Woofington

I love DayZ, I have put way WAY too much time into it. I love its brutality, I love its unforgiving nature, and I love player interactions. I'm a huge fan of this latest patch (ladders what what!?) and am looking forward to seeing this gaming develop. So lets talk about player-player cooperation. I have been playing a lot lately and have found one thing to be true, unless it is an actual friend of yours, no one is to be trusted. Now this exists for two reasons. 1) You have everything to lose if that other player is untrustworthy. 2) You have everything to gain if you kill him. His items, and a sense of safety from that other potential threat. What this leads to is a mentality of killing on site. Now this isn't a terrible thing, this game is an anti-game, it is meant to be cold and unaffected. I really enjoy seeing some of the player interactions because not everyone will just shoot immediately (although this seems to be becoming more common). However there is very little opportunity for emergent cooperation. I think this is a bit disappointing but I am not sure if there is a way to correct it. I would love to come across another survive struggling and team up without having to worry about him shooting me but the risk is too high. I would love to form little roving parties of random players who actively work towards a goal, but again, how can you be sure to trust anyone? Because of this there is never, NEVER cooperation outside of pre-determined friendships/communities. So what is everyone else's thoughts on the matter? Should there be some mechanic to encourage team work? How can we implement such a mechanic without hand-holding, or reducing the anti-game thesis? Just a topic for discussion I think.

Thanks, love your servers :)

This patch sounds AMAZING. To everyone complaining that its getting too spergy survivalist leave now. This isn't a video game in a classic sense, its an anti-game. It is not meant to reward you or hold your hold hand, its meant to beat you in to the ground and remind you "Life is hell now, survival is your ONLY option, and it won't be easy." This isn't a zombie shooter, this isn't a deathmatch, its a survival game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic zombie scenario. Emergent game play abounds because of this setting and difficulty, but it won't necessarily be "fun" game play, or even "video-gamey". What it is however is an incredibly immersive experience that opens the doors to thousands of possibilities, and tons of differing strategies. It is a brutal game, it is an unforgiving game, it is a survival game. Stop complaining, and go play L4D, you morons.

Because' date=' if you write a script that causes permalight. Then the world never ages. Zombie spawns never happen. Loot gets fucked up. Time is the foundation for nearly every event within the system. That is why I went to such a great effort to synchronize it. I think I'm a pretty reasonable guy, I don't just pull these restrictions out of my arse you know. People make assumptions without knowing the full impact. This mod is a cardhouse, don't presume to know what does or does not affect anything. A good example is sound mods. Audibility is based on values for terrain in the sound config. Some of the community sound mods don't use a standard method, and they break the system. [/quote'] Question Rocket, it seems one of the problems with serverside time synching (and I am not defending UK11, fuck em) is that it causes players to just server hop to play at the time they want. I'm not really sure if this is a good idea either because it forces people who want to play during the day but perhaps work until the evening to play on servers across the world in order to experience daylight (and thereby suffer high pings). The obvious solution to this is to synch every server to one specific time, that is not relative to the server's real-world time. However this then screws over people on one side of the world but not the other. So then I posit that an implementation of a non-relative, sped up day/night cycle would alleviate this. Sure a sped up day/night cycle isn't completely realistic, but it solves a lot of problems, and I have a feeling most players would prefer it. Make it cycle every four hours or so.

So I was stalking a survivor with my friend in electro. I can in and me and him had a winchester battle. I died but my friend killed him. I aborted to the multiplayer setup and hit ok to respawn. When I came back though I was back where I had died, with about ~5000 blood, but I was knocked out (with the hourglass). My friend stopped my bleeding but I can't seem to get out of this knock out. It has been about 20 minutes now and the hourglass has not even gone down one tick. At this rate it will be hours if ever that I will get up. I think its bugged and the timer will never go down. Help?

I was just spawned a new character after dying and I have been knocked out. There were no zombies that I know of, it literally happened as soon as I loaded in. I can't hit escape and I can't respawn. I just want to start a new character again, not wait 20 minutes (it is a really really long knock out) for something I had no control over :(

Hey, I am a creative developer for an independent studio that focuses on post-apocalyptic games. I actually recently purchased ARMAII and the expansion solely to play Day Z as it tickles my very specific fancy. I love it, so far my experience has been great, one of the best most immersive post-apocalyptic zombie experiences. I had some ideas that would be interesting to see fleshed out. However I would like to state I do not know what modding ARMA II entails and what can, and what can't be done. 1) Chat needs to be revamped. This game is great, it feels huge, landmarks are distant, and encounters with other human beings are rare, but extremely tense. However chat shatters this illusion. I am new to ARMA II so I don't necessarily understand all the different chat modes but it seems like most are a form of global chat. I think global chat shatters the illusion of isolation, and makes it feel much more like a game than it does a post apocalyptic simulation. Now if friends want to play together, there will always be means, mumble, steam chat, etc. But what instead should be in place is a form of chat which only speaks to players x amount of meters around them. Basically there should be a: -"say" chat which would address people directly near the player. -"yell" chat which would address people still close to a player but further out, say maybe 300 meters? -"Walkie Talkie chat" I believe that walkie talkies should be added to the game, and once a player has found one, he gets access to 12 different chat channels, illustrating different walkie talkie channel presets. This would allow a team of players to break up but still remain in contact. Whether or not this has a distance cut off remains to be decided. I believe that doing it this way would add to the sense of immediecy. If someone says something in chat, you can be damn sure that person is nearby. This is the apocalypse and some oniscient all chat has no place in this game. 2) Further player interactions. This may have been brought up already but players need to be able to surrender, give up, and drop their weapons, but make it apparent they are doing so. Furthermore other players need to be able to frisk, and remove weapons from a player should he enter a surrender state so as to ensure that the surrendering player isn't holding out just to shoot the others when their back is turned (unless they find a new weapon on teh way). Player interactions are by far the most dynamic and interesting mechnic in this game, lets utilize that further. 3) Remove the timer from being knocked out. This game tries for a rather intense, and realistic approach to the apocalypse. One shot will kill. Being knocked down should be a dynamic event, that can differ in length from rather short to rather long (maybe not too much of a difference) but the player should recieve no timer. Much like when someone is knocked unconcious in real life, they should not know exactly WHEN they will get back up. More ideas to come as I am able to put them a bit more eloquently.

I mentioned this in another thread. But I think the game should limit chat to DC unless you find a walkie talkie, then you have 12 seperate, Global chat channels, so only people with walkies can talk or listen globally.