hatfieldcw

I like the idea of radios, but why make it so complex? Currently DayZ doesn't use batteries for anything. NVG, GPS, Flashlights and illuminated gun sights all have fusion cells in them. Let the radio run for free. The radio should go on the toolbelt, not in inventory. Frequencies are awesome. There should be a ton of them, so channel surfers have a hard time locking down your comms. I don't like the idea of having so many variants, though. Why not just have one radio and give it a 5km range? The big problem with radios is that they aren't needed. In-game comms are less useful than Ventrilo or Skype or Teamspeak or Mumble or any one of a dozen other VoiP solutions that do not have restrictions. What if I'm on a different server than my buddy is? He has to call me up, find me, join my game and get within radio range to ask me what I'm up to. I'll stick with Teamspeak. What if I drop in the middle of an operation and have to log back in real quick? I'll be totally out of the loop until I get back in the game, but not if I'm on Ventrilo. People can get lucky and catch my broadcasts on their radio? They'll have a harder time listening in on my Steam Voip. You need to find a way for the radio to be relevant. Can it help you find downed choppers? Does it link with your GPS to let you see your buddies' position on the map? What does it do that makes me use it?

Skorpion's clearly a better choice, but I'd never use it. Too much Klobb stigma. And take a breath, Freezy. Here are my main reasons for not liking the P90 for DayZ: From a technical standpoint, it's not in Arma 2 or Operation Arrowhead, so it'd have to be shoehorned in like the crowbar was. In terms of gameplay, it would require a totally new and proprietary magazine and cartridge, since nothing else uses the 5.7mm round except the Five-Seven. That means it would be in the same category as the FAL and Bizon and SVD. Unlike the FAL and SVD, though, the rinky-dink P90 would be a weak weapon with low range that wouldn't be recommended for anything except collecting, and would add virtually nothing to PvZ or PvP. Aesthetically, the P90 is a very modern, very fancy gun. We don't really have a precedent for that sort of thing in DayZ. Of the guns we have, I think only the Mk. 48 Mod 0 was developed more recently than the P90 (correct me if I'm wrong), and its design is similar to the M249 of 1974, making it look less like a ray gun than the P90 would in this context. I like fighting zombies with Cold War-era armament, it feels good to me. If you're putting the P90 in, why not add in all the G36 and Mk16 variants, too? XM8s are good, as is the M110. And don't get me started on vehicles. Additional content, added solely for the sake of diversity and vanity items that do not contribute meaningfully to the gameplay can bog down the mod. I like it leaner.

Every zombie-spawning locale, either on a per-spawn basis or in terms of larger zones, should have a finite rate at which zombies can spawn. At first, zombies will spawn quickly, as they do now, and they'll be drawn from a population pool that's slowly refilling over time. When the pool is depleted, zombies will not spawn until the pool is incremented. In this way, it could be possible to lock down a gas station or a place where you're repairing your vehicles, so you can do your work without having to sneak from the gas tank to the vehicle and back again. Take for example Bor. It's got a dozen buildings, only three of which spawn loot (one being a lousy doghouse), and a few deer stands up the hill. Pre-apocalyptically, the population of the entire village was probably less than twenty-five people. Yet if I stand in the middle of town with my AKM I can produce a corpsepile that makes no sense in that area. So say Bor has a zombie capacity of 20, and can generate one zombie every two minutes. You and your buddies roll into town and exterminate all of them. Now you can take a breath, eat some beans and refill your bottles at the well, because the town is straight-up out of zombies. Every two minutes one will ramble past, but the horde is gone. Not hard to do, and not terribly worthwhile. If you go away for 40 minutes and come back, Bor's zombie population will be maxed out again Chernogorsk, on the other hand, would not be affected by this. The population can be understood to be massive, and no amount of gunslinging can get rid of all the zombies. Same goes for Electrozavodsk and Berezino. They'd be generating hundreds of zombies per minute, more than anyone could hope to kill in the same amount of time, and so the zombie population is effectively bottomless. In the medium area, between where zombies can be easily controlled and where they're unstoppable, are towns like Vybor, Zelenogorsk, Novy Sobor and Krasnostav. This is the more interesting situation, because it becomes possible to secure an area for a time. Perhaps most critically, it allows players to have an impact on the zombies, and makes the infection an enemy, rather than just a setting.

