random51

The guy with thermal is going to see you long before you see him. Not only will you not know that you need to hide behind a tree you wouldn't know which side of the tree to hide behind in the first place. So yes, if you sit in a bush on the edge of the map far away from anything of value, never moving, your odds of getting spotted with a thermal scope are pretty low but so are your odds of having any fun.

People hide vehicles/tents in the woods, not unusual to come across them now and then.

There is a covered area on the side of that building, sorta like somewhere you'd store trashbins, it has the loot spawns.

That explains the performance improvements. ;)

We don't miss anything since we're playing with a group of friends we made before DayZ, people we've already formed relationships with, people we already trust, people we know aren't clueless when it comes to PvP. That is something people who complain about the lack of teamwork, about shoot on sight policies seem to miss. There is a lot of teamwork going on in DayZ, we're just not inviting you to our teams. Complaining about it on a forum isn't going to increase your odds of getting invited. Advocating changes in the game to hamper open-world PvP isn't going to make you any friends worth having in-game.

What people call hackers nowadays aren't hackers, they're crackers. Unfortunately the popular media misused hacker to describe the black hats and now it is permanently etched into the lexicon of the ignorant.

Are they a member of my DayZ tribe? No = kill them. Yes = laugh with them about the last survivor we killed.

Go back to the Sims. All you've added is a metric. You've not added a reason for the bandit to care what the metric is. Indeed it would probably backfire in that bandits would seek to increase the murder count, not reduce it to carebear survivor levels. This thread is kind of pointless, it is based upon a false premise. There isn't a PK problem. PvP is an integral part of the game. People who don't like it need to play some other game because DayZ without open-world PvP is just another boring zombie mod.

What would be awesome is a death map for each server. You'd have to put it on large delay, but say once a week post a death map for the previous week, with every death marked on the map.

The OP left the most important metric out of the equation: FUN. If you don't factor in the desire to have fun and that what a given person finds entertaining might differ from that of somebody else you can't make an accurate analysis of bandit vs. survivor, much less where that balance is heading. If I find it entertaining to kill survivors I'm not going to care whether or not it is optimal behavior in terms of continued survival. In fact most people already know that seeking out PvP is a great way to die. They do it anyway because surviving indefinitely in the middle of nowhere is less entertaining than getting killed in a massive Cherno firefight.

I get a kick out of people who think a game exploited by hackers in an "alpha" version will be ignored in a release version. Hacker attention is based upon popularity, not development phase. Unless it is aggressively fought on a daily basis you won't put a dent in the hacking as long as the mod is popular, just the way things work. Most other games you can just play on password-protected, actively-moderated servers. Can't do that here, may not ever be able to do that here, based upon what I've read about the intended direction of the game.

M9 SD headshot is still a 1 hit kill, FWIW.

Can do your own range calcs on the fly with most of the scopes in this game. My spotter is there for security, not rangefinding. He's watching the flanks so I can spend all my time looking at the target area. Without somebody on security I'm too paranoid to spend much time on a scope. :)

They pick them for utility and flexibility.j What I'm carrying now: m16a4 ACOG with a mix of regular and SD Stanag clips - Good close quarters weapon that also has 400m effective range and the bare minimum in terms of optics for scouting. High RoF for those rare occasions when I get a horde of zombies I can't just run from. Camo SVD - For when I want to hide in the grass and watch an airstrip for an hour. Good range, good optics, good rate of fire, and it just looks cool. :) M9 SD - For stealth kills on zombies anywhere I think other players might be. If I have to kill a zombie anywhere near an airstrip, downed helicopter, or major city I headshot them with this. The Enfield is the great equalizer, the mass-produced partisan gun of DayZ that can kill anybody regardless of how much gear they have. It keeps the experienced players honest when they come to the coast for a little PvP. Anybody spawning on the coast can snag an Enfield from a barn in 5 minutes and put up a fight regardless of how otherwise outgeared they might be.

ARMA 3 is way beyond Alpha stage at this point. Furthermore Alpha and Beta don't really have much meaning when it comes to modern online games. Most good online games are in beta for the majority of their lifetime. Always being tested, always being tweaked, always being updated, etc. Alpha on the other hand is whatever the developer in question wants it to be.

You forgot the part where War-Z will probably never be released.

Not true, it can and is battleye. Battleye has been getting "client not responding" errors for me on every beta patch since 95054. I've reinstalled every a bunch of times, used every installer/updater under the sun, placed the battleye dll files by hand, etc., nothing works. I played the game just fine on 95054 and for 2-3 weeks before that on other beta patches so I don't think my router has anything to do with it. I connect to a server, see the battleye version challenge and acknowledgement (everything is on the right version), and I can play for anywhere up to 15 minutes or so before I see "playername is losing connection" and then I get kicked due to battleye not responding. Kind of annoying when an anti-cheat "solution" prevents legit players from playing while the hackers run rampant.

You're dead, I'm not. It could have gone the other way. It didn't. That is enough to satisfy me. If you're tired of getting shot then all you have to do is avoid all resource centers. Stay out of the cities if you don't want to run into bandits. Stay away from high traffic areas. You can get everything you need to survive without going anywhere near Cherno, Elektro, or the airstrips. Whatever you do, stop complaining about getting burned after you've stuck your hand into the fire.

This isn't an MMO, it isn't a level grind, it doesn't need an endgame to keep people paying indefinitely. Play it because you enjoy surviving, play it because you enjoy exploring Chernarus, play it because you enjoy PvP. When you stop enjoying all of those things, then move on to the next game. There isn't any magic crack at the end of the game to keep you on the hamster wheel indefinitely. People looking for an endgame in everything need to realize that sometimes it isn't about the destination, it is about the journey itself.

Who said anything about playing DayZ solely for PvP? I don't. Anybody who lives longer than 30 minutes doesn't. Even pretending that they do it is still OK for them to do it here, they're not the ones advocating that the game be ruined for people who currently enjoy it, are they?

The part that I find the most confusing is that people actually like boring PvE zombie games. PvP is the only thing adding any excitement whatsoever to this game. An Arma II NPC isn't going to out-think me or out-play me. It isn't going to throw new tactics at me, it isn't going surprise me by learning to counter my tactics. If I snipe a zombie it isn't going to make it its goal in life to kill me after it respawns. It isn't going to spend 2 hours making sure it has the tools it needs to get the jump on me. It isn't going to practice stealth, use distractions, or dark of night to cross my perimeter undetected. PvE games last me hours, sometimes days. PvP games can keep me interested for YEARS. Please stop trying to suck the life out of this game in an effort to make it another boring snoozefest compstomp when you already have plenty of those to choose from.

Entirely different question, one completely unrelated to a supposed "PK problem". The most obvious answer is: Lots of people still play Counterstrike. :)

Good comeback, I particularly liked the in-depth analysis you used to refute human nature as documented throughout ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY.

If you think humans aren't the biggest challenge to surviving in a post-apocalyptic scenario you need to think again. When you have limited resources the strong band together and take those resources from anybody who can't defend them. Zombies---by their very nature---are just a mindless environmental hazard.

What PK problem? There are more PvE zombie games than you can shake a stick at and exactly one with open world PvP. HINT: We may have come for the zombies but they're not what is keeping us here.