Mojo Jojo

Not everyone will shoot on sight, but most will. And very few people enjoy playing the martyr so much that they will endure needlessly dying over and over and over this way without learning to KOS and/or avoid all other players. The game basically trains everyone to KOS, regardless of their intention coming in. And then they train the noobs who come in after them. Under current game mechanics, DayZ is just a shooter, and you'll soon enough learn to play it that way.

Cute.

No. 1 tip to not get shot on sight: Shoot them before they see you.

Wow, hadn't heard of that exploit before. Sketchy... but helpful, I guess.

LOL, you really need to ask? Everyone on this board who harps about hardcore realism has a tent city located 5 miles off the map packed with gear and coordinates with teammates in-game using a 3rd party utility. Realism is for the chumps they mercilessly slaughter.

Go up a steep hill or through a building. Problem solved.

If only someone could have told them: Just fight the zombies INSIDE! You can't lose! So much needless slaughter could have been avoided...

I regret that I have only one can of beans to give. Great post, agree 100% with everything you wrote. Wouldn't mind to see the military grade weapons disappear entirely and even have non-military weapons and ammo be considerably more scarce. And please give us a separate melee slot so it is easier to save ammo for the times when you really need it.

In-depth gameplay ... Duke Nukem 3d? Hmmm.... But man that was an awesome game for deathmatching. So much ridiculousness.

So long as you can just sprint past a horde of zombies, lead them into a building, pick up a hatchet and mash their brains into a pulp without getting hurt (which is pretty much the case now), I don't really give a crap about starting with a gun. If, on the other hand, they ever manage to make the zeds dangerous (particularly indoors), then I would probably feel differently.

I wish you were right about this. But, at least for now, you might as well get used to the idea that this game is a deathmatch shooter with zombie survival elements. It's far less frustrating once you realize this.

Which, if they're concerned with server load, is precisely the point. Mission accomplished. If a bunch of people are continuously respawing, making it take 3 minutes to kill yourself instead of 10 seconds will noticeably drop rate of new spawns the server has to contend with.

This is really helpful. Thanks!

And what's the mechanism that you think connects the bandit skins to low life expectancy? Couldn't that statistic be linked to the fact that new spawns were armed at that time? Seems like a correlation =/= causation situation. ZDB is correct that I wasn't here when bandit skins were enabled, but my assumption is that killing bandits did not count towards the murder tally. So killing bandits would never make you a bandit. And it helps by giving players at least some indication of who they might be able to trust, which would go a long way towards fostering non-violent interactions.

Is this still a thing? Anyone doing this?

There are a lot of things that could be done. At the very minimum re-add the bandit skins (or some other form of reputational system). Make it easier to visually distinguish one player from another as a general matter. Create a usable trade interface (though they should probably start by a making a usable inventory interface). Create a way for a group of players to control a spot of ground such that players cannot respawn there (see the Fort Friendly thread and the issues with bandits ghosting in). Make it possible for people to in some manner advertise the presence of a safe zone/trading hub/recruiting station in game. And once some features are added to facilitate cooperation, crank up the difficulty of the environment, reduce the availability of supplies and firearms, add some new types of zeds that are more dangerous, less predictable, and harder to kill, or maybe some wandering herds (ala the Walking Dead), then buff the resources at helicopter crashes and advertise them with columns of smoke visible from a long distance. There would still be lots of PKing, but hopefully more of it would be purposeful (resource wars, territorial disputes) rather than just random deathmatching. Push people to group up, then pit them against one another. People are trying to do a lot of these things already, but the game constantly works against them in favor of the PvP deathmatch (again, see Fort Friendly). Just give folks a few tools and they'll run with it.

And if we enjoy the danger and difficulty (and frankly think the world could stand to be more difficult to survive in) but just find the mindless shoot-on-sight PvP deathmatching to be a let down, which game, pray tell, is there out there for us? I'd like to know who exactly is catering to that market?

Something real? It's a bloody free-for-all deathmatch, just like every other multiplayer deatchmatch game ever made. It's a bit slower paced and built off a military sim, but fundamentally it's the same old shit in a different package. Which is exactly why people who came here looking for something different (survival horror?) are feeling dissappointment. Don't get me wrong, I think PvP absolutely needs to be part of the game. But I'd like it to be just one part of the game, not the whole thing the way it is now. The game needs to facilitate interactions between players that are not exclusively PvP. Yeah, you can work around it by organizing with others outside the game, but that's not always practical or feasible for everyone and shouldn't be required to enjoy the game.

