mrducky (DayZ)

OP has my full agreement on the issue. The game seems pretty much plagued by hackers at the moment if you ask me. I haven't played for about a week now and I probably am not going to bother in the foreseeable future. The whole thing started to seem ridiculous when by far the most common encounters in the game started to be ghillie guys all carrying M4 SD and AS 50. And when shooting at these crappy players, who can't even aim properly with their hacked gear, will either a ) cause them to mass kill the entire server right after they die or b ) just do absolute nothing, no matter how many times you shoot them at point blank range, because they are invincible. And all of this started to happen even on the less populated servers. It's hard to see any point in playing that kind of game. If most of the people you meet is using the best possible gear, it seems to make more sense to just go play the plain Arma 2 - at least there you will instantly have the best possible gear too. I hope that BI would actually get a sensible anti-cheat going on for the standalone, but I'm a bit doubtful. It was fun while it lasted, so I might return for the standalone, but only if it seems that the problems have been solved in it (which does not seem like the most likely scenario though).

Consoles? + Pros: Could finally get rid of the hacker plague that will always be present on PC. - Cons: Don't make me laugh... This game/engine barely runs properly on modern PC hardware, uses shit loads of memory, and is full of holes. Try running that on the current console hardware or even getting an approval for its release. So.. Yes... if they redo the whole engine first, then this might be something worth discussion. But, currently, the idea seems just utterly ridiculous.

Underrated? Definitely the winchester and the lee enfield. Easy to find. Basically one kill. (Doesn't really necessarily kill a player with the first hit, but will generally punch them unconscious, which is effectively the same as being dead, as the second shot will finalize the deal). Winny also has an adequate rate of fire. They also have a decent effective range. Obviously nothing compared to sniper rifles, but if you aren't an elektro hill sniper bandit, but rather run around scavenging towns, then it's not really sniper rifle you are looking for anyway. I don't know why I ever started hoarding those crappy assault rifles and sniper rifles anyway... Been doing much better in fights after changing back to just using lee enfield and winny. One shot kills are the way to go.

The soldier clothing (not the camo) is hacked in. Last time I killed a hacker who was wearing one (because even with his hacked in fancy gear he still totally sucked at shooting :P), he apparently got pissed off and mass-killed the entire server. So, it's probably best just to DC on any sign of that clothing and go to another server. Secondly, if you put on any clothing after recently picking up a backpack, it tends to revert your backpack to the previous one. Maybe even sometimes make it disappear. It happens, the game just bugs. (I've never had the backpack disappear due to change of clothes when I have had the same backpack since joining the server though. Thus, I assume it has something to do with the recent backpack pickup. But could be just random luck.) Also, sometimes the game just randomly loses all your stuff, etc. with no apparent reason. It happens.

With the bandit skins back (assuming they would work properly), I see less reason for any other major incentives for survivor play style. Thus, the suggestion seems unnecessary. Now that it is theoretically possible to identify at least most of the biggest mass murderers, the survivors should have a possibility to have a little bit of trust on each other again, not full trust, but a bit of it anyway. (And a little bit of deterrant for useless killing - as the survivors probably don't want to start appearing as bandits themselves). There is supposed to be some tension in the random encounters, I'd expect the skins to balance that a bit again. However, the other issues, mainly hacking, duping and alt+F4 should obviously be addressed. Because they give an unfair advantage to those using them. And a lot of the hackers and dupers are probably playing in bandit style, sniping people from the elektro hills, etc. (Note, there is no point in playing as a survivor who explores and scavenges stuff, if you already have hacked the best gear for yourself - so survivors are probably not really hacking.) So that hacking and duping and use of alt+F4 all contribute to the bandits being able to more effectively keep killing the survivors. It those were removed, the bandits might actually have to start using the banditry to gain gear after their death, which would tone the killing down a bit and make it all a bit more sensible. Then again... Its damn easy to get decent gear within an hour after spawn, so I doubt the banditry would change much even if duping didn't exist. Maybe we would see a bit less sniper rifles on the hills and a bit more assault rifles, but that's about it.