Alcohol and tobacco would be a neat addition. Like you say, having beer do double duty as a drink and minor blood regen would make it desirable, but the alcohol content would keep people from just drinking 240 beers to heal up. I like the idea of a pack of smokes that take up one slot and have twenty uses, as with chemlights or flares. They should reduce shaking from pain or cold, but not totally eliminate it. Smoking would make you slightly thirstier, and after smoking x cigarettes in y time, you'd risk coughing at inappropriate times, similar to an infection. Then you can celebrate your new GPS with a smoke and a brew. Most importantly, I'd be able to sneak up behind a stranger, spin my mouse wheel and "Give Cigarette", which would cause them to start smoking without knowing why.

I'd like one UH-1H and one AH-6.

I'd be all about adding more of the high-tech military stuff if they put in the batteries that Arma requires for them. NVG, GPS, rangefinders, even flashlights and holo sights should require power sources. With duping being what it is, the scarcity would not be much of a factor, but the hassle of having to carry and use batteries with your high-end toys should eventually dissuade certain play styles.

Partial mags are all well and good, but with the item ID being what it is, it seems that it's tough to track the contents of all mags at all times on the server side. Hence the magic reload on logging. I think I've been using the same MP5SD mag in my PDW for like 120 shots, because I never use more than twelve or sixteen per play session. And I don't want to be saddled with a bunch of partials until I have a way to combine them. I hate having three 1911 mags with two shots each in them and not being able to pop the cartridges into one box. I know you can convert them back and forth to revolver ammo and refill all three, but there is immersion to think of here.

Yeah, not a lot of call for a P90 in DayZ. After all, the cartridge isn't great, the proprietary mags would be a bugger to find and the smaller gun wouldn't be good at range. It'd be like a Bizon without a suppressor. No, thanks. You'd got the Bizon and a micro Uzi, the P90 would be redundant. And as others have mentioned, more military hardware with PvP-only applications will shift the focus of the game toward deathmatching.

I find that on busier servers, you can find empty stands and even empty barns and buildings if you come up on them too fast. Driving or even just running can get you across that sweet spot before the server has time to populate the loot nodes. It seems to work like this (numbers estimated): <150m - Too close, loot will not spawn | | | 150m-250m - Loot spawns in empty loot nodes in accordance with probability model | | | >250m - Too far, loot will not spawn Since it takes time for the server to actually populate the nodes, you can screw yourself by getting there in too big of a hurry. Often, when I'm running from zombies and take shelter in a supermarket, there will be backpacks spawned, but not so much as a tin can otherwise. Wood piles also seem to appear before useful loot, along with hatchets and crowbars and car parts, the sort of stuff that appears alone, not as part of a discreet "loot pile". So when you're scanning deer stands, make sure you walk part of the way there, so you spend more time in the band of "loot-making distance" around the location. I also try not to look directly at it during this time, just in case the item spawning is related in some way to polygon culling, as zombie spawn locations seem to be. No hard data to back up any of these practices, I admit, but I've had good results playing the way I do, and these are the theories that have arisen in my mind from my observations.

One time I was messing with my video settings, trying to get the artifacting under control, and when I closed out of the menu the sky was all fire. Weird glutch. Got rid of the artifacts, though, so that's cool.

How do you destroy tents? I found a tent one time with a Mk. 48 in it, grabbed it and all the ammo I could carry, then ran the tent over with a truck. Promptly crashed the truck and died. Went back to that area to see if there was another campsite nearby, found the same tent, the same contents, everything like I left it a couple days ago. Just no truck, obviously. I've tried to break my own campsites, pulling out the gear and axing the tents to the ground, but no luck. They're more stubborn than the zombies are, rising from the dead time after time to annoy me. Since I've died since placing them, I can't repack them, and I'm not even sure that would work. The only thing I can think of to get rid of the stuff would be to take it all out of the tent, pile it on the ground, then save the empty tent and hope the server restarts and cleans up the pile before anyone goes there and puts it back.

Something that's been working for me and my friends on various systems: Set resolution and interface resolution to whatever's native to your monitor/GPU. Set video memory to default, set interface size to smallest setting. 100% success rate on an admittedly small sample of the population.

I like the idea of helicopters being on one island and the parts to fix them on another.

If you quit, remember to post servers and coordinates of your gear stashes, so we can have your stuff.

Vybor's a nice town. A little rough sometimes, but it's a good spot to meet all my needs and it's not too far to find heli crashes or hit up the NWAB. Often as not I'm just duking it out in the school, but there's a lot to be gained, fun most of all.

