bazbake

You can change your name and skin without respawning. Once you understand this basic mechanic, it should be obvious why anything short of a visible identifier for banditry is equivalent to telling survivors and heroes to just suck it up and forget about it.

I doubt this. For instance, some bandits have positive humanity up to 1999.999 points. It shouldn't subtract from your humanity for killing them.

Alcohol doesn't make me hungry. Weed? Yeah. Alcohol just makes me want to dance, make out with women, and take a nap.

I was being slightly facetious. Most of this game has fallen to metagaming and there's no easy solution to a lot of it (who even really uses direct chat)?

A way to streamline it and fit it easily to the Arma II system. Maybe Jerry Cans could be converted to a certain number of "fuel canisters" by right clicking on them. Each fuel canister would hold a certain amount of fuel which could be used by a variety of weapons. A chainsaw and flamethrower would both be rapid-fire weapons that do the same damage. The chainsaw would be short-range while the flamethrower would have a slightly longer range and faster fire rate. Throw in differing animations and voila.

I try to use it, but there are limits. You can't use it when you're prone (this makes no sense). You can't use it with pistols (this makes no sense).

The bandit skin is pretty good AFAIK. And once they get rid of tents and duping and scripting, the ghillie suits will probably be harder to come by.

Also, remember that dead bodies create clouds of flies. If you saw a dead body with no flies, that person would probably not really be dead.

Maybe we can extend this to microtransactions and specialized extra backpack slots and one-time self-rezzes when you die at 2 dollars a pop. Or not.

Five minutes ago...server-hopping bandit spawned right in my cross-hairs just after I finished looting her stashed silenced M9. I carefully backed away (I was debating firing the gun but decided against it). She asked me if I wanted any meds and I said, "Newp," saluted, and dashed off into the woods. I get a couple kilometers, go prone, and decide to change my graphics settings because my screen is sputtering. While my screen reboots I hear the sound of legs breaking and zombies screaming and flies buzzing and wait patiently to die. Except...screen returns...I'm not dead. In fact, my leg's not broken either. There I am, lying in the middle of a pile of bodies and some guy says, "Isn't this an interesting place to be?" I hit my scroll wheel and all I see is "Open Alice Pack." I hit G and unfortunately, all I have is that silenced M9 and this game still STUPIDLY forces you to get to one knee to check gear if you're holding a pistol (seriously, BI? Not on a priority of things to fix?)...as I rise to a knee a voice on the radio says, "Oh, that's interesting." I snatch the Alice Pack and Alt+F4 like a motherfucker. ... Okay, logged into a new server. Looks like I didn't get to keep the backpack. :( Oh well, still got my silenced but incredibly nerfed M9.

So individual players aren't immortal but groups of people effectively are. You had a pretty good idea until group save, though. Take that idea, toss in "all storage wipes on reboot" and you've got a really good thing going there.

Endgame? What is this, World of Warcraft? The endgame starts as soon as you wash up on shore.

"I'm not poor, ergo, poverty doesn't exist."

Missing the point....

Vehicles should definitely be randomized. I've found helicopter crashes literally in the middle of the road. Why can't a same system be applied for vehicles like SUVs in open fields or pickup trucks abandoned in the middle of the road. I really like this idea, Starkey, it seems strange that it hasn't been implemented yet considering how many other items randomly spawn in the environment. Anything that foils players simply looking it up on the internet is a good idea for keeping the game going strong.

I liked the idea before. And I still like the idea. It'd be better when the debug monitor is gone, of course, but yeah...so many times all I've wanted to do is keep my head down.

This happened to me twice in a half hour period on two servers. As for the empathy thing and doing it because other people are doing it. It's a little like the banditry system we had in play for a while. People committed banditry because it was convenient and other people did it to them. After a while, hacking will be the only way anyone is having fun in this game. I'm calling it now, if the standalone alpha isn't released in the next three weeks, this game will be 80% hackers. When there's anonymity and no consequences, you can expect a race to the bottom.

PvP for most new players on the server means: "Get one shot by laser pew rifle" or "sneak up on sniper, fire 8 pistol rounds into him, get shot when he turns around and returns fire" or "countersnipe...watch character alt+F4" so I understand their hesitation. It's an alpha so it's broken by design but it can be jarring when you think you're lining up for something that makes sense and instead find yourself wading into an increasingly high pile of shit. It's like boiling frogs. Some of us showed up when the temperature was balmier and haven't noticed the increasing heat because it was so gradual. Others are dipping their toes in and freaking out at the scalding water.