Ah... now you got it all wrong... How it really goes: Humanity resets when you connect to your alive character. At least that seems to be the case for me - Every re-connect gets me back to 0 humanity. Then I hide in the bushes waiting for that 10 minutes or so for the bandit skin to change to survivor skin. Now, that's how it works. :)

What? Has it really been fixed. I installed the 1.7.2.5. expecting my assault rifle ammo count to finally go down, so that I might actually have a reason to waste 10 inventory slots carrying those damn things. ...Yet, All of the mags have been full every time I've connected so far. I dunno... maybe it requires a server side update too or something... Or maybe I'm just being lucky with random glitches again.

I had 0 at first. And then I had about -30k (after killing a single bandit, and getting mass teleported to the ocean). Then I had 0 again after death. And now I have 0 every time I re-connect despite the value slowly going up and being different on disconnect. Go figure.

People will usually opt for the easiest and most obvious solution to a problem. For example, you die in DayZ. Clearly you want to get the items you previously had or better. You know you can get the stuff by running 10 minutes to your corpse to get them. Or do you instead pretend to be dumber than you are - to not know where you died - and to go looking for the stuff elsewhere? Some might do that, but most won't. Because it is "artificial stupidity". If in any game, you have two weapons, a crappy weapon A (say, a pistol) and a awesome weapon B (say, a machine gun) - how many of the players will intentionally use the pistol only when they have a better alternative? Very few. Or even in real life, if your sports team is clearly winning a match, for example in football - do you go and kick the ball in your own goal just to make the game more interesting? You know, to just add to the possibility of losing instead of winning? Of course you don't! The same applies in DayZ. As long as the game mechanics allow people to take the easy way to reach their goal, they will usually do just that. People who take the optimal (and legit) choice to succeed in the game are not flawed, it is the game mechanics that are flawed if anything. And if such mechanics really ruin the game, then they should be fixed. I hope new players would understand to stay away from the loot maps, at least for a while. As they'll be missing a great deal of that exploration if they do. But still, it's their own choice. And there is really no way to prevent that, not unless the game randomly generates the content. For those who have played this game long enough, the loot maps are worthless anyway - as then you already know all of that without needing any maps. Also, at that point, the exploration no longer offers new experiences - when "you've seen it all", you don't see anything interesting or fun in exploring the map anymore. The game shifts from that wandering and exploration to more of a farming or base-building. And perhaps the game should do just that! It's a new form of gameplay that lasts longer than the exploration in a static map... (Now, if the map wasn't static and the same every time, then things might be different.) Well, I do hope the duping and infinite ammo bugs and such would get fixed. I would not mind knowing that my assault rifle might actually sometimes run out of ammo. (Note, I'm not duping, but I certainly have no problem with ammo due to "tactical reloads"). Also, it should be noted that the game just keeps spawning more and more of loot inside the game. It will be a tricky thing to balance all of that so that rare does not mean "next to impossible to find", but at the same time, still actually remains rare. You know: rare today, an every household item tomorrow - if more of those things just spawn spawn spawn. If that's not what people want, that's their choice. I see no harm in that. (Personally I found the intial part of disorientation and exploration in the game most fun - but people have different preferences.) Obviously those that are not here for the "DayZ experience" as you put it, are probably more eager to just shoot on sight. But also, this applies to those who were here for the DayZ experience, but have now exhausted what it had to offer. I would love to have the same experience I had in the intial days of playing DayZ... But... I realize that just isn't possible anymore. No more new content, no more super deadly zed infested new areas to explore, nothing more to gain by teaming up with someone - you're teaming up only to lose all you have. The game is just unable to offer a sensible DayZ experience at that point. The game has the same content, the same difficulty level, etc. for all of the players. In order to still allow new players to get in, the bar cannot be set too high. But at the same time, the high end players are now left with nothing to do in realm of the "DayZ experience". So they go for the next best thing the game can offer. The loot farming and the cherno bean wars. By doing that, they obviously unfortunately interfere with the other kind of experience. All of this might change in the future standalone. Or it might not. We'll just have to wait and see. PS. I hope to see if the re-introduced bandit skin is able to bring back some of the "good old days", when even the armed survivors were still willing to sometimes risk an encounter with each other. (Although, I doubt the difference will be anything significant. It won't change the fundamentals of only having everything to lose on the encounter, and nothing to gain.)

