Treehead

I can confirm this. Tried the new "Play with SIX" and it worked like a charm, Pretty nice map. A lot of buggy buildings with falling through floors and breaking legs. Far too many instantly respawning telepathic zombies. But it looks really good. I just can´t get in my head why it should be desirable to die of pneumonia within minutes after spawning. The low temperature is nothing more than retardedly frustrating. Hey, why not spawning in underwear in the middle of antarctica, with the slight chance that you might meet a polar scientist and steal his clothes within 30 seconds... It's just perfectly realistic... Except that in reality you could never ever get to the starting point without adequate clothing.

I get kicked instantly from every single server (Even when they don't appear locked or whitelisted). Never had this problem with any other map. Usually I use DayZ Commander for starting DayZ, Fallujah, Pantera,etc. and a .bat for playing on the Celle map. Namalsk is the only one where it seems to be impossible for me to get on a server.

I'd prefer whitelisting to passwording. Passwords go around like a STD. But the same day when PW or whitelists are allowed, I'm booking a new server. I think I would make it similar to joining our MMORPG guild or our guilds forum: Start a new topic, introduce yourself, write a few sentences about yourself, give us at least your email address. If your introduction doesn´t sound like a spoiled ADHD brat, we give you a trial period in which we feel entitled to kick you for any reason, after that, we don´t care. The most important part is not to grow too fast.

It gets pretty ridiculous how people see hackers everywhere, or - even better - admin abuse. How about this: An evil, evil admin changed something on his server in your disfavor, so a minor road bump destroyed your car. Blacklist him. Kill Osama! Burn the witch! Call FOX News!!! Not that DayZ didn't have a hacker problem. It has the biggest hacker problem I have ever experienced in a MOG. But the problem doesn't get solved by accusing everyone of being a hacker. After 3 days of gameplay you get enough skills to be called a hacker by a complete noob playing for the first time. "He can sneak aroud a village without being aggroed my Zed. BAN HIM!" Of course we have thousands of script kiddies running their bought scripts without the slightest understanding what the scripts do. Allow whitelisting of servers and the problem is contained. How about this: There was a Sniper at one of the towers in Cherno, he saw you driving around in your car but didn´t want to waste a bullet. Then you left town driving in a straight line away from him (without any transversal velocity) he simply fired. You were so far away that you even didn´t hear the shot. For me it sounds more probable than there was a "hacker" who acually could do anything more than klicking on his thunderdome-bound-key. But whatever: You were in cherno in daylight driving around in a car. You got killed. What did you expect? I put my feet into water, they get wet. So what?

I think it would be annoying if we could be infected easily with a little drop of blood as in "28 Days Later". But I would love to see every killed survivor stand up as a zombie after 10-15 minutes to roam fully equipped (without being able to use weapons and stuff) so you need to kill the zombie to loot the corpse.

Have a friend with morphine waiting for you in front of the hotel and jump on his head.

Well, it's an experiment. Do what you want to do and expect being shot all the time. You can start shooting everyone on sight, if you don't like it anymore you can start being the helpful medic. I would definitely reccomend everyone to try being the evil sniper at some point of his DayZ career (preferred after finding a sniper rifle) to see how hard it is to snipe someone and to learn how to avoid being sniped. After several weeks in this game I can tell you that the most fun part is when you are freshly spawned and have nothing to lose. My next step is going to be the insane axe murderer, It looks like fun :D

The points I'm complaining about would be implausible for almost any AI controlled pc game enemy, except the lore tells me that this enemy is omniscient.But I doubt any game developer had the balls to insert the christian god as a shootable NPC into their game. I assume not with their intelligence and debating skills. How could microbes kill the aliens in "War of the Worlds"?

That's how they should work and most do. But I assume you never had the joy of being spotted from 200m at night, lying in deep grass and peeking with the 3rd person camera over a wall? THESE zombies are so extremely annoying. Most times I'm a gammawarrior and I like to lie on the ground, several hundred meters from the town I want to enter and watch the zombies. From their spawning points and walking directions you can pretty soon see if there is another player in town. I have done this for 2 weeks and I have a pretty idea how they should behave. You can make their behaviour more random or whatever, but it doesn't make the slightest sense that sometimes a single zombie inside of the town starts running towards me and aggros me. No player could have only noticed me except he had thermo view but one sigle zombie can spot me? This reminds me of the idiotic mission in ArmA(1) where I had to snipe someone in a hotel. It's a pretty long shot at the edge of the effective range of the Dragunov, but at the moment I shoot, several MG gunners headshot me firing from the hip.

