bazbake

"Hey, that guy's taking things from a dead body. I better shoot him in the head." Yeah, punishing that kind of thinking would be the worst possible use of humanity. Although in this case they were probably a disguised bandit.

I don't think you understand how this works, OP. It's not World of Warcraft. There's no steady progress. No instanced raids. You randomly stumble across really good stuff or shoot somebody in the face and take it from them. It's more like a really, really long game of Battlefield 3 where you start out with nothing in your hands and you claw and scratch and punch your way desperately to reach a loadout or snatch it from someone's hands trying not to die in the meantime. So saying, "It took two weeks for me to get geared," really means, "I've cobbled together the best equipment I can imagine over the last two weeks." Tent exploits have made people forget the point of all of this by creating artificial persistence across deaths. The memory of discovery's thrill and the patience required have faded. Now everything's been replaced with mindless completionism as if the purpose of the game was solely to get really cool shit. It's not all your fault though. Weapon nerfs have taken the validity of a lightly-armed build and pushed the gear curve even higher. So people who were happy with a pistol now HAVE to get assault rifles. People who were happy with shotguns now HAVE to wield AS50's. So people think there is a "proper level of gear" that they need to achieve and then the rest of the game opens up for them. But that's the secret. In a game where you can die and lose everything at any point and people aren't duping and hoarding and server hopping, in a game where every weapon is dangerous, the game starts as soon as you step out of the brine and start a mad dash for your first hatchet. But the game is currently broken and the flock has been led astray by greed, cheating, and mindless consumerism.

Got it.

The joke's not funny if you have to explain it. *takes away his beans*

If the inventory was really based around encumbrance, the 30 pound AS50 and M107 and 25 pound SAW would replace your backpack and the 14 pound rocket launcher would go in your primary slot. Arma II plays fast and loose with common sense.

Whoops.

Or get rid of the tents. Then you can't hack or dupe.

Someone suggested an America's Army style treatment/diagnosis system once. EDIT: The only way for Rocket to accomplish the goal of having real-world knowledge benefit gameplay is to have the in-game world reflect the real world in some fundamental ways. For instance, if you wanted to get into combat and have real-world knowledge influence your tactics, then you would need guns to have real-world stopping power and effects. Which means until the DayZ engine reflects how bullets affect the human body, then that's not going to be the case. If you want survival knowledge to reflect real-world knowledge, you'll need a system that closely falls in line with a real-world environment.

Ever been to a war-torn Russian country?

And when they die they wouldn't reincarnate on the beach with knowledge of where all of their old loot is and run back and get it....

Find loot. Pick it up. Put it in backpack. Repeat.

This game facilitates player interactions within a somewhat dynamic open world. Replacing player interactions with bots removes the need to rely on other people. Scavenge, loot, kill, deal.