Sounds really unlucky encountering that amount of hacks in a short time. I've clocked hundreds of hours to DayZ now.. And I've been killed 2 times by a clear hack. - The first time was months ago, everyone on the server was killed. - The second time was today, everyone got teleported to the ocean (which didn't really kill me, but led to loss of most gear - which is pretty much the same and also led to my subsequent death) In addition to those clear hacks, I've see hacked tanks rolling down the streets, people basically openly admitting to hacking on the side chat and then a few cases of disconnecters, getting killed by a server hopper getting behind me, and seen some probably duped loot and that kind of usual exploit (rather than hack) stuff. And of course there are those couple of times when someone had killed me thanks to major desync, but that isn't really a hack, its just an engine bug (assuming they other players have not triggered it intentionally). There may have been several other cases too where I've gotten killed by a hacker, just not knowing that, but no point in speculating over those. So yes, clearly the hacks do exist. And even if they aren't more common than in other games, still, because of the persistent nature of the game they are much more annoying than in some other normal deathmatch game. (In other games, you'll just lose maybe 30 seconds of play effort - in DayZ... well. It's a bit different.) Hopefully, BIS / BattlEye put some effort to hack prevention. It certainly would be nice if there would not be all those hackers to deal with in addition to all the bugs and the general douchebaggery in the game.

First of all, it all depends on whether your CPU or GPU is overheating. (If both - you should really look more into you chassis ventilation). Secondly, setting graphics settings to minimum probably won't affect the GPU or the CPU overheating. Choosing lower graphics setting just means that instead of pushing a few nice looking frames, your computer uses the same amount of power, but is now pushing more frames that look crappier. What you need to do instead of lowering the graphics settings, is to ensure that your CPU / GPU get some idle time. The easiest way to do this, specifically for the GPU, is to set the vsync on (if you don't already have it on). It will make your framerates go down a bit to match the screen refresh rate (or some value the multiple of which it is). The rest of the time the GPU can idle while waiting for the vsync - and that will bring its temperature down a bit. Also, DayZ really taxes the CPU, which is a likely to heat up. Some notes on that: - Make sure there is no dust buildup on the CPU heatsink - Make sure the CPU and the chassis fans are actually running properly (the normal cheap chassis fans tend to die after a few years of heavy use) - If you have some kind of smart fan speed feature that adjust the CPU fan based on temp, go tweak it in the bios - either disable it completely or adjust it so it revs up to max speed even on lower temperatures - If you chassis fan speed can be adjusted, set it to max And of course, make sure you have no unnecessary applications running in the background while playing. They might be utilizing some of the CPU cores while playing, causing unnecessary additional power usage and heat up. All in all, if things are installed/working correctly and there is no dust - and the computer chassis is sensible - even the stock CPU coolers should be able to pretty much deal with even the maximum CPU usage if you haven't overclocked anything.

Something weird going on with the humanity, I got no idea how it is supposed to work. First time I updated to 1.7.2.5, I got humanity at zero. And looking like a bandit for a few minutes. I assumed it was meant to be reset for each players, but then to be persistent across death. After a while, it had risen to about 900 - at which point the entire server population got teleported to the ocean. Now, things got curious... After I reconnect, I suddenly had about -30k humanity... Maybe all of my past sins caught up with me? After hours of swimming and some reconnects, I finally got reset on a beach instead of the ocean. Having lost almost all of my gear to the ocean and then getting my leg broken with no morphine and having a bandit skin, I decided it was easier just to let the zeds eat me and restart than crawl around and hope for any help. And now, after death. Back at zero humanity again...? And every time I reconnect I'm back to zero humanity, even if I have not died. So I got no idea what is going on. The humanity does not seem to be persistent across lives or even across play sessions. Each session starts at zero humanity and with a bandit skin that goes away after a few minutes when the humanity goes up... And I wonder what was up with that -30k then. Anyways, the humanity certainly does not seem to be working sensibly - at least not for me.