Assholes are assholes. Shoot the assholes, stop complaining. Hackers are assholes you can't shoot. I think there's a thread for this.

Hacking is about power. Why do people pull the legs off of cockroaches? Because they can.

If you removed chance from the game, people would log onto the server 5 minutes after reboot and raid all of the high value places. It would get ridiculous. And it would ruin a game that is already suffering from server hoppers and hoarders. I consider this a bad idea. The result of character progression is that people who suck at certain things will get advantages over people who are better at them but have just started. And people who are better at certain things will get even larger advantages over people who are just as good but have just started. If you suck at gunplay, don't worry, eventually the game will make you better at it. Unless, of course, you suck at gunplay and run into someone else who sucks at gunplay but has been around longer than you. Naturally, this person will kill you and now you'll go back to the beginning and gain nothing from your encounter. And that's the thing. In DayZ, you learn from your mistakes and successes and adapt. In a game with skill progression, you don't have to. In fact, people who encounter you and don't survive will necessarily make no progress in several areas that you, as the winner, will make significant progress. Oh, and you get to keep their loot as well. So the winner doesn't just win, they WIN. And the person who loses doesn't just lose, he LOSES. In order to keep what you have, you'll naturally work harder. But under a skill progression system, not losing something will now REQUIRE LESS WORK. And that's the paradox of investing in progression that rewards lasting advantages during a life. It becomes easier for you to play the game. And while the consequences for failing feel dearer, the actual dificulty decreases. This is a game-breaker waiting to happen. Ever heard of stratification? It's a social phenomenon when people with the most resources are rewarded disproportionately than those with the least resources. It's the same system that is currently plaguing the game when it comes to tent and vehicle storage. Basically, people with advantages use those advantages to succeed such that, when someone who is actually their competitive equal but lacks those seemingly arbitrary advantages competes, they are dominated no matter how smart, fast, or cunning they are. This is actually a huge problem in the real world, but if you want to see a microcosm of this system, look at Dayz's gear, loot, and storage system. Reality check. For example, a guy with gunfighting skills goes up against a newb with none. He wins the fight and continues. Whatever progress that newb made is lost. Now gunfighter has better skills than before. Same newb fights gunfighter, gunfighter wins again...except more easily than last time. And so on. And so on. Eventually the gunfighter who survives becomes the best gunfighter in the entire world. And people who are actually better at FPS games or smarter or more cunning ambushers fall before the might of the gunfighter. This works in a single-player game like Skyrim because you don't have to deal with other people and the difficulty of the game curves up subtly to keep up with you. But if you had to play against other people in Skyrim, what would happen? They wouldn't magically become stronger because the game needs more competition. They would just die. And in a game where all of those skills disappear, you would become a god and they would be ants. These things sound like good ideas because most people think no one has ever thought of their new idea before. But these ideas have been implemented in other games and it's easy to see where they've failed horribly. To prolong the life span of DayZ, the game doesn't need a constant progression toward infinite power. It's not a MMORPG, it's an online MMOFPS. What it needs is to have its balance issues resolved with creative new options. It needs to maintain a constant threat at all levels, and this means the bullet damage needs to be flattened and the intro level to PvP needs to be lowered with the threat of zombies being increased. Metagaming has to be subverted, so we need to limit the efficacy of external storage while randomizing loot spawns even further. And the environment needs more random stuff for people to play with and interactivity so that logging onto the server is always an opportunity for something interesting and incredibly risky to happen. High risk, high reward, flattened difficulty curve, and the removal of power players exploiting the game's systems.

You should probably do a search to make sure someone hasn't posted this before. Oh...wait, you posted this a few days ago. You should probably do a search to make sure you haven't posted this before.

I'd rework it this way. Currently, bandit skins include a head wrap and hero skins include a scarf around the neck. I think a pretty simple way to implement this with the current humanity system is that your humanity determines what "head" you spawn with. Your achievements determine what "skin" you can choose to equip. So bandits, survivors, and heroes are still always identifiable by their faces but their particular talents are identifiable by how they're dressed from the neck down. Also, heroes need cowboy hats or berets because cowboy hats are legendary and berets are badass.

I believe the hunger and thirst system is the stamina system. The more exertion, the more you need to eat and drink. If you hyperventilate, you get hungrier.

Right now, damage tables for the .50 calibers are totally ass and Arma II is doing its best to nerf anything that's not a long-range killer. I'm not saying they need to be taken out, I'm just saying that the damage tables need to be separated from Arma II at some point and the damage needs to be flattened so that the game becomes interesting again instead of a slippery game of king of the hill where the people on the top never even risk getting pushed.