I'm told it's roughly thirty seconds between syncs with the hive, so you should probably give it a full minute. I myself just lost an FAL and about 5 mags I looted from a bandit to this mistake. Careless on my part, I was so excited about winning the fight I just looted everything and logged out to get a celebratory beer. Came back and had nothing to celebrate. Drank a regret beer to commemorate the event.

Linking zones often leads to chokepoints. If you warp from one to another, you wind up with camping in the style of EvE Online. If you travel from one to another you have massive travel times and huge challenges in terms of server resources. What if I fire a sniper rifle from one map into the other? Does the bullet vanish? Of course, with the new standalone model, there's ample opportunity for re-imagining the game world. Maybe you could have an NPC faction in the game that will airdrop you in a new region for a price, so you can play on a server until you find some otherwise useless ultra-rare item, like a circuit board or a Krugerrand or something, and then you can use your radio to call for fast-travel to another part of the world. You spawn in 500m off the ground in a parachute at a random spot on the map, do some quick recon of the immediate vicinity and then get busy surviving.

This is where my beans are going. I like the idea of having the old familiar spots available, but making the world larger and more varied at the same time. Of course, spawning 67km from your buddies would be problematic, so it might become necessary to have it divided into "zones" that you could select on spawn. That way you can pick your starting point, within 10km or so.But if I may be romantic and impractical for a moment, here's my dream situation for a "hardcore" DayZ server: Procedurally generated world, using a sophisticated terrain generating algorithm combined with some fancy logic for distributing loot-bearing buildings and vehicles around the map. Each server whips up its own world when it starts up, like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress might, and then player characters are bound to that server, unable to move gear from one to another. I'd even go so far as to have an end-game condition. When it's met, the server restarts and creates a new world, and everyone starts over on it. New, fresh survival experience every time. No more server hopping to get loot or avoid night time or infiltrate camps. No more mandatory hospital run to Cherno or Elektro after spawning. No more mad rush to NWAF or Stary to get lewt. In-game map is the only map. The other feature I'd like to see is a substitute for the base building mechanic we have now. Arma has a built-in base building feature that never gets any attention. You can play it like an RTS, spending resources to erect barracks and fortifications and even make vehicles. I don't want anything quite like that in DayZ, but I'd like to see an option to fortify and upgrade individual buildings, or even settlements. A perimeter wall, some locked doors, a lot of scrap metal and time and effort and you could "lock down" a little town or farm or something. As you increase its defensive capabilities, the zombie spawn rate inside and near it is reduced, but so is the loot spawn rate. You'll no longer find rifles in the barn that you mysteriously overlooked the first 40 times you went in there, but there won't be zombies wandering into your yard but once or twice a day. Park your vehicles, stash your meds, hoard your food, amass your weapons. Players could still mess you up, of course, but that's the chance you take.

I can't help it, I go into squirrel mode. It's a lot less fun, but I have this compulsion. Whenever I find an SD mag or something, I scurry back to my tents and stash it. I killed a guy and got a Mk. 48 one time, then I ran back to the tent, dropped it off and went back toward town with a hatchet as my primary. I'll probably never use/risk that Mk. 48, which totally defeats the purpose of having it. I have an M24 and an M107 in there, but when I want to go sniping I spend an hour scrounging in barns for a CZ550, because I'm too chicken to bust out the fancy guns. I gotta stop living like this, and go do some Cherno deathmatch or something.

Col. Moutarde's foreign, he can't tell the difference between normal English and terrible, eye-gouging English. Don't trust his opinion, he probably found your nightmarish wall of text about as legible as a well-formatted post due to his bilingual awesomeness. Moutarde, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you, and I hope that I will someday be as good at reading your native language as you currently are at reading mine. Ry777, stop sucking at writing. Seriously. It's the information age, and being able to communicate effectively in text form is crucial to your success. Get some paragraphs and formatting in there. Show some consideration for your audience. Package your tale as a consumer good, or keep it to your damn self. Jesus. I'll bet it would take me more than a week to read everything that was written on the internet in the last half hour. I'm not likely to waste my time reading your clumsy-assed post, and that means you won't get a good discussion out of it, and that means you're wasting your time and counterfeiting your value as a human being. The story's not even bad. Presentation, my man. When I can read a good story and still think, "Boy, this author sure is a total piece of shit," you've done something wrong on your end. Your readers shouldn't have to enjoy your post in spite of your writing ability. Goddamn, son. You might hate your English teacher, but he's got a lot to offer you. If you want to keep telling stories, on the internet or elsewhere, you should spend some time and effort polishing your communication skills. Shit. And good job on the bus dudes. There's no reason to repair a bus unless you've got at least a dozen buddies to populate it. Cargo space isn't great, it's slow as hell and it draws attention as readily as it draws zombies. Best thing to do is blow it up and hope a UAZ spawns instead. Shoot those guys.

