sherlock (DayZ)

Someone already did: http://www.dayzmodwiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page Hope this helps. Edit: JustSONY seems to have beaten me to it ;)

Very entertaining video and one learns some very important lessons from it.

Get a good night's sleep. All the best with the patching process later.

Good luck with the testing, hope it all works fine. Looking forward to a new interesting round of experiments. :D

Something else just crossed my mind. Quite a few argue against the removal of the bandit skins with balance considerations in mind. This, as many that argue from a realism standpoint have pointed out, seems misplaced. However to argue that the removal would increase the realism of the mod seems misplaced too. It is partially correct that you can't visually tell a bandit apart from other people, although their ruthless methods would give them access to equipment others don't have. Yes, that equipment comes from the other survivors but the bandit will have the collective sum of all valuable equipment from all his victims, which would make him stand out. You could see the bandit skin as a indication of that. Furthermore it is questionable if the realism would rise at all since the phsycological aspects of murder is not (cannot and should not be) simulated in any game. Murderers in reality have shown a disconnect with the outside world and their environement. More often than not they would isolate themselves. This isolation renders them uncapable (after a while, mind you) to not raise eyebrows when trying to blend in or lead a casual conversation. The bandit system might be seen as a representation of that and the reasoning a human concience would bring forward against murder. I'm sure noone would want a game that realistically touches those aspects because it wouldn't be entertaining anymore. The bandit system seems a sort of way to incentivise "correct" behaviour while still remaining fun to play and explore it. I'm convinced that not everyone will now just shoot everything that moves but strangers will mistrust each other even more, hence my only real concern for an increasing segregation of player groups (for reference see my initial posts on page 34). As I tried to show, both lines of thinking, balance and realism, have some inherent problems. I focussed mainly on presenting a counter-argument to the realism dogma because it went relatively unchallenged and all other arguments were coming from balance concerns and therefore weren't directly addressing the realism arguments. So, let's not abandon or keep something because of either balance or realism (even I will put my reservations about it due to my other concern away ;)), let's try something new for the sake of experimentation and let's see if the result is any better or not.

As with the last introduced feature (more zombies) I'm all for the new experiment. While the new zombie numbers did grow on me and I really started to appreciate the added difficulty, I'm a bit more critical about the outcome of this experiment. It might be more realistic that way but it will also remove one big incentive to cooperate when bandits cannot be told appart from everyone else. If there is no drawback, the pvp is likely to rise. I don't consider just your humanity going down as a real drawback since other than your personal taste nothing is effected. If you chose to be a bandit untill now, you deliberately did so, knowing about the concequences. The concequences beeing that most people will shoot you on sight because they know that you'll do exactly the same if you get the jump on them. The removal of the visual distinction between survivors and bandits incentivises pvp and might decrease the threat posed by zombies further. The other problem I see is the fragmentation of the player groups. A lot of people already play and communicate with friends over ts/skype or other services. This is likely to increase since the people you can trust are now people that you know or people on ts since you're able to sanction them verbally over ts, if they betray you. One of the best parts of the game so far has been meeting someone in the middle of nowhere and that very tense few seconds where you decide to either work together, part ways or shoot each other. I fear that the other two choices are now decreased in validity. Removing the feature for the sake of realism isn't that convincing either. In every post apocaliptic movie there are always bandits and they can be told apart from survivors easily since due to their ruthless methods they have better gear. The different skin is a reflection of that. My biggest concern however, as already mentioned, is the increasing segregation of the players due to the new system and the direct communication channel which doesn't seem to be working (already creates an incentive to use proprietary software). All concerns aside, I'll gladly give this a try. Well, let's see how it plays out. I didn't see any major problems with the skin system, so I don't know what's not working. Could someone elaborate this in a bit more detail?

You can only lower your rifle by double tabbing the CTRL-key, the pistol will not work. I have seen some, only equiped with a pistol, use salute (have a look at the controls to figure out what it is bound to on your keyboard) to signal that they're friendly.

Is the tent in that case bound to one specific server (e.g. Virginia 1) and won't be where it was placed on any other or where you referring to the centralised server that handles all character infos?

The problem is that most people don't seem to have the slightest bit of patience. If it says "waiting for server response" that means that your request cannot be handeled at the moment because there are a lot of others. Leaving the server and reconnecting or connecting to another only makes matters worse since it creates new requests to the server. I was on a couple of servers waiting for the server to respond and I observed people connecting and disconnecting so fast that a chat message that had more than 4 words in it couldn't be read before it disappeared. This is not helping. Constantly connecting and reconnecting causes more traffic and eventually might even crash the server. This problem is known to the people who are familiar with the armaverse and I would advise admins to close their server after a while to prevent the constant switching of servers and to allow the server to handle the existing requests. PR:A2 did use this successfully to allow stable game sessions. The motto is: If you want to play stay (and wait a bit). Have patience.

I gave this new challenge a go with a colleague and I have to admit that I like that a stealthy approach seems a lot more rewarding now. However we were in Staroye, a small village, that could accomodate about 30 inhabitants tops but we encountered more than twice as many zobies which was a bit immersion breaking. The other thing I noticed is that they do not react to thrown empty tin cans or whiskey bottles at all which makes a stealthy approach almost impossible since their count is that high that the chances of getting through the village undetected are very slim (mind you we were prone to make absolutely sure we wouldn't anger any of them but they move faster than you can get out of their way). Player killing might see an increase (I never did it so far) because it's less ammo intensive and easier to get provisions (off course the killing is going to shift from cities to more remote areas). But I find this bug an interesting opportunity to examine the changed dynamic and think that a slightly increased zobie-count (compared to the last release) might add to the immersion.

I disagree with this assessment. An increase in the zombie numbers and very short respawn times make looting a less viable option. This in turn creates an incentive to prey on other players because it presents a ever decreasing challenge. Newly spawned players will also have a rougher start and might not come very far at all. They might also spawn way off of anyone else to cooperate decreasing their life expectancy or they might come to the conclusion that it is easier to kill players than it is to get decent loot and fighting off hordes of zombies. With the scavenging getting harder it might create an incentive to group up, but at some point the group might just resort to preying on other players since they got the strength in number and killing other players in remote areas is far less risky and less ammo consuming. With ammo beeing scarce pvp might be the easiest way to stock up on it to be able to fend off a horde when you accidently alert them in the next area you're trying to get some provisions. Some suggested that zombies should spawn should spawn a lot more in the forest to discurage player killing. While I like the attempt to discurage it, this would be a step in the wrong direction. Zombies are infected humans and only very few humans are held up in the forest.