Virfortis

Fake, DayZ has no emotion. Here it's all "boom lol teabag headshot! OMG murder!!!"

In what way? I'm all for firefights, but sniper griefing is something that requires a case by case basis. So no, arbitrary mechanics would just cause whining, it's the player mentality that has to change. We all know that's not changing, kids have to look skilled or else they're picked on right?

There's a misconception here that everyone has an equal chance. People that kill on sight and camp for fun have an exponentially better gameplay experience than players who want to survive. The fact is, you're ignoring the only answer to your question, you're denying that the bandit glass ceiling exists. In short, there is nothing but killing, ergo there is nothing but banditry. Survivors die because they think, bandits win because they don't think, just click the mouse. Yes, there's nothing stopping you, but then you're just playing Modern Warfare with a much larger map. It cheapens the gameplay, something we're TRYING to avoid. There is no answer to PvP EXCEPT to enforce complex rules, rules that force people to think like rational human beings, instead of falsely presumptuious paranoid, unbound murders with a god-complex. That involves changing the games mentality and feel, two things which do not simply change. The simple answer to your simple question it this: There IS NO ANSWER. DayZ is a game, and a game will always be a fantasy. DayZ is the uncanny valley of gameplay, plain and simple. It has too much attempted realism for there to be a respawning feature. Obviously, taking away the respawn feature is not an option, and one cannot force people into talking things out like a normal human being would, because that's not gung-ho actiony and doesn't leave you fooling yourself into thinking you're a man. So you either take away the respawning, or take away the concept of realism, but having both in a persistent world where players can do what they want causes the uncanny valley, a place where there's no real question except "why do I bother?" With no co-operative mechanics, no way to keep people from "pushing the big red button" as it were, and no fantasy mechanic to counter the fantasy respawning, morality and calculation fail. EVERYONE is going to push the "game over" button because they have no reason not to, so your only option is to push it before they do. So in the end, it's not about mechanics, or planning, or hell even incentive, it's about the misconstrued, false, fantasy driven mentality of the gamer playing it.

Busted link there.

If you have NVGs, stick to nighttime servers. Stay inside the treeline near the NW airfield, watch the loggers pop up.

Most people camp survivors for fun. Those people are assholes. Don't be an asshole. Hunt them.

You know, if you're in the barracks or NW airfield and this kind of thing happens, hell yeah that can be a lot of fun. That sounds like a really worthwhile firefight. Too bad all my PvP moments involve hackers or DCers. I think I picked a guy off while he wasn't paying attention, and died a lot of times to snipers camping the coast for lulz, but an actual, meaningful firefight in a high-risk place? Never happened.

Which, and I think we all agree, would be okay if DayZ were marketed as a Post Apocalyptic Persistent PvP Arena, but it isn't.

Primal Kneejerk. What? Same thing.

An unwatched community makes for a pathetic experience. I'm not sure what process went into being a moderator, but popularity should not hav been a factor. We need new rules that ban people for low content/pointless posts. Anything that doesn't politely contribute needs to be weeded out. In short, we need the decent people to be the voice, not the tear-trolls, only then will the game start to turn around for the better.

Combat Arms and Soldier Front didn't, can't see DayZ changing, same mentality.

Do you hear that? That is the sound of a thousand intelligent people facepalming at the notion of your continued existence. Yet sadly, we must be better than you and allow you to continue on using up our precious reserves. I award you no points, and may you finally get some sunlight and cultural enlightenment someday. The only problem here is that he's trying to take this douchebag simulator and turn it into a unique survival experience.

