xaphoo

This makes no sense within the gameworld and breaks one of Rocket's first principles: a focus on immersion.

Adding morphine to the starting pack would greatly alleviate some unfun frustration.

I've had no problem with the many difficulty increases throughout this game's development. However, this latest round of patches introduced an element of frustration that was not present in the game until now. There is nothing more unfun and frustrating than having no weapon and being aggroed by a distant zed. This forces one to attempt to evade the zed in two ways - by running through the forest and hoping it somehow loses interest, or by trying to lose it in a building. The former seems close to impossible, and I've tried it a few times. The latter runs the risk - the probability - of aggroing more zeds, unless you happen to be in a town with many large buildings you know well. If you are not in such a town, then more zeds inevitably pile on as you search for a barn to run through. And as one continues, the attempt to evade them becomes more and more helpless as more zombies join the train. There is one way that this can be seen as an opportunity for cooperation, for the kind of cathartic desperation that is what makes this game so compelling. But most of the time, when aggroed without a weapon, you end up dying, simply dying alone. It becomes repetitive and frustrating. And with 1.7.1.4, it's so EASY to aggro a zed without a weapon. I've wasted three lives being attacked by zeds with no recourse other than a mad dash to try to break line of sight, which ends in failure. Just now, I was successfully running through the woods to my favorite inland town, moving between deer stands and isolated buildings. Except suddenly, a lone zombie sees me in the distance and starts shambling towards me... just one. I try to run away from it, see a building I can run through to break its line of sight, and aggro another en route. And another. And I failed to break their line of sight and make them forget about me. Ultimately I had to let myself die. If I had spawned with a hatchet, I could have dispatched the lone zombie, perhaps with bleeding and injury, but I wouldn't have had this boring death.

Agreed' date=' my bad - this was how it was supposed to be. Will be fixed soon. [/quote'] Having two separate items, both of which have a blade of similar size and sharpness attached to a wooden shaft -- but one of which which magically can cut wood but not zombie flesh, and one of which cuts flesh but not wood, is terribly unrealistic. There needs to be some compromise: put the crowbar in the tool slot or some such thing.

I'm enjoying the gameplay, except I can't seem to find a stable server. I presume this has to do with the patch. I've been on five servers that have timed out on me. Rocket, please check up on this.

3 bugs in a few minutes: 1. I had the same bug as Kaw. Over 10 hatchets on the ground, with icons of shotgun shells, which cannot be picked up. 2. I've also crashed a few times. The game freezes, then ARMA 2 OA gets minimized to the desktop, but cannot be maximized again. Sound continues. This never occurred before this version. I have to go to task manager to quit the game. 3. I'm not sure if this is new, but I've been throwing chemlights around the interior of the school in Elektro, and many of them (but not all of them) fall through the floor and disappear. As far as good news goes, the fps was fine and I found some food and soda for the first time since spawning yesterday. I also picked up a crowbar but haven't used it.

YES (again) It's subtle and great. Can they tell I'm a bandit? Was that a heartbeat I just heard? A great, great idea. BUT this is all punishment for bandits: we need REWARDS for non-bandits as well.

YES Doesn't harm gameplay, incentivizes perceptivity, introduces a moral economy without making it take over interpersonal dynamics. Also, it's atmospheric.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I'd like to add some input right now anyway. Rocket, you mentioned Pasolini's Salo in another thread - how it revealed to you the great potential of an artwork-or-game which is morally punishing, which draws out one's feelings of disgust and fear and stretches them to the breaking point. I agree with you on this aim: this is what makes Day Z so striking, so terrifying and real an experience. It is cruel and dramatic in a way I have never seen in a game. The other day I bled to death in the doorway of a church, legs broken by zombies, while strangers laughed. This is great. But the infiltration of deathmatch players detracts from this emotional intensity in every possible way. It is not their added danger that is a problem, not at all: rather, the deathmatchers' senseless logic inevitably makes deaths cheaper and more senseless, and lives cheaper too. It detracts from one's personal identification with the player, if they are forced to act with rote, boring violence towards every player they meet. Just as importantly, it weakens the illusion of a zombie apocalypse. Humans tend to cooperation as much as to violence, so I refuse to believe that everybody will be shooting each other if this scenario were to take place. Our state of nature is not aimlessly brutish, but tends towards societies which come out of necessity. The reason that deathmatch appears to be taking over is because - to state the very obvious - this is a computer game. Death inherently carries less risks, so people will engage in risky and murderous behavior more often; there's also no real-life retaliation, complete anonymity, and so on. Also, players come into this with expectations on first-person games which revolve around shooting. So the balance is upset: with lower risks than real life, and gun-shooting already being the norm in first-person games, a cycle of murder emerges which leads to gradual "gamification". The verisimilitude and emotional harshness which you want, Rocket, is going away, because it's becoming a low-risk shooty-game. I don't think this is irrevocable at all, however. All that the game really needs is to restore the balance to counteract the aggression-producing biases that video-games inherently have. Something is needed to encourage teamplay, to create factions or something, to restore the emotional attachment one has to the character. Of course, this should not be an "artificial" mechanic to "incentivize" a certain style of play, but something within the game-world itself. So basically, I agree with the first poster. (I've got one small idea here: have the respawn timer be by default very long, let's say twelve hours. For every in-game hour lived, the timer decreases one half hour, to zero if 24 in-game hours are lived [or the ratio can be 1:1 instead of 1:2]. This way new spawns won't rush to Cherno to fight and get killed, and old survivors will have a little bit of an extra incentive to live long) **I should mention that deathmatch has not yet completely won. I've been killed three or four times and been shot at many more times, but I've been killed by zombies more than by players, and had more friendly interactions than unfriendly ones.**

