bazbake

Hm. Beans to you, OP. Although you should have started with removing tents and vehicle storage in the first place. That's the best idea on making survival a challenge I've seen yet. It would also help curb banditry, to be honest, as no one takes death seriously anymore and they now use tents and vehicles as what amounts to an "extra life". If every time you died your teammates had to sit next to your corpse to make sure no one steals from it or abandon all of your equipment to escape with their lives, I think the dynamics would change significantly for the better. I know that tents were originally designed to hold all of the extra stuff you couldn't carry, but at this point they've become an exploit (in so many ways). Removing them and forcing players to constantly keep moving in order to survive would keep things fresher.

A .50 caliber bullet is smaller than a man's pinky, not his thumb. .50 means half an inch, or about .03 inches smaller than the diameter of a AA battery. You're thinking of the far more impressive .99 caliber/25mm bullet, which...is actually a standard NATO round. People keep talking about removing advanced weaponry, but I really think it's because most people have the same fake belief about calibers and bullet sizes as ninjaholic and think that a cartridge is the same as the bullet in the cartridge. And this problem has been reflected in the damage tables for the game. A .50 caliber cartridge LOOKS big but the bullet is only 1/7th of an inch wider than a 9mm bullet. That's the thickness of a US penny. Unfortunately, Arma II's initial weapon system seems designed around modern military body armor technology and liberal use of Critical Existence Failure. In Arma II, low velocity bullets will do less damage because they won't get as much penetration on soldiers' body armor and helmets. Faster bullets are more likely to pierce armor, so this makes sense. Unfortunately, DayZ is filled with unarmored people, zombies, and cows, so when you compare the two damage systems you get really screwed up mechanics like a 9mm Uzi round doing 1/3rd the damage of a 5.56mm rifle round...and 1/6th the damage of the same round coming out of a different gun. The rifle round would punch through armor better (more damage against armored soldiers), but it would only do a fraction of the damage of that Uzi round to soft tissue once it gets through. Also, some people trying to justify this traditional VIDEOGAME LOGICTM mistake muzzle energy with trauma. A bullet traveling through a fluid causes kinetic damage larger than its caliber. But larger caliber bullets create larger shockwaves than smaller caliber bullets. In the real world, most of that muzzle energy is spent on penetration and distance and never interacts with the surrounding tissue. You know that trick with pulling the tablecloth from under the plates really fast and not disturbing it? Now imagine that the tablecloth is a bullet and the table and silverware are big hunks of meat. Faster bullets are less likely to transfer energy into the surrounding flesh unless they deform on impact like hollow points (problem is, most .50 caliber rounds aren't hollow points because they decrease penetration but 9mm hollow points are pretty standard). This is the real reason why AS50's and M107's are used for anti-materiel purposes -- they don't make holes much bigger than .45 rounds, but they have enough penetration to cause leaks in engine blocks and they travel really, really far, really really straight, and are dense enough to negate a lot of the effects of wind. In short, they're extremely accurate armor piercing weapons that make big holes big holes while .45 rounds just make big holes without the penetration and shotgun rounds make ridiculously big holes. The real question is, if DayZ continues to use ArmaII's damage tables, are they going to put body armor on the cows and zombies? Are our rabbits going to be mechanical steampunk creations that dispense meat from a slot in the side or something?

Guns should be zombie bait. Make them louder.

Um...realism, dude. Realism. ... No, wait...have some beans.

You realize that those are only dangerous/high traffic areas because they're dangerous/high traffic areas. The more the game nerfs everything but military weapons, the more people are funneled into those areas to farm for military weapons. It's circular logic. Those areas weren't designed to be more dangerous, they just ended up being more dangerous because players started killing each other for loot. In fact, if no one killed anyone for loot, there would be plenty of loot for everybody. Which is why, no matter what changes are made to the game, there's room to accommodate it. Because the game wasn't designed the way it's being played, it's just how the social structure developed incidentally due to courting and ushering by player feedback. If player feedback changes and pushes it a different way, then the game is evolving the exact same way it evolved to get here in the first place. Funny how that works out. ... P.S., Gun damage tables and scoping aren't accurate at all. So you calling it a "simulator" to defend the fact that it doesn't actually simulate anything except VIDEOGAME PHYSICSTM is kind of funny. The Lee-Enfield shoots a decent-sized bullet a really long distance and does twice as much damage than the M1014 which shoots a bullet 8 times heavier capable of actually removing peoples' heads in real life. When the Lee-Enfield was in use, it couldn't even kill people at point blank with almost a half dozen rounds. Heck, the hatchet does a third of the Lee-Enfield damage but you can actually remove entire limbs with them in real life in a single blow. Come on now, you seriously think this game is a simulator instead of a military fantasy arcade?

