Askar

Legalities aside, I'd like to see children zombies in the game, assuming regular zombies are 'fixed' first. No way in hell I want to try and shoot some tiny zombie zig-zagging at me, but if the dodginess of zombies in general was fixed I think having a smaller, harder to notice target would add more depth to the game. I'm sure it's been brought up already (didn't read the entire post :o) but the source mod No More Room In Hell includes child zombies, who are in my opinion the greatest threats in the game because they're hard to shoot and harder to notice, since they at most come up to waist height and can slip in with a larger group of adult zombies easily. Female zombies are essentially a given, I believe. The only reason they aren't in the mod proper is because of some weird and difficult ARMA issues that would need to be overcome, and the fact that dev-time is rather precious at the moment. I can't think of a single game that featured some sort of child-zombie/mutant/alien where the presence of said children detracted from the gameplay at all. At worst, noone will care aside from Fox when they're added, at best they add an entirely new threat to the experience, and a realistic one at that. Just my two beans.

I don't know if this is legit, and if it is I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, I like S.T.A.L.K.E.R quite a bit. On the other, I'm not sure if it will fit in with the rest of DayZ. In any case, you should avoid making two identical topics about the same thing in the future.

I agree fully. I'm not really expecting a December release, although one would certainly make me happy! I was just wondering what the latest official word was, as I haven't really seen anything conclusive for months. I really do hope they take all the time they need to at least get a stable working alpha out on sale. The initial release of the Standalone, no matter how incomplete it is, will have a significant impact on the way DayZ is viewed for quite some time. It's not often that you get a second chance at making a first impression, but when you do you want to make sure you do it right. DayZ has been getting a bad reputation lately for the abundance of hackers and the antagonistic fanbase, this is Rocket's biggest chance to change that for awhile.

I'll admit, I haven't really been following the standalone's progress. I like surprises. That said, I think I've managed my expectations well. I expect a smoother version of what we have now, major UI improvements, and maybe one or two cool features. Beyond that, I don't see much coming for awhile. I only hope we soon have the option of abandoning Chernarus, as I've played that map ad nauseum for years in ARMA II and now in DayZ. My one and only question right now is the reason I'm posting here. I've spent about 20 minutes skimming around the web looking for info, but I'm not seeing much about when the standalone is set to release. To my understanding, it's this month right? Do we have anything more specific than that, or has it been delayed?

Really, I'd say not knowing the statistics is part of the experience. It kind of cheapens the experience when you know exactly how much damage an AK-74 bullet will do, for instance. It's the same as kill messages, it kind of makes PvP easy in that you can tell by how many times you shot a guy whether he's dead or not. It's more fun when he could only be unconscious or still alive and you have no idea which it is. That said, there are some general guidelines you can follow when you have no info. Expect almost every assault rifle and most carbines you come across to be zeroed at 300m. Expect them to do roughly the same damage as other weapons of the class, especially for weapons that utilize a common ammunition. For audible range, fire it. See what comes running. It's how people did it before everyone knew the audible ranges, just be prepared to fight an army of zombies if it's a new dinner bell. Also run like hell afterwards, as someone will no doubt be heading towards where you fired.

As a medic, I've gotten killed a lot before and never really killed anyone. I'm taking a temporary leave of absence from the medical profession until the standalone is realeased, however, and I've been trying out other playstyles in the interim. Killing is hard for me and something I'll probably never get used to (which is probably a good thing). The only people I've killed and felt no remorse for were the ones who just killed my friends or my patients. Just the other day on Panthera, I had one of the most disgusting murders I've experienced take place. I had stumbled across a helicopter that was in great shape, and had just returned with fuel for it. As I approached the helicopter, I saw some poor bloke with a hatchet poking around at it, so I raised my crossbow and sent a shaft through his chest. He didn't die, but his legs broke and he started shouting that he was friendly. I didn't care and I didn't want to risk the only helicopter I'd ever 'owned', so I shot him again. I ended up standing over him while he was unconscious, shooting him two more times, slowly, with my crossbow to finally kill him. I felt terrible afterwards, and proceeded to die anyway since I hadn't gotten enough fuel to reach a refueling point and crashed into the fuel tank as I was landing and the engine ran dry. Perhaps if I hadn't killed him he could have helped me haul more fuel. Playing a PvP style is certainly an experience, but it's not for me. What I would 100% love to do is play like a true bandit, robbing people and kidnapping them to make them haul gear/loot dangerous areas/whatever I want. But unless a lot of issues are fixed and some things changed, that won't really be possible. I'm afraid today's DayZ player would abort the instant any of those things happened.

