hatfieldcw

Yeah, I love that flashlight, as long as nobody's looking at me. My beef with it, though, is that the ArmA lighting math often turns my light into a little circle on the wall. When I use a flashlight in real life, I can hit the ceiling and cover the whole room. In a DayZ building, I have point my 5-inch circle of light right at something to see it. For the record, I originally typed, "When I use a fleshlight..." which made this a truly hilarious post.

DayZ as it is couldn't be ported effectively to the console, the interface and controls are too complex to map well to a controller, and since a large part of the gameplay is stuff like changing your stance, varying your rate of movement, zeroing your scope and looking around, it would be virtually impossible to preserve even the basics without compromising the shooting controls. Plus, I doubt the console market will respond to such a game the same way the PC market did. There are plenty of people who try DayZ and hate it. Just like Dwarf Fortress or EvE Online, DayZ chases away a lot of people, many of whom are non-casual gamers. The slow pace, the steep learning curve, the brutal consequences for failure and the risk of being totally smoked for no reason and not even know how it happened all add up to an unpleasant experience for many. They want the reliable return on their investment, and DayZ doesn't provide it.

I hate the sort of advice people give. "Don't trust anyone, never let another player get too close, if anyone approaches you assume they're a threat and shoot them before they have a chance to shoot you." If everyone followed that ridiculous advice, we'd see a worse culture than we have right now. Nobody would interact with anyone else except over Teamspeak or iron sights. Being a dickhole because you're afraid all the time is the functional equivalent of being a dickhole because you're angry all the time. You're still a dickhole, and you're still shooting people for no good reason. The quivering, pants-drenching terror you feel when you think you might lose your AKM that you had to search two different fire stations to find is no more valid a rationalization for murdering a survivor than "teh lulz" is. It's just that the griefers are laid back and you're uptight. And it's always the carebears who talk the most trash. When they have the upper hand, they say things like, "I'll spare your life," "You will not be allowed to live," "You brought this upon yourself," or my favorite, "I don't want to fight you, but if you make me defend myself, I'll crush you," like they're some kind of godlike entity dispensing justice and resolving fights with the power of their mind, but when they lose, it's all, "These dirtbag griefers don't have anything better to do than ruin my fun!" "Everyone on every server in every timezone woke up this morning with a plan to make me angry!" "This game needs to be fundamentally altered so that I am protected and/or win fights!" The fact of the matter is that the guy who killed you, most of the time, was scared shitless and trying not to get ganked, because the threads you start and post in on the forum have him convinced that everyone is a monster, and he can only survive if he matches their wanton ferocity. I can't tell you how many times I've bumped into a guy and been immediately hit in the face with a crowbar, but when I say, "Yo, Doctor Freeman, chill right the hell out!" instead of unloading my .45 into him, I wind up getting a transfusion and a friend. If I had killed him, he might well have jumped on here to tell the story of the big mean griefer who camps the Cherno supermarket killing newbs who only have a crowbar to defend themselves, and even though they did their best to fight him off, he overpowered them with his total lack of scruples. Yeah, sometimes a cackling maniac chops me to death before I find my first tin of beans, and sometimes I die before I hear the rifle's report, and that one time I got run over on the road to Kamenka, but I see a lot more when I take the high road.

Until the duping exploits and gear-spawning hacks are well and truly addressed, rarity of gear will have no impact on the behavior of these players, since they didn't get an as50, which has a 1-in-115 chance of spawning at a helicopter crash site once per server restart, just to use it to camp a hill near elektro and farm murders. The vast majority of such weapons are obtained illegitimately, and the whole grief-sniper playstyle is predicated on the equipment being trivial to acquire. .30cal sniping takes a lot more effort and yields a lot less success than .50cal sniping, and when the .50s and their ammo stop growing on trees the anti-materiel snipers will be about as common as helicopter pilots and there's no reason to begrudge the chopper its might.In the meantime, lousy snipers are always a great source of gently used second-hand rifles.

He was helping you out, man. If you'd shot that broken leg full of epinephrine instead of morphine, you'd have been in terrible pain. Volumes could be written on the sociology of this game. I like it myself, and I find that if you introduce yourself to other survivors instead of hiding from them until you need a favor, you'll have a chance of getting some buddies. I'd say that the first guy I meet after I spawn on the beach is friendly at least half the time. The other half I either don't meet anyone or get attacked. Many players are terrible at PvP and cannot hit me, others kill me and take my bandage. No sweat, I try again and maybe make a friend. Without an endgame my goal becomes the telling of interesting stories, and meet another survivor virtually guarantees a big boost in the story of any given life.