In short, this. I likewise have a question for the OP, without trying to troll: Why is PvP such a turn on for you people? Why do you then turn around and say DayZ is somehow a brand new concept? Where does all this excitement and adrenaline come from? Why do you get jollies off from picking on people? People say it adds to the experience, not knowing who to trust, but I ALREADY KNOW from the moment I step onto the beach that every player out there, that has the capacity to do so, will kill me without any form of thinking. I mean really, look at Call of Duty, is there any tension and addition of experience because you might run into someone in a free for all map that won't shoot you? Do you then look at someone and decide if they're worth the bullet? No, absolutely not, you fire on those hoofing pixels so you get points and be the winner. DayZ suffers from the same, exact problem. Look at Face of Mankind, has a lot of the DayZ concept in it, but the only interaction is inner-faction, outside of that is just shooting people. There's no depth, no feel, and certainly no uncertainty, you kill people because they will kill you, plain and simple. Us, the RPers, you know...people that make the wikis, the storylines? The trekkies, the comic nerd, the movie buff, etc. You get my point. We were told DayZ was something new, that there was the concept of actual, legitimate storyline that could be created, that we could craft something all on our own. But nope, it's not. There's no social interaction at all, just shooting. Peaceful groups are intentionally targetted, not just held indifferently as no threat and relatively ignored. You never see shooting in the saloon as a norm for a very good reason, yet that isn't even the norm in DayZ, that's the cardinal rule.

No, he means that by levelling your character, you then kill so that you aren't set back to start. What we need are ideas that reduce or eliminate the KOS mentality, BUT that would clearly not favor the bandits, so Rocket will have no hearing of it. DayZ is designed for bandits, and until someone makes a better game, DayZ is just a fad.

Only "some" though, in DayZ, it's "all." I'm getting sick of the "in reality..." statement, it's total BS when you consider that in reality, they would run out of ammo and be zombie food within days instead of some overlords that everyones wants to be. Gamers WANT to be mass murderers, DayZ does nothing but prove all our "videogames cause violence" campaigning is futile.

DayZ is a first person deranged paranoid power fantasy for right wing shut-ins who would blow their own nuts off the moment they were handed a real firearm and probably already have done, shooter. Just like EVERY OTHER FPS OUT THERE. It's a game that inspires the schizophrentic and psychopathic to do whatever they want and then uses the word, not the action, of realism, so that they can aritifically fool themselves into thinking "I'm an okay human being, this is how things would really work out!" Disregarding the unending amount of fantasy that shatters the entire concept of realism. The simple fact that we respawn makes it not much different from Minecraft. The level of paranoia and justification/overdefensiveness rivals heavily armed cabins in the middle of Wisconsin. If you're looking for real survival, you need to go out and actually try surviving in the real world. Gamers are complacent and easily bored, and insist they have to be killing each other for entertainment. Meanwhile, I have dozens of games with relatively forgotten, or miniscule PvP element that people play constantly, oh but according to these "gamers" they're just casual players. Are we really so dense as to segregate based on whether we enjoy intellegence over gung-ho paranoia? I digress. Games are not going to scratch that survival itch in anything but a singleplayer title. The reason for this is that online gamers are less human and less intellectual than a computer programmed AI, no really. You don't see neutral factions in DayZ now do you? It's because computers can be taught that people don't just shoot on sight for fun, a concept gamers cannot understand. The best thing to hope for is that STALKER 2 is a co-op title. Oh wait...the assholes said co-op is for carebears.

Except snipers don't miss, because this is a game. If this were real life then they have a pretty decent chance of missing, but in a video game they don't.

If you go out to kill bandits, you become bandits by assuming everyone in XYZ situation is a bandit. If you kill a bandit, they have a camp the can just gear up in. You're also going up against superior numbers, superior equipment, and you have more difficulty than they do. They are the people that have been playing FPS games for decades. In a real situation, most Bandits would lack the discipline to effectively hold a camp, but in DayZ there is no need for such discipline. You can fight back, but you cannot break the glass ceiling that is banditry, sorry, they are gods in this game and they can do whatever they want. They don't even have to worry about zombies like survivors do.

With all due respect, you're putting too much faith in a mod. DayZ has everything going against it for the true survival gameplay. Rocket does not believe in balance, and won't intervene if there's even an artificial glass ceiling. It's a mod designed around a buggy FPS which is solely based on just a more drawn out Team Deathmatch, the only difference being gimmicky realism based fantasy (magic healing anyone?) It's also catering to a community that ONLY cares about killing for fun. There is no survival. You're just going to have to wait for someone to make a spinoff of DayZ that actually has survival in it, but then it will be boring to most. What you're looking for is a co-op Stalker, because then the AI won't shoot you on sight. It's sad that a computer controlled AI has more humanity than a human being, but that's what happens when PvP enters the fantasy realm of no loss.

