be forced to take sides, or they would continually get caught in the cross-fire. We would need customizable skins for tribes to create their identity, and an awareness of which tribes are friendly, which are not. Armed people not in a tribe would have a normal skin and would be under instant suspicion and unarmed newly spawned players be motivated to find and join a tribe, if they haven't associated themselves with one already. Just a thought.

Well said Kitrick. The more people that realise this, the better the experience will be for everyone. That being said, banditry does make sense within the context of of the mod...Senseless murder of unarmed people on the other hand, doesn't. Literally every time I have died from another player in this mod, I have been unarmed, and carrying pretty much nothing of value. "Just blowing off steam" doesn't really cut it as a rationalisation. Neither does a twisted interpretation like "Strongest will survive! Shoot everyone on sight!". It's just server griefing and/or an expression of a psychotic, psychological state of mind.

Are you running from the DayZ beta launcher? If not, you need to update to the latest Arma 2 beta version and launch from the Dayz Beta launcher. No idea where the instructions are here, but they are in a sticky on the Steam forums.

parasitic - of plants or persons; having the nature or habits of a parasite or leech; living off another; "a wealthy class parasitic upon the labor of the masses"; "parasitic vines that strangle the trees"; "bloodsucking blackmailer"; "his indolent leechlike existence" leechlike, parasitical, bloodsucking dependent - relying on or requiring a person or thing for support, supply, or what is needed; I think it is you that doesn't know what it means ;)

Haha...So many of you are quick to assume I just got killed. I am alive and well and haven't been killed in a while. It was just something I was thinking about. It'd be much easier for me to get a weapon and camp out around a popular looting area and wait for victims to come along so I can murder them and take their stuff. I am actively choosing not to do that, because it's not how I would behave if it actually happened, and it is a much more challenging experience, due to having more than just the zeds to contend with. Realistically, if humans were going to survive a scenario like DayZ, they would have to pull together against a common foe. The funny thing is. It is that survivor empathy, kindness and willingness to share and watch each other's back that makes them 'the strongest'. It's the only reason our species has survived real world ice ages and other earth changing events. If it was natural for people to choose to go 'every man for himself' and 'might is right' we would have become divided, weak and eventually died alone or in small isolated groups and our species would have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Given how so many people choose to play this game, I'm sure much of humanity did. It was the people that pulled together and had strength in numbers, showed empathy and more importantly compassion towards each other that won out in terms of evolution and natural selection. They were the strongest. Same applies here. In game Bandits display all the classic traits of a clinical psychopath: "The psychopath is a predator. He is ruthless, manipulative and often charming. Once referred to as “moral imbeciles,” psychopaths exhibit a marked lack of conscience. They are callous, remorseless and spectacularly self-centered, willing to use and abuse others to achieve their ends, and they are inclined to blame others, including their victims, for their problems and bad behaviour." I find the psychology of this game is very revealing.

I haven't been shot in a while. Generally I am pretty good at evading detection completely. Plenty of times I could have shot people who wandered close to me, but I chose to let them live and keep my distance. Whether they are a bandit or not is irrelevant. Saying that, if I'd known they were a bandit, I'd probably have put them down. But yeah, I've been shot in the back by cowardly bandits a few times. Never face on. Usually always when I am in my inventory. Because they are opportunists and can't handle the challenge. Thing is, I adapt and I learn their patterns and cheap tactics, and rather than join them. I use it against them. Much more challenging and much more satisfying. A lot of the people on these forums are so quick to jump all over everyone. Friendly bunch, eh?

My suggestion is simple and will basically render banditry pointless... Make it so that bandits can't loot corpses. There. Simple.

Currently it is way too easy to be a bandit. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. There is no recourse to anything or consequence for it. Anyone can camp, or just shoot you in the back and that's it... So yeah...Basically, as it is, you are rewarded for being a murdering psycho and punished for trying to practice non-violence and cooperation.

This is a suggestion forum, if you don't want to read people's suggestions, don't come here. If reading this thread was all it took to turn you into a bandit, you are a pretty fickle tool...

