madmax939@hotmail.com

Probably just another hacker. Some of them have the capability to teleport all players or vehicles to one location, i've seen two servers now where all vehicles in the map were at electro or cherno. They can also use god mode and teleport to you and kill you, which happened to me a few days ago!

What about going down the Red Orchestra route? In Red Orchestra 2 (a WW2 realism FPS) you cannot see your magazine count, instead you have to hold down your reload button, then your character pulls out the magazine and feels the weight of it to estimate how many bullets are left in the magazine, after which a little caption comes up on screen for a couple of seconds, saying: 'magazine is full', 'magazine is light' or 'magazine is almost empty'. The caption acts as a bridge between us and the character because we cannot be there to feel the weight of the magazine ourselves, much like in Dayz we can't see or feel how much blood we've lost. But now that I think about it, should we really be able to estimate how much blood we have lost? I can't imagine myself being able to estimate how much blood i've lost even if I could see or feel it. Especially if I had just been shot or ripped open by a zombie. Maybe the best solution would be (and maybe this will only be possible in the standalone) to have no blood indicator at all, but when a character is shot have the blood pour out of them and stain the ground, as well as keeping the current greyed out screen after significant blood loss. At first this will take a while to get used to estimating your blood loss in this system, but experienced players will be able to accurately estimate by the amount of blood on the floor, the amount of blood pouring out of them, and the colour of the screen. Yes, in real life, it would be hard to estimate your blood loss after getting shot, mostly because you probably haven't been shot enough times to have practice at guessing that kind of thing. But as gamers who will have multiple characters who have been shot, we can experience and learn from previous lives and encounters and quickly be able to establish how much blood we would have lost, making the blood icon or debug monitor obsolete.

You mean you never shot your neighbour in the head with a spud gun as a child? By the time I was 8 years old my humanity was probably somewhere around the -16k mark; the best bandit on my block.

Let's say you spawn at Cherno Hit the supermarket, church and firestation. You'll get food/drink from the supermarket and if you're lucky a backpack or gun, binoculars, bla bla bla. From the church you might get a pack, more food, bandages, ammo. From the firestation you might get ammo, and other stuff that i can't remember, maybe even a primary weapon but we're not counting on that. Next head straight to NWAF hitting all the barns and deerstands on the way. If you know which direction to go in you can get to NWAF in 10-15 minutes from Cherno. NWAF is the best bet for guns and gear because of the barracks, all kinds of shit spawns there. If you're unlucky enough to not get any primary weapon or backpack from the barracks then make do with the winchester/lee enfield you should have collected from cherno or the barns on the way (use it to kill someone and take their shit, like I said, if you didn't get anything from the barracks then you're unlucky and it didn't work out this time). In the earlier patches when you spawned with makarov, bandages, water bottle and beans, I used to run straight to NWAF no matter where I spawned - without the need to go through Cherno for food/drink etc. Try not to die at the airfield.

Wut? That ancient weapon burial site shit is going a bit too far, this isn't Indiana Jones we're talkin about here...

I do love me some crazy time.

...Yeah so what we're saying is to make players hear gunshots and noises etc when there is no actual stimuli; and thus simulate a broken down mind. If I think about what mental problems could occur after a traumatic experience such as an apocalypse what you might mainly find is schizophrenia and depression. The one to cause more freak-you-the-fuck-out is schizophrenia which causes a lot of mind fuck, paranoia, hallucinations, as well as complete changes in thinking that can question your reality: maybe you might believe you had already died at the beginning of the apocalypse, and now this post apocalyptic world you're surviving in is in fact hell. Not nice, I know! But the hallucinations you describe have no place in a game because it's just that - a game. You'd get bored of seeing zombies running at you that aren't there after 5 minutes! The reason it would be scary in real life is because in order to see visual hallucinations, you would be suffering from some kind of mental illness, which would make it scary no matter how ballsy you are.

Think 007 remote controlled ejector seat... wait for some asshole to get in your bait vehicle and then hit the eject button from the tree-line off the road. Haha, not very post apocalyptic.

It might get tedious looking for pieces of maps, when really why would a map be torn up and placed in different locations. But I like the idea of treasure/loot maps..... Anyone played STALKER? You could find corpses with diaries on them that gave locations of the dead guy's loot - backpacks that had been stuffed down sewage pipes or hidden in the cavities of car engines. That kind of thing might add diversity to the loot locations instead of always finding stuff in buildings. Maybe in Dayz standalone, there could be maps of underground sewage areas which the players could then enter. Imagine exploring sewage tunnels with your flashlight and sewage line map as your only guide. Would be cool to have gunfights in large underground sewage lines!

I'm no programmer but I think stuff like that is difficult to make practical unless you're playing a more linear game like F.E.A.R (singleplayer that is). If you have routine visual hallucinations like that, players will soon learn to tell the difference between real players and the hallucinations, making the whole thing pointless and in the end reducing immersion. Similar things have happened in quite a few other games before, where players quickly learn how to overcome an obstacle, and from then on the obstacle just becomes a laughing matter; a bit like how zombies used to be very easy to sneak past by going prone and crawling through a town.

Reminds me of this topic: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/9127-a-new-status-to-encourage-cooperation/ Thing is I reckon strong visual hallucinations such as seeing other players following you, would interfere too much with the gameplay. But as I suggested in that other thread what you could do is fuck with the player's situational awareness. Mess with their peripheral vision indicators, creep them out with player noises in forests, make them hear distant gunshots, that sort of thing!

Most of the time on a Dayz server, the administrator is part of the clan that actively plays on that server. Ghosting/metagaming is almost impossible to trace in Dayz, the only clue you'd have about it is that a bunch of guys seem to keep finding you, wherever you are in Chernarus. Allowing admins to spectate would be fine if all Dayz admins could be trusted, but unfortunately that isn't that case...

What about hallucinations? When I first started playing Dayz I often got creeped out when I heard sticks breaking or birds scuttering away in the forests I was walking through, but after a while I realised these sounds just play randomly whenever you're in a forest and in fact had nothing to do with other players being in the same forest. What if these noises were modified to be related to other players being around in the forest with you (so the stick breaking noise might play when another player is nearby in the forest). Then if your depression/anxiety/schizophrenia etc is severe, these noises would be increased to play even when there are no players in the forest with you. Not knowing whether there's another player in the forest or if it's just their own solitude mind playing tricks on them makes the Lone Wolfs more careful about traveling on their own and really feel insecure, but doesn't just piss the player off with a greyed out screen like they're low on blood. Maybe the psychological breakdown could be explored even more if the player doesn't find anti-psychotics, such as experiencing visual hallucinations. But I fear that visuals may change gameplay dramatically - stuff like seeing human figures or zombies might really fuck the player up if they start shooting at things that aren't there...

don't play with psychopaths i guess.

Wouldn't really say that this is evidence because it could have easily been a simple server crash (there's been a lot of that, as well as de-syncing, since the last dayz patch). And if you guys didn't save the vehicles anywhere after you took them, then of course they would have rolled back, the server places them in the last place they were saved, that's just the way Dayz works! AFAIK some servers can employ a system where if multiple players try to join the server in a short space of time, the server automatically locks until those players have loaded into the game. Also I doubt the administrator would be raging enough over losing a couple of tractors and crappy guns to reset the server, especially not one of the popular servers such as UK4...