jovial

This is the main reason I'm playing DayZ (or rather not playing it atm, since these features are so far off :)). But I hope there will be more than simple instanced underground bases.

I guess it's a difference in viewpoints. I see DayZ as UO with guns and zombies. I wouldn't mind a proper system for reds and blues along those lines. I know this is how a lot of people actually see the game. It's a sandbox PvP game. I doubt zeds will ever be dangerous enough on their own to deter the vast majority from going bandit/red. A system that rewards heroes/blues instead of punishing bandits/reds is what's needed IMO.

This pretty much.

I wanted to get a feel for how the community felt about nighttime, and I hope Dean Hall will take feedback on this subject and not be a slave to some idea of immersion. I'd love night to be dark, and having to use ingame tools to survive it. However I believe the VAST majority of players will simply alter gamma settings, either ingame, through external applications or monitor settings. And with that, it throws all your work on night time, fancy flashlights, lamps, etc out the window. I hope Hall will try to adapt to this, by making night much brighter. Think moon in the DayZ mod, and then some. Yeah, there should be practically no use for flashlights or the like, but at least we can play without being forced to turn up gamma (which breaks immersion a LOT more than having a naturally brighter night IMO),

Not really. KoS is part of a FFA PvP ruleset. It's just a case of taking the good with the bad. You can't have a immersive survival experience without a FFA PvP ruleset. Rocket knows this, and won't change it, though he may add consequences for choices. IMO it shouldn't be overanalyzed, simply go with a reds and blues type of system, award more benefits to a blue playstyle (the reward of wanton slaughter is often enough for the people that go red in these types of games :)).

If you don't like a certain private server, don't play on it. Easy. The good thing about private servers is that there is something for everyone. If your idea of fun is self blood bag, M4A1 starting loadout and 10000+ fully repaired vehicles, there are many servers for it. Enjoy. But there will also be good private servers with tougher rulesets, active and fair admins and good, active communities. I always prefered a semi-closed community on a private server to the bullshit that was public hives, where admins couldn't do anything. And though this may be early alpha, I have a bad feeling about the standalones ability to actually counter hacks and cheating. I look forward to private hives once more. But for now I just look forward to the next patch, hopefully changing loot spawning. :D

Gotta agree much better than the mod. No more cheesing LOS tactics, their pathfinding is pretty damn good now. They are fairly easy to melee, you can circle strafe them basically.

People just want to be cool and "hardcore", so they mouth nonsense about how a system I'm sure Dean himself knows has issues is actually fine and perfect. Personally I feel loot should work along the lines of keeping survival basics along the coast, respawning in a way such that you have a fair chance of surviving no matter what time you join the server. And then have the loot scale upwards (firearms, advanced survival gear, car parts later on in the games development) the farther north and inland you proceed,

I like that, if Dean would be able to do the same thing here, it'd be a lot better.

As some have said, the problem would be lessened if the day/night cycle was shorter. Though I really have a hard time understanding why someone would be opposed to a bright enough night that you'd mostly wouldn't need to alter gamma settings, unless you were visually impaired, etc. Yes, it is a blow to immersion and realism, but a much lesser blow than everyone using maxed gamma settings. If there was a way to cut out changing gamma settings completely, I'd get behind the current night time, we'd all be flailing around with our flashlights in the dark. But I don't think this is possible.

I believe most people will and have choosen to do this. It's pretty easy. Press escape, go into options, jack gamma all the way up. Or run around with a flashlight, placing yourself at a disadvantage versus the majority who won't be doing that. Inb4 a slew of "hardcore" players post "lol gammascrubs", "bro do u even flashlight?", etc. :)

Except in one scenario, you still have something resembling night, and the other you have a washed up horrible looking playing experience. No need to exaggerate, this isn't about missing loot, it's about the fact that most people can and will use gamma settings to cheat the night time anyway. If we are already doing this, why not try to come to some sort of middle ground, so we don't have to do it, and hopefully keep some immersion in the night.

I love the night, as I said I would love to play during the night the way it was meant, strategic use of light sources and what not (I loved doing night time ambushes in cities, putting flares here and there, and waiting for a hapless hero to run into the light :D). But most of the time, noone actually played on nighttime servers unless you had NVG. Now that NVG's are hopefully a lot more rare, playing on the public hive we might be forced to put up with the night, but that still leaves gamma settings. Fact is even if you don't want to, you'll most likely just turn up your gamma, nevermind that the game will look horrible and scorch your eyes, condemning your soul to hell in the process for such cheap metagaming. So please Dean. just work around that premise instead, until you get to a point where people won't feel the incentive to up their gamma settings. Or until you can deem tweaking gamma settings an exploit or a hack, and police it (can't see how that would work).

