hatfieldcw

Or perhaps his own. Any vehicle destruction will get you a negative score there.

It's just a video game. It's not real life, you have no real claim to any of your imaginary loot and your character's life is short and meaningless in any event. The objective is to vie with other players to survive and succeed within the rules of the game, and the rules of the game explicitly permit and condone robbery as a valid means of obtaining the tools of survival. Perhaps most glaring, the difference is that the kid in example #1 is required by his very nature to participate in the world he inhabits, and cannot escape it except by way of his own death or insanity. You elect to play this game, you are not deceived about the rules and nature of the game and you knowingly log in. Why do you cry here about how you do not want to play this game, when you could simply stop doing the thing that discomfits you? It's intuitively obvious that the social contracts regarding possession of personal property are suspended in this scenario. With no governing body and a high-stakes survival test at every turn, we must and do descend to the basic state of nature, forging alliances and societies when it's most prudent and beneficial, resorting to violence when it's appropriate or convenient and seeking the path of least risk and resistance in all cases. Also, many people are jerks in video games, just like many people are whining carebears. Harden up, sissy.

When you get shot by a player, don't you go into shock? i always seem to. Alt-F4 during a fight should condemn you to a 5-minute nap when you log back in. So if you cap a dude and he vanishes, it should be possible to punch his name into DayZ Commander, watch for him to log back in, then give him a few whacks with your axe while he lays there senseless. Truth be told I've only every killed a dozen or so players in DayZ, and none of them logged during the fight. I don't generally find myself fighting heavily geared dudes, though.

I would love to see a single-shot .22LR rifle. It could be made to work in Arma by giving it a 100-shot magazine that takes up one inventory slot, then giving it a really slow rate of fire, to replicate having to manually load the next cartridge from your pocket. The performance of a reload between each shot with the all-important space-saving advantage of the smaller cartridge. The stats quoted above sound about right, make it effective out to around 140m and give it either a telescopic scope or some good iron sights with zeroing ability, like the AKM has. 30m is a good noise alert radius for zombies. This gives you a low-power rifle that is easy to use, cheap to feed and can be used against zombies in a controlled environment, but has little to no value in PvP or a pitched gunfight. Great for overwatch while a buddy heads into town or for clearing the entrance to a barn.

If and when the game's security prevents duping of high-end gear, it will become far more difficult to obtain a big bad rifle like that. Once the Alt+F4 get out of jail free card gets countered somehow, it'll be much harder to keep high-end equipment. Once that happens, the game will be improved. The drips who camp Cherno and Elektro will either go away or have to do their thing with a CZ 550 that took them an hour to find in a barn instead of an AS50 they pulled out of their bottomless trunk. They'll have more work to do to get gear, and they'll have a motive to avoid dangerous, unprofitable uses for it. And yes, I'm in favor of ditching all anti-materiel rifles, they are overpowered for PvP. Sniping's fine, I'm all for it, but the M24, SVD, CZ550 and DMR are all ample for the purpose. I'd support a non-camo SVD and the M40 camo being added in in place of the .50s.

Yeah, it's weird to mee that NVG work in conjunction with any other optics. I think the NVG should only work with iron sights, maybe with red dots or holo.

I've played probably close to 100 hours of this game, maybe 30 lives, on different servers almost every time I play. I stick to servers with about 30-50 dudes on them, and I've seen exactly one obvious hack/script and one weird event that could be a glitch. I was sent to the thunderdome one time, and I just aborted and logged in somewhere else. Another time the sky above Balota was a wall of flame, like there was a forest fire or something. Walked right by it to Cherno, no ill effect. I've seen plenty of evidence of duping, of course. Camping tents that contain four coyote backpacks, each with the same two rifles and ammo in them, or a car that contains 12 FALs and dozens of magazines for them. Based on my loot finding experience, I'd say that most of the .50cal rifles in the game are evidence of duping, but not so much of hacking.

Play through the Arma2 campaign, you'll see what was going down in Chernarus. Plenty of military personnel from plenty of countries doing plenty of specops stuff. The zombies interrupted a full-scale military action, with a large NATO presence. Hence the smashed Humvees.

It's weird how quickly your vision degrades, I agree. I like the effect, and being close to death has a nice desperate feel to it since you can't see well enough to fight as effectively. I'd prefer to see 9k and up be "fine", 5-9k be washed out, <5k gets the pulsation. Also, I'd add in an effect for when you're actively bleeding, since I'll sometimes not notice the little blinking cross and you can't always see the blood fountain in first person. That said, one of the best moments in the game is when you get a transfusion and you feel like you just stepped through the door to Munchkinland. As for passive regen, I'm totally in favor, but I'd support blood regen being linked to status ailments. Pain, shock, hunger, thirst, cold or a fracture would all prevent passive blood regen, and even while you're in good shape, the regen would be slow enough that it would be useless in a fight. I'd say something like one blood every three seconds, so you regain 1200 blood per hour of safe, healthy play. It would be enough that you'd recover naturally from the odd scratch or hilarious stair mishap, but you wouldn't be hunkering behind cover waiting for your shields to recharge in the middle of a fight. Point of interest: A cow is 8 steaks at 800 blood each, so 6400 blood. More than half your health back in one beef binge.

Yeah, I was attacked in Cherno by a guy who looked like he had Braveheart face paint on. I thought it was the bandit skin back with an upgrade, but no mention of such a feature anywhere. At least I got an M4 from his cold, dead hands.