PC, for sure. PC allows a much wider range of customization, control, and performance than a console could ever hope to provide. Plus, no matter how terrible the DayZ community is, I know from experience that the console crowds are much worse. Of course, it would be years and years before a console was released that could even handle ARMA II's engine. The consoles ran on decent tech seven years ago but now it may as well be a toaster, at least compared to the demands of most true PC games. I doubt the next gen consoles could handle ARMA II, but perhaps the Xbox 1440 or the PS5 could.

Yeah, because I like immersion in my military sims I must have no life and have never served in the military. Your comment is baseless and at best meaningless to this discussion. And if you're referring to the guy in the video who's very enthusiastic about TrackIR, he has served with the marines for several years. I'd love to give the TrackIR a go, but unless my application to ShackTac gets accepted I don't see myself spending that much money on it yet. I've used it briefly thanks to an old friend who had one, and it was amazing. I only used it in a flightsim though, and I'd love to see how it works out in ARMA and DayZ in general.

Personally, I'd love to see military weapons outright removed, or at the very least made so rare that many people would never see one. I don't want a game where people run around with assault rifles/sniper rifles killing each other haphazardly. There are literally hundreds of FPS games that suit that playstyle already. Hell, just go play ARMA II with no rules on a server set in Chernarus and you can do that. I'd love to see civilian weapons become more than ninety nine percent of the weapons players use, while at the same time becoming extremely rare. A weapon should be the best damn thing you ever find in most lives, whether it's a hatchet or a crossbow or a double barrel, or any of the other 'cheap' weapons that would need to be added, you should feel excited and want to hold onto that markarov for dear life. That's the premise DayZ was originally working towards, albeit in an unrefined manner that has led to a number of problems now. In the Standalone, I see Rocket getting the game back on track with his vision as somewhat of an 'ultra-realistic survival zombie "anti-game".' So yeah, maybe we'll see bikes going ~10 mph. And I'm sure that'd be okay with many people, because that's the type of thing that draws people to this game. It may be a big deathmatch now in many respects, but noone starts playing DayZ to play a deathmatch. They hear about a realistic zombie survival game and they go from there. Perhaps you don't find that fun, but it has been made very clear that a great many people do want that. This entire undertaking sounded good 'in theory' to Rocket. Guess what? People also found it fun! ;)

That's just the thing though, it's as hard to 100% prove you didn't do anything as it is to prove that you did. Probably much harder, in fact. I don't actually believe I'll ever get randomly whacked by BE, I was just sharing a fear that always lurks in the back of my mind, especially after getting banned thrice by PunkBuster (I think it was PunkBuster, anyway...) back in BF2 for reasons I still don't understand. :rolleyes:Took me a week and a lot of hope each time to get it repealed. It's the opposite for me, I like seeing that mods have recently viewed my profile. I don't know why, I just don't really have any fear that they'll find anything unbecoming. Nothing beats the time that Rocket viewed my profile, though. I don't know why or how he found it, but I've got a screenshot ;)

Video should be mandatory, especially for the ban appeals forum. That said, I'm always terrified of one day finding that my account has been banned. I've never hacked in any game and I never plan to, but I've been hit with a lot of false positives over the years and it always worries me that I'll be banned from ARMA II for some reason. There is no 100% infallible anti-cheat, though there are plenty that are almost never wrong. I don't have much faith in BattlEye and I never have, but I'm still pretty sure all of you getting global bans cheated or got hacked yourselves. In any case, stop whining here and hit up someone who can actually do something about it (read; BattlEye).

