mrducky (DayZ)

Yeah, naturally people come to DayZ for some totally different expectations than what it is. Because: 1. The popular youtube videos (or online reviews) don't have videos about a game where you run for hours, scavenge some random crap, and then suddenly just drop dead because someone sniped you or shot you in the back. They have the 1 in 100 scenarios where the player makes a friend out of random encounter, survive a horde of zombies, and have some kind of epic ending that leads to their eventual death. In reality, there are 99 stories not worth telling for each of those epic ones. 2. Even the DayZ main page and video on it give a rather different impression of a "zombie survival" game where there might be some bandits around or some betrayal, but we all know what you are really trying to survive in the game. Its basically all the other players, not the zeds. 3. DayZ has already changed during the few months of its existence. 4. A lot of players are not going to go through the forums of some game they intend to get to thoroughly investigate what they are about to play. They rely on the reviews and the youtube videos to give an "accurate enough" representation of the game in general. And while that might work for most linear and scripted games, it won't for a sandbox game like DayZ. All that being said... DayZ certainly wasn't quite like I expected it to be when I got into it, but regardless, I liked it, despite the flaws. But I can totally understand why some others might feel that the game did not live to their expectations.

I believe they clean up the tents outside the map? Perhaps even automatically these days. Also, the very exact border of the map is obviously a bad place. Someone venturing a bit outside the map is likely to then start running at the edge of the map... Probably more traffic at the very edge than a little bit more into the actual map area. Personally, I've had much more fun placing the tents in the cities. For example, I currently have one in elektro. (And at other undisclosed towns) :D The elektro tent managed to stay completely unlooted for 3 - 4 days I think. Then someone found it and took some stuff outta it, such as the AK cobra and morphines. But still left plenty other random stuff there. (So, if I die, I know where to run first to stock up.) Even the towns, especially others than elektro and cherno, there are places where people rarely check.. Mainly the buildings that cannot be entered (and all the pro players know those buildings cannot be entered already from far away). So they don't bother to check them out. Just gotta place the tent between some building like that and some other proper cover, and all good to go. I really don't expect those city-tents to stay unlooted for very long, but then again, they are super fast to fill up with random stuff - when they are so close to the loot spawns. Sometimes being super sensible is not the most fun thing to do. Doing some silly stuff can be much more fun. ;)

Totally okay to loot low pop servers. If its a valid server and few others bothers to join there, then heck, it ain't your fault. As long as you stay on that server for a sensible time and don't just constantly hop in and out from server to another low pop server, etc. Its rather easy to notice sometimes when on a really really low pop server, with just a few guys, that some of the other players come in and go at regular intervals - I can only imagine they are server hopping / farming on low pop servers to loot the NWA or something. If that's the case, it's just lame. Or possibly they are looting the low pop server, and then going to store that loot to their tents on some other populated server - and then rinse and repeat. Kinda lame too, but at least that's somewhat accetable compared to just constant server hopping at to some high end loot position. Just remember that getting too careless because you think no-one is there might get you killed. I've died several times on low pop servers too. :)

...And then there is the simple little note: Tents are not really a safe place to store your stuff. Anyways... The tents are NOT safe. I do not generally put my best gear into the tents, because I cannot be watching them 24h a day. Unless you really go into the middle of nowhere to pitch the tent, the stuff from the tents is more likely to get taken than the stuff on you. And if you go pitch it in the middle of no-where, then it isn't really gonna help you gear up any sooner compared to just looting some coastal city. Its faster to run into a city and collect similar loot from there than to run into the middle of nowhere and empty your tent to get that loot. (After which your tent would be empty and you would be back to square one) If you think that your current gear would be somehow much better had you had a tent in the beginning, I doubt that a bit. Perhaps it might be. or perhaps not. Frankly, I don't think my gear would be much better right now. (I've collected stuff to 4 tents scattered around the map, but I haven't had any need to use pretty much any of that stuff... And other people have just looted lot of that stuff already. So in reality, the tents have been of no use for me really. Just some storages for some silly hoarding.) Naturally if you really intend to carelessly just run into a city, guns blazing and all that, then the stuff might be safer in the tents than on you. But then that begs the question that is this game really supposed to be some kind of deathmatch where everyone can just run to the city thinking that "it does not matter if I die, I'm carrying nothing of value". If anything, that would just make the game even worse. The PvP deathmatch and "I don't care about my survival" is already going rampart enough as-is. We don't need people to start feeling that there is even less value to their survival. I guess that would make the game shootouts more "fun", at least from a casual shooter player perspective.. But that has never really been the point why this game is so unique and appealing. There are plenty of casual shooters out there... Ones with much better controls, much less bugs, etc, etc. What has made this game so interesting and unique has been exactly that feeling of permanent death. That on every encounter, or every careless move, you could be done for, and it is game over, everything lost. All those hours of playing lost in a blink of an eye. That and the uncertainty of other players intentions is what makes every encounter so meaningful. That's what makes you truly fear every player you see. That's what makes you feel remorse and bad for the other guy when you do your first murder in the game. etc. Any modification to alleviate that feeling, by giving any safe storage for your acquired loot, would not make the game more interesting. It would make the game more like every other generic shooter game out there. And I don't see why we would need one more of those games. And I do understand that this is not some black and white thing, the game either being a casual shooter or hardcore survival. Its always going to be somewhere in between the absolute extremes. Definitely on the hardcore side though. A balance between extreme feelings and still having some fun. So the tents on spawn would not be an unthinkable thing, but I think the game is better without them. And if there were tents on spawn, the spawning tent logic would simply have to be different from current one to prevent the excess fill-up of the maps with the tents (as already explained on earlier replies). I understand the point, that for example, groups of bandits already have a safety-net, their buddies.. Who can pick up the guns from their friend's dead body and give them back to the guy after he respawns. Which pretty much de-values their death, as nothing of real value was lost. Solo players don't have similar safety net, unless they have found a tent. That is one of the extreme benefits of clan play. I know its not fair that death has a significant meaning for some, while not for others. But this is an issue that should rather be solved so that even the groups of bandits would have to value their survival - not by doing the opposite of giving everyone an automated safety net that de-values the impact of death for them too. This game should thrive to provide what gave it the hype in the first place. Extreme survival. Paranoid encounters with other people who's intentions you cannot know for sure. Not the deathmatch where death does not even matter.

