FalafelCopter

Almost ONE YEAR after this was posted, this fixed my problem. Setting the beta .exe file to run as administrator solved the problem that's kept me from playing dayz for almost the same amount of time. This was the culmination of almost 40 hours of troubleshooting. I don't know if you're still around, but thank you. I can sleep again.

I'd rather have him focus on making the hatchet a little more reliable than add a bunch more melee weapons that will be just as frustrating to use.

I wish people would stop calling themselves retards as an insult. I bet there's tons of people with learning disabilities who are smarter than the people who have these insults aimed at them. :P

Realism this, realism that. If this game were a realistic zombie simulator, almost nobody would intentionally seek out pvp because they would be too scared that the other guy would win and they would be dead forever. Nobody would ever stockpile loot for the next life because there isn't one. People would band together for protection because the best safety is to be found in large numbers. This is a game that is very intentionally and strongly unrealistic. We all realize that, right? What should matter is what allows the game to be as successful and fun as it can be. I feel like there are people in here that get a nice big ego stroke from feeling like they're some kind of hardass zombie survivor who'd be totally fine in a zombie apocalypse because they play a "realistic" game, and that people making it easier will take away the thing that's making themselves feel good about themselves.

Or to put it in another way: You have to take away a couple of people's freedoms or else they will use their freedoms to take away all of everyone else's freedoms, which results in a net loss of freedoms overall. (That actually hurt to type.)

People deal with temperature in vastly different ways. There are guys who can sit in the snow naked and be perfectly fine, and people who get hypothermia in a little bit of rain. Does that mean we shouldn't use temperature in a mechanic? People have different metabolisms and differ in the time they can go without eating, does that mean we shouldn't use hunger in a mechanic? People differ in how long they can run, does that mean everyone in the game should walk? People differ in how much they can withstand pain, does that mean we shouldn't use a pain mechanic? People are vastly different from one another in tons of ways, but that rarely stops game developers from using these traits as game mechanics. I would say that people are probably more similar to each other in how well they deal with loneliness than in how they deal with endurance sprinting. Okay, so you agree that a loneliness mechanic is an okay idea as long as it's fully thought out and other things change to make it work? Great! We agree then. I never said my ideas for how the mechanic could work are the only ideas there could be, I just threw out some random ideas as they came to my head. Of course Rocket would be able to do a far better job with it than my random musings. I'm only brainstorming general directions solutions can come from, not fully fleshed out game mechanics that need to be implemented perfectly or ignored.

One person's feedback is another person's whining. It's all useful. Stop trying to shut people down and let them get their opinion out. Rocket wants to hear the "whining" as well as the praise.

I just don't understand why loneliness is "gamification" and needing to drink every 10 minutes is "perfectly realistic." These are both basic, common, physiological needs. I can't think of any criteria that pain fits that loneliness doesn't, for instance. They're both invisible things that are represented only by a meter and by your character's movements and sounds. I get that you might not like the mechanic for gameplay reasons but the realism/authenticity argument is nonsense.

THIS. "I think my best option for survival is to run to where there's lots of horrible monsters that are killing everyone and are attracted to sound, and then make a ton of noise! Surely this will help somehow!"

Other than how incredibly simplistic this viewpoint is, wouldn't troll be a subset of selfish? Thats why you need to modify the game so that it's within people's self interest to act in a variety of ways and not just the most obvious and simplistic ones. Players are lazy and they'll get themselves stuck in a boring rut unless the game subtly pushes them towards other things. If you just leave players to their own devices in a game where it's easier to ruin fun than to create it, then everyone will ruin each other's fun until nobody is enjoying themselves and everyone is bored. It's like how if you leave a bunch of lobsters in a pond, they will just sit there eating each other until there's one fat lobster that will starve. That type of game design isn't conducive to long term success. The trolls will chase out all the players who want a social experience and then they will just troll each other until they get bored. It's just weird that you would use gamification as something that can even happen to a video game in the first place. This game is chock full of gameified mechanics. Temperature, hunger, thirst, none of them work the way they work in reality. They're tweaked to act in a way that's fun and engaging rather than realistic, and designed with specific goals for player behavior. Blood packs requiring another player is transparent attempt to get us to work together, but it doesn't feel like "gamification" because it fits well within the world. Any other mechanic that gets introduced should be as authentic as that, but you can force pretty much any rule and make it authentic somehow if you think hard enough. None of us want to see the experience cheapened, we want exactly the opposite. The experience feels cheap as it is. Also, wait hold on a second. You think that new mechanics should be introduced in order to allow players to rebuild society, yet you think we shouldn't be requesting new content? What?