Easy way? Log in, see if you still have your character. That said, I vastly prefer private hives. Aside from the lessened presence of hackers and the like, private hives eliminate server hopping and greatly reduce combat logging as well. As an added benefit, most generate an actual 'community', as in you'll see someone you may have met before and know you can trust/know they've murdered someone else, and so on. Just some things to think on, I find private hives to be much more of an 'oldschool' DayZ experience than regular hive ever could hope to be now, but I've been playing since May so that's the experience I'm trying to recapture. Edit: Most private hives I've played on have had essentially the standard ruleset. There are of course some with sidechat enabled, some with tons more vehicles than normal, and other things... but most of those indicate as such in the name.

I love playing at night as much as I do during the day, and I absolutely abhor servers that limit time to either spectrum. Yeah, it's hard. It's supposed to be, it's the part of survival you should dread. And honestly, the challenges you face at day are just as bad, if not worse than those you face at night. They're just different. At day, you're clearly visible to anyone and everyone with any sense, and zombies will aggro onto you much more frequently, making travel more obtuse. Looting and fighting are easier, but also more likely to get you killed in the daylight. At night, you need some source of light generation or amplification to do the same things you do during the day with as much ease, but these things work two-fold. Do you wear a bright green chemlight to help you loot, which paints a target for potentially unfriendly players? Do you stumble around in the near-blindness, completely stealthy but unable to see? Night time brings out the many novel uses of lighting in DayZ, as wonky as ARMA's light engine is. When lighting is absent save for what the players generate, it brings an entirely new layer of gameplay to the fore. For instance, even things that people never consider normally become critical at night. A lot of players are ignorant of the different uses of different chemlight colors. A green chemlight gives off a ton of light, a blue less, and a red barely any. For that reason, you'll often see squads of people carry red chemlights at night merely to identify friend from foe, as the lights are so faint that noone farther than a hundred meters or so will see them. Likewise, flares have many uses besides mere illumination. They can be used to blind enemies, highlight them, and mislead them. A good tactic is to toss a flare behind you in a firefight, as the people you're facing will be fully illuminated by the flare whilst to them you appear as shadows within a blindingly bright glare within the black of night, and even when their eyes adjust you'll still be backlit and harder to spot than the front-lit enemies. Cold is another deadly enemy at night, particularly on Namalsk. I've even seen it bring people together, such as one time when I saw a fire burning in a forest on Namalsk and cautiously approached it to find three people sitting around it. After watching them for awhile, I approached when they were most vulnerable and stated that I was friendly. Several other people found the camp later on, and most of them joined us at that fire. It was a unique event within the KOSfest that DayZ has become. Zombies are both a bigger and a lesser issue at night. Bigger in that they can often surprise you, and you can get into very nasty situations because of that. On the other hand, they're easier to lose and easier to avoid when you see them. TL;DR If you don't play at night for some reason, you're missing out on several entire spectrums of the DayZ experience. Lighting and temperature are far more important than you likely realise, and other key differences from daytime make night time a unique and engaging challenge. Quit worrying that everyone else has NVGs, so what if they do. That just means you can take them from them, if you want. They're not infallible by any means.

My problem is the opposite. I find vehicles everywhere, but I've never been able to fix one up. I get to the point where I'm literally moments away, have all the parts + toolbox, and am about to attach them. Then I die, every single time. The most rage inducing was a few days ago when I got sniped seconds after applying the rotor to a helicopter and hopping into it.

A lot of the scenic pieces and such were taken directly from STALKER. It's great, as a fan of STALKER I get flashbacks everywhere I go. For instance, those towers with the stairs on one side, or the buildings and atmosphere of Vorkuta.