Go into any barn or factory warehouse anywhere and make some noise. It can take a while, but if you hit the "sweet spot" you'll have zombies that are spawning outside the building where your client isn't rendering (they won't appear where you can see them) but they can hear you and will make their way through the door in orderly single file. It's a good idea to have an axe or M9SD handy, so you can take a break every so often, mop up the latest volunteers without attracting more, and do some housecleaning with regard to loot and body-hiding. AKM is a great primary weapon for this, since it has high capacity and doesn't require headshots, but just a WInchester or even an enfield can do good work for you.

Can an SD gun even load normal mags? I've never thought to try it. My understanding is that the gun isn't less accurate with SD ammo, it's just that the SD ammo is sub-sonic (so there won't be a sonic boom that defeats the point of suppressing the gunshot sound) and therefore has a much steeper dropoff. Hence, if a gun is sighted in at 100m with normal ammo the bullet might be a couple inches high at 50m, but if it's zeroed to 100m with sub-sonic ammo it'll be much higher at 50m, since the slower round's trajectory has to be higher.

I definitely agree that direct comms needs a "shout" button that'll let you be heard in a 200m cone in addition to the 80m radial range. I meet a lot of friends by getting involved in their PvZ woes or offering a bandage when it's needed, and seeing a guy a short distance away but not being able to alert him to my presence (without shooting at him, which has a predictably counterproductive effect) is often frustrating. As for a policy on aggression, I do my best not to fight survivors unless they have gear that I value above their companionship, and not much gear fits that category. A Coyote pack is only 20% bigger than the ubiquitous ALICE pack, and an 1866 is every bit as effective in PvZ as an AKM or DMR. The only stuff that's really worth killing a guy for is stuff like NVG, rangefinders and sniper rifles, which in turn are used primarily for PvP. The obvious exception is vehicles, which are awesome at all times, but when you have the infrastructure and resources to maintain them you'll find that you're in the realm of fighting players for access to finite goods and had better be ready to take on all comers. So for me, I'll only shoot on sight to get rare PvP gear, which in turn I'll only want when I'm trying to steal a vehicle with my buddies, and when I have said vehicle I'll gear up for PvP and kill anyone that comes near the vehicle I stole. That's a different game up there, where the trucks and the ghillie suits and the forward scouts come into play, and the guys who have gear that's appropriate to that game but not the stomach to play it are the ones who sit on hills overlooking Elektro or watch the fields south of the airbase for targets of opportunity. Those guys are a problem, but not as bad as the nublets who hear stories about griefers and think that everyone they see is hellbent on killing them to drink their blood. They then become what they fear and create this culture of fear and mistrust that permeates the game, and the end result is me having to bind my voice key to my mouse so I can shout, "You're a moron and a jerk and we could have been buddies!" while I scurry out of the Elektro supermarket with Enfield rounds whizzing past my head.

Survival isn't all it's cracked up to be. Staying alive for 75 days is all well and good, but it's just one of the ways to have a satisfying experience in DayZ. Go ahead and hit up Cherno and Elektro, learn how to run through a whole city full of zombies and loot a supermarket and a hospital without ever getting a weapon or taking a hit from a monster. See where the snipers hang out. Introduce yourself to the panicked survivors who start swinging their crowbars as soon as you enter the building (I find that, "Hey! Dickhead! What do you hope to achieve by shooting at me? You need a bandage so bad? I'll give you a bandage if you chill the crap out and be civil!" is a much better greeting than, "Friendly! Friendly! Friendlyfriendlyfriendlyfriendlyfriendlyfriendly!") Sure, you'll find yourself sitting on the beach seaweed on your flashlight more often that way, but you'll have good experiences with random dudes, and every so often you'll have an epic run. So try to stay alive, but don't be a little girl about it.

That's probably my least favorite feature (at least among the features that are working as intended) in the game right now. Morphine is ultra-rare outside of cities, even if you farm deer stands and military zombies. So if you get a break and don't have one handy, you're in for either a fabulously long haul to get some, a crapshoot to find some, or a respawn. How does morphine cure a broken bone anyway? Maybe it's the Dwarf Fortress player in me, but I'd like to see more complex and ridiculous wounds and medical treatment to go with them, but I doubt it would fit well in the game. Breaks should be redone though. Chalk them up as serious injuries or crippling pain, and give them symptoms like chronic pain (pain pills only work for a couple hours), reduced movement speed (can walk, cannot run or sprint), blood capacity reduced to 8000, and rare blackouts. Morphine will cure it, but it will also go away on its own after a day or two of real time. Don't let it be cured by play time only, since that would just mean dozens of people afk in bushes taking up precious server slots.