You know, if you actually owned two copies of the game, then the two of you could play it properly. It's really basic math. 1 purchase = 1 copy of the game 2 purchases = 2 copies of the game Your local school of pirating might have educated you that 1 purchase = N copies, but you know what... It really does not always work like that.

Yup. I'm now swimming in the middle of the ocean as well. And no luck getting a position reset on reconnect. A respawn button sure would sound nice at the moment. Guess I could just keep swimming north and hope for the best (that is dying of dehydration). Or I could just go away and wait for the eventual random database reset at some point of time in the future, so that my character gets reset.

It's really easy to kill the zeds if you want to and once you find some proper gear. Once went on a zombie clensing rampage, just constantly trying to clear elektro of the buggers (which is obviously impossible due to the zed respawns), scored about 950 zeds during the 2 days of surviving, mostly with an AKM. (And then the streak ended when some player shot me while I was eating some beans having a little break of the zed killing) :P So yeah, killing zeds is easy if you don't really care about the amount of days you survive. Obviously the more you keep shooting the zeds, the more likely you'll expose your position to the other players which usually gets you killed eventually. You can even rack up some 100 zed kills quite easily with the hatchet alone once you know the zeds well enough. Probably will lose of lot of blood in the process though. Killing zeds, easy - Surviving the other players, quite a lot more challenging. (Unless you're happy to patiently camp in the woods near some small town).

You can play the game alone, if you want to... The point just is, that it is exactly what you will have to do... I mean: Play alone. Avoid all the other players. Really there are 2 sensible ways to play the game: a ) Try to avoid all the other players you see. b ) Try to kill all the other player you see. If you play alone, you'll end up doing one of those alone - or If you play with some friends, then you and your friends as a group will probably end up doing one of those as a group. Just don't expect to encounter any cooperative friendlies in the game (Surely, such an encounter can happen, but is way too rare to rely upon and base your playing style to).

The thing is, that once you've collected the silenced weapons, nvgs and all that, it is easy to survive for days if you want to. It is actually easy even with nothing but a hatchet as a weapon. Log in, head to some smaller town, go find an animal or check some barn for beans, eat the food, get water from a pond/well, log out. Repeat the next day. It isn't much of a challenge to survive for weeks like this... It's just that it is utterly boring for most people. And people rarely play games to get bored - usually they play games to have fun. Games are entertainment. There obviously are alternatives to just hiding in the woods and getting bored - or being a bandit: - Go to the coast to help the unarmed players... Well, that's a more interesting challenge, but eventually gets you killed. Either some third guy shoots you while you try contact / coop with the unarmed player (because this interaction with other players usually hinders your ability to play smart and stay in cover, etc.). Or, the even more likely scenario, the guy you are helping kills you and gets away with all your fancy gear. Might still be fun for a few times, but eventually, it gets kinda annoying to have to re-acquire all that high end gear again and again, knowing that some backstabbers are running around with your previous gear on some server and you have basically no way to even find the guy ever again. Want to go and give your newly acquired gear to one more backstabbing bandit? - And basically it's the same thing when playing medic, etc. - And about hunting bandits... Even though killing bandits is highly rewarding - both loot-wise as well as emotionally... The problem is that you cannot really recognize them. So... You'll just end up doing nearly no bandit hunting at all, or accidentally killing those who were not real bandits - thus actually being a bandit yourself. It is rarely that you can say with any certainty that someone is a bandit. Basically only if you see him shoot someone in the back or shoot an unarmed player. It is quite rarely that you manage to witness such a thing. - And how about cleaning the towns of the zeds? Well, you can easily rack up some 1000 zed kills in a few days if you really want to. But to what end? The zeds spawn back within minutes. You've essentially done nothing by shooting them - apart from causing every bandit to be aware of your presense, which really isn't that smart and will lead to your premature death. So, if you want to intentionally play in "suicidal mode", then there are lots of options. But if you want to survive, then it's either hiding in the woods avoiding other players and getting bored - or being a bandit and just shooting everyone on sight. There is only so much you can do within the game mechanics and still call it a sensible thing to do.