First and foremost: Deathmatching behaviour isn't really caused by the lack of difficulty, it's caused by the game mechanics and having nothing better to do than to go shoot at other players. Yes, one might argue that by adding difficulty, now the players have something better to do - having to battle the environment. And yes, if the players are getting killed more by the environment, they are forced even more to cooperate to survive that... right? But is that really going to happen? First, any adjustement in the game/environment difficulty will always have the biggest impact on the noobs. They are the ones who will immediately get slaughtered by the merciless environment. Not the experienced players or established groups. Will this somehow affect the grouping behaviour of the people? Very little, I suspect. Because, as far as my experiences in the game go, the bright eyed solo noobs who have not yet been jaded by all the killing going on, are the ones who try to cooperate with every random encounter rather than try to shoot them on sight. Their behaviour is not the biggest problem. The people who are most willing to shoot on sight are the groups of bandits or just any other established groups of people who are playing with their IRL friends, etc. They already have their little group put together. They don't want to risk it by getting some random player join them. And of course there are always the few odd solo players who just enjoy running around killing everything they come across. And some of these probably were those noobs, who got killed too many times trying to be friendly, and then decided that the game is just best played as a deathmatch. If you try to force the players to coop, by making sure they die if they don't do so... You are just making the game even more miserable for those players who would already like to coop, but keep ending up getting killed by others. Then they will not only still get killed by the other people, but they will also be killed by the environment. You end up not solving the actual game mechanic problem causing people to kill each other, but also add new problem that the people who are getting killed by others are now are getting killed by environment as well. The problem is that the game has the same area, the same difficulty level for all of the players. The noobs and the pros. If you cater the pros and larger groups by making the game difficulty more suitable for them, you're just dickslapping all the solo noobs in the face. The noobs will just rage quit after the first few hours of play because they just can't make it anymore. If you cater the noobs by making the game easier to survive, the pros will be utterly bored in that environment (which certainly won't help with the DM situation, but isn't really the fundamental issue, which is the lack of other things to do). Its a lose-lose situation whichever way you go with the difficulty, unless you somehow manage to make it dynamic, so that the environment offers a suitable challenge to both groups, noobs and pros. For example, I like the idea of the wondering zed hordes in the map (outside cities as well). Why? Because they could be just the kind of environmental threat that mainly affects larger groups of people, rather than the solo players... The solo players can always just run away when they see such a horde approaching, whereas some bandit group might actually have to defend themselves against the horde, if the zeds in the horde were, for example, to destroy any tents they come across. When the bandits would see a horde moving toward their campsite, they would probably want to defend their site and intercept the horde. They would now have one more threat and an interesting thing to do other than to go snipe the noobs. Alternatively you could have the usual player classes (Note: I'm not suggesting to implement these!), by making even any medium sized bandit group not to have all the necessary skills in their team. If they lack a doctor, or say an electrician to make their base electricity work (assuming there were bases), then they would have an incentive not to kill all people, but rather somehow try to get that random electrician guy they find to fix their electricity. By some trade or by threat or by whatever means. Just by making something like the character classes based on the acquired loot would not change anything, because once again, the bandit groups are the best equipped anyway. Its the noobs that are affected by lack of necessary items, not the bandits. Also, even when ignoring the bandit groups... Items can be deprived from the cold dead hands of the other player. The other guy has something you need? Wanna risk cooping with him... or maybe just shoot him to get what you need? (Unless those items take up most of your inventory, introducing any items to promote coop is quite unlikely to work, it just promotes killing the other player to get the item. With the exception of those items that require at least one other player to use, like with the blood bags) Sorry, if most of these point were already presented by other replies. The OP was just so long and there were so many replies that I didn't really wade through all of them. TL;DR - Just generally adding the game difficulty is not addressing the fundamental game mechanics issues that cause the deathmatching. It won't stop the solo players who want to coop getting shot on sight by the other players. It will just make those said players die from the environment as well. Its just an additional slap in their face.

