Black Dow

I've got five right now, but I generally pick up any I find so I can give them to friends. I'd drop a few if I found anything more valuable than a water bottle or anything else in my inventory, but so far I haven't needed to do so. I'd say just grab the ones you find and drop them later if you need to. Water bottles aren't rare, but they're sure as hell valuable. Too many is better than not enough. And again, it's not like you don't have the option to drop them if you find something better.

The similarities between weakness due to starvation and weakness due to blood loss are similar enough. It makes sense. Anyway, to the TC: find houses. Loot houses. Cross fingers. You're never guaranteed to find food in this game, but houses and supermarkets are your best bets. Houses are a lot easier to find. You may have to go into some of the big cities if you want your best shot of finding food. You're going to die anyway if you don't eat something, so you may as well risk death and enter the nearest city.

Amen. God forbid someone should actually try a new game that wasn't playing it since the day it came out. The fact is, any time you get a massive influx of new gamers into your game of choice, it's a good thing. Big communities help games stay alive longer. Today's noob is next week's over watch sniper for your raid group. I remember when Team Fortress 2 went free to play. So much bitching, but it made the game better in the long run. Yeah, it sucked for a few months while the new players were still terrible and you ended up unable to win because half your team didn't know where the capture point was (things were similarly bad when the Mac crowd came in unable to right click...many a sticky bomb went undetonated that day), but eventually things evened themselves out and a good chunk of the players started to improve. The point being you should welcome new players into your community rather than shunning them. Face facts. A lot of people bought Arma for this game. Many of us, myself included, have no interest in Arma at all outside of this mod, and we only reluctantly paid the eighteen bucks that we were forced to pay to give DayZ a shot. If you love Arma, great, but don't expect everyone to enjoy that type of game. There's a reason a lot of people had no interest in it until DayZ came along, as the game's sales illustrate.

See, your problem was you tried to mug more than one person when you were alone. You're supposed to mug people when you have the advantage. Trying to mug people that have an advantage over you is just stupid.

Definitely better than Six. Just the search options alone make it better. The ability to add friends, enable the Steam overlay, favorite servers...all features that every game should have.

Awesome. I love that I can now favorite servers without having to write their names down. Thanks. Also the ability to sort by day or night!

I think it really boils down to whether you want to play the game as a simulation or whether you want to get the best gear and stay alive for long periods of time. Stealth is certainly more realistic, but it's also the best way to get killed very quickly by a sniper. I tried stealth half a dozen times. I'd crawl and sneak around like Solid Snake for an hour, collecting items, avoiding zombies, and hoping to hit the jackpot and find a good gun. Then, inevitably, some asshole sniper would shoot me in the back while I was crawling toward a loot building despite the fact that I was completely unarmed. Stealth is fun, for a time at least. But eventually you get sick of being sniped by people for no reason and decide to use the smash-and-grab method. You get in, grab some good gear, and get out as quickly as possible. The game is much more fun for me when I actually have the tools to help me survive. I suppose if you played alone on an empty server this game could be a great survival simulator, but as long as there are other people playing with you your best bet is going to be getting in fast and getting out before anyone has a chance to mark you.

The thing is, DayZ really isn't all that hard. It just has a really, really steep learning curve because the controls suck (seriously, they are awful for anyone who has played any or every other PC shooter ever made) and are very unintuitive, and the game gives you almost no useful items and no concrete objective when you first spawn. Couple those two factors together and you have a game that is very difficult for a first-time player and very easy for anyone who knows what to do. Take zombies for instance. They are a huge threat to a new player, but once you know how to deal with them (which requires watching maybe a YouTube video or two), they are total pushovers. Once you've got two weapons, zombies are little more than an annoyance you occasionally have to put down. The only thing that makes this game difficult once you've got the basics of survival down is other players, but that's true about literally every other multi-player game out there. There are always going to be players that are better than you and thus a bigger threat. What makes this game good is not the difficulty, but rather the consequences of dying. When you die, you lose everything. That makes every firefight more meaningful than it might be in another game. Sure, finding supplies isn't terribly difficult, but it can be very annoying to have to start over from scratch. What also makes this game great is working together with friends to accomplish things, which is made cooler due to the open world sandbox game design. I think a lot of people just get a hard-on by pretending that the game they play is much more difficult than "that game the n00bs play." In reality, this game doesn't really require more skill than any other online shooter. It just requires different skills.

I'll add you on Steam a bit later tonight. I play with a few of my friends as well, but some of them are pretty inconsistent with when they can play, so I'd like a solid group of other people to play with regularly.