Rocket said at some point he would implement team play, probably through the use of underground bases. As time goes on, it's going to be increasingly apparent that the use of tents carrying over past death is going to be an obstacle to the nature of permadeath in the game, so something will have to replace it. I got to thinking. In PvP for FPS's, there are various modes of capture point and control point mechanics. And the game provides some of the means for establishing strongholds (tank traps, barbed wire, bear traps). What if strongholds weren't loot gardens and caches but were instead something that directly influenced the environment? For example, if you gather a team of survivors you can storm and control the Elektro Power Plant. Rather than a timer giving control to whoever sat inside the power plant for a period of time, you would instead have a switchboard in the base which, if manipulated, would allow you to redirect the flow of power to light up certain sections of the map. Maybe better loot is hidden in a section you can redirect power to. Or, more realistically, controlling where the lights turn on and off can redirect the flow of zombies while allowing players to navigate the darkness safely or the now lit areas without their flashlights giving them away? Even better, there could still be working televisions in town and the only way to watch the televisions would be if someone in Elektro turned the power on for you! In fact, turning on the power in a section of Elektro would allow access to a lot of environmental things like jukeboxes and ovens (for cooking food without attracting zombies!) Maybe controlling the port of Chernagorsk would allow you to manipulate cranes to create sniper nests that people can't access unless they kill the person controlling the crane or until that person leaves? Or you could turn on a factory and the smoke from the towers would lure zombies in and allow you to snipe them for shits and giggles? Maybe there's something in all of those pipes in the industrial yard that can only be accessed by turning on the equipment? Maybe Jerry cans would be filled like water bottles and controlling a gas station gives you access to unlimited gasoline? Basically, while dying would definitely have consequences, you would have the motivation to secure an area of the overall map without being under the illusion that you can hold onto it forever. Organizing an assault would require planning and armament and risk with the reward being the capacity to impose your will on the other survivors. Maybe you could make Elektro into a safe haven luring zombies away from the best loot? Or you could create what is essentially a giant flare to hassle scavengers? Other possibilities: Control the church and turn it into a zombie lure. Control a freight train and fill it with gasoline to travel safely from one side of the map to the other while fighting off bandits. Freight train cannot be destroyed except by satchel charges and explosives! Control a radio tower to broadcast propaganda to all of the radios within range. Basically, anyone with a radio within range will hear what is said by the person using the microphone in the radio station through the global channel. Control the television station. Basically, you get to decide what the programming will be on any television a player turns on in a city where power is activated, chosen from a selection of a dozen stations. Or maybe even an arcade where people can play crappy 80's arcade ports? I'm not saying you should only be able to access these things if you have an assault team. I'm actually saying that anyone who has access to these resources can use them and change the dynamic of the map. It could be possible that a single player with enough resources could control the radio station for fifteen minutes before thugs came bashing down his door. But the effect on the map as a whole or a specific location would be so significant or influential or imposing that squads would want to do battle for their chance to control it while willingly putting their lives on the line for the opportunity.

Bump.

The swinging gate has a nice touch of creepiness to it. And even if a town were abandoned, you could expect a gate to swing on its own in the real world if a strong breeze were to blow. The fact that you freaked out when it happened means you were scared. Verdict: working as intended. The churchbells are on a timer. They also help you navigate your way toward cities if you're not one of those people alt+tabbing between your main screen and an online map every five seconds. Verdict: working as intended. Loud booming in the distance? Yeah, that's someone shooting a gun. Verdict: Duck.

We already have a .22 caliber weapon. It's called the M16. ... Just saying.

Until they get rid of storage and see what the game is like with hard caps on loot where people actually experience permadeath and are in a constant search for equipment, we won't know how the standalone will even play. If they could experiment with a game system where storage doesn't exist and hammer out player dynamics in advance, it would go a long way toward designing a more logical standalone experience. Right now tents and vehicle storage are the root of several exploits undermining the game design.

Even without armor, their damage tables were ill-conceived. The design was based around long-range gun combat, critical existence failure, and a completely different health scheme, so they basically decided, "Fuck anything that's not a rifle" and designed damage tables that had nerfed anything without a rifled barrel. Mix in a little bad science ballistics trauma based on prevailing myths instead of hard science and you ended up with damage tables that had always been crappy. And THEN they remembered body armor. I've posted a lot of hard science on ballistics trauma and wounds and hope the designers pay more attention to it when they get a hold of it because Arma II is a joke. 1) People are incapacitated by loss of oxygen to the brain. This means big holes in the human body from big bullets or the destruction of the medulla oblongata. 2) High velocity bullets do not cause lasting trauma because human flesh is elastic and temporary cavitation doesn't cause lasting wounds. Slower velocity bullets that deform and crush on impact are deadlier than equivalent high velocity bullets. 3) Shockwaves from bullets do not cause extra trauma because human tissue is elastic and can recover from massive temporary cavitation in a mere fraction of a second. 4) Debunking the myth that bullets with more energy cause greater damage. It's all there. The idea of rifles causing more damage than handguns with higher calibers is the biggest issue that the damage tables need to address. A game like COD can get away with it because of body armor, and even then the damage between 9mms and NATO rounds are at least kind of close, but a game like DayZ with ZERO BODY ARMOR is totally broken if it starts with Arma II's already screwed up views on ballistics and then lets them add armor on TOP of it. http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/wrong.pdf http://ammo.ar15.com/project/Fackler_Articles/effects_of_small_arms.pdf http://www.firearmstactical.com/pdf/fbi-hwfe.pdf http://www.rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/myths.html#wli

Step 1: Cheat guide. Step 2: Make friends with a server admin. Step 3: Occasionally have your loot accidentally dupe. See, it's not cheating...they're just better than you.