Like the pen and paper idea. Currently, there is no way to properly communicate with random people. The radios suggested would help immediate communication, but anything else (since players cannot be playing this 24h a day) would still be lacking. This kind of thing would help with that. It would be nice if you could write a note next to your tent saying "If you find this, take what you need, and please leave something in return if you can". And then perhaps the people who find the tent would not feel the need to level it down with a grenade (since it's current the only way to "communicate" and troll the tent owner). Instead, they would perhaps just grab some stuff from the tent and then leave a note "thanks for beans and the AKM, left some empty tin cans in return. lol." ... Now that would be some progress in level of interaction and trolling in the game. :D

LOL, what a civilized discussion people have here. But no.. seriously.. If everyone started out with a tent, there would be just such an oversupply of them. The maps would be just totally spammed with them. And everyone would be hoarding all the loot to the tents. No point in going to scavenge the cities anymore, when looking for tents in the woods would be where all the loot is. The current tents are an "end game" feature... Meaning that once you've really acquired the best gear for yourself (and have no reason to play the game anymore, unless you try to get some player kills), then tents offer you some way to keep the game interesting.. You can then try to acquire a tent, and start filling that with some loot. Thanks to the tent, you still have some incentive to go scavenging. And trying to find the tent is a challenge by itself. The tent on spawn might only work sensibly if there was some kind of totally different mechanism to it.. For example, everyone that spawns would spawn with a tent automatically pitched to that spawn location (obviously this could not be the beach), and that initial tent could not be moved (or at least not very easily). To make it seem sensible not have a non-movable tent, it would probably have to be more like a shack or house of some sort with a few slots to store items to. This would effectively be the assigned initial home for that player for the duration of that life. It might lead into some interesting territorial behaviour in the early parts of the game, as the player would not yet have found any tents / the ability to move his home elsewhere, and would probably be unwilling to venture very far from his "home". So he'd probably be running around in that part of the map with a bit of a territorial defensive mindset... And he might get along with any possible neighbours... or perhaps he might not. :) But all that said, I think it would be a bit of a different game. At the moment, the game starts with the sense of being lost at some unknown place, having to go to explore, etc... And I think it is just fine as it is. Maybe at some point, this starts to change a bit if the base building and other end game features get implemented.

Yeah, constantly pressing the respawn button until you get the spawn you like is a bit stupid. Then again, it makes coop play much more viable for those who want to play with their friends.. But it does also cause devaluation of one's life to some extent. So, I'd be totally ok if the respawn could not be used in that 30 minutes after your latest spawn. Or, alternatively, pressing the respawn button would make it so, that you would always respawn at some of the more remote spawnpoints (like Kamenka) and never near the cities. That way by the time you got to the city, you would already have some valuation for your life. This would probably still have little impact on the bandit groups that snipe at the cherno/elektro hills, etc. They have high end gear and aren't really taking risks anyway. But.. I'm not really sure if the cities are the issue anyway. Because you can always just avoid them if you don't like the shooting going on there. So.. I don't know. I doubt this would fix the biggest issues the game really has.

The zeds are currently just buggy. When someone gets killed (or disconnects?) then the zombies that were controlled by that client apparently just start standing still, no-longer able to move. Obviously this should be fixed. I can only imagine its a bug. Perhaps there has been some point to it, like trying to make the zombies stay on the towns briefly after a DC or such in order to make the other players not to be able to know if there is another player in the town or not, but it went wrong somehow... Or something. Or maybe its just outright some random buggery. And the temperature... I do remember that earlier I actually had to light up some camp fires and such to stay warm... But for quite some time, I haven't even paid attention to the temp meter at all. As it basically never goes below 42. But I think the reason for this is that I just don't play on the night servers anymore like I used to. Night servers have nothing but bandits with NVGs running around. If I don't have NVGs, it's just plain stupid to go get killed at one of those servers... The coast near elektro hills is often littered with corpses of new players, who thought they could actually equip their flashlights during the night and live for more than a few minutes doing that. And even when I have the NVGs... Why play on a server where everyone can see each other with the NVGs just fine, everyone just has the green hue to their screen? The same visibility can be achieved on the day time servers, but in full color! :D So I think the temperature has lost its meaning mostly due to the fact that very few players play at the night time servers (because it would be just plain stupid without NVGs these days, I think it used to be a bit different a few months ago). And it is totally realistic/authentic that the temperature is an issue during night only. Not during daytime, even in rain. Also, as a solo player, I've never come across the sickness in the game. Basically, the game's 30 minute average lifespan just isn't enough to get sick from anything other than lead poisoning. :D (Even though I can usually get way past that lifetime, unless sniped at coast spawn.) To make the sickness spread, looting a dead body that was sick should have a proper chance of infecting you. Then someone might accidentally get it from someone else. (Usually they won't get close enough to infect you alive, before the lead poisoning gets them.)