Technically there are no safe zones in eve either. You can be killed anywhere, as long as the pirates brought a large enough group to fight off the security ships. (At least, that's how I remember it.) You're right about one thing though, eve does have an option to be a peaceful player. There are enough tools in place for players to create the type of experience they want, whether it be an aggressive or a peaceful one. Eve is the textbook definition of a well balanced sandbox. There's a reason a game with combat as butt-terrible as Eve's is as successful as it is. Wow, those both sound like really cool ideas... except, that's not what actually happens right now. There's no reason to enslave people or do fancy merchant stuff right now, because generally other players don't have things you need. The people doing the most pvping are the people who need the least things. I've never had someone come after me with a hatchet or a makarov, NEVER. I'd totally understand and be cool with it if a starving player killed me for weapons or supplies, but it's always some guy with NV goggles, a high powered rifle, and a gillie suit. I'd love if this game were a true sandbox and actually allowed for a range of different player experiences, but it's really not that right now. There simply isn't enough depth to allow for it. (With the exception of maybe the metagame doctors who server hop to save injured people. That's great and I think that's one of the most interesting bits of emergent gameplay the game supports. :D) It has the potential to become a sandbox if it's problems are ironed out, though. This was only being argued because people were saying "stop whining, its an alpha." Otherwise nobody would be arguing about what technical name to call the phase the game is in. The thing is, in real life, people get too scared or lonely to go off on their own, even if they have the skills to do it viably. For most people, if they were alone in a zombie apocalypse, they would be incredibly happy to see another human being because they would know the other human would be likely to be as lonely and scared as they are. In this game that's not the case for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed previously. We can argue until we're blue in the face about what would "REALLY HAPPEN FOR REALZ" in a zombie apocalypse, but what really matters is that we both agree that current in game player behavior doesn't represent it. Someone would not walk into the most heavily zed infested town, climb up to a building, and randomly snipe other survivors and then not loot them. It wouldn't happen. More importantly, it doesn't matter whether it would happen or not. All that matters is what kind of gameplay it provides and whether it's good for the health of the game and the playerbase. The whole argument about realism only got brought up in the first place, again, because the bandit/pvp side people have been bringing it up incessantly to attack the people trying to make the game a little bit less deathmatchy. Or they could do it through specializing people to the point where it's worthwhile to group up. Hey wait, that sounds familiar! So, you seem for individual mechanics that facilitate social nonaggressive behavior, yet you seem against the idea of people asking for mechanics for that purpose. It's confusing to me. None of those things are "just like" dayz, or even resemble what happens in it in anything but the most superficial of ways. >_>

I think people should take a look at the walking dead graphic novels. They have the most well thought out and psychological approach to life during a zombie apocalypse that I've seen so far. Yes, there's a lot of banditry there, but almost never on first sight.

