entux

+1 @op. exactly what i said a few weeks ago. there's still the chance, this mod is not supposed to be the one i thought it would be... namely survining against zeds, not mindelss noob bashing.

i fail to understand why 75% of replies are actually just the same circle jerk over and over, where on is complaining about rocket and someone else jumps to his defense. i did not intend this thread as judgment on rockets motives, but rather to undestand them better and to give my feetback as to what would this game make it great and live up to its premise. i thought the main focus of this mod should be survivial against overwhelming odds of zeds. once you figure out the basics of the game, it's just another frag fest. i think this would be remedied by making the game hard to solo. even for seasoned players. at its current stage, the mod doesn't offer a whole lot of challenge unless you are stupid or seriously bored. of course this is because of it's alpha status... at least i tend to say that to myself. looking at another zombie survival game - minecraft - the game's motivation didn't change after its release. they added tons of content, still, it's far from being a challenge. atm dayz' only challenge are other players and there's simply too many games that do that better, especially since dayz is not balanced in any respect. it's just griefers all over the place and that's hardly a good alpha/beta testing ground unless rocket wants to build the game around the elment of griefing. i think it's clear that this is not the case. regarding my initial point 3: arma 2 is clearly getting it's datetime from the system. adding a multiplier to that number is something i could probably HACK into the existing code. this is not difficult at all... for the arma devs. adding a "int_timemultiplier" setting should be something very easy unless you really really fucked up your core code. this SHOULD be as easy as changing one line of code, if it was done right from the start... which of course i can't say.

so i've been playing 1.7.1.5 for a while with some pals and had fun until we reached a point where zeds were basically no threat any more. all that's left to do now, is to shoot other players in the face. while i like the notion of being able to do full on pvp, i'm rather disullusioned with the actual premise of the mod itself. 1.7.2 was just cosmetic imho. i'm actually quite irritated that there aren't any big changes going on to make the mod live up to it's potential. isn't this mod all about survival against zombies? isn't the pvp just a side element to be used only because there's no other way out of a dire situation? i think of dayz as a coop game rather than free for all pvp. in my idea 3 major things would need to be implemented to reach some kind of tangible goal in this respect. i don't know anything about how hard it is to implement those and i'm well aware that there might be quite some obstacles due to how amra 2 is built: 1. server hopping, disconnecting to avoid death or get out of a dire situation. i know there's a massive thread about that, 2. zeds need to pose a real threat and need to be drawn to players. kind of like a gravitational pull. the more players, the more zeds. currently you can't die easily after you found some basic gear and hide in the woods, 3. time of day. it needs to be locked and set by the master server. for that to be fair, there needs to be a faster day/night cycle. at least 4 times faster. i get that, this is a design decision, but i think it doesn't work out as the devs planned, or does it? these three points are quite a major undertaking and i guess at least 1. and 2. are actively worked on to some extend, but i've no idea in what general direction this mod is headed. i can only say, that i'd rather have dayz as a very difficult and fun coop experience with pvp elements, which are passively discuraged by how HARD it should be NOT to working together, than the current pvp kill fest. personally i have no interest in that kind of game and there's already billions of them to choose from. especially arma 2 comes to mind. i think you should be heavily penalized if you want to be a bandit, not encouraged. Having said that I was wondering, why are there only small incremental steps in the patches? i thought the fine tuning is something for late beta. is it, that those things are hard to implement with the current engine or are my expectaions wrong to begin with?

it's kos because the game is in alpha and zeds are no real danger, while survival is easy after a certain level of experience and/or gear is reach. there's basically no other reason. people are looking for something to do.

when zeds are are real threat and resources are really hard to get to, pvp will be down to minimum. pvp is only interesting, because after a certain (gear) point there isn't really anything else to do. ...and of course this is an alpha, which is why we shouldn't expect it be more than it is. i'll just wait and see how it turns out and jump in every other patch or so. maybe even do a bug report once in a while.