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.

First off, let me say that I'm enjoying DayZ quite a bit. I started playing recently at the suggestion of a couple of my friends, and after watching some helpful YouTube vids and getting past the ridiculously steep learning curve, I'm loving the tension that comes with having a bagful of great loot and very much wanting to avoid dying at any cost. That said, this game does have issues, and not just ones related to it being an alpha. There are plenty of bugs, obviously, but I see no point in addressing them here as they will be ironed out over time. PvP is more rampant than it should be, random people have zero incentive to work together to survive, zombies are a complete non-threat after you've watched two or three YouTube videos, and the list goes on. Anyway, here are some of my suggestions... 1. Randomized starting loot. I'm fine with not starting with a weapon, but starting with basically nothing kind of sucks. I think that, in addition to the current starting loot (which, I believe, is a bandage, painkillers, and a flashlight), players should receive a couple of randomized lower-tier items and one randomized tool aside from the flashlight. Not only does this give new players a bit to work with, but it also makes attacking unarmed players slightly reasonable given that they may be carrying a somewhat valuable tool like a compass or map. 2. Fix night time gameplay. As it stands, night time play is literally only fun if you have night vision goggles or a rifle with a night vision scope. For everyone else, the gameplay at night hovers somewhere between totally unplayable and completely unfun. When I spawn at night in this game, it's like I'm in a fucking cavern. Has anyone here ever been out at night? Even in the middle of a field miles from the nearest city and with no light sources nearby, you can still see reasonably well because of the light from the moon. Even on cloudy nights you can still see at least enough to tell where you're going. In DayZ you can't see shit at night, and turning on your flashlight just makes you a free sniper kill. Let me put it this way: if you need a very rare item to enjoy playing during an eight hour period every day on every server, something is wrong. Night should be more challenging and more dangerous, but it shouldn't be the complete bullshit that it is right now. 3. More zombies! I'm not sure how feasible this is in the current game engine, but I'd like to see significantly more zombies. As it stands, zombies are basically just a minor inconvenience. They make you grab your gear in five seconds when normally you might take ten. They force you to acknowledge that they exist, but not much else. Doubling (or tripling) the zombie count in any given city might change that a bit. 4. More difficult zombies! Nothing but a head shot (or frag, or at least three melee shots) should take a zombie down. Given that aiming in ARMA is, at the best of times, uncertain (I'm sure most people here have had their sights right on a zombie's face and watched the bullet hit the wall behind him at least a couple of times), this will make zombies more dangerous and tougher to deal with, particularly when paired up with some of my later ideas. 5. Different types of zombies. Adding in "elite" zombie types like SWAT zombies who are wearing helmets and, therefore, much more difficult (if not impossible) to kill. These zombies would naturally spawn only in cities near the more valuable buildings, thus making supply runs much more dangerous. There could be similar types of military zombies that require multiple shots and maybe a few that are even invulnerable, thus making easy runs at the NW Airfield a thing of the past. I'd also like to see some larger zombies (in real life, there are tall people and morbidly fat people, right?) that maybe require two headshots to kill. Just anything that can turn zombies into more of a threat, really. 6. Less ammo spawns. Gun spawns should stay about the same, at least for non-military weapons, but ammo should be much more scarce. As it stands, ammo for most of the normal guns is pretty abundant, so there is really no penalty for using it with reckless abandon. Every time I pull the trigger, I should weigh the cost of the bullet over the value of the target. This should be a world like Metro 2033 where bullets are a primary currency, almost as valuable as food and water. Lowering ammo spawn rates by fifty percent or so should also put an end to veteran players getting bored and hunting unarmed players. 7. Slightly lower medical spawn rates. I'm fine with bandages being prevalent, as that is realistic. But right now it is entirely too easy to stock up on morphine and blood packs. These should be rarer items that carry a ton of value, which will also lead to hospitals becoming highly disputed zones. If this is done, I do think that another hospital or two should be added to the northern cities on the map for balance, though. 8. Lower spawn rates for high-powered military weaponry. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Finding an advanced sniper rifle should be an amazing discovery, not simply a quick trip to the NW Airbase. These weapons should be prized possessions worth taking big risks to venture onto military bases (with the aforementioned elite zombies) in the hopes of finding another clip or two of priceless ammunition. 9. No more drinking pond water. This isn't realistic. The only reliable water source should be freshwater spouts found behind farm houses and near cities. I suppose you could also add the option to boil the water (thus giving water "dirty" or "clean" designations), but I think it would be more fun to remove the option to drink anything but tap water altogether. Mostly because suddenly those random shitty houses in the middle of nowhere with a water tap out back suddenly have actual value, as they may be the only source of water in a long stretch of harsh and unforgiving terrain. 10. Better zombie reactions to gunfire. If you fire a gun, any zombie within hearing distance of the gunshot should immediately being to converge on where the shot was fired. They don't have to necessarily sprint there (unless they actually see the person who fires the gun), but making zombies more reactive to gunfire does a few things. It makes firing your gun more of a risk. If there are two dozen zombies in the area, and you fire your gun to kill another player, all of a sudden you may find yourself in trouble. Similarly, you and a friend may be able to work together to loot buildings by luring zombies out of a valuable area with gunfire somewhere nearby. 11. Smarter zombies during chase mode. I know, that sounds redundant, but right now it is so goddamn easy to lose an entire horde of zombies that they are little more than a minor inconvenience. In a game that's about the zombie apocalypse, that's a bit of a joke. It should be much harder to lose zombies, particularly once you've got a hoard on you. I think it should remain easy to sneak around without being noticed, because stealth makes sense. The sprint-and-smash-and-grab method that most players currently use should not be viable. I could probably come up with more, but those will have to do for now. I think all of those would lend to DayZ being a better, more challenging, more cooperative game, with less focus on griefing and more focus on finding people who can actually help you survive. Looting cities and army bases would suddenly require a team of smart, dedicated people, and not just because there might be some asshole in the radio tower with a sniper rifle and a 360-degree view. It would also add a purpose to banditry. Right now, bandits basically exist to just run around and kill people. I doubt most of them do it for the loot. They do it because it's easy, and ammo is abundant. With the ideas I suggested above, suddenly loot is much more valuable, and thus killing to obtain it becomes a viable objective. Similarly, working together with your group or clan to lock down valuable areas would become a huge part of the game, just as it would in a real-life zombie apocalypse.

