FluffyM

Yes.

This thread certainly was a roaring success.

There are tutorials in Arma2 as well as Arma2OA that explain the controls in detail. North can be figured out very easily by reading stuff on the wiki (hint: look at the clouds, or shadows if you have a compass). Starting with a weapon would lead to easy griefing and unnecessarily make the game easier. Not having one teaches people how to lose aggroed zeds and where to look for weapons. Demanding a supportive community is a two-way street. No one likes helping people that can't be bothered to figure stuff out for themselves and instead cry on the forums.

Same -.-

I'd like to see some official stats on this thesis.

I'm sure some of this has been suggested and probably declined, but I did not see a way of checking. Usually I play with a group of 2-6 players and meeting up is terribly inconvenient. Either you respawn up to 30 times, or you run around for 2 hours if you get a bad spawn. To remedy this, we could only really come up with one solution or alternatively, one slight improvement on the current system. The solution would be: 1. Set 1-3 fixed spawnpoints somewhere in the mainland, somewhere that isn't advantageous at all. Nothing nearby except maybe a really small town. Or maybe keep them on the coast, but really far out, like east of Olsha or west of Kamenka. 2. Let players choose between random spawn (same as it is now) or one of the above spawnpoints. 3. Now people that want an easy time of meeting with their friends can do so, but sacrifice the "chance" (dozens of respawns, more like) of spawning near a major town where gearing up is easy to do. The workaround, if you will: Allow players to actually party up (or "search" for a certain friend), and give them a vague directional marker to where their friends are. This marker could be set by server-admins, or it could be a fixed setting, to only appear after a certain distance. For example, it only shows up when one player is more than 5km away from his group. That's pretty much all I have for now. Feel free to rip this apart or give positive input.

One more against spawning with a weapon. At first I was very confused and disheartened. Then I spent 5 minutes on finding a weapon.

Don't really see why you'd need one in the first place, that's just cheating in my book. :p We found a map in game and that was indeed helpful, but even without it's not that hard to navigate once you have the basics down.

The game is completely different, and differently amazing, at night time. I was playing with a group of friends, we were scavenging Cherno for gear, then set out into the woods. At this point, nighttime approached rapidly and we soon found ourselves surrounded by trees. It was pitch black in the forest when a rainstorm kicked off. The raindrops were falling so fast and thick, that I had trouble seeing my character's back in 3rd person, no less see where I was going. We finally made it to the airstrip near Cherno and were scouring the hangars, when a flashbang exploded above our heads. We screamed like little girls and ran off into the woods. At this point, it had gotten even darker, and it really was impossible to see anything but the horizon. Each one of us picked up a differently coloured chemlight (they're great, they illuminate your character model fully) so we wouldn't lose each other in the woods, and headed east. After an encounter with a crazed axe murderer who no doubt spotted us due to a flare used in a small town, we logged off for the night. That was one of the most exhilarating sessions so far, the risk/reward of using light-sources and silent/noisy weaponry is very fun, the low range of vision makes it very challenging and it's just very, very fun overall.

I read the OP out aloud (including the spelling errors and caps) on mumble and I am glad to be able to tell you, it was a roaring success. Highly amusing, would read again.