Haha... That's amusing. I guess next time I'm in a tight spot, I'll go "adjust my control settings"... I've been playing with some bad settings for too long already - so no wonder I keep dying in the game! :D

Lets face it, DayZ seems pretty clearly to be a quickly hacked "prototypish-mod" on top of Arma 2. - Problem 1: Arma 2 already appears to be one big bugfest :P (That's usually what you get when trying to push a lot of features into a single game, specifically on a relatively small team). All of those bugs will obviously affect the mod negatively too. - Problem 2: Its only a mod. It probably needs to be standalone and get significant engine modifications to be able to do everything the game really needs. - Problem 3: Its quite ambitious. And I don't mean this only techinically or content wise, but rather in the game mechanics as well - the game relies on the players to actually be sandboxing correctly to create the experience. (Rather than just outright defining what the players must do or are not allowed to do). This weird mix of coop and player vs player with players choosing what to do gives us a unique experience, but is also susceptible to the changes in the ways the players play the game.. and those playing styles surely will change based on the hours the player has clocked in the game. - Problem 4: You just cannot compare this to any existing commercial game. Why? Because most big games are done by teams of minimum 20-30 people or so, and they do the game for several years, a minimum of 2-3 years generally, before the players actually get their hands on the game. So DayZ won't probably be very polished until maybe after 2 more years, at earliest...maybe?. And even that would more or less assume much more resources to be put into the development. (Though it surprisingly well manages to use the Arma 2 as a base to get to the content/playability level it already is at.) So... I think this may be a long wait until we really see a polished gem out of this game. The basic idea is there, and it clearly works as the game has already proven that with the hype generated and the masses playing it. But it will certainly take time to get it "done". And it needs to adapt as the playing style of the players change during this time. And who knows how well it can keep the existing playerbase interested while waiting. Probably a good idea to go have a little break from the game at some point, and return back later.

Its the desync.. (If you see the blood hit effects, but the guy does not go down) Basically all the clients are playing their own little game - Just trying to mysteriously synchronize the games to appear to look like the same. And frankly, often the Arma 2 engine / DayZ seems to be doing a pretty damn bad job at it. :P It is sometimes possible to unload a whole mag of even AKM bullets to a person at close range, seeing the blood splashes and all, and still the guy just keeps on running. Then some 20 seconds later on or such the guy may suddenly drop dead as the hits finally sync to him... or he might just continue living happily regardless of being shot. I've similarly mysteriously died after watching another guy chewing his beans from behind. All of the sudden I just ended up dead on the ground for no apparent reason... At first I though the guy was a decoy and had a friend that had shot me in the back, but soon realized that the game had just been desyncing really bad. I thought I was looking the guy from behind, but at the same time, he had probably already ran at a totally different position, aimed at me and taken some shots at me on his own computer. Then eventually the whole thing just synced so that I ended up dead on the ground. I didn't have any clue that we were supposed to be in a firefight already. I though I was observing him from behind, because that was the case on my screen. The one advice I would give, is that if at any time you notice trying to pick up loot takes very long or that shooting zeds takes a long time for the zeds to actually react, etc. - then you know there is probably another player nearby who is desyncing badly. (Or you yourself are desyncing.) You can also go check out the player menu for the desync values. When that major desync happens, it's best to get out of the area or stay hidden rather than to get into a fight, because the fight could end up in a total mess, where people just warp all over the place, etc. and you can't be sure the hits really register, etc.

Yeah, they have some weird random probability of seeing you from far nowadays.. Makes them more unpredictable... Which could be good I guess. The real issue is that they often seem to just lose the last bit of their AI when some player has died in the area or something. They just stand still. At worst, I've seen basically the entire elektro populated with zeds that just don't know how to move. It turned out to be a total PvP deathmatch there, when the zeds weren't even trying to slow down the players running around the streets.

