entelin

Rocket mentioned in a fairly recent post that the standalone might come as soon as the end of the year. He mentioned that he is thinking of the Minecraft approach, where its sold very much in an alpha/beta form, with the promise that updates are free, at least until it reaches a polished, non beta stage. So here's my question, since the Arma3 release date is not this year, would this mean that the standalone is being contemplated for the Arma2 engine? If so would the inevitable update to Arma3 be available to those who bought the Arma2 engine based standalone? I've always supported the Arma series (and I'll be getting Arma3 in addition to the DayZ standalone). However I will not buy a DayZ standalone on the Arma2 engine unless I'm assured that the upgrade to Arma3 would be included. If it is included, I'd be happy to buy an early copy of it to support the project. I do think the "minecraft approach" might really work well, however if that's the course that is chosen I would need an answer to that question.

That's a good point I had not considered. I had not thought that he might have meant that he would start working on it by years end rather than releasing it by years end. That makes a lot more sense, it would be a pretty olympic endevour to actually release something by then. Presumably BI would give him access to the Arma3 engine well before release, so it makes sense that he might get to work on it around that time. I'll see if I can find the quote I was thinking about, but it does sound like it was just a misunderstanding of his meaning on my part.

wow.. some people really just can't read can they?

It basically boils down to, "We have no investors, so the player community buys a known unfinished/alpha/beta quality game, with the understanding that they will be entitled to updates until it does reach a polished state" It sounds kinda bad, but it does get the game out there quickly for people to mess around with, provide feedback, and gets cash coming in to the developers sooner. However there does need to be that understanding with the players, as well as a good commitment from the devs. So it can be a very good option for Indie devs.

+1 for not reading the OP at all. Since your special, I'll reiterate that this is topic is about payment methods for the DayZ standalone. We aren't talking about the mod. (btw, I bought Arma2 when it first came out, and Arma1 before that, some of us do actually play other things than DayZ)

Edited the OP to make it clear I was talking about the Arma2 engine when referring to Arma2. It is all up in the air atm, which is why I wanted to throw this out there. There's a number of good approaches that could be taken, personally I think the best way would be to bundle it with Arma3, and work out a satisfactory payment scheme between Rocket and BI. However this approach would work as well I think. In any case its worth talking about this hypothetical, since there's less point in discussing something AFTER a decision has been made.

The main issue that causes sniping in arma to be so good is simply that the terrain, by and large, has very few features. No ditches by the side of the roads, no little hills or piles of things like you would have in a more detailed map. This, coupled with the horrible physics and movement controls in arma2 cause players to be unable to take proper advantage of the features that do exist, make snipers and scopes king. Poor iron sights and firing mechanics are another issue. It's not a DayZ issue as much as it is an Arma one. IMO, I'd just get rid of them, mid range fights are a lot more fun.

Actually you can easily kill numerous zombies with a hatchet, especially indoors. I'm sure i've killed 10+ that way with little trouble, and yes, I would probably never bother with a pistol if I could use the hatchet as my sidearm. The loss of some blood is probably a worthwhile tradeoff for not alerting other players to your presence. This, depending on your feeling of the mater I think would be the only valid argument for not making it a sidearm. Personally I do think it should be a sidearm however.

Man.. there's people out there that defend every random thing out there isn't there... As other people have pointed out, its a hatchet, not a battleaxe. Need both hand? like for example when your firing a pistol? That's what the weapon strap is for, put it on your back. Even if you say that even then it would be too cumbersome consider the following points: 1: In real life its easy to just set the weapon down against a wall, far quicker than you can accomplish the same task in arma. 2: In real life you could attack physically with the but of the weapon if need be 3: In real life it takes no time at all to drop a weapon in an emergency, you don't even need to stop or be squatting, you don't need to dig through your pack and drop all the clips for it, you just let go. In light of this, I ask you very simply, which is more "realistic" in actual gameplay, just allowing you to use the hatchet as an offhand, or the current system.

I agree with this, though I do think the messages should go away completely. The message answers the question "is that obscured guy I was shooting at actually dead?" and thus robs you of the fun of firing extra "just to be sure" rounds, approaching carefully and then actually finding the body there, and then lastly discovering his name through investigation.

It's fortunate that Rocket makes a significant effort to read and respond to many posts. Often these responses are to the same questions or variations of a question repeatedly. While one can never eliminate the need for that, it is I think important to at least ensure that it's easy to find Dev responses to any given post, both while browsing, and more widely on the forums. The forums already has a good feature to view all the posts of someone, here [searchInKey]=&userMode=content"]http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=user_activity&search_app=forums&mid=199&sid=99a19207da0d85c5c8238039739d4d39&search_app_filters[forums][searchInKey]=&userMode=content However many users will not know about that since it first depends on knowing who the Devs are, and then navigating a few options deep to get there. Remember, many forum visitors will just lurk without even signing up for an account. New players may not know who the devs are to begin with. So I would suggest initially to have a prominent button at the top of the forums to this link for a start. Ideally it might be something more custom, but even this I think would have a positive effect. ------ Secondly, and more importantly I think, there should be a button on the side of any forum topic that has a dev response. Clicking this button should bring you directly to the dev's post. At that post, should there be another dev response in the topic, there would be another button which would bring you to the next, and so on. This is useful because it allows readers to skip over much of the inevitable noise / fighting / worthless content, instead of having to actually skim it. This doesn't diminish ones ability to read everyone else's posts, but it does give proper attention and accessibility to the devs. Example of this system in action: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=258 (I had actually recommended this there before they implemented it, probably not related, but I do think it works very well.)