More fun moments in DayZ... I started out near Novy Sobor from the previous night. I was holed up in the church waiting on one of my friends to arrive at the city. I thought he was relatively close, and he certainly didn't make it sound like he was all that far away when we logged off the previous night. When he finally got online earlier tonight, he informed me that he was all the way at the castle at Rog. We decided to meet up around the deer stand down the highway from Guglovo. Well, apparently I started out leaving Novy Sobor down the correct highway, but I mistakenly thought I was traveling down the wrong one. I figured the right one was a short trip East, so I headed that way. Boy was I wrong. Ten confusing minutes later, I found myself on the outskirts of Gorka. Meanwhile, my friend somehow managed to fall from the castle and break his leg, leaving him unable to walk. I figured meeting up was a lot cause, so proceeded to loot the more valuable buildings in Gorka. My friend then decided to log off, so my new plan became a solo trip north to Dubrovka, and then to travel west around Black Mountain to Krasnostov. About halfway to Krasnostov, I came upon a tiny, almost boring shack and, with nothing else nearby, I decided to go ahead and loot it. Being out in the open, stealth seemed like the best option. I initially noticed four zombies, all of whom were walking away from the shack in question. I looped around to get between the two pairs of zeds and started creeping my way forward. As I approached the shack, I noticed that there were more zombies than I originally anticipated, and one of them happened to be coming right for me. Rather than do the smart thing and go prone, I decided I could probably squeeze of a single shot off and not alert the rest of the zombies. They were already pretty far away at that point and I was using a Winchester, which sounds pretty tame compared to many of the weapons in the game. And obviously, I was wrong again. Upon taking down that first zombie, I summoned a horde of angry, screaming violence right to me. Now, in cities, zombies are not much of a hassle. You give them the run around, enter a few buildings, and lose them easily. If you're on the outskirts of a city, you can use steep hills to get rid of them. Luckily for me, there was a single building within a mile radius of that building and the surrounding land was completely flat and barren of trees. I decided the only solution was violence, and as much of it as possible. I led the zombies on a quick route through the building. As they all swarmed together, I realized there were no less than ten goddamn zombies hanging out around a solitary, tiny shack in the middle of nowhere. Must have been my lucky day. I flipped around as quickly as possible and went into first-person mode. Two of them were already on me. I took some damage and, with my luck holding up, the first blow had me bleeding. My Winchester rattled off round after round, but the zombies kept coming. At that point, I didn't even know where they were coming from and I sure as hell didn't care. They were falling in waves at my feet and I was determined to stay alive. With two zombies left, I was shocked to hear a terrifying click as I attempted to fire the next round. I had gone through thirteen bullets already (I didn't start with a full clip), and as far as I know I hadn't missed yet. I reloaded, taking a bit more damage in the process. Two more cracks echoed through the field and, finally, all that was left at my feet were dead bodies. I looked at my kill tally in the debug monitor. It read sixteen zombies. And with my luck, remember that tiny shack in the middle of nowhere? It was empty. But hey, I was alive, those fuckers were dead, and sometimes that's all that matters.

Are you a mod? Because it certainly doesn't say so next to your name.

This thread actually offers suggestions for how to accomplish the first two, and I don't think I complained about technical glitches. This is an alpha. Those are going to happen.

I definitely think the current system needs to be changed, but I don't think the suggestions in the OP are the way to change it. I'd rather see much scarcer ammunition and much tougher zombies. Bullets should be a luxury that you can't afford to waste gunning down an unarmed survivor. Every time you pull the trigger you should be forced to weigh the cost of the bullet over the value of the target. If players have to start doing that, they will be less likely to go on mindless murder sprees and more likely to only go after targets that offer them some personal gain.

I'm not saying the zombies should be able to solve complex mathematical equations when I say they should be smarter. What I am implying is that it should be harder to ditch them. Right now it's retardedly easy. The zombies add very little challenge to the game to veteran players. Hell, I've only been playing DayZ for a week and I've already figured out how to ditch them. In a game about a zombie apocalypse, don't you think that the zombies should, you know, be a threat? In your typical zombie story, the zombies are always the biggest threat. That threat is a constant. Other people generally pose a threat as well, but that threat is more subdued and tends to pop up every now and then rather than being ongoing. In DayZ, zombies pose next to no threat to anyone who knows what they are doing. The only ongoing threat is other people. This game has it backward. That was my point about the night. Realism, ultimately, is overrated. We're quick to squash people's realistic ideas (see: the thread about going to the bathroom in the game) when we don't think they'll be fun. Why should this be any different? If night isn't fun for over 50% of your players (and the percentage is likely much higher than that), tweak it until it is. It's as simple as that. Yes, the pond idea was going hand-in-hand with decreased ammo spawns and less high-powered weapons. In a scenario like that, it's doubtful you'll be randomly sniped if you don't look like you have much valuable gear. I look at it this way...if I have a bandit group that sets up a perimeter around a water spout in the wilderness and some random guy came through without any weapons, we're probably just going to let him fill up his canteen and go on his way without ever letting him know we're there. If a well-armed group comes through to fill up, we're going to be much more inclined to attempt to rob them. That's really the way the game should be. Right now players are being killed for nothing and to no gain.

Well, it would be a bit hypocritical to complain about getting shot on sight while unarmed when you sit on top of buildings and snipe unarmed people.