One thing that pisses me off in this game are the people who hunt down others (the bandits), but then are not man enough to take the bullet themselves and just log off when shot at... They just want to ruin other people's games, placing themselves above all others. The "It's ok if I kill someone, but not when someone else kills me." mentality. This hatred of mine for the disconnecters does not really extend to the real survivors... I don't mind them saving their asses by a DC all that much - if they themselves have never killed any other player, nor do they intend to kill. In your case... I don't know. You did execute the guy. You have killed. And apparently the guy took the bullet like a man rather than disconnecting, when he could have just DCed to avoid getting shot. But considering that you apparently did not plan to DC when getting in a tough spot, it was just a bad decision made in haste, and as long as you keep this in mind and play it fair in the future, you should not beat yourself too much over it. If you really feel like redeeming yourself, just hit the respawn button and don't go recover the gear from your dead body. But you'll probably lose your gear many more times due to deaths from game bugs anyway, so it's not really that big a deal ;)... Just never cheat again.

A good story. And don't worry... The first murder is always the hardest, and the one you'll always remember. But it gets easier and easier after every kill. A few more kills, and soon, you'll be running the streets of cherno and elektro like a ravaging madman, putting bullets in the heads of the innocent - like the rest of us who where tainted by the harsh world of DayZ, caved in and forgot our humanity. I really, really, REALLY hope that all the talk about games and movies and such affecting impressionable young minds is just utter bullshit... Because really... If this game has any effect on anyone's mind in real life... Oh hell... Nothing good could come out of that. If there is one game in the world that should be for ages 18+ only, it is this one. In no other game has shooting another person had such an emotional impact as in this.

In my experience, Berezino used to be somewhat quiet still over some 2 months ago or so... But not quite so quiet anymore. I guess the "go north" mantra, along with the groups holding camps up north have driven people there. Basically, because it's been one of those military loot spots at north. I avoid Berezino nowadays... There is lots of bandit/sniper traffic there for the military loot, and up north people are usually well equipped and have more patience, unlike down south. Meeting players up north (near military loot spots) tends to be more deadly than with the hatchet noobs at south. It also seems to depend a lot on luck and server. For quite a some time I've hanged around Elektro... And it was surprisingly quiet. (Compared to what it used to be in the old makarov spawn days) Then, one time, I happened to go on a regular server with player name tags on (I usually avoid the tags like plague, I hate them exposing my position when I'm supposed to be hidden)... And, oh hell, Elektro was like a frigging war zone on that server. Gun fire going on constantly. One thing that might have also contributed was that the zeds there were bugging and frozen mostly. So you could just run around the city, shooting at people without having to even bother to think if there was a zed standing right next to you. Anyway, I guess it depends on server / luck where the other people just happen to be. But any place with any military loot always draws people in. Berezino included.

In plain an simple, this issue comes from the 2 different approaches to the game: - The PvP players don't need any "balance" to the killing. They are just fine with the current "kill all you like" buffet. - The players who want the survival experience and tense encounters with other random people - They need a balance. For them, there must be the possibility of PvP and getting shot - but there must also be a sensible likelyhood that they won't get shot on sight. If the balance tilts too much in either way, those kind of tense encouters won't occur anymore. And how the hell to cater both of the player groups in the same game...? Don't ask me. There are plenty of tools suggested for that (like, say, having the radios, base building, writing notes, etc.), but we'll just have to wait and see which one of those we get, and how much they really affect the game. The game is on its best when both groups of players find it fun to play. The killers will have their prey scavenging stuff and scurrying around the towns scared. And the non-killer players will have their moments of cooperation and tense encounters with the possibly hostile players. If either group of players were to completely disappear from the game, it would become more boring for the other group as well. It would be nice if people could sensibly discuss these things... Rather than the PvP players always calling the non-PvP players "carebears". And the non-PvP players calling all the bandits just being assholes or dicks.

The thing is, this game really does not tell you what the goal in the game is.. Or, well, frankly, I guess it does say that it is to "survive"... But it really does not show up in the actual game all that much. Its shown only briefly when you log in. At the same time the murder counts, etc. are constantly visible on the screen. Can't blame some people who don't think the survival is really the key point in the game. So.. I guess its a sandbox... You choose your own metric for success. - Some people choose the survival time. They go with the initial setting presented by the game. - Some people choose the murder count. They are the mass murderer bandits. - Some people choose the bandit kill count. They choose to be the ones who fight for the justice. - Some people choose the loot and vehicles. Its obviously the most tangible thing presented by the game and means for the other goals. - Some people choose the zed kill count. Its the only thing you can really use your weapons for, if you don't want to shoot the other players. - Some might fail to see any point in the game. They probably won't stay with it for very long. - And some just go for some totally different creative goals. I've certainly tried many of these, with varying success. The actual goal itself is rather boring usually, just some number somewhere (the only exception being the loot). So in the end, the most fun offered by the game is never actually reaching that goal (which really usually cannot even be reached... There is no predetermined amount of days that you must survive to have "succeeded"). The most memorable fun comes from all the different - usually totally unique - situations that are presented to the player while he/she is trying to reach the so-called goal. And these situations are generally the encounters with the other people in the game. Some good. Some bad. It's not about the ultimate goal... In DayZ, everyone fails, everyone gets killed eventually. Its all about that interesting stuff that goes on, trying to reach that unreachable goal. And that is why I'm taking some risks.. If I see a player, if I'm not out to shoot him, I might try to carefully get into contact with him... I might lose all my gear by doing so, should it end up badly (like it sometimes does), but you never know... And that's what makes it so interesting. I likely won't succeed in the "ultimate goal", whatever it is, but does that really matter anyway. PS. I have no idea what all of this had to do with the original subject. Nothing, I guess... Here, have some :beans: to *nom nom* before you decide to flame me for totally wasting your time with this post.

