GeeksterDayZ

1) If there was children in the game would you SOS? 2) If there was old people struggling would you SOS? 3) If there was ill or injured would SOS? 1) Children make tasty bite-sized zombie treats. Break their leg and throw them at Zed's as a distraction whie you run away! 2) Old people tend to hoard canned food. Pillage the old folk's home! They're nearly dead anyway, and it's not like they can help rebuild/repopuoate the world now is it? 3) You can get ill/injured. My mate broke a leg. I used an axe to break his face. Took his stuff. No point leaving a dying man alive to suffer, not when I can have his beans. Edit: that was supposed to be comical, by the way. I do no advocate breaking children's legs, or pillaging old follk's homes. I would axe my mate again though. That was pretty fun :D

I rarely get above 10 kills when I play. Longest I've had one character was 4ish days, and even then I was only on around 15. I don't go 'hunting' though, I play as steathy as possible and only kill if it is a last resort!

Apologies, I misunderstood what the OP was saying. After discovering for myself tonight that you cannot use the hatchet while you have a rifile on your person I retract my statement! Yes, it would indeed be nice to be able to switch between rifle & hachet without having to drop the rifle :)

What's the point of that? So you can go loot your old body for the stuff you had before? If that's the case, the why not just have people start with stuff. Or make everyone unable to die. Either way it defeats the purpose of the game. If you die, you have to start over, from a new place, and create a new story with a new character.

*sigh* Do you really think you'd get on with trying to hold a rifle in one hand and a whacking great 20Kg+ axe in the other? Axes are heavy, and requires a two-arm swing to use. Running around twiling an axe around your head while pumping out winchester rounds is just not realistic or even sensible. Your character is a survivor, not Conan the fricking Warrior. Also, melee was hacked into the game, it's just a ultra-short-ranged projectile weapon hence the need to "reload" the axe when first equipping, it having 99999 'swings' available to it and the sound/smoke effect of a gun when you swing it.

Choosing where to spawn? Hell no. I hope they never put that in. The point is SURVIVAL. It is meant to be hard, tought, unforgiving. Oh you want to play with your little friend? Then man up, sack up, and walk the 45 minutes meet each other. Along the way you'll find some stuff, they'll find some stuff, then when you meet you can trade and continue together. Oh you can only play for 2 hours? Then spend today getting together, save somewhere safe, and come back tomorrow to carry on. Between threads on here I've seen people wanting to choose where to spawn, have auto-walk, start with a weapon, be able to spawn in teams, communicate wherever you are in-game via some magical radio... Hell, why not just spawn inside a house? With supplies already in the bunker? And stay down there? And never do any exploring? And never have the awesome rush of looting a town on your own, bragging to a mate when you finally reach him & swapping stories? In fact, why not just make the game play itself? Hooray, we all survive, all the time, and no-one ever needs to actually do anything ever.

I get what @khknight is trying to say about the guns, having one should be a real sign that someone has explored & been through hell to get it. Ever played 'ALIVE' (the download-only earthquake-aftermath survial game). It was far more'arcade' style than DayZ but when you saw an enemy with a gun you were really put on edge - likewise you could threaten others with your own gun even though you had no ammo in the clip, they'd be scared enough of the gun to leave you be.

Equipping weapons can be a bit tricky, here's what I have found after about 30+ hours of play so far. Pick up a hatchet, open inventory, right-click hatchet and "Remove from toolbelt" to put it in your hands. You often have to click the mouse wheel to 'reload' the hatchet for some reason! If you pick up a gun and want to switch back to the hatchet, roll the mouse wheel to open a small side-menu and then click the mouse wheel on the hatchet. To go back to the gun, do the same, scroll the wheel until it highlights the gun, click the mouse wheel. Buggyness with backpacks. Open inventory, double-click your backpack. This will add the items in your backpack to the main items list in the top-right; the numbers of the items will be on the left of the item, the numbers on the right are the ones on your person. At the top of the list you will see the spaces you have free in your backpack (for example ALICE BACKPACK, 2/20 show you have 2 spaces free). If you have no space left, and try to add something to your backpack, you will lose it. It is GONE. I lost a morphine this way, a hard lesson. Same with moving weapons, you can have it in your hand but if you put it away without having the space for it, you will just lose it, permanently. Learn how many space stuff takes up, and check your pack often to make sure you have what you should! Best items to get early in your searching; hatchet, matches, knife and water bottle. If you have those, you can go away from the large cities where you are far more likely to get killed for your stuff. Go up to a tree in a dense forest-type area, open inventory, right-click on hatchet and "harvest wood". This will add a wood pile to your inventory (takes 3 spaces, I think). Now you can right-click on the MATCHES and choose "make fireplace". Kill sheep / cows and use the knife to gut the animal (option will appear when looking at the animal, click the mouse wheel to do it). This will create 3-8 steaks depending on the size of the animal. You can then cook the steaks on the fire you can make - again the option will appear as "cook steaks" as a mouse-wheel click when you are close to the fire and looking at it. This will cook all the steaks on your person, NOT the ones in your backpack - you may have to move stuff around so always try to keep 1 slot on your person free so you can "juggle" stuff between backpack & person withou putting it on the floor (stuff often vansihes when you put it down, especially on grass!). Steaks give you +800 blood, keep you full for a long time. You can fill the water bottle at any water source (not the sea!), often found near barns / farmland. Bascially, with those 4 items, you can find a decent place to 'live' and survive for a few days at least while you run search missions to get more items, coming back to the farm each time :)

I guess it depends on if "DayZ" is actually copyrighted. If not, you can just design your own and have a company print it for you for about the same cash that a 'official merch" site would probably sell it for. Of course it'd be great to buy merch & have the proceeds go to Rocket for doing such an awesome job!

Fair play to the guys in the camp, I say! They are playing the game as intended - if this was real-life, you wouldn't just leave a perfectly working vehcile onthe roadside because someone else might come along at some point and joyride in it instead, no, you would take it for yourself and not look back. The fact the above poster is big enough to not even be riled about being raided shows decency and respect for other players and the game. I applaud you sir :)

ITS. AN. ALPHA. You ain't gonna get "polished" or anything even close, this isnt even on the level of a playable demo yet, we're just fortunate enough to play the mod as it is being created. Yes, there are lots of bugs. Yes, it has an Everest of a learning curve. Yes, you need to watch some Let's Play videos and tutorials to help you out. Yes, the only story is the one you create yourself along the way. But living a few days, teaming up with others, looting cities, camping and hunting... its just awesome fun. But if you arn't into it, don't force yourself to play it.

Go to the STEAM properties for both ArmA II and OA, and click on "verify integrity of game cache". It'll probably find some missing files & re-download them for you. Then launch each game at administrator level once all the way to the main menu. Fixed it for me, though I have to do it almost every time I reboot my PC :(

I have heard several stories of people being "kidnapped" in-game by bandits :/

The point of starting with nothing is to make you suitably afraid of the zombies. If you started with a weapon all new players would just assume that you are meant to go killing instead of just avoiding & trying to survive.

I am now making my DayZ journeys into an ongoing blog/story here :) http://geeksterdayz.tumblr.com/