That's an interesting approach and certainly useful for a variety of things outside of just alt-f4. How do you distinguish between a "emergency" disconnect and a "I'm quitting for now" disconnect? If you track only the frequency of successful connections, does this not just mean that players will just have to wait a bit after saving themselves via a disconnect to safely log back in and preserve their database reputation? Also can it distinguish between getting kicked for weird errors, like for example, battle eye kicking you? I know I've had odd cases, particularly when hackers are on the server (speculation) where I start getting kicked constantly for "battle eye not responding" multiple times in a row, but then it will be fine again for hours. In other words, how do you prevent such a system from either being gamed, or not being deterministic enough. Is this approach a result of limitations in the engine preventing the implementation of a logoff timer (player stays in game for 5-10 mins after disconnecting)? (I know you mentioned you still plan on doing this but for a much reduced time, I'm referring to the associated duplication issues.)

It should be more like 5-10 mins to be honest. You should have to be actually safe before safely logging out. 15 seconds is far too short.

+1, many people don't understand this. I love nighttime play in DayZ actually its got a really good atmosphere that fits the whole zombie thing well.

I wish I was as cool as the OP

It's actually better to kill people in churches because then you know they have had the chance to make peace with god. It works out either way! edit: You know what I'm looking forward to more than anything? 10-20 years from now when political candidates are coming from internet generations and people start trying to dig up dirt on them. Suffice to say, it will be more fun than arguing over if they smoked weed in highschool or not.

Your joking right? Arma has been hacker heaven since OFP, its just that it didn't matter much since almost nobody played any of them online, and if they did it was on private servers among community members. Hell, in Arma1 there were people going from server to server spawning tactical nukes on top of cities, destroying *everything*. Still today hackers have the ability to do almost anything they want. Most games have only a limited number of possible hacks, most of which are patched out quickly after discovery. Not so with Arma, they have never had to focus on security until now. I hope they fix it in Arma2, but my gut tells me not to hope for much until Arma3.

Most of my deaths have been from hackers, teleport behind you and kill you. It's pretty common to see a whole server get wiped in a few mins due to a couple hackers coming on and killing everyone. I'll admit, I love DayZ but I've stopped playing for the moment, between the hackers, the duplication bugs, and the bugs causing you to loose item's.... it's not really all that playable if you want to do much more than pvp around the starting areas with whatever you happen to find quickly.

This wont be the issue it is now once all the duplication problems are resolved (and alt f4), as it is now if you find one, you can just get as many as you want easy enough. Due to those issues there's just way more of them than is really appropriate. Until those issues are solved I would actually approve of removing the anti material rifles, but keeping the regular ones.

Fix your audio settings, its horrible....

An exceedingly generous statement...

In a real zombie apocalypse where say 99.9% of the population are initially either killed or turned into zombies here's what would happen: First two weeks: These are your "dayz" weeks, most survivors are just going to hold up in their house if they happen to have enough fresh water. With almost no exception, those that do venture out and encounter other survivors are going to work together. Why? because the danger is coming from the zombies and supplies would be hugely plentiful almost anywhere. If that many people just up and died, just think about how much canned food could be found in any city... years worth. By the end of the first two weeks almost all zombies have died from starvation. Even if they were smart enough to drink water, or eat each other, I think the general idea behind zombies is that they are dumb, without the brain of a human they just wont be able to get food and will die off very quickly. Next few months: Survivors group up more and this is when conflict starts potentially be a factor, mostly due to stress and organisational conflicts. Some survivors start dieing from conventional illness due to worse water quality, corpses everywhere, and reduced ability to properly treat illness depending on what skilled people you have available. Months after that: Initial organisational issues have been sorted out, this is where bandit groups become a possibility, as well as conflict between groups of survivors. The successful groups will be the ones that can merge together both for defense, scavaging, and for the production of needed goods (like getting agriculture up and running). My main point: Lone wolfs are almost not a factor at any point, bandit groups will have some initial success, but eventually will be destroyed by larger and more organised communities.

Duping is almost unavoidable to be honest even if your not trying to, there's so many ways it can happen. Lag can cause it to occur quite easily, any time you destruct a tent and put it up somewhere else you've just duped it, the server going down while working with a tent vehicle can cause it to occur very easily, attempting to move things between servers causes it to happen.... Recently I was switching to a new server, took our AS50, and somehow managed to have 3 of them by the time it was all said and done, it just kept coming back... As far as I can tell you can't even destroy tents, so sure you can try and manually go through your stuff and prune out things you think got duped, but its all such a nightmare. Until the game can actually be played without all of these problems, I'd be very careful about accusing and banning someone for duping.

So in other words, you recognize its in alpha, but are complaining that its in alpha? The fact that BI and Rocket are releasing fixes/patches/updates quickly, is a good thing, despite the minor inconvenience of staying up to date. For those who cannot manage it themselves, I've heard the six updater thingy does a reasonable job.

There's every reason to team up, much easier to kill people & secure an area with your 5 clanmates than it is alone :)