Fixing the bugs is a suggestion for how to solve the problem. Period. I don't see what you're confused about here? Some of them would, and it's fine that they would. Any change that completely stops people from doing this would be far too strict a change. The problem is that the game currently doesn't support grouping up with players you meet in the game. You have your players that you met up with in the forums and teamspeak, and everyone else in the game is an enemy that needs to be shot on sight. It all reinforces the idea that anyone you meet in the game that you don't know outside of the game needs to either be killed or escaped with out even the smallest urge to try to communicate with them. Things should not be that black and white. For a mod that tries to be realistic, it veers incredibly far away from realism in some of the places where it matters the most. First of all, quit it with the misogynist slurs, seriously. Yeah, all the people who disagree with you are whiny bitches, right? Game developers who don't make games you like lack balls? Grow up and quit with the aggressive language and discuss the topics at hand. Second, yes, I get it, this game is unique for now. If it's successful enough it'll spawn an entire genre and everyone will probably get what they want. I understand that you'd be frustrated with people providing suggestions that make it slightly less your baby, since there aren't any other games for you to go to if this one starts to go in a direction you don't like. However, nobody in this topic want to remove any of the features you list. (Except, "no rules" is incredibly vague. Combat logging is against the rules, and racism is grounds for serve bans, so there's plenty of rules, but now I'm definitely nitpicking.) Third, I thought for a second you were trying to say that this game didn't have persistence. I see now that you are, but I don't really know if the way you're using it is the way it's generally used in games. The games that have the most persistence as you describe it (having a single character that persists after logging out) are MMOs, which are almost never described using that word. It generally only refers to games where you normally wouldn't keep your progress after a "match", where you don't lose all of that progress. Generally what that means is that you can start with better stuff next time you play. In other words, I would be more likely to describe getting items from your stash after respawning as persistence than simply logging back in to the same character. In a sense, that just means your "match" hasn't ended yet. Anyway, sorry for the misunderstanding there. Fourth: Is the ability to gather loot from your stash after dying counter to the idea of a hardcore permadeath game? Shouldn't death mean having to start over with a flashlight from the coast? Doesn't knowing that you can just wander over and grab yourself a full set of gear again dull the fear and caution you should be having? Isn't that a step away from the hardcore realism that people seem to want out of this game? Or do people only want hardcore realism when it suits them?

It's not that survivors have a harder time hoarding loot than bandits, it's that once you've hoarded all that loot, there's not much left to do besides become a bandit. The worst bandits are the ones who manipulated the game via server hopping and other cheesy mechanics so that they can get back faster to their cherno deathmatch. If you make it harder for them to do that, the random sniping will lessen. If you think that loneliness isn't tangible, then you've never had to be by yourself for an extended period of time. If you want to get really technical, loneliness is as physical as being in pain is. (In fact, some of the same parts of the brain are involved.) A game is never going to be able to cause you to have emotions anything like what you would experience if you were in a situation like that, especially to the people who are just screwing around and playing call of duty cherno edition. A subtle mechanic could nudge them a little bit back into being immersed in the world. Grouping up with other players (NOT IN TEAMSPEAK) represents a danger because you never know when your new friend might decide to shoot you in the back. Shooting on sight or running away is far safer, always. Isn't stockpiling loot for your next life a form of persistence?

I actually kind of like your suggestion at the end there because I think it would also help a bit. The problem right now is that permadeath sucks far less for the bandits, which is why they're just sitting there randomly sniping people running around with no weapons and a flashlight. If the bandits were actually trying to survive instead of screwing around and putting themselves into the most dangerous situations possible, the game would be a far better place for survivors. 1. What do you think about the blood bag mechanic? That forces people to play together too, right? 2. I don't understand why you think this mechanic is more gamey than the heat mechanic or the pain mechanic. Is it just because you've gotten used to the other ones? 3. Nobody would be forced to do anything. I added the alcohol mechanic for a reason. (Morphine and maybe certain plants could also help with this.) Solo players have an extra resource to worry about to balance out the danger grouping up with other players represents. The problem is that the worst and most irritating bandits are the ones using non-legit means to get their stuff. Removing the ability to server hop to get tons of free loot or escape pvp will force a lot of bandits to actually start trying to survive again, with a net effect of improving the game for everyone. I know these bugs will be fixed some day, but that doesn't mean we can't brainstorm stopgap measures in the meanwhile. Tell me about another zombie game with a loneliness mechanic and maybe making a comment like this won't make you look stupid.