Chuck Hawks seems to love rifles but hate math. He never once mentions the muzzle energy of the shotgun or mass of any of the projectiles he's hypothesizing about and wants us to take it on faith that merely having a denser projectile should make a weapon more dangerous. Except, while we do have to divide the muzzle energy by the 9 projectiles, he conveniently leaves out that the muzzle energy has to be high enough to make those 9 projectiles as fast out of the gate as the .45 bullet. So, shooting a 00 shotgun shell into an animal is the equivalent of shooting it with 9 rounds from a .38 or .357. Each one of those pellets is moving at the speed of that .45 round. And while they don't have the same penetration potential, they may still go right through one side of the animal and out the other at effective range wrecking total house along the way. Rifles are great for penetration and distance. Shotguns are good for sheer trauma. Anyway, here you go.

Maybe if every few minutes you randomly left behind a small decal of your footprints that disappears over time, but only if you were walking across an open field or on a dirt road. You could even select the footprints and "hide footprints" to cover your tracks. The random chance would increase if you were sprinting. And only the last three decals would be active. The fourth decal would replace the first one.

The Lee Enfield is louder than any gun but the .50 calibers. The M249 Light Machine Gun is about as loud as a pistol. The only weapons with audible ranges more than half of their effective range are the shotguns and pistols. All of the military weapons are effectively silent past half of their effective range. This guy's post is right in that much.

The weapons aren't realistic. They're straight out of "Generic FPS 2012TM". But the other systems are great, and that keeps me fascinated. Especially seeing how it's developing and how much is getting added. I never fail to be impressed by what Rocket and team keep putting into it and have planned for it. I think a lot of people complaining are also, deep down, thinking about how little sense some of the game mechanics make and they just don't know how to voice those concerns. Like the sniper rifle issue. The reason sniping seems to throw the game so completely off balance to many is because it doesn't fit with the realism of the rest of the game. It's an archaic mechanic from when FPS's had tiny battlefields with very little cover so game designers had to increase the lethality of sniper rifles to make them more effective compared to other weapons that, in the real world, would kill them in seconds. It's a conceit of VIDEOGAME LOGICTM, an invention by design. Unfortunately, in retrofitting VIDEOGAME LOGICTM to a realistic game setting with hunger and temperature and bleeding, some of these relics carried over. So snipers get Finger of GodTM up to 1.5 km away in forests on mountains overlooking wide open city streets and their weapons make almost no noise. And guns designed for personal defense that reliably drop people with one or two shots now take 9 or 10 shots to kill people. Because videogames, that's why. So some things are fantastic and other things are just completely incongruous and throw you out of the game.

I was thinking about the flare thing, too and think it's great. I've decided that a lot of the people talking about making the game too easy really mean they don't want to lose the advantage they get from certain lapses in realism and the advantage they get from certain elements of realism. In short, whatever makes the game harder for them needs to be stopped. People talk about realism all day and then you mention flares and it's like, "No, we need to make the game harder!" You tell them that sniper rifles are just regular rifles that shoot really far and it's suddenly, "No! But I need to kill you in one hit or else there's no point in me sniping!" You tell them you're considering morphing bandits so they're more easily identifiable and THEN it's suddenly, "No! What about the realism!"