For at least the roughly 3 months I have played DayZ, it has always been mostly about shooting on sight. Yet, it was a little bit different earlier than now. And it's probably heading even more to the direction it has been going on lately. In short: Once the supply of new players eventually starts to diminish (a.k.a. survivors), there will only be the old players left (a.k.a. mostly bandits) - And they have nothing more left to do in the game than to shoot at each other. Maybe the game features/mechanics change before that happens, but probably not fast enough to really offset the playerbase change.

Yeah, the small towns are "useless" if you already know the game well enough and can easily manage a loot run to one of the bigger cities and get most of your gear from those. But then again, at that point, ALL of the locations in the map are basically useless, even the bigger cities, because you don't really need anything. But if you are a new player, or want to try surviving without PvP and possibly have some player encounters with in some new ways, then going to a small town can even be sensible. Though I usually nowadays just grab some assault rifle from balota after a respawn and then get the ALICE and stock up at cherno or something alike, I lately tried out just running to a middle map small town right after spawn. Grabbed a hatchet on my way there and started slaughtering the zeds from the town with the hatchet. Constantly running from one end of the town to another and cleaning up the loot from the small residential houses, sheds and a barns there. It probably took me less than 2 hours to get a winny, revolver, alice, compass, water, binocs, etc. etc. Basically all survival gear "maxed out" - apart from having morphines or having a military grade weapon / nvgs. So for survival, by essentially collecting the loot in a small town, you can get all you need. So in that sense, they are not useless if you opt for that style of play... But obviously, you can get the same gear much faster in some larger coastal city. So yeah, I guess they are a bit useless, but not every town in the map has to be the next cherno with PvP deathmatch going on and military loot spawning in.

Solution: Check if the server has a lot of players with clan tags in names. If so, choose another server instead. It won't guarantee that the other players would not be part of a group as well, just not showing it in their name, but at least you've just ruled out a whole lot of players that were sure to be a part of a clan/group. Plenty of servers out there, no need to choose the one where the clans are playing.

It's a bug. (Been happening since 1.7.2.3 or something) - Sometimes you get the meat instantly from the carcass after gutting (as it should happen) - Sometimes it takes a while. Like a minute or so. - Sometimes it seems to have depended on the weapon I've been equipping - sidearm vs rifle (but frankly, I think this has just been about the timing of the bug just happening to match my weapon change) - And sometimes the animal drops away before you get anything out of it. It's a meat roulette. You never know if you're gonna win or not. :)

More animals - Might depend on your location in the map I guess. Lately (probably because of my current location), Mostly I've encountered much more animals than I really need. I probably kill less than one third of the animals I see. Simply because I don't have the backpack space for all that meat. If you cannot find animals, you may want to consider if it is because of your location. Give the canned foods 500+ blood as opposed to 200/300 - There is a obvious reason why canned food give much less health compared to meat. Getting meat requires you to get some items first, and cook the meat, etc. If the meat/canned food were to give nearly comparable amounts of health, the whole point of finding the knife, matches, hatchet and then go find an animal would be lost. Though in all honesty, once I get those items, I really don't bother looking for any canned food anymore. Its so useless in comparison to meat and higher risk to get. Something like changing from 200 to 300 might be sensible to fix that a bit, but certainly not to 500. More canned goods/food - Not sure about this. Lately, I have found much less canned food than I used to. But it might just be because of my location rather than some spawn rate adjustment. Might be sensible to adjust - or not. All in all, the scarce food has some point to it. The game should make you feel a bit desperate to get some food when you are on low blood. If it was easy to just restore your blood to max every time you have taken damage, it would just make the game even more like an arcade shooter. Have a firefight with someone or a hairy situation with zeds - once done with that, auto-restore your health. The game should not be like that. The damage you take should feel a bit more persistent. It is already highly unrealistic that you can usually fully restore your health after being shot by just eating up a cow - or your friend giving you an instant blood transfusion. :P