I'm with Taggert on pre-pubescent players. They generally can't pass up a chance to shoot someone, even if they're better off staying friendly. I'll either ditch them in the woods or recommend that we "split up" and go to another town. If I see them following me, I qualify them to be Whiterun guards. As a rule, though, I don't shoot players on sight unless I'm in a bad mood or just found a fun PvP weapon. If they look like jerks I'll keep track of them, if they look nice I'll try to make contact. I love to rescue newbs, so if I see an unarmed survivor run into a church or log cabin with a half-dozen runners after him, I'll swoop in and mop up the threats, just to brighten their day and improve the general community spirit of the game. If I see someone running across a field who doesn't look like they know how to lose their train, I'll use a smoke grenade or flare to help them out. Obviously, if I get shot at, I'll usually go to war with the dude, but if they're just panicking and coming at me with a crowbar when we meet in a hallway, I'll usually try to talk to them before I open up. I've had some good times rolling around with players who initially gave the the Gordon Freeman greeting.

Yeah, DayZ PvP feels like EvE Online PvP. Even if I'm just watching a bandit through my binocs and waiting for a chance to advance on him unseen, I get a rush above and beyond what I feel sprinting through a lead storm and lobbing grenades in CoD or Halo. It's so gritty, and the stakes are so high, you can't help but get emotionally invested in the situation.

One of the reasons Dayz is a little glitchy is that you're playing in the most zoomed-in possible form of the game, a single infantryman. It's like playing as a marine in Starcraft, you're seeing an itty-bitty cross section of what the game is. Depending on your taste, you can get into some pretty incredible situations in Arma. I used to play the multiplayer Armory from time to time, and it's funny to have a guy in a fighter jet, three riflemen and a dude driving an APC and see what the game whips up as a scenario for you.

It's tough to avoid those areas, since they're often right near the best places for a new spawn to go to gear up. I brave it in Cherno every time I die, since I won't even try heading north without at least a little morphine.

I've been told that there's a damage falloff as the projectile decelerates, and I've had two-shot kills on zombies with the CZ at ranges >600m or so, so I'm inclined to believe it. Either that or I got some weird lag/RNG hosing on those shots, which is also possible.

Yeah, quite the thread hijack, and I helped. I'm totally in favor of adding the M40A3, it's a sweet-looking gun with proven functionality. Also, it would make me feel like Tom Berenger, and I'll never be convinced that there's anything wrong with that.

If the hatchet was a secondary weapon instead of primary, I'd never use a pistol.

The bulk of such weapons currently present in-game come from unethical practices like duping and hacking. No changes to the loot table will keep people from cheating at the game.

Dying once every twenty minutes due to bad decisions is manageable. Dying every four seconds due to respawning is much more taxing on the back end. I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure that the local server has to ship some packets to the central server every time you respawn, and that's going to queue up a lot of data in a short period of time. Even if you go get eaten or jump off a roof every time you spawn, that'll increase your life twentyfold or more, reducing server load considerably. So for now, the ultra-rare case in which you spawn brokenly will punish you, but it's worth your inconvenience for the huge benefit the change brings. I've spawned dozens of times and never been in the ocean, in the wilderness or a bird. I'm guessing these things are quite rare, and even if everyone who experiences the glitch straight-up quits playing, the mod will survive with a large population of testers. The math supports this decision, and so do I.

The zombie raycasting math is opaque, I can't figure it out. I had a hopper gorilla-walk right over me one time and not aggro, and on several occasions I've been spotted from considerable distance when I thought I was totally invisible. Their hearing is sketchy, too. I like that there don't seem to be hard and fast rules for how and when you get detected, so you can find the best practices for avoiding aggro, but you're never totally safe.

Do they see chemlights? I've thrown them to distract zombies, and had about the same results as a tin can. I know that flares attract them, same as smoke grenades, but is that due to light or sound? I tried carrying a flar around a couple times, and zombies love that, but can I carry a chemlight to illuminate interior rooms? The flashlight's no good for going room to room in the school, due to the narrow beam and lack or diffusion.

I like the woods being mostly empty. It's where you go to avoid roads, towns and open fields. It's possible to get turned around in them if you don't have a map or compass, and the odd deer stand or little building is enough to keep you from forgetting that there are zombies in Chernarus.

From now on, I'm going to be a 0.4 warpcore stabilizing griever.

I'm not at all excited about a standalone game. I think DayZ is an accident, Like Equilibrium or Boondock Saints. Rocket had an idea for a game, and tried to make it with the tools at hand. The blend of his vision and the restrictions he faced wound up being very, very popular, but if he made a standalone game, where he could fully realize his vision, who's to say that the "correct" DayZ won't be utter garbage compared to this buggy, clunky, shoddy thing we currently enjoy? I don't think he can do it. My plan is to let DayZ's pride precipitate its fall, then buy ArmA3 and see what the modding community builds out of that. Seriously, who's going to build a big-budget video game that's got good graphics and a deep engine and expensive marketing, but still has five pages of keybindings and pitch-black nights and no explanation for why your sniper rifle's crosshairs only very rarely point at where your bullet is going to hit? Is anyone going to stand at a podium and say, "Okay, here's our new game, we're very proud of it and we think that you'll like playing it, but you'll need to spend about 40 hours on the wiki and forums figuring out how to fix vehicles and use mil dots, or else you'll just be getting wrecked and crying and that hurts my ears." Yeah, Minecraft made a killing despite not really telling anyone how to play, but that game is crazy simple compared to this one. This is closer to Dwarf Fortress, and that game's not selling any million copies any time soon. Tarn can barely afford Dr. Pepper on the donations he gets.

As far as gear distribution goes, I just kind of figured that the zombie plague hit during the events of ArmA2, so there's a large military presence on the ground there from the various factions involved. It makes sense for AKs and Armalites to be strewn about fairly widely. I'd rather not see "high end gear" as such, but for now collecting it is the bulk of what passes for "end game content". Once there's a little more to do in post-apocalyptic Chernarus, I think some changes to the armory could be made to allow for good weapon balance with ample opportunities for bling.