/eyeroll VIDEOGAME LOGICTM. The Lee-Enfield .303 rifle is overpowered in this game compared to its real world counterpart. During the Seymour Expedition when this gun was in wide use by British soldiers, one soldier reported emptying FOUR ROUNDS into a boxer at point blank with his rifle. Only their machine guns were effective.But this gun is supposed to drop people at 500 feet with one shot? Yes...this makes a lot of sense. The 5.56mm for the last 30+ years is notorious for being a wounding round whose job is to remove two soldiers from the battlefield (one incapacitated, one to drag that soldier to safety). Its killing advantage is that it weighs half as much as the 7.62. Anyway, During the Viet Nam conflict there were stories of VN being shot multiple times without slowing down and entire reports were drafted up about the ineffectiveness of the round and its tendency to overpenetrate because of its copious propellant and small bullet caliber which just made tiny holes in people. And yet half of the guns in this game use this exact caliber of ammo, including the M16 and they all supposedly do more damage than 9mm pistols which are world-renowned for their stopping power and lethality. Explain to me why a bullet caliber that is praised for killing people does less damage in a simulator than a bullet caliber noted for being unable to kill people? What does a 7.62mm round do to the human body? Well, considering the .303 used in the Lee-Enfield, which is technically a 7.9mm round, apparently requires you to pull the trigger four times to drop a dude coming at you with a sword, I would have to say -- force you to pull the trigger three more times? Just a guess? I understand where you're coming from. Really, I do. You're all "Look at the size of the cartridge! It has to be doing a lot of damage!" But here's a question. What does a 12 gauge shotgun do to the human body? What does a 9mm round do to the human body? What does a hatchet do to the human body? Now why the hell would I be afraid of a 7.62mm round and not any of these other death-dealing tools? Just because I don't have to go to Elektro to use them? Is that where we're at? The amount of trauma and damage a single pull of the trigger causes isn't based on its real world performance, it's based on my likelihood of being able to farm it in a firehouse? So naturally the gun with 30 rounds in it with less recoil firing smaller bullets at a longer distance has to be more dangerous than the gun shooting bullets that are SIX TIMES AS BIG!? No.

Or...DayZ is filled with shut-in 12 year old script kiddies.

Wouldn't deleting a player's history upon death mean they actually have no identity and can just change their mind and do whatever they want with no consequences?

Reality is unrealistic. How much extra damage do you think you would get from shooting a bullet from a 9mm Uzi as opposed to a 9mm pistol? The three most important factors for weapon damage in order are 1) placement, 2) cavitation, and 3) hydro shock based on projectile velocity. And hydrostatic shock, while evidenced in scientific literature, is also inconsistent and unpredictable. Placement is on the shooter, cavitation is caused by the shape, size, and material the bullet is made out of, and hydrostatic shock is completely random and dependent on the individual target's response to trauma caused by high-velocity projectiles. But projectile velocity is limited by the size of the propellant driving the bullet anyway. So really, while the maximum effective range is going to be dependent on both bullet and the gun, damage is primarily decided by the bullet you shoot from the gun. Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. Guns just happen to be an effective delivery system for spinning hunks of metal strapped to explosives.

There's a certain body language in real life that gives away peoples' intentions and gives people "vibes" when they interact. It's not a sixth sense, it's just observation taken from years of interacting with normal human beings. And dogs, since they have spent millenia dealing with humans and reading us, are especially good at it. It'd be cool if this humanity sense was detected by people naturally and lower humanity set it off more strongly and if your dogs were even better at it and would growl whenever someone with evil intentions approached.

A hatchet's deadlier than a hunting knife. Hatchets can sever limbs and crack skulls. They're probably the only weapon in the game other than the .45, rocket launcher, and grenade with anything resembling realistic damage potential right now.

This is pretty weak right here. The game world is two headphones and a screen with colored lights on it. I can't read body language, smell the air, or hear anything in the environment not pre-coded to my limited digital perception.

Heh. Right. Because my heart isn't a target 4 inches across.... No, but seriously, you would probably have to walk up to me and put the rifle up to my chest to kill me with it in one shot. I tell you what. As soon as the .45 caliber revolver and the 12 gauge shotgun putting an entry wound in you the size of a golfball drop players in one hit, then we can entertain the idea of a M14 killing people with one hit. Scopes don't magically make guns super-awesome except in videogames.

The damage a bullet does isn't really based on how fast it's moving. It's based on how much shithouse it wrecks on its way through the body. Faster bullets actually do less damage because the muscle seals back over the wound when the bullet goes through which prevents bleeding out. Slow, heavy bullets transfer more of their energy into the surrounding wound as they go through, which makes them more dangerous. They also push through meat instead of sliding through it, crushing tissue along the way. Some exceptions, though. A fast bullet hitting bone transfers kinetic energy into the surrounding tissue. A fast bullet hitting armor transfers that energy into the impact point and out. On a side note, a yawing bullet slices the surrounding tissue and tunnels through as well. I can't remember if it is more likely to yaw early if it's traveling slowly or if it's traveling faster. It may depend on the type of bullet.

You know, if all I have is a pile of raw, bloody meat I can't eat, why the hell wouldn't I just throw it at some zombies? Raw meat could be an item you equip that distracts one zombie per piece of meat similar to a dead body. And then when you start a campfire, you cook it to turn it into cooked meat.