Possibly. But there is usually a reason for not trying to create a massive horde of enemies in games. And the reason is performance. Unless greatly optimized, if you were to, say, triple the zed count - then that would probably totally kill the game performance for a whole lot of players that don't have the latest, most expensive, supah-computer. Then, suddenly half of the players would not be able to play the game anymore. That hardly would be an improvement over the current state for those players. And as far as the zed "performance" goes. It was just recently changed in 1.7.2.x. They were much less performing (less likely to spot the player) in the previous 1.7.1.5. I'm not really sure why such a change was made. Perhaps to make the zeds more unpredictable and thus make them a threat again, or something. Or perhaps something just went wrong. As far as their running speed goes in general... How much of a threat would the zeds be, if they were slower that you and you could just outrun them? Considering most of the map is just large open space - not some kind of a small indoor spaces and narrow city alleys. Slow zeds would be just plain non-threatening in this kind of environment. You could just dance around them. So yeah. The zeds aggro is a bit weird at the moment, and they are really buggy at times. But, in general, their characteristics seem to fit quite fine in this game.

Getting sniped is still somewhat easy to avoid if it is annoying you: - Never run across open fields or roads - Never climb up on the roofs - Never play on the servers where the player nametags are on. You're a free lunch for the snipers with that. - Always assume there is a sniper or few at the hills surrounding elektro/cherno. - Always move running and in the cover of the buildings/walls in the cities (makes it hard for the snipers to hit you when you are visible only briefly between the covers, and a fast moving target at those times). - If you are safe from any assumed sniper position, then you can move slower to prevent aggroing the zeds and thus prevent drawing unnecessary attention to your position. But when on open, better just run and aggro the zeds and handle them later on, than to get sniped because of the slow movement. Zeds are not your real enemy. The other players are. - Assume that the snipers on the hills may be spotting you for their friends over comms (TS, etc.), and those guys might be on their way to your last location. Don't stay at one part of the city for too long. Loot fast, and get out. - Scout any area from some good hill/treeline position before going to the area. Pay attention to the "misfeatures" of the game... Mainly, that zeds spawn around players. (This however, is now a bit harder to do since the zeds are sometimes totally broken in the 1.7.2.3). Also, the snipers at the hills/treelines are generally too far to trigger any zeds. Just assume the snipers are there even if no zeds. - Night time is bad time if you don't have the NVGs. The guys hunting you will have them. - If you move in groups, it might make sense to assign one as a spotter at the treelines or such to ensure you won't get surprised with your pants down. And at least you'll have a chance of fighting back should there prove out to be snipers that start shooting at you. And more game misfeatures that can be used as minor cues of "more players nearby"... - If your framerate goes down while in a city, it might indicate other players nearby. (causing more zed triggers and all that) - The same thing can often be seen visually too.. Unusual amount of zeds seem to be crawling around you, specifically at some direction? Probably some other player is triggering more of them there in that case. - Also any added lag when trying to pick up loot usually indicates another player is near (compared to being there solo, when there is usually no lag with the loot). - If the loot pickup lag is really really bad, then the other guy may be desyncing really bad. (Best to get out of there, because you don't want that guy to suddenly just warp next to you and shoot you.) The rest is pretty much up to your luck. Eventually some sniper is gonna get you, but at least you can signicantly reduce the risk of it by constantly playing in sensible manner to counter the snipers. All that being said... I think the high end sniper rifles, like, say, the DMR, should be more rare. They should exist, but be rare. But just making their spawns more rare probably would not really help all that much. There would still be rampart exploiting and duping going on. And an eventual build-up of those weapons as more of them are spawning to the maps and thus to the hands of the players day by day. So, what would making those spawns even more rare really do? Just make them next to impossible for the legit players to acquire (specifically survivors who don't kill people for loot), while the exploiters would still have them. First should get rid of the exploits and dupes to make things legit. That would already reduce the high end sniper rifle counts a bit. After that could start adjusting the spawn rates / make some kind of small sinks for the acquired loot (like randomly making them get destroyed when a player gets gunned down or such) to ensure that there won't be the eventual build-up of rare stuff in a system that only spawns more and more of that stuff but never removes them. (Luckily, currently, the game bugs somewhat prevent the excess build up by randomly losing stuff and killing players, etc. So the bugs are the current loot sink.) :P

