louist

I wasn't expecting anything else from this fine community. Come now, if I spawn outside Electro, naked, soaking, and freezing, I'm going to check Electro. That's a no-brainer. Given the way temperature works right now, you need to grab something to wear as soon as possible. But that's beside the point. Mentioning that I couldn't find an axe =/= equal a no-loot complaint. Heck, if I couldn't find any loot, I probably wouldn't have noticed that the spawns had been fixed. But hey, reading comprehension can be tough, so I wont hold it against you. I managed to play again the other night with a friend, and I'm still not seeing a large difference. I appreciate the added content, obviously, but I'm disappointed to see Zombies haven't changed, or that character movement is still a work in progress. I'll give it another go next weekend, and see if anything jumps out.

People have a way of distilling lists of changes into those that have a meaningful impact on their play sessions. But, in an effort to be less of a burden, I had a look at what's changed since April/May. While there looks to be a fair number of new items and some new towns, I didn't experience much different in my few hours of play. Most of the areas I went through had been picked clean of food and weapons, the fire station in Electro had must have had 15 crowbars, and almost as many fire extinguishers, and I saw only 3 zombies. The inventory was still buggy and slow to react, some items I removed teleported to the room above me, while some others just disappeared... My experiences today were not marketly different than they were last spring, though I did spend most of my time trying to not freeze to death. Couldn't find an axe for the life of me.

... And I'm wondering what's different? Loot spawns seem to be fixed, and I came across a hockey stick, a zucchini, and a welding mask, none of which I recall from before, but otherwise I couldn't detect anything new over the course of a few hours. What's the progress been like?

I'm in favor of side chat, as an option. Some people see it as not immersive, but that's never a problem I've had. Hell, the most immersive, memorable experiences I've had in DayZ come from the mod, despite side chat, and prevalent vehicles, and so on. SA hasn't left me with any truly lasting memories at all. And that worries me. Yes, it's still early on, but I could say the same about the mod, early on despite the many Micky-mouse workarounds of the mod, the chunkiness and bugs, the hackers, etc, it consistently provided immersive experiences that sucked me in. But immersion =/= realism, and we shouldn't conflate the two.

Then please, call it quits, move on, and find a hobby that you aren't so personally invested in. Simply put (as has been stated many times), there's nothing to stop people from adjusting gamma on their monitors themselves, or using their GPU controls to do it. Bohemia spending time "fixing" the problem wouldn't do anything to stop the people who abuse gamma, but would negatively impact those who have legitimately need it.

Gews has repeated showcased the ridiculous dispersion, pulling data from the game files directly. It's not merely anecdotal evidence.

Congratulations, you just defined "gimmick." The gimmick of Sonic is running very fast. The gimmick of Braid is turning back time. The gimmick of DayZ is zombies. Sigh.

On stable DayZ mod servers you do see this kind of community-building. I've mentioned it a few times before, and I will again. When you have a group of people who regularly play on the same server, you see a mellowing of KoS in favor of more balanced interaction. You get to know people, their habits, attitudes, and play-styles. There are people who I will go out of my way to help out (because they've proven themselves to be cool people, or they've helped me out before. There are others whom I will go out of my way to hunt down, simply because they've shown themselves to be douche bags, or because we've built up a rivalry. None of that is currently possible in SA, and won't be unless we have some way to indintify people. In the server I play on, it's possible with global chat. Bullshitting with people a few hours each weekend goes a long way towards getting to know them as players. That's not something the majority of people want in SA, or at least the vocal forum dwellers, but it's something that does work. A possibility I could see working in SA is a short range mouse-over nameplate, that only appears within, say, 8-10 meters, a distance from which you could easily see and recognize a person. Having it mouse-over only simulates scrutizing a person, while having it only work when right next to a person also keeps most people from exploiting it to locate players in hiding. Is it realistic? Not really. But is it any less realistic than having every other player a veritable clone of every other? No. It's just a compromise within the limits of the engine.

But the exact same situation applies to gunshot wounds and removing bullets. The pain of removing a bullet can also knock one unconscious. And really, if DayZ wants to implement a detailed medical system, removing bullets, cleaning, and stitching wounds should be part of that.

But you still do, don't you? :P

I'd eat there.

Yes.

I understand what the salty air will do to metal, living on the ocean myself, but the level of damage to the cars goes far beyond what a few months of exposure can do. The civil war point is a good one, but it's funny how the only physical damage was inflicted to cars and windows. No other signs of combat, that I can think of. None of the buildings have been so much as burned, aside from the hotel, and that was hit by a plane. Another inconsistency: the power to the streetlights are still running.

Sure, you make that argument, but it's still extremely tenuous, especially in regards to the poor maintenance. That every car was in the same near-death rust-bucket state approaches absurdity. Look, for instance, at Havana. Cold War era cars, poor country, coastal. But you'll find plenty of well maintained cars. But it's more than that. All upholstery, if my memory serves, is absent from the cars as well, something that takes a fair bit of time, even with exposure to the elements. We're talking nylon or polyester, each of which can take decades to decompose. As for the Arma 2 model theory, there are a ton of models in Arma 2 that aren't so rusted, and indeed, those used most by DayZ, even as static art assets (crashes, etc) still had paint, and so on. So... I'm just going to stick with the idea that it doesn't and won't make sense. Rationalizing it doesn't work at the moment, unless you're going to throw probability right out the window.

A good idea? Perhaps not. A necessary one, from a financial and PR perspective? Yes. Rocket talked up the then-upcoming SA a lot, but dates he mentioned came and went without much to show for it. I think, if they waited for a finished product(that is to say, around December 2015, given the timeline they posted at the EA release) I think a lot of the interest would have passed. They also wouldn't have so easily justified the recent additions to the team.