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.

2) Yes, I have camped out. Numerous times. I grew up in a small town, and was no stranger to taking trips to the woods. Even at night, miles from the nearest town, you can still see reasonably well in the dark. Well enough to move around without a light. Your eyes adjust fast. And, ultimately, this is a video game. It should be fun. Playing at night isn't fun. That's a problem that needs to be dealt with. 9) Because, in real life, you can't simply drink pond water without running the risk of getting sick which, in an environment like DayZ, could be fatal. The game already removed the ability to drink water from the ocean, so why not further the realism and make drinking pond water a thing of the past? The main point to doing so would be to make those water spouts in the game actually valuable. Every player needs water to survive, so if suddenly those spouts are the only source, their value skyrockets. They become smart places to set up camps, or to set traps for unsuspecting groups of survivors.

The problem with night time is that it's just not fun. This is a video game. I play it to enjoy myself. If I'm not enjoying myself, I quit. When a huge chunk of time in your game in not enjoyable, you need to reevaluate that part of your game to make it more fun. As it stands, when I join a night server, I instantly leave because I know I'm not going to enjoy it. I will keep searching until I find a daylight server.

To the OP: Just read this and love your ideas. I created a thread today that contained some similar ideas. The way I phrased it was this... This game should be like Metro 2033 in that bullets are worth more than gold. Every time I pull the trigger, I should be weighing the cost of the bullet on the value of the target. As it stands, people have no reason to hold back because ammo is abundant and zombies are an inconvenience at worst. I agree that making the game more difficult and zombies more of a challenge will encourage people to work together, and make banditry more a survival tactic than a form of griefing.

One more I wanted to add: Minor wounds and major wounds. Minor wounds heal on their own after a set amount of blood loss (say 1000 or 2000?). Major wounds require bandages to heal or you will bleed out. A minor would could be the first hit from a zombie, or hits from a crowbar. Maybe even the first hit from a hatchet. Bullet wounds are always major wounds. And if you're hit while you're still bleeding from a minor wound it turns into a major wound. I don't mind the bleeding mechanism in the game, but I do think it's stupid that being hit once from a zombie will cause my character to bleed out if untreated. In real life certain injuries are more severe than others. I don't see why it should be any different in the game.

This is a game where we're role-playing the zombie apocalypse. No one is going to get far working alone. And I don't think anything I suggested would make lone-wolfing it impossible. It would certainly be more difficult, but in a harsh, hostile environment filled with zombies, isn't it realistic that going it alone would be more difficult than working with other people? Everyone seems to love the "realism" of DayZ so long as it supports their beliefs about the game, but the second it contradicts them they are quick to ignore it as a factor.

I'm pretty sure the entire point of releasing a game in alpha is to get opinions from the players on how you can make the game better. That's part of the reason I find it so hilarious that people on here get so defensive when other people criticize the game or offer suggestions that may make it better. That's why we're playing!

I don't play either Battlefield or CoD regularly. My multiplayer game of choice is Team Fortress 2. I just think this stupid elitist attitude that "COD IS FOR N00BS" is stupid. The fact is that is that DayZ is extremely off-putting to new players, and if some of you don't see that as a problem, you're delusional. A lot of cool people will never get into this game because of a combination of the steep learning curve and the unintuitive controls. Everyone on these forums being assholes to them won't help the issue.

In my mind, that quote represents one of the biggest issues with this game. There is basically zero incentive to make friends with anyone you don't know. You're better off just shooting another player than you are worrying that they'll shoot you if you approach peacefully. I don't mind the PvP element, but there needs to be some sort of incentive to work with strangers, or perhaps a disincentive to killing people for no reason (a reason being self-defense, to loot their corpse, perhaps cannibalism if it's added at some point, etc.). It would make the game more realistic, more interesting, and more fun.

Actually, it seems like a lot of people here think they're cooler for playing harder games. You pretty much confirmed that later in your same post by ripping on CoD, the "easier" game in this scenario. "Hey guys, look at this codfag. He doesn't know how to play real games like DayZ." That's the kind of attitude that sours people to communities such as this one. This game has shitty controls and a really steep learning curve. I hated this game for a couple of days, as I'm sure many people here did as well (although I guarantee most of them wouldn't admit it now). Once you get past the learning curve it's a lot more fun, but the controls never really bridge the gap between borderline unplayable and legitimately good. I still feel like I'm fighting the game engine more than zombies or other players a lot of the time. You can get past a mountain of a learning curve, but you can never really get past shitty, needlessly convoluted, unintuitive controls. Rather than crucify a guy for pointing out that this game does in fact have shitty controls, perhaps you should direct him to sources that better explain said shitty controls, at which point the game becomes playable. I agree he was kind of a dick in the OP but fighting a jerk by being a bigger jerk is counterproductive.