I would like to call them cheaters as well.. But then again.. I know that the game saving often just bugs like hell... And just totally screws up saving your death - Resurrecting you to the position where you were a few minutes before you died, with the same gear. (In case of a sniper just standing still, I'd guess that would be the exact same position they died at). So, not necessarily a sign of a cheater. That once even happened to me 3 times during a single day, which was starting to get kind of ridiculous. And I did nothing to intentionally provoke the bug. It just felt like bugging on its own that day. I can only guess the database server had massive load going on or something.

Less than 10%. But gotta admit, it is friggin annoying when it happens. Specifically since I play fair myself and never DC when getting shot at. Then when I finally get a jump on some bandit I know was shooting other people and the guy just disconnects when getting shot... Just such BS. Those guys sure are ready to kill others in the game, but can't even be man enough to take their own medicine. Makes me want to start exploiting like an a-hole as well, just to counter those guys. I don't care so much about the obvious survivors who disconnect when being shot at. Yes, they should not do it either because its an exploit... But as long as they are not out there shooting other people, I just think that they just want to be play a PvE game... So at least they are not trying to ruin the game for others. I don't care if they play in their PvE way, and I play my PvP way, as long as they then strictly stick to that PvE and never start shooting at me/others. And I do assume many of these cheating bandit guys are assholes in real life as well, because as far as I've seen it, the guys who I know IRL who choose to cheat in games, do seem to be rather self-righteous and narsistic personalities in real life as well. I can't say my sample size on this matter would be statistically significant, but enough for me to draw my own conclusions. If you are ready to shoot other people, you gotta be man enough to accept the fact that others may shoot you too. This applies in the game. And it applies in real world as well. If you're not willing to accept that, then you're a self-centered asshole. Both in the game and in real life.

The That might be putting it a bit harshly, but yeah, people should understand that the main page statistics can lie. Some examples where the statistics might be badly off: A ) Total player bandit percentages might have nothing to do with active player bandit percentages - It is irrelevant as to how many overall bandits there are compared to overall players / unique alive character count. - What is relevant is how many bandit players have played during the last say 24h (vs. non-bandit players played in that time) The reasoning for that: I would assume, for example, that many new survivors might have just played the game a few hours, gotten killed a few times, etc. and then decided that they are not interested in playing the game anymore. (Have you looked at stats of any games that release their player behaviour stats? Often more than half of the players never bother to finish the tutorial / very first level!). So it is totally plausible that there is a huge amount of those players that have just started the game, and then stopped playing. Their possibly alive character might be dangling in the stats, unused. So overall player counts and such might tell next to nothing about what is really going on in the game. The bandits could be much more active players. I'll just assume that out of that some 100k players logged in during the last 24h, it is totally plausible that 30k or more might really be bandits. Which would give us about 30% bandit population at the servers, compared to the overall stats saying something like 13% or so. (This was just an example to illustrate, I don't really know if its that high). B ) As far as I know, the game does not mark you as a bandit from your first kill during that life. Clearly this biases towards "non-bandit" stats, even though reality is different. - Someone claimed at the forums that it would take 5 kills to become considered a bandit.. And bandit status gets cleared on every death nowadays. I don't know if that's really true, but if it is, then the bandit counts are totally off. They are really the "mass murderer" counts, not the bandit counts. Even if it would not require 5 kills, but say, 2 kills. It still heavily biases the survivor status over bandit status. In detail: Assume all bandits would be equally skilled (this is not really the case, but easier to illustrate the following point)... In that case, a bandit that meets another bandit, the chances are about 50%-50% for one of them to die. Lets say bandit A kills bandit B. Now A has a murder, and B respawns with a clean count. None of them are considered bandits. Now, A meets bandit C. Perhaps this time the bandit C kills him. At this point, you might have A and B with survivor status, possibly even C if he had recently died and that was his first kill. We have 3 bandits roaming around the cities, actively trying to kill other players, but yet, none of them appear as bandits according to stats. Because the lack of their skills / roughly equal skills, the probability statistics just keep them at about the equal 1:1 kill to death ratio. Most of the times the players won't get more than 1 kill before their death. Often they fail even at their first kill, even though they attempt it. With this logic, a huge number of the (non-professional) bandits are kept below the bandit threshold by their constant deaths. Only the real mass-murderers / skilled professional bandits stay alive long enough to get tagged as a bandit. So, if the statistics say 13% are bandits (a.k.a. mass murderers in reality), people trying to actively kill every encountered other player, just being bad at that, might still be way way more than that. Perhaps even over 50%. (Just a guessed number, who knows the real one, there are no real unbiased stats to tell this number). C ) From the perspective of a player, banditry is more common than it is in reality - The true pro survivors usually just avoid people. As that's the way you really can stay alive for a prolonged time. - What does this mean in terms encounters in the game, specifically from the perspective of a, say, new player? Obviously the new player will usually never meet those pro survivors who are scattered around the woods, and who actively stay clear of any other players when they hear gunshots or spot the player before he spots them. That is not to say that there would not be a number of such survivors in the game. Its just that they are very unlikely encounters. So, when you really meet another player in the game, in any range that would even remotely allow any kind of communication (other than putting a sniper rifle bullet to one's head), then you can count out those survivors hiding in the woods. So even if the number of survivors of the active playerbase would be over 80% (which I highly doubt, based on the previous points I presented). Then you can probably drop at least that 10%-20% of players who actively and successfully avoid any contact. Meaning that the probability of the other encountered player being a survivor is at least that much less than 80%. Maybe around 60-70%? Specifically for any new players, to whom the pro survivors could just as well be invisible (because the noobs won't be spotting them before the pros spot them and hide) Because of those reasons explained above, I think that both the main page statistics might be simply incorrect and biased towards showing people as survivors and additionally, and additionally the players' perceived experience due to random encounters being more often bandit encounters over survivor encounters, the general feeling for many probably is that 80% of other players will shoot you on sight. This might be a bit excaggerated, but probably also more true than what the main page statistics like to tell us. Until some proper unbiased statistics about this are actually collected and presented, I'll just roll with my gut feeling on this. (Which is that shoot on sight is the current prevailing trend over friendly encounters.) PS. All that said... I am not trying to say that the PvP should be somehow prevented. Without the PvP, this game would just simply be boring any player encounters would be meaningless. Just saying that it might have gone a bit over the top - mainly deterring any new solo players away from the game, as they might get the impression that there is only PvP deathmatching going on in the game. Naturally this isn't an issue for established clans and groups of people or the solo bandits.