You can't create more force in drag than force propelling the projectile without the bullet flying back into the gun. Sweden's an interesting place. But none of the military ammo would have hollow points. It violates the Hague Convention, and all of the ammo for the sniper rifles except for the AS50 and M107 are NATO ammo. (And as I noted in the post I made, 5.56mm NATO is notoriously low on stopping power. These rifles just should not realistically be doing damage on par with the other weapons, and that's all well and good since these are also the weapons with the most frills, the best accuracy, and the highest fire rate...it's like they kept all of the bonuses for small caliber and then ignored all of the weaknesses) This also means none of the assault rifles or light machine guns would have hollow point ammo either. The Lee Enfield and CZ550 might possibly have hollow point ammo, but that's a hypothetical and all it would do is make them more dangerous, not the 90% of the other guns I mentioned that were overpowered. And, yeah, I already mentioned that there's no point talking about hollow point ammo since going down that road relies on a bunch of empty hypotheticals and I was arguing about stuff that could be proven. Not to be mean about it or anything. Also, to the guy who mentioned Arma II. If Arma II was wholly accurate, Rocket would have stopped changing the damage values for weapons already and no one would be rocking ACE. It's still another videogame and there's still work that needs to be done to make DayZ realistic instead of "realistic." And since making the game more realistic just so happens to balance the weaponry and gameplay, why fight it? Unless you spent 10 hours one day server hopping to get a FN FAL or something and want to keep everything the same. Personally, if they changed weapon values, I'd be nerfing myself (I actually found an M107 on a crashed helicopter last night and then picked up an AKM in NAWF, so I'm actually hurting myself more than anyone).

You just stated the point...and then ignored it in the same sentence. In a game where every weapon has the same damage and effective range, your point is valid. But the M1014 is rarer than the AK-74 but the AK-74 does about half as much damage, holds 4 times the ammo, has full auto, and has an effective range about twice as far. Why? Because assault rifles are overpowered and shotguns are nerfed. I repeat, the M1014 is rarer. The only compromise in effect seems to be that its effective range has been buffed compared to its real-life effective range (unless it's using sabot rounds or something). I'm speaking as someone who carries an AKM and whose weapon would actually be less powerful once the game is rebalanced. But this whole thing is ridiculous. And the idea that all of these games are already balanced is doubtful. The Winchester 1866 was nerfed a couple days back. It's as if people keep complaining that since they can't win in close quarters against a gun designed for close quarters they need to keep making it weaker. But no one's stopping people from finding their own shotguns. And there's no reason a SCOPED, semi-auto weapon with a range of 800 meters and no recoil should have more stopping power than an iron-sight semi-auto shotgun with a range of 100 meters that is harder to find. It's not just bad real game physics, it's crappy VIDEOGAME LOGICTM.

When I first played I found a bicycle, rode it around the coast, then parked it and stole a tractor. Since then I haven't seen anything other than an ATV filled with rifles....

Sniper rifles aren't bad, per se. Their damage is mostly unrealistic, though. The Lee Enfield is seriously overpowered and amping up its rapport to make the gunner zombie bait is only half a solution. None of the other rifles in this game should be one-shot kills at all unless they're head shots, and even then only the .50 caliber rifles.

Not so much that the game is bad, mostly that the guy who shot you is a douche. It's unrealistic watching people engage in so much unchecked murder. If peoples' lives were really on the line, you wouldn't have people camping at the treeline shooting newspawns as they appear. Mass murderers wouldn't log off and then join their family for dinner secure in the fact that it's just a game. So there needs to be some sort of in-game mediation to raise the consequences for killing since there's a strange metagame at play where gamers can identify what their opponents are carrying on them, the amount of equipment in their backpacks, etc. If they pared down some of the in-game identifiers like backpack sizes and balanced the weapons so that they were closer to their real-world damage potentials (a CZ550 or a M1911 should be twice as deadly as a FN FAL but the FN FAL's damage charts put it equal with the CZ550 and make it twice as deadly as a gun that should be deadlier than it is), then bandits wouldn't be so emboldened to act. Also, if guns were more likely to attract zombies, bandits wouldn't spend all day sitting in the same place shooting at you, especially if it meant they would soon be surrounded. There are a lot of loopholes in the game design that are being exploited to take advantage of new players that could be patched up by balancing the weapons more realistically and making the zombies respond faster and more aggressively to gunfire (muzzle flash+rapport should basically break your cover instantly sending zombies swarming your location no matter how far away you are ... that would decrease sniping quite a bit).