My best results have been with adding my primary weapon to a loot pile, then putting it into my backpack from there (making sure I have ten slots free, of course). Then I arm the axe, do my chopping, and put it back on my belt. I've never had a problem pulling a weapon out of my pack and into an empty weapon spot, so I wouldn't worry about that. The system failed me once, when I tried to add my Winchester to a loot pile on the highest loft of one of those red-roofed barns. The thing utterly vanished, appearing neither on the ground nor in the loot pile's inventory list. Just a Winchester, not too hard to find another one, but it's among the best weapons nowadays and that cheesed me off.

I never feel bad about getting killed in major cities. I know what I'm getting into, and if I need to make a run for morphine or transfusion bags, I do it with full knowledge of what I'm up against. PvP in DayZ, as in any other game that allows griefing and carebearing in equal measure, has a certain initial stigma. The first couple times you get offed for no reason, you get all worked up about it. You hate that guy, you hate his mom for raising him to be a douche, you are 100% sure that he was hacking and teleported to a spot where he had an unfair drop on you with his hacked-in supergun and his aimbot and his modded controller and his xray vision and he's probably a fat neckbeard who lives in his grandma's basement stroking his three-inch boner while drool and Mountain Dew Code Red pool on his bitch tits, the only boobs he'll ever see. But really he is probably just a guy like you, playing the game and doing his best to get by. After you've played a few characters through their life cycle, you get a good idea of how the DayZ stories are told, and learn that sometimes you just get a short, sad vignette instead of a saga. I've shot dudes on sight, especially when I'm on overwatch for a buddy who's hitting up a hospital or military site. If I'm all alone with no good gear, I'll almost always try to introduce myself, but there have been times when I've just shot dudes because they were hiking too close to my tent or looked like they might be on the way to check a hangar or supermarket that I wanted to loot. I found a CZ 550 on a corpse at the top of the Cherno fire station, the first scoped rifle I had seen in DayZ. I immediately started looking around with it, and saw a player running across a field being chased by a couple running zombies. I figured I'd play the hero and shoot them off his back, Natty Bumppo-style. I zeroed in, shot both runners, and the player whips out a scoped rifle of his own and fires back at me. He misses, and I put a round into him and go prone while the zombies his shot attracted finish him off. Ingrate. Moments later, another survivor crawls out there to loot him and I shoot that guy, too, just because I'm in a bad mood. I'm a lot more ethical within 50 meters than I am at 700.

I seriously doubt it. The anti-exploit measures aren't implemented yet, to my knowledge, and even when they are, they should be able to tell the difference between periodically quitting wrong and habitually exploiting the disconnect mechanic.

We need to go deeper.

Not just .45s, though. Check out the notes, the AKs got nerfed, all 9mm pistols and even the Makarov a little, plus the MP5 is about neutered now. At this point, for fighting zombies, you're often best served with an axe or the 1866 even after you find military gear.

I do that, too, but I usually use a custom map with a bunch of those pop-up targets on it at various ranges so I can try to figure out how the sights work. I'm still unforgivably bad with the grenade launcher, I don't even pick them up in DayZ, even though I really want to use a flare in the middle of Cherno some night. My problem is, every time I load up the ArmA 2 armory, I find myself flying that A-10 around for about three hours. Man, is that ever fun.

It's not my favorite feature, but at this stage in the game's development, technical concerns like server overload can be expected to take precedence over gameplay concerns, at least for a while.

What really strikes me about this is that you and 4 of your mates managed to come up with "NVGs, Range finders, Gps, best guns.. etc.. AGAIN" in just two days of playing. I've logged my share of hours with a few pals of mine, and we've never even found one rangefinder. What's your secret?

I like this game. Pacing is important, and complacency is a huge part of atmosphere for me. Fast travel would mean you spend most of your time sifting through loot, which turns the scavenging mechanic into a slot machine. Getting into a town full of zombies, going from house to house without getting devoured or spotted by bandits, and then getting back out again without a train of monsters or a bullet in your spleen, that's the core gameplay mechanic of DayZ. The fact that you can run the same road and raid the same supermarket a dozen times, and then on the thirteenth attempt you run into a truckload of clan members looking to top off their tent city's bean supply, makes it all the better. The routine work gives the emergencies somethign to emerge out of. It's packaged a little clumsily in the hollowed-out skeleton of an older and very different game (which I recommend on its own merits), so there are many glitches and some flaws in the interface that I don't like. It's a fresh experience for me, a delicious multiplayer roguelike with decent graphics and a terrific potential for cooperative storytelling, and I have been unable to get enough of it this month. The most boring lives I've lived in DayZ have been the most conservative, where I either went out into the woods and live on pond water and boar meat or tried out the server-hopping loot hoarding griefer lifestyle, scooping up piles of top-tier equipment and then trying to rack up a high score of murders while unscrupulously using game exploits to protect my own life and assets. The good games are ones where I treat it as a roleplaying experience, trying to befriend survivors rather than shooting them and setting myself a quest like, "Get back to my house in Zelenogorsk and see if my car is still there." When I get to Zeleno, I say, "Rats, no car," and I try to get to the Vybor school. You need a plan that's not just, "Run to the barracks and practice logging in and out until you have a .50cal rifle." Obviously, everything's better with a couple buddies, be they real-life friends or total strangers encountered in-game.