Hint: The go north mantra that people keep saying. It's not really true. The people there are just as trigger happy and ready to kill you as in the south (If not even more, as they are protecting their precious gear, unlike the just respawned guys at the south who have no gear to protect). The only difference is that in the north, the player density as well as loot density is lower, and therefore, you'll spend more of your time running between the small towns. Thus, technically, you'll live a longer life - but that extra lifetime is just mostly filled with the extra running. And nights will obviously get you killed. Because even though the amount of players is lower... Still, most of the remaining players are those bandits that are out to hunt you with high end gear and NVGs. Unless you got NVG, night time play can be very atmospheric, but also suicidal. Play at day, stay at coast. Have some fun joining what was previously known as the cherno/elektro bean wars. Or continue playing the northern run simulator. Whatever rocks your boat. :D

Strange things happen with the game. Maybe some because of hackers, but most because of bugs I'd say. - Once my backup shotty in my alice had changed to a hatchet when I logged back in. I'm pretty sure it was still a shotty at log off as I had checked my gear just a moment before log off (and the shotty had been with me for a while). The ammo and all the rest for the shotty was still in the backpack - Once I had my entire alice change back into the patrol pack. Rest of the gear intact. - Once had a patrol pack appear on me, when I had no backpack whatsoever at log off. - And I've carried around a coyote full of canned foods only. Thats 24 cans of food if I remember the size correctly. I'm sure a lot of players might have found that very odd had they managed to kill me back then. But nothing hacked with plenty of beans. :P - I've lost a CZ I had equipped when I logged off from one server and then logged in on another. Considering I had never dropped the gun during my visit to the server, it was a bit odd. (Though that one might have been lost due to someone hacking, as the reason I left the server in the first place was because it had seemingly people hacking there. The gun was acquired earlier though). - ...And the numerous other times when something else has gone wrong with the gear saving that I don't even remember anymore. So things getting lost or just swapped to other stuff... "It happens". Specifically anything backpack related seems to be somewhat vulnerable. At least when dropping/picking up stuff, etc. I always try to avoid having to shuffle good weapons, etc. by having to drop them and then pick up again. (Rather just swap them between the main inventory and backpack if possible. At least one step less to go wrong. Lost a DMR once because just simply couldn't pick it back anymore). And it usually seems to be that picking up stuff may not get saved. And after any stuff pick up.. Better not log off for several minutes to ensure it actually gets saved. Also, a lot of semi-noob players might end up with rather good gear just by stumbling upon some dead veteran player body and looting it (or even managing to kill one). I know I've had some of my best gear setups off some random dead bodies at cherno and near NWA. So even a noob might get their hands on that stuff if really lucky. (Should they manage to stay alive with that.) This is not to say that there would not be hackers... And those damn disconnect-cheaters to go around. Just that no way to know for sure - Too much general bugginess going around.