Yeah...It asks you if you are sure you want to 'abort' the server, but not if you want to respawn... To add...Having to press abort, then ok, then disconnect, then disconnect again, then cancel to get back to the main menu is totally overkill... haha

If you have a water bottle and it is raining, you should be able to fill your it with rain water, but make it take a few minutes or so. The amount of times I have been walking in really heavy rain and the thirst meter is flashing...Just makes no sense really.

The zombie AI is currently broken. It operates on proximity, but only on a horizontal plain. It doesn't matter if you are 3 stories above the zombies, on the other side of a wall etc. If you are within a certain radius, they just automatically know you are there, regardless of line of sight, and regardless of verticality. It's completely illogical. If you are looting a building and they happen to wander by the other side of the wall, they become alerted, then warp through the wall and attack you, or just hit you through the wall as if the it isn't there. If you are on the roof of a building, 3 stories up, and a zombie walks by on street level, and you are within their radius, they become alerted. If one zombie becomes alerted, it seems like every zombie in the area are all telepathically linked and become alerted too...then they attack regardless of whether they saw you or not. Once the zombies have been alerted to your position, even if you lose line of sight with them, they still know exactly where you are. They all have x-ray vision...This makes losing them really, really difficult. All of this makes looting building in a stealthy way, without confrontation incredibly difficult and frustrating. Especially as a newly spawned character. Most of the times when I have died, it has been because of the bugged zombie AI. It completely breaks the immersion and sucks all the fun out of the game at times too. I have heard that they next patch is going to deal with zombie AI, I just hope that these things are fixed as they are so bad that it would keep me from playing until they are addressed.

Rocket said in the PC gamer interview the other day that they planned to have more enterable buildings.

I already have to wait for at least 2 minutes for the bloody servers to respawn me...and that's annoyingly long. Not sure, but I'm thinking that you are just trolling with these suggestions...I hope you are.

Until today, I have been launching the DayZ beta through the desktop command line prompt shortcut. I'm pretty sure most other people are doing the same. It makes playing with friends really difficult because they don't know when I am playing, and the Steam overlay doesn't work in game. So yeah...A DayZbeta.exe that we can launch the game from, and add to Steam, so people on our friends lists know that we are playing and can join us. This is pretty much essential.

Yeah, I know...I am launching CO through Steam with the launch parameters, but if the DayZ beta had a proper .exe launcher, people could very simply add it to Steam. Adding the launch parameters is hit and miss. I have tried about 4 times, following (poorly explained) instructions from various threads and have now randomly found a set that work. Sometimes making things simple is a good thing. ;) These are the launch settings I got it working with in Steam... -beta=Expansion\beta;ca;Expansion\beta\Expansion -mod=@DayZ;ca -nosplash (you will first need to replace the normal ArmA2OA.exe in "steamapps/common/arma 2 operation arrowhead" with the beta one from the beta folder in "steamapps/common/arma 2 operation arrowhead/expansion/beta")

I would like one profile that I can use to play with my friend when we get a chance, and another that I can play on my own... If we log out together, we can log in together and carry on...but if I play on my own, we obviously end up splitting up. Which kind of sucks.

It seems to me like every time I enter a building, even if there is a wall between me and the zombie, or even if I am on an upper floor of a building... If they get too close to me in terms of horizontal radial proximity, they get aggro, then every zombie in the immediate area joins them because they appear to be telepathically linked... I have no way of accurately knowing where the zombies are when I am inside, and I have nowhere to go once I am inside a building because they are massive choke points... But somehow the zeds know exactly where I am without line of sight, or me making any noise at all. Often they get aggro and then clip through the walls, or hit me through the walls... It makes looting a building way more difficult than it should be, especially as a beginning survivor. You can have perfect stealth, but then get ganked because a zombie wanders too close to the building you are looting and somehow detects you through the wall...then teleports through the wall, or just punches you through it. It's not logical and you can't reasonably argue that it shouldn't be fixed. It's faulty AI.

Yeah, dogs could be cool as companions and for hunting purposes. If you could use them to lure away zombies and then rejoin you, that would be very useful.

Fishing pole would be great, especially if we had working rowing boats that we could use on lakes, ponds, dams and even the ocean.