Temperature should decrease much more slowly. The leaves haven't started falling off the trees in Chernarus: it's September at the latest. And I'm wearing a vest.

The gist of all of these replies is correct. The need for a hatchet to get firewood is somewhat ridiculous, and what's even more ridiculous is to have to go into town to find wood when there are forests all around. The best two solutions here have also been mentioned repeatedly: allow one to "gather firewood" with the action menu, OR simply get rid of the need for wood altogether, since Chernarus is certainly a place where wood is commonly available.

Wood is indeed a bit of an immersion breaker. Chernarus is not a barren desert -- it's teeming with wood that you can pick up off the ground. There's broken furniture in every building. There are massive woodpiles in the backyards of many towns. Carrying some kind of "special" wood which takes up two inventory slots really doesn't make sense in light of the gameworld. Even if a hatchet were added to make forests a viable place to harvest wood, it still is a bit of a useless chore, since anyone who has gone camping once in their lives knows that all kinds of burnable materials are there for the scavenging. Alendor (commenting above) is exactly right. The wood requirement for a fire should be removed.

I too have had the strange fps drop. I played for quite a while and noticed generally improved performance with respect to 1.5.7. Then, I died and respawned, and suddenly I got just a few frames a second. I alt-tabbed and saw that my CPU was at close to 100% usage. I quit and restarted ARMA 2, and the problem did not return.

Yeah, something's going on. I can't connect anywhere. Logged out of Chicago 1 to get a snack and now I can't find any server that will let me in, despite many open slots.

In case Rocket is paying attention to this thread, there seems to be a growing consensus that the numbers are fine, but 1. Spawn rates need to be lowered, 2. Zombies should be significantly slower so that they can be killed from afar, and 3. Their hearing or aggro should be less sensitive.

A lot of people have the problem of only being able to play when it is night on one's own side of the Atlantic of Pacific. A way to alleviate this problem while keeping a very long day/night cycle is to offset it from the natural cycle by a half our or so - day and night cycle every 23h 30m or every 24h 30m, so that over the course of 48 days (unless my math is bogus), the game day-night cycle will pass over the entirety of a real-life day. The difference in length will not be perceptible in any given gameplay session. Of course, this may present coordination difficulties for some who are planning on certain game-times at certain RL-times, but overall it will help those of us who are condemned to playing nocturnally.

I posted in the other thread once, but I'll do so again here. Basically the number of zombies is fine, but three things should be changed to restore balance. 1. Make the zombies slower so that one has a chance of killing them at medium range. 2. Loosen up the aggro mechanics so that it's not "horde or nothing", so that a town can be cleared peacemeal. 3. Slow down the spawn timer so that areas can be actually cleared. 4. Ammo spawns should increase accordingly.

I think the new zombie count is fine, but some things need to be changed to return the game to equilibrium. - As the poster above said, the zombies should be a little slower, a little less erratic in movement, so that we have a chance of shooting them before they are clawing at our face. -They should also be a little less easy to aggro en masse - if they don't hear the gunshot or footsteps or see you, they shouldn't be drawn by other aggro'd zombies, as seem to be the case. That way hordes would not be so large and one would have a chance of clearing out a town piecemeal, instead of all at once. - Ammo spawns should increase accordingly. -Finally, their spawn rate should be slower, so that one actually has a chance of clearing out an area before they begin to spawn elsewhere in that area. Overall, zombies need to be made a little bit easier, if their numbers are to remain so large.