mrducky (DayZ)

Its a bug. I Had that issue myself too a while ago. I'm guessing that apparently the game sometimes saves your character data just as you go down unconscious. And then, for some reason, if it fails to save the data again after your death, the next time you play, it loads the state where you are unconcious... But something apparently goes wrong, and that time in the hourglass can total bogus. For me, it was basically not moving at all (got a few pixels of progress in after waiting an hour or so). So for me, it basically took a whole day to get rid of it. I just kept logging on to servers, and just dangling there waiting for someone to find me and pop a bullet in my head, but since that never happened, finally, at the end of the day, the water level went to zero and started to cause the blood to go to zero. After that I finally died and could restart. The game seems to have quite a lot of these random save bugs (I've certainly experienced them many times and in different forms). Often, after dying, you can end up spawning unconscious to the same location or somewhere where you were several minutes ago with all of your gear. Usually, the timer just moves or you keep bleeing to death rather than being stuck in that screen for a whole day. (Its probably best to wait for a moment in the you died screen just to make sure it isn't triggered by disconnecting too early, but it really does not seem to prevent it, it still can happen regardless.) I hope they get that fixed at some point. At least the hourglass getting totally stuck. The wait was tedious (and an unnecessary waste of server player slots). Other than that, the bug of spawning with your stuff but the hour glass properly moving.. We'll I'm not complaining about that, its always a nice surprise to get your stuff back after death. :D (even though some ppl apparently use it as a misfeature to intentionally cheat death, which obviously isn't fair, and thus should be fixed somehow).

Well, I'd say, go for it, if you feel like trying it. Just have some kind of back-up plan to get the thing rolled back with "minimal damage", should things get out of hand. I guess the current system is a bit flawed, but still, without it, like some others here, I fear things might get a bit hairy. From a point of a lone survivor, I think the game already gives a big advantage to bandits. Specifically if you play without any voice comm. Try to type something in the chat, and you'll just be making yourself a stationary easy target. The guy who is willing to pull the trigger and empty the clip to your head on sight already has the upper hand. So the communication on encounters surely are a frantic, paranoid game of hide and seek, gun pointing, and "friendly?" texts. And that's with other people wearing survivor skins. At least in those cases you might sometimes be willing to risk the chatter (and also most often get shot for it). Take away the skin difference (which already is very little guarantee) and the result will be even more of the shoot first, ask later. Considering that I'm already starting to get frustrated to getting constantly sniped by bandits and shot at point blank range by people with survivor skins - and bored after collecting the same stuff over and over again - and once done with it, having nothing to do but to hide in the woods or get myself killed in some town... And the only thing keeping my boredom in check and preventing me from going about to create mayhem is mainly that I wish to keep my humanity and the survivor status (skin). Take away that incentive, and well... I just might relieve my boredom by going to have some shootouts on the coast. So if my current survivor logic is generally: a) Try to avoid other people, both survivors and bandits. b) If you happen to have a clean shot at a bandit, take it. (And for bandits it seems to be: Take the shot) It's probably now going to be: a) If you happen to have a clean shot just take it, no questions asked. Nothing will change for the bandits, at least the dedicated ones, they'll still shoot everything that moves. So things will get even more difficult for the survivors. They'll be targets for both the bandits and even more to each other. The balance will tip even more for the bandit game style. The added amount of spawned zombies already made survivor life harder, and bandit life easier. ('cos the real bandits won't bother scavengering villages, they'll be just sniping the survivors doing that, and having to avoid the added zeds just makes one an easier scope target, and mistaking in shooting the zeds will certainly tell every bandit where you are). I was originally kinda hoping the added zeds would have added the need for survivors to band together, but in the end, it just made it a much harder for survivors to successfully loot towns without getting shot (and incidentally caused the framerate on my oldish quad core to dive to 10 fps or so near the zed hordes) :P The whole realism aspect of this can be forgotten - Its not realistic that a person changes appearance if he has killed someone - but neither is is realistic that ppl are polygon-faced clones who's tone of voice cannot be heard nor any other subtle cues can be seen. Nor is it realistic that a person can start a shootout with you and once both of you are dead, just hit the respawn button until he respawns close enough to your bodies and then run to loot them. So no, the game is not realistic as-is, nor will it be any more realistic by preventing the appearance change. If you really would want realism, then the lives should be persistent - if you die, you really really die and cannot play the game again. Now, that would actually make the bandits re-think about whether they're willing to start a shootout :). The current penalty of having a bandit skin is really nothing compared to that. So the realism aspect... pff.. forget it. The skin change has nothing to do with that. If anything it added a little hint of realism (by having at least some penalty for the bandit's starting shootouts, since they don't really have to fear for their loss of life). With all this said, I slightly fear for the game turning even more from surviving the zeds and other players - more so into a TDM between the few somewhat organized bandit groups, and some lone gunmen (the previous lone survivors) thrown into the mix... All shooting at each other. But as if I would know where it actually leads to - Maybe even to a brighter future where all people try to co-operate in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust... We'll just have to wait and see. :)