I think this totally misses the point. Or maybe what you say is true for some of the "ragers and care bears", but frankly from what I've seen of the critics of the PvP mechanics/culture of DayZ (and speaking for my own feelings) put a higher value on the survival aspect of the game than others. Some of us would like to see MORE focus on the difficulty of surviving in the world and LESS on the PvP deathmatch aspect of it. In other words, I think you've got this issue completely ass-backwards. For my part, I was really intrigued by the idea of a multiplayer zombie horror survival game ... but it turned out to be less "horror survival" and more "standard first person online deathmatch". I'm down for some deathmatch,so whatever, but I think the game could be better if it was structured to de-emphasize the PvP aspects.

Love this feature. :D

What you're describing is kind of what I'd hoped the game would be (and what some of the gaming press covering the game implied it would be). But I don't find a PK free-for-all deathmatch to really carry much emotional response. As much as people here like to shout "go back to CoD" at folks, it seems like most of the shouters like to play this game as CoD, just with a longer respawn/re-equip period before you rejoin the fight. I'm not saying that this isn't fun -- I've been playing multiplayer deathmatch games for near 20 years now and it's always been fun -- but it's not really original and certainly not emotionally engaging. To read some of the press on this game, you'd think it presents players with ethical challenges. There are no ethical challenges in a deathmatch. You see a player, you shoot a player. End of story. There is nothing to think about and no repercussions to consider. I had hoped there would be something more here, but there doesn't appear to be. That doesn't mean it's not fun; as I said, deathmatches are fun. But this game could be a lot more than that if the mechanics were there to facilitate and encourage other means of interaction between players and to bring out more of a role playing aspect so that players are actually invested in their character and what he does.

On the other hand, it would have been a short fight with no 3rd person and no cool video for it.

Seems to me it's not realistic for a person to bounce across several hundred servers with a million other players on them. Seems like its also not realistic that most of the population of this territory pops into being out of the sea and then are dead within an hour or two. But it's a game, so things work like that. The point is it's not like it's feasible for people to develop reputations in any organic fashion because it's a game that has game mechanics to facilitate vast numbers of people playing over the same territory. Most players you encounter in a given session, you will probably never encounter again. Adding a reputation system is not about tacking on something that doesn't exist in real life -- it's trying to replace something that DOES exist in real life but is otherwise prevented from existing in the game due to the mechanics of the game.

The game is structured to reward and encourage this behavior. If you kill someone: a) they won't be able to to shoot you and b) you get their loot. There is neither a penalty for being evil nor a reward for being good. It seems like some sort of reputation system (like bandit skins!) could do a lot of good here. Until then, efforts to change this behavior are sledding uphill. Gravity will always win in the end.

Because someone on the Internet doesn't like something that they like and spend time playing, which is a direct challenge to their self-esteem and feelings of self-worth which they then feel the need to defend with childish insults (on this forum this appears to almost always take the form of references to CoD). I also just started playing a few days ago. I like the game and plan to keep playing, but I share some of the OP's disappointment. I played Operation Flashpoint back in the day until I could no longer take its lack of polish and its wonky interface. It was a nice idea, but it was poorly executed. I hadn't touched the series in decade, so I guess I was expecting that it would have become more polished and less wonky in that time. Apparently not. I mean that inventory interface. Good lord, what a piece of shit. That may be one of the worst user interfaces ever designed. All of the menus and commands and interactions with the game world are clunky and confusing as hell. The Operation Flashpoint/Arma engine has not matured in the way I would have hoped. As far as the mod itself, I think the idea is brilliant, if obvious: a (relatively) realistic, zombie survival game with perma-death. Finally! Thank you! But it obviously has a long way to go (yes, I know it's an ALPHA!). There's not much more to it than that basic idea: an empty world with some zombies and some loot spawns. A lot more could be (and probably should be) done to facilitate interactions between players that do not involve the exchange of bullets. The bandit skins seemed like a small step in the right direction on that front, it's confusing to me that they were taken out. Some sort of reputation system seems pretty crucial to non-homicidal interactions between players. Anyway, as I said, I have enjoyed it so far and intend to keep playing for now. But I can certainly understand feeling some disappointment after trying it out.