I don´t want to say "realistic" but "plausible" zombies should always be easy at some point because they shout be stupid and predictable. Not to this point that it should be no problem to kill any amount of zombies in any situation. A city full of aggroed zombies should always be a death trap, but there should always be reliable tactics how to handle zombies in general. And to most players it should be possible to simply outsmart them. (initially I wanted to say "any players", but judging on some postings in this forums, ehhh... no I don´t want zombie shaped wooden blocks standing around.) The problem now is, that they are inpredictable, their behaviour seems random and some of them seem to have supersenses. Combined with the handgun nerf, zombies walking through closed doors and attacking through walls, they are pointless ATM.

That's why a standalone DayZ game is a good idea. BIS can make their ArmA3 as mod friendly as they want, keeping the engine interesting for their military customers, other modders etc. But there is no need for further mods of the DayZ game (a.k.a. hacks) so they can remove the open parts, drop any custom client side scripts without executing them and so on.

The point ATM is: after the recent handgun nerf you need less empty cans thown at the zombie than bullets in it's chest to kill it. OK, I see it: empty can nerf is coming.

When being chased by zombies:

First: It's their server. Second: Since hackers are everywhere, everything is seen as hacking. The point of a simulator is, that over time you can achieve pretty awesome skills. You are hidden between bushes, can't see anything and get a headshot? Most players cry "hackers!!" But it can be a team of a spotter with a L85A2 AWS putting a laserpointer at your head and a sniper blowing your brain out from 800m away. I started playing on sanctuary servers recently and it's much enjoyable and relaxed. The admins can run scripts and addons which kick and ban automatically everyone who tries anything that looks fishy. So they can afford being more laid-back and be sure that a lucky strike is just a lucky strike.

Yeah,right! We have hackers that can spawn crates full of every crap Arma2 has and regularly bomb your server into oblivion. Dupers building tent cities full of über-gear, but the biggest threat to the future of this mod is that you could pickup a Makarow mag in the outskirts of Gvozdno without the risk of being Thunderdome'd

Valec, I must admit, you are abolutely right with your points. But I draw the opposite conclusions: My idea of a perfect stand-alone DayZ game is one coherent MMORPG world without any private servers, without the need to host own servers and with a company that is paid for hosting the DayZ world. Someone who is responsible and can be blamed if something goes wrong. That´s why I´d prefer a DayZ-MMO-monthly-subscription-mode, to keep safe that servers and server admins are paid to do their job. One day I would like to have a common shard where every DayZ player can meet every other player in the common shard. Perhaps a big world made of islands or whatever... But we are very far away from this and try to simulate it with the hive and privately hosted servers. And of course, the people responsible for hosting their servers always can abuse their power and some of them will always do this. But a very important element of DayZs popularity is the cold, harsh, unfriendly, but fair world. You have the right to try to survive, but its very likely that you will fail. You will succeed if you adapt to rules, you learn rules by failing and these rules are pretty clear. They can be complicated, like the whole combat simulator stuff but they aren´t random. One of these rules: It´s easy to avoid admin abuse. These admins have a clearly drawn area of influence. You leave their server, you leave their power. Hacking on the other side is completely random, unfair and impossible to avoid. You can Alt-F4 but they can follow you to any server. Hacking is massively destroying the game. And - for reasons posted by other people in this thread - it´s not very likely that BIS and BE will solve the hacling problem soon. It seems they have to rewrite their whole engine from scratch to do this and this takes months. The mod can be completely dead until then. (Duping is a problem too but I assume it is more likely to be fixed soon, and you can't kill a whole server with duping). So if you ask me: "Do you want to trade the risk of hacking for a higher risk of admin abuse?" I say: "Sure, we have a deal. At this moment it´s the only right thing to do" "But we will end up with only closed servers and admin abuse will get out of hand!" No, it won´t. It´s extremely tempting to become the admin of a flourishing and successfull server and enough people will put great effort into this. People want to play on your server, you get volunteers to help you. People donate so you can pay for the server and so on. Of course there will always be enough admins which are too stupid for this. Some of the hackers will even start renting their own servers to grief people on it. But players will leave for better servers and the abusing admins will sit with their AS50s in their ghillie suits in their choppers as sad little kings of sad little hills with no one to play with. Then most of them will be fed up with paying $50 per month for their own version of their single player editor.