@lazyorc ...You win this round.

I found two M107's in the same week from helicopter crashes. The high-end loot is legitimately not impossibly hard to find depending on what server you're on. It's just hard to hold onto. So the spawn rates for high level loot (I should probably stop using tiers and "endgame" since these are slapdash MMO terms that don't really apply to a game where you can find the most powerful weapon while strolling through a field) don't necessarily cause problems on their own. However, thanks to tents and vehicle storage, the loot will never disappear. It just gets hoarded so that when someone loses their gun, they end up just going back and finding a new one in their tent when, otherwise, they would have had to either pass by the gun or drop whatever they were using at the time to upgrade.

Please, please, no...not this again. A .50 caliber rifle bullet can pierce through one inch of RHA steel. A T-34 has TWO INCHES of armor plating. The only way you're getting through that tank is if you lay it on its side and shoot it in the belly. Anti-materiel rifles are not magical superguns that rip apart tanks and blow things up from miles away. They poke clean holes half an inch across into engine blocks. How is this getting confused with the nonsense I keep hearing? The mythmaking behind these weapons has already ruined them in DayZ to the point that they don't even VAGUELY resemble anything like reality. They're a long-running joke right now and letting them kill tanks would be the most obnoxious punch-line ever.

Damage really needs to be reworked in this game. A sniper rifle with a range of 800 meters shouldn't do more damage at 100 meters than at 700 meters. Even if we're talking the complexities of tumbling physics, you're not getting a reliable increase in trauma. Originally this was Videogame LogicTM designed around the idea that most people are more accurate the closer they are and the game supplements their lack of real world combat ability. But in a game like DayZ, with location-based damage, this shit needs to be abandoned. Smarter guns, smarter damage tables. Seriously.

I get it. You think I'm going after you because you're seizing on an advantage. That somehow we're jealous. That implies that you are special and have found a loophole to put yourself ahead of people. No, I'm going after you because you are incredibly common. Polling on this forum says you aren't the majority, but there are enough of you that you are supplying servers with gamebreaking amounts of easy loot they don't have to actually work for. You're a problem because there are TOO MANY PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU. Seriously, you're breaking the game. You're not the only one doing it, but you are the first person I have met who has admitted that they are doing it for the reasons the rest of us keep claiming that you're doing it -- to break the game. And that's why you have become a lightning rod. You are the first honest exploiter of external storage I have ever seen here and every time you say something you just prove why external storage needs to be removed from the game. You're not the innovator of tent storage, you're the poster child for why it needs to be stopped. And here we go...I'll just leave this here.

The mooks are gaslighting you, OP. Ignore the rabble. A Kamenka spawn is pretty much a guarantee of a mad, unarmed dash to Zelenegorsk unless you're looking for a .45 (which occasionally spawns in Kamenka). Loot is randomized. It's quite possible the OP is looking in all the right places and there is nothing there. I should know, I've played games where I've found alice packs before I've found my first weapon. It's just how the game works. Saying, "Just FIND one" isn't really a response. It's a non-response. It shows a fundamental lack of understanding the reality of how loot spawns in this game. Of course, if you're exploiting with tents so that you don't actually experience permadeath, then of course you won't notice this sort of thing. Personally, my longest time unarmed was three hours. At that point I had found an Alice Pack and three water bottles. And then I stumbled into a barn with more than half a dozen "common" rifles and double-barreled shotguns of various types that had spawned in it. OP is not necessarily stupid or a bad player. He may just be unlucky. So I would say that there need to be higher spawn rates for lowest-level weaponry or a very weak starter weapon for players.