Yeah, I think this is the same issue as reported in a couple of other threads, for example: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1137 And I too understand the "really, devs?" comment - having the same issue. The fact that the game deliberately disables all input during the hourglass (even any methods of exiting the game!) is questionable as-is. I think that one really should be able to, for example, exit a game whenever one wants to, rather than having to wait for some game world event to allow that - or having to kill the game process from the task manager. Now, that wait wouldn't be much of an issue, if only there wasn't the persistent save bug, which causes the hourglass to appear and the game to get stuck on EVERY SINGLE attempt to play it. Basically, at this point, I'm just waiting to see if devs would be kind enough to reset my account - since the bug is bound to user id, which is bound to the ArmA 2 cd-key... which I incidentally bought just to try out this mod. And now I'm finding out, after first day of playing, that I cannot play the game anymore. (Obviously its a bit annoying, to say the least.) I've tried all things imaginable on my end, but cannot really find a way to get past the bug (since it is really in the persistent dayz database data which I have no access to). Lesson learned: Never pay for a game just to play a free mod, 'cos if the mod doesn't work, you're screwed. As you cannot really blame the game you bought for the mod's issues. And you cannot expect a free mod to have a 24/7 customer service for the non-paying "customers" either. So, I cannot really demand for a refund for ArmA 2 (since it works, but I'm not really interested in playing it as-is). And I cannot expect dayz mod devs to quickly jump on the bug just because I've been stupid enough to pay for ArmA 2 to play the otherwise free alpha stage mod (regardless of any affiliation between them). Still... I'm hopeful that this gets solved at some point.

Yeah, I got the same problem. It would seem that the game has somehow saved the state of the player dying (I kinda figured that out as I see the broken bone symbol on the HUD too, which was the case before my last death)... and then, when trying to join a game, it will just always go to that dying state - but this time, being buggy so that the time won't pass. Neither the ingame chat work will work (as it cannot be used during the dying state) and nor will any other ingame control/menu (at least I have to kill the ArmA process from the task manager to get out of that screen). The problem persists regardless of the selected server. (Or the selected player profile name - as they apparently share the save data) So basically, I cannot play the DayZ mod anymore - at all. :( If would be really nice to get that bug fixed - or to just get my player save data completely wiped out so I could start a fresh game without the buggy save. EDIT: After a tedious day of connecting to different servers, leaving the game on for hours on end, finally I got rid of the bug. The hourglass time never really got anywhere, but my water level eventually dropped to mimum and started causing damage. And after a few attempts of loitering on servers it finally caused my blood level to go all the way to zero and thus causing death and allowing me to continue the game. All in all, it took hours of waiting in the hourglass screen, so its definitely not something I want to do again... ever. But, it seems that when the bug appears, its may possibly mean several hours or maybe even days (or indefinitely) of waiting to get rid of it. I hope the bug gets fixed soon so this doesn't happen to people, 'cos it was one tediously long wait.