It may not be part of vanilla, in so far that Rocket never got around to implementing it, and has it only chalked down as something that will be put in way down the road of standalone, but once I discovered mods that gave us base building, there was no going back to vanilla for me. I like to play in a persistant environment, but if I can't somehow accumulate items in a more secure manner than putting tents that will inevitably get nuked/found by hackers, I see no point in playing basically. Luckily there are mods like Epoch and Origins, and although they have their faults, those are still where I find the most enjoyment in the game. I also enjoy finding more vehicles than vanilla, where it was a major chore to fix anything, if you could even find it in the first place. Personally I want a server where you can realistically get vehicles, maybe even drivable but damaged when spawned sometimes, but where most military grade weapons and vehicles are either EXTREMELY rare or non-existant. And where the only aircraft should be civilian helicopters, those also extremely rare. I at least hope that standalone won't be too cheap with the car spawns, not vanilla-cheap. :)

Many additions in Origins do go hand in hand with what many people want for an endgame though. Basebuilding, additional content (Sector B and AI with guns that hunt people), many vehicles, ability to choose where you spawn. This is what the typical group wants to do. Get a base going, hoard shit, drive around, in addition to the sandbox, make your own fun type of content, raid towns, kill people/bandits, etc that is at the core of the game. Base building and the concept of AI military survivors that hunt you is something that the SA might pick up on. Bathtub cars named "Batmobile", maybe not. :D

I for one am happy loot will be based on population. One of the main points in SA for me, is that hopefully I won't see everyone decked out in nightvision, thermal and sniper rifles. If you do get something like that, it should be so rare you will think twice, three times, fuck, you'll think ten times, and then you'll leave the sniper rifle in your base for fear of losing it. :D That is when there is base building. Which is another huge point for me in SA. I'm sure I'll enjoy the game at the start, but until it has proper base building and vehicles, I wouldn't be able to play it for any longer amount of time.

Hilarious. :D

lol this thread again. :)

I don't get the extremes in this discussion. On one hand you have some people saying a KOS mentality adds nothing to the game. They couldn't be more wrong. If there were no KOS bandits in the world, it would be A LOT safer. Even in standalone, no matter how dangerous zombies are, or how hard basic survival will be, you will always have to consider there may be someone lying in ambush around the next corner, or behind the next pine tree. This is a huge part of what makes the game exciting. On the other hand, I agree that the mod lacked mechanics encouraging people to do ANYTHING but employ a 100% KOS mentality in their interaction with other players. This is something I REALLY hope the SA will improve on. If there is no incentive to do anything but KOS, I agree the game suffers for it and we might as well all be playing Wasteland. But at the end of the day, I will still KOS more than half the time, because that's why I play the game. For old school gank or be ganked-pvp, as well as the appeal of a post-apocalyptic sandbox. :) Killing someone, knowing you're taking away a few hours of progress from them, and at the same time also constantly being at risk of getting killed yourself, it's such a rush. That is the core of the game, the uncertainty, excitement, paranoia. :)

How about a compromise? Give us a choice to spawn in one of three locations, for example location 1 being anything between Kamenka and Balota, location 2 being between Cherno and Kamyshovo, location 3 being between Solnichniy and Berezino. It would still require running, but would cut down a bit on it. Usually I'm all for making the game experience harder, but this is one area where I think we could use some slack.

I'll say this for microtransactions though, it doesn't have to be bad. There are some examples (actually I can only think of one, Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games), where the devs have integrity and offer strictly cosmetic items and no pay2win. Who cares if you can buy some hats, hairstyles or such if it helps host official servers and keep the game going? That being said, I also feel that microtransactions are as a previous poster said, "the sewage of modern gaming". For a quality game, I don't mind paying a subscription. I prefer it even, since that eliminates the risk of any kind of p2w completely. Because the norm when it comes to microtransactions is far from what I see in Path of Exile, far from only cosmetic options.

I have to say, in answer to the thread title, most likely not at alpha release. I have high hopes for the game further down the line, but it's best to manage expectations for the alpha. It's gonna be a repeat of the mod since release, it's gonna be a long, buggy road. In the end it will have more potential than the mod ever had though, and that's what will make it worth going through again. Hopefully. :)

The Days Ahead series by Kilroy was what made me fall in love with the game originally. I doubt I can ever relive my first moments in the game, and it kinda saddens me. :) Since I started playing after zombies were nerfed, I've gotten into this mentality where I see them only as a minor environmental hazard, really a nuisance at best. They are no threat, in very few situations can they do more than mildly annoy me. This will probably be a long process, judging form the E3 footage, but I feel that getting the zombies just right is key to recapturing a true apocalyptic ZOMBIE game instead of the current "49% random bandits, 50% paramilitary groups/clans, 1% heroes" game where zombies are a complete nonfactor. They need to be very dangerous, but in a non-glitchy way. The danger should come from actual gameplay fuckups, not from random glitches, or their method of movement (100 km/h zig-zag beasts). They shouldn't walk indoors. They shouldn't lose aggro on you easily. Honestly, I think they should be able to catch up to you on foot. The moment you aggro them you should feel fear and panic, as you start looking for a place to hide, kill, or try to lose them. :D

1. No sniper rifles, or extremely rare. 2. Actually some more melee options would be awesome, KNIVES specifically.

Good points, I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough to comment on anything there specifically, but given the server model they are using it sounds plausible. While Bohemia hosted servers would be preferable, looking at the type of company they are, it seems unlikely. Even given the huge success DayZ was and is, there is still a risk, and such a server model would indeed carry more financial risk for them. So at the end of the day, I just hope we don't see the type of rampant cheating going on in the mod, and that at least certain aspects (like item spawning and the economy) will be harder to breach. If all else fails, back to private hives I guess. :P