I still don't understand what the devs are afraid of. Everyone of us is absolutely free to hoard insane amounts of different weapons and vehicles. Without all the players, the annoying zombies and the thirst/starvation stuff. It´s called "ArmA2 single player editor" and anyone has access to it. It´s the social stuff that we want. Perhaps we should start building a web of trust with common whitelists or something like this.

We all have a hierarchy of needs. When I´m fine, my family is fine and my friends are fine, I can start taking care of all the other people. It´s one hand for the ship, one for yourself and every Idea / movement / group of people / social experiment that ignored that failed for a good reason. Yes it is. And its the only working solution. All the server should to do it until BE gets its problems solved (Or at least solved so much that the amount of hacking signinficantly drops)

Well, it´s just history repeating itself once again with a young guy and a fresh idea. He sees what the old farts are doing wrong and wants to make it better. He has an idea of freedom in good and bad and starts his own project to prove the inflexible morons wrong. He is pretty successful. But of course there are problems - there are always problems of any kind - and people start to revolt. His great new idea of freedom is just freedom in a very small area and outside of this he just suppresses what people need. Then he gets upset "Well, we never talked about ME being able to adapt and being flexible." And the old farts chuckle and say. "Don´t fuck it up boy. Get so far to keep your success some time without ruining it and behaving like a roman emperor. Then we can talk like equals" Well, it´s the point where we are now.

I´d prefer the body standing up and running around as a zombie you have to kill before looting him

So you mean, 3 people with ghillie suits and AS50 snipe your players occasionally? Just like the othwer snipers who found their stuff on public servers? And this is a big problem on the contrary to hackers who nuke your whole server? To be honest, every coordinated group of three people with some experience where to find stuff can get top level gear within two days. Being a gamma warrior is just as good as having your own server. And on a private server you have to find the stuff yourself, on public servers there are always the same places where people store their gear. (e.g. not too far from the southern shore, so that you can run there after a respawn without starving, At the edge of the map, whre no one has a reason to go, near a city with an almost never visited convenience store. Think of a small valley with some pine trees and some flat ground to hide a tent. There are very, very few places like this) So you think making their server public would change anything? Or if they annoy you, would you like to... BAN them?

I strongly support this as a regular player without an own server. This mod depends on people volunteeringly hosting servers and treats them like shit at the same time. Hackers are now far worse then everything that can come from passworded and whitelisted servers.

Whats the problem with private servers? I know, the community thing and stuff. But what exactly are you afraid of if people start whitelisting their servers? That clans start to farm NWAF and Heli Crash Sites and flood public server with their harvested über-gear? Srsly? This would be much worse than hackers spawning jets, helis and über-gear from thin air on all public servers? Think again. A lot of people want to host their server but are reluctant to do so because of the insane rules. Renting a server for DayZ is pretty expensive and I will draw my credit card in the same moment you loose the rules and give me some rights as a server admin. I can pay three MMORPG accounts or one fresh new game every month with the money I need for hosting an own DayZ server and I would prefer the DayZ server. But not if if the server gets full, I and my buddies can´t even play on it because of the kicking rules and the people playing on my server get killed by hackers. Let us PW and whitelist our servers and you will get many many new servers for testing and most of them will be public. At least try it for 2-3 months. We all hope for a standalone game with many public servers hosted by you at the end of the year and no one really believes that the hacker problem will be solved within the next weeks/ months. Make the situation better for us who simply want to play the game right now.

While you are right that the developer of "The War Z" ("Hammerpoint Interactive") is completely new on the market. Its publisher, "Arktos Entertainment Group" has already another game on the market: "The War Inc". The reviews of "The War Inc" are not exactly convincing: Metacritic, Steamaddicts, Gamesyn but you can simply try it on steam (Link) It´s just a lousy pay2win game with 40$ weapons. Check http://arktosentertainment.com/news.html. See how "Executive Producer Sergey Titov" from the pcgamer article is also the CEO of Arktos? It looks like they try to sell ridiculously overprized weapons in War Inc. and now they want to bandwagon on the DayZ hype and sell some preorders for WarZ while modding some zombies into their crappy shooter.

The other game published by Arktos: thewarinc.com Its F2P on Steam so try it out. Review: http://steamaddicts.com/2012/02/war-inc-battlezone-review/ They can't change a lot of code until fall, so thewarz.com will be pretty much the same game.