There are lots of opportunities to fight AI soldiers in ArmA, I go to DayZ to fight zombies. If a heavily geared, bored DayZ player wants to shoot at a target that has human-like stats and deals human-level damage, then the obvious choice is to go to Cherno or Elektro and fight humans. If you want a stand-up fight, there's a whole video game that you paid between 17 and 40 dollars for that can effectively simulate a military engagement of that scale and type. And if you're going to have a military stronghold in the game, that implies that some vestige of civilization remains, that there are still healthy soldiers following orders from a government and maintaining a base in Chernarus, which wrecks my whole idea of what's going on here. It turns all my food hoarding and fellow-human-murdering into ill-advised sociopathy, and I'll probably wind up in front of the Hague on account of that time I saw a guy running from a swarm of zombies and accidentally on purpose shot him and took his beans.

I logged into three servers in rapid succession tonight, trying to find a daytime server. The third time I logged in I got the "Choose your gender" dialogue and spawned naked on the coast. Didn't lose much, just an 1866 and some morphine on me, but I was way up north of Zelenogorsk, near Vybor with a buddy last time I played and now I'm looking at a long jog to meet back up with him. Is this the much-anticipated feature to stop people from jumping servers? I'm all for preventing exploits, but if I log in and see my gun silhouetted against the stars, you can bet I'm going to hop, especially since I've got no gear to deal with it. Maybe there's a better way to track what people are doing?

Yep, looks like that did it. Must've been the server I joined. I tried a new one, logged right in under the sunshine, and was killed seconds later by sniper fire. I guess that coastal spawn was a sign of things to come. Thanks for the input, everyone.

I like having to get headshots on zombies with pistols, I like being able to use a makarov without feeling like I'm just waiting to find a "real" sidearm. I like that zombies keep coming at you after you shoot them in the chest or extremity. I think zombies should be more resistant to bullets of all types, with headshots dropping them regardless of the source. However, reducing the effectiveness of guns against players is problematic. A buddy and I had a tussle in Cherno, and I killed three bandits with my CZ550 while they pumped magazine after magazine from their M4 and MP5 and 1911 into my pal. When the smoke cleared, all four of them were laying unconscious, and I still almost got to my partner with a bandage after I polished off his assailants. That's a lot of shooting, at close range, with powerful weapons, that these dudes almost survived. One of them took two shots to put down even after he passed out, so he had a good chunk of blood left.

I like ArmA, it's a pretty good game if you don't get caught up in the campaign. Lots of powerful mission editing tools, a variety of gameplay options and, of course, laser guided missiles. When I laze a thing and my buddy shoots it with a hellfire from like eight miles away, it's incredibly gratifying for both of us. Arma doesn't suck, it's just for a niche audience, the same kind of weirdos who bought A-10C or Falcon 4.0 or Plane/Train/Boat SImulator. So anyway, you bought an incredibly nerdy toy because there was a good mod for it. Imagine you'd found a blueprint online for a really good butt plug made out of Erector Set pieces. You go out and buy the Erector Set, build the plug, and enjoy it immensely. Then the designer goes and builds a version out of custom-welded aircraft aluminum with pearlescent enamel and a custom monogram on the tip. You'd buy that, too, and then you'd have a really good butt plug and an erector set, both bought and paid for. Just because you don't really like playing with the Erector and just bought it to use the one butt plug design doesn't mean it's not a good toy and worth the purchase price, it just means that you don't play with it now that you found a new way to get what you got out of it. What I'm saying, in a nutshell, is that you like to shove metal objects up your pooper.

Only one thing for it. Rocket needs to get that real-money auction house up and running. For my part, I'd like to see the .50cal rifles removed entirely. The CZ550 and M24 are entirely adequate for sniping, and the SVD offers a nice shiny option for the very successful. The big anti-materiel rifles are a little absurd in the context of a zombie apocalypse. The ability to respawn ammo by logging in and out makes them effectively bottomless for the players who use them for server-hopping PvP/griefing, and the power and range they offer has little purpose beyond ambush PvP, which is only very rarely used in the context of legitimate cooperative play. If you want to shoot people for fun, you should have to use an M24 or SVD, not the crazy hand-of-God rifles that are now dominant.