I just recently snuck into a bandit camp and picked off two of their NVGs. They had 10 just sitting in their car. It was nighttime and I approched from the far back. They had, in error, tried to hide their car and not move around it. They also had a ton of bloodbags, AS50 with ammo, cooked meat out the wazoo, etc. I am now living like a king on top of a hill near them. I wait until nighttime+when they all leave to go mass deathmatch in Elektro to make my move. I grab what I can and get out. Truth be told, I don't think anyone notices, they're so loaded with stuff that it's really sad. I have a lake on my side, so I can safely sneak in and fill up the 5 waterbottles I've taken from them. I use the AS50 during the day to watch their camp, and NVGs with a DMR at night. All in all, it IS a testamanet to just how easy it is to play a bandit.

Enfield, because remember: This isn't about zombies, this is about bandits. Zombies are just background noise.

DCing is really a symptom of the bigger virus. Gear is too easy to get in this game for people to really be THAT attatched to it. However, most people think it's unfair that players can just click an easy button at any time and ruin their gameplay and progress while they can't. So they likewise click a button as some form of retaliation against the clear development bias. It's wrong, it's exploiting, but that's the problem. If players had a chance to defend themselves, or if any form of tactic other than simply not playing/avoiding/shoot on sight worked, there would be a lot less of these issues. This, unfortunately, is what happens when a developer makes a game and never balances it. Everyone plays what is overpowered because they will win every time, but players who join in and think "yeah, I'm going to roll survivor" are steamrolled by the very game itself, making the game exponentially harder, if not impossible, for players wanting to survive instead of have shootouts ALL (read: ALL) the time. Currently the "best" way to play DayZ as a survivor is to play it as a singleplayer camping simulator, as it achieves maximum survival, but the moment any players get involved, it immediately becomes a shootout. If not your friend over skype, indefinitely the bandit picking people off for giggles as he sits on a hill safe from harm, which is considered the "best" way to play DayZ overall. Also, seriously guys, I've said this before. Sleeping bag, tollbelt item, 20 second animation, makes a command that kicks the player out of the server, makes the tent making noise so players know they're trying to DC and can rush.

Everyone knows that this would be a big change to DayZ for the better, but it never happens...so I ask: Why does it not happen?

I'll be taking this up again in the morning, and thank you for not being a prick like everyone else. DayZ has a glass barrier to it. You don't see it, but there are places a player does not go because they are always camped. What is stopping me from gearing up is the same that stopped me last time. Sure, I may get lucky if I go inside a town, maybe sneak around for 10 minutes and find a gun, but then what? What's to stop a bandit from picking me off at 500m? I'm defenseless, I have no actual chance of survival. I'll eventually starve to death if I don't go into a populated area, but every populated area near the coast has at least one or two snipers hanging around on any densely populated server. It creates a cycle where people who aren't already geared can't get gear because the gear is under the watchful eye of someone looking to pile up murders for the gallery. My question is not why I have it so hard, my question is why they have it so easy. Compare my situation, factoring zombie pathing and proper housing planning, to their situation of sitting up on a treeline and watching. Why are there no zombies in the woods? Why is it they can shoot with no fear? Why do high caliber sniper rifles not pull everything at an ungodly distance? They're certainly loud enough. I've been on both sides of this fence. I sit up on the hill and I have absolutely nothing to worry about, really. I'm fully loaded, NVGs, AS50, and I watch people crawl around, marking down the number of times I could have gotten a kill. I even tried this in the daytime, and it was extremely easy. When bandit hunters started getting nearby, I simply moved across the road and into the other trees, they never saw me. Why did I not have to worry about zombies? Why did they not have to worry about it? Sniping isn't the core issue, really. The core issue is that outside of cities, DayZ is just like ArmA2 because there's nothing distinguishing it. Inside the town, it's a zombie survival game where you're concerned not only with other players, but with the zombies that could swarm at any second. Survivors have to multitask while bandits only have one sole objective. They're two completely different games, and the one with the "easier" time is always going to be the one that wins out. And furthermore, why is it that whenever I suggest zombies go in the woods, it's suddenly a taboo topic?