Ghillie in a shed? What kind of shed was that? I got one once, raided a tent city for it. Pretty cool outfit, and it really does its job. When I flopped down in the grass with it, I could barely see myself in third person. Powerful tool.

I've met a lot of folks in DayZ, and the guy who runs straight at me with a train of zombies yelling, "Friendly! Friendly!" on VOIP is one of the worst. The chance that he's dangerous is almost 100%, trying to be his friend just helps you figure out how he's going to end your life. Sometimes it's treachery, but more often it's attention deficit or straight-up stupidity. They tend to be awkward young men, bad at video games and worse at meeting strangers. Remember, all the character flaws that make a person unable to look you in they eye or give a firm handshake are also responsible for these guys being incapable of providing effective support to a zombie apocalypse survivor. They'll take your stuff and pretend they didn't, they'll hurt you when they think they won't be punished and they'll fail to complete the simplest task if it becomes even a little bit inconvenient for them. Best-case scenario, you wind up with a co-dependent flunkie who is always asking you for approval and insists on following you around like Robin climbing a wall behind Batman. A guy who runs at me shouting "Friendly!" gets the same treatment as a guy who runs at me shouting, "Braaaiiiiins!" I keep a respectable distance, and shoot him in the eye if he catches me off-guard or doesn't give up after a little while.

I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but it's pretty easy to miss in this game, especially if you're hip-firing with an AK-74 in third person. You might feel like you had teh crosshairs on them the whole time but only landed a few shots, even at very close range. I know I've missed some shots that seemed totally unmissable, due to the parallax associated with shooting in third person. Remember, the bullets come out of your gun, not out of the center of your screen, so even in first person the suspended crosshair is not to be trusted except as a pointer for opening doors and picking up crossbow bolts. Even ignoring that, the AK-74 really is kind of a crappy gun, especially now. It does less damage than any other rifle, less than the pre-nerf 1911, less than an ax. Judging by the math, it would take five body shots to kill a player with the AK-74. With the vagaries of shooting and the engine's herky-jerky performance on the scale of an individual soldier, it's entirely possible that you didn't get that before your mag ran dry. On the other hand, if he caught you with a .50 or even a smaller rifle, that's a minimum of 8000 damage in one shot, guaranteed incapacitation. That's an easy fight to lose. My advice is to move around more when you're fighting snipers up close, and try not to fight so close unless you're using an axe. Automatic weapons are good at like 50m, because the other guy can't use his scope on you without getting a full-screen look at a shirt button or something, so just dodge back and forth and spray lead at them, reloading on the move.

Yeah, I just countersniped a guy who was plinking away at me. I was pinned down in a hangar with one door, and he and his friend were behind their truck shooting at me with .50 caliber rifles. They must have been zeroed wrong or something, because they couldn't hit me at about 500m, and I scored some solid hits with my DMR. One of them died, the other bandaged up and drove the truck away. Later on that day, I was checking a deer stand and a guy was up in it. I panicked and shot the crap out of him. He had a ghillie suit and an FAL. Am I supposed to introduce myself to this guy and hope he's friendly? That's two kills in one day, bandit mode engaged. Then I'd be flagged for KoS, so even people who would have worked with me otherwise will kill me on sight, turning every encounter into a deathmatch. I'll have to hide in the woods for a day or two in order to lose my security status. I don't see how a rule like this can suspend my ability to play the game based on a fuzzy logic like you propose.

Very scenic. Take the Green Mountain Ghost Tour! I'm not a fan of classes, even if they're just basic starting gear. Also, it doesn't make sense that a hunter would have been out hunting for the duration of the apocalypse and only left his deer stand now. It would be more like an accelerated start, I guess. You always start up and get an Enfield and make your way to the hills around Chernogorsk, so why not let people start in the hills with an Enfield? I'll tell you why. For the same reason Terran players don't start with 9 SCVs and a Supply depot at their ramp: Just because the first few minutes of gameplay are often the same, that doesn't mean it's okay to skip them. There are alternatives to the usual start, obviously, but also remember that the other players are counting on you starting at the coast with a light. If I beat a bandit near a heli site, I don't want to wonder, "Is he going to pick the soldier class and spawn right in my pocket?" And of course, if it's random, it'll be just like the spawn points: People will commit mass suicide until they get teh spawn profile they want.