Yes, playing solo is obviously a bit more difficult than cooping with someone you know... But the bloodbags aren't really the reason. Its easy to get the blood up, even when playing solo, you just need to hunt the animals, and always keep a few pieces of cooked meat in your backback. In that sense, the game just offers different mechanics of keeping up the blood for the solo players and the coop players. The only real significant disadvantage when playing solo is that you have no safety net for your loot in case you die. Which basically means that if you die (getting shot by another player), you really do most likely lose all of your gear. Death really means that you may have to restart from the scratch. For a tight group of people, a single person dying is not really a problem. They just regroup and the dead guy can re-acquire his stuff from his body / friends. That is the only, and quite significant, difference in solo vs group play. Surviving solo isn't really that much more difficult than in a group. Zeds are never the real problem once familiar with the game. And a shot to the head kills both of the players equally, whether in group or not. The difference is only what results after death. Also, playing solo has a few small advantanges, such as being able to move faster, being able to fully concentrate on the environment rather than where your friend is. I really don't think that survival time wise, there isn't much difference whether you play solo or in a group. You just have to play differently. As a solo player, you just need to be cautious and avoid people, specifically groups of people. In combat, being outnumbered isn't a good thing. The PvP issue is a totally different thing... It's a general "flaw" in the current game. Obviously, solo players in particular, have even less chance for any other interaction than shoot on sight. So the issue is probably most apparent for those players.

It's a game, it's not real life. So realism was thrown out of the window on day one. You are not really killing a person by shooting him in the game. But yes, you are nullifying his/her hours of work by doing so - so its not a very nice thing to do anyway. I do often shoot newly spawned players, even unarmed ones... Why? Because just because that player has respawned, does not mean that he would not be a bandit who kills other people on sight and would continue to do so the moment he gets a gun. What I try NOT to do, is to shoot new players, the ones that are really new to the entire game. Because I still consider them to be innocent to the KoS going on. Unfortunately, it is rarely that I can truly know who is a new player and who is just a new respawn. And usually I just opt for the assumption that "guilty unless proven innocent". Also, I've noted that unarmed players can be indirectly hostile. If they are part of a group, they usually communicate to that (often hostile) group - And this obviously poses a problem. The guy might not have a gun on him, but his friends have. And I don't intend to get killed in that manner anymore, so, I'll just rather cut off their spying communication. With the one method available to me. Which is to just shoot the unarmed guy. I try treat players by the person behind that character, not by the temporary character that might be one minute of age and thus supposedly "innocent" with zero murders. The temporary character lifetime and its stats are irrelevant. Death is not a real persistent death even in this game. You respawn and run to get your gear back (from your body or clanmates) - and then continue whatever you were doing. You are the same person despite the death in-between those lives. If you have killed others for no reason, then you still deserve the same faith, despite the respawn. TL;DR - Because I've been killed dozens of times for no reason by the other players, I feel no obligation to be above all that (and contantly getting killed), and thus will kill on sight as well to counter the situation. It's either that or just quit playing the game. If that is not what the game is supposed to be, then the game mechanics should be changed to counter it. It's as simple as that.

DayZ is a frustrating and painful experience even if you have perfect hearing. No reason to expect otherwise in case of being deaf. :D No, but seriously, like others have stated... The zeds are probably not the biggest problem, even though their sounds make it easy to detect when you aggro one of them. Lacking that sound, you are more likely to get surprised by a zed from behind. But that can be compensated by just being more careful around zeds and looking around youself more actively. The biggest problems will probably be not being able to hear gunshots or the bullets hitting the ground next to you. That will significantly reduce your chances of reacting to other players presense / someone trying to shoot you. Probably a lesser issue if you plan on playing as a careful survivor around smaller towns and always scan the treelines carefully for snipers and look at the zeds for cues of player presense in the town. Lack of voice communication probably isn't a big deal, since most players will rather just shoot on sight without any communication attempts anyway.