hatfieldcw

I doubt we'll be happy with a mod for Arma3. I'm loving me some A3 multiplayer, but you can't play wasteland for an hour without getting teleported to the ocean or otherwise scripted to death. The kiddies have hit it hard, even so soon, and with all those alpha lite keys rolling around out there no server can hope to ban them all. I'm probably going to stick to small MP missions with my buddies and custom stuff we cook up ourselves to enjoy A3 for a while. The DayZ engine, with its emphasis on server-side security and limited client powers, is what's needed for DayZ. Arma3 has a lot going for it, but it's still an Arma game, and it still gives the client enough power to facilitate trolling on a persistent, heavily populated hive. If a DayZ mod is executed in Arma3, it'll be vulnerable to all the scripting nonsense that plagued the Arma2 mod, and I doubt Bohemia will have the resources or motivation to lock down the Arma game to accomodate DayZ. Standalone for zombicide, A3 for sweet laser-guided missiles and stuff.

I tried using an M203 to make a diversion, so I shot it into town from a couple hundred meters away, thinking the zombies would all go to where the grenade detonated, but they all headed across the field to me instead. I don't know whether the launcher's report attracted them or the detonation gave them my location, but they definitely weren't drawn to the point of impact. I've also tried using my Lee Enfield to attract zombies to a location by firing it and then skedaddling before they get into normal detection range, but they always make a beeline for me no matter what. Here's hoping the standalone can make this a little more interesting, because the zombie missile-lock is a little annoying. It precludes so many fun zombie management techniques.

If you fire up the shooting range scenario in Arma2, you can set up a "bullet cam" that'll follow the projectile's flight path. With some of the anti-vehicle rockets, you can watch that thing fly from NWAF to Chernogorsk, pretty fun. With rifles, it'll eventually vanish, and the camera will stop, even if it's up in the air at the time. I know that I've made hits on zombies at extreme range with the CZ550 and not killed them, despite the blood splat being on the zombie itself. Might've been limb hits or something, but even a limb hit should be a one-shot kill with an 8000 damage rifle, so the damage is surely reduced at long range (unless it was a ricochet, I've been hit by bounced M107 shots and survived). So damage falls off after a certain distance, and accuracy will obviously suffer at longer ranges, since being a milliradian off at 100m is negligible, while at 800m it's kind of a big deal, but I don't think the bullet just flops to the ground or changes course at a particular point in its trajectory.

I've had good luck with campfires. When I start to show signs of hypothermia (shakes, basically) I build a fire wherever I am and I'm steady and on my way in under a minute. I assume there are some hidden numbers at play here, so if you're colder longer it might take a while. Also, being inside buildings and vehicles will fix you up, though they take longer than fires do.

Thin out the herd of empty cans and bottles, maybe. That population is getting out of hand. An air rifle would be in the valley between the crossbow and the SD rifles. It would have the abyssmal rate of fire of the crossbow and the non-retrievable ammo of the Bizon/MP5SD, worse damage than either and still take up the primary weapon slot. I'd rather have a crowbar.

Vodka yes. Put it on your toolbelt, use it to sterilize wounds before bandaging.

I definitely want this aspect of the survival game to be fleshed out. I don't want to die just from zombies and players, I want to die of exposure. Hypothermia? Yes. Heat exhaustion/stroke? Yes. I'd want to go a bit farther, and loot fuzzy hats or make them from dead rabbits in order to stave off the cold. I want to leave my ghillie suit and Czech pack at home on a hot day and take the patrol pack because it's lighter and breezier. I want cars to be tough to start, and big diesels to be kept running lest they become unusable. I'd also like to see more options for buildable shelters. Get a tarp and a stick and make a little lean-to next to your fire. Wear a raincoat or thermal underwear or a hat to keep the sun off your face. And why does the weather have to be the same map-wide? Why can't it be raining at NWAF and sunny in Berezino? I want to see clouds forming on the horizon and start thinking about getting my rain hat out of the car. Wind direction should be variable, all these Westerlies get boring.

You're running 30km a day and living on Coke and canned pasta. A smoke a day won't turn you into an invalid, and if you're worried about cancer in DayZ, you're not playing right. If I don't have matches, I'll cook my mutton over a burning oil barrel and eat it. I'm guessing that's worse than cigarette smoke. How about all that gunsmoke we inhale? I know I always wash my hands after shooting before I eat anything, to get the lead and cordite residue off my fingers, since it's poisonous. A guy who kills five undead horrors with a revolver, then five more with a hatchet, then sits out and scoops beans out of a can with his fingers is going to be eating some grody stuff. Cigarettes would be a cosmetic touch, like the cigar or chaw is Soldat. No need to get upset about possible health risks, except that the ESRB splash for DayZ will have to include "Use of Tobacco" among the reasons it's rated M for mature.

I have that very hatchet. If the hatchet was a secondary weapon with reduced damage output, it would make it more believable on your toolbelt, more versatile in-game, and less overpowered for zombie-clearing.

This patch demoted the crowbar from best to worst. How I will miss you, my duct-tape friend...

I'm assuming you're using a rifle with SD ammo for this. On that assumption, I'll try to explain what's happening. Rifles that can't be zeroed are sighted in at 300m (or thereabouts) by default. The way the bullet trajectory works, the bullet starts at the muzzle of your gun (a few cm below your sights) and travels in a parabolic arc that intersects your perfectly straight line of sight in two places. These intersections, where there is no deviation between the sight line and the path of the shot, are called "points blank", an often misused term. Your first point blank is a few meters away from the muzzle, as the bullet ascends, and the second point blank is at 300m, as the bullet falls back down. For most of the flight from you to your sight-in range, the bullet will be higher than your line of sight to the target. With supersonic rounds that have a very flat trajectory, this discrepancy will be negligible, but with subsonic SD rounds, it can be quite dramatic. At 150m--a common engagement range--the bullet will be way above your CCO dot, causing you to miss high. At 300m, it'll be right on the money. So if you're between 100m and 200m from your target, aim lower with SD than you might with regular ammo. This is working as intended.

I'm not sure what this means. It's difficult for me to imagine a situation in which an armed player "controls the situation" when they meet me and I'm unarmed other than shooting me. What does a player who's quite good at the game do to control the situation upon meeting an unarmed player?

I always use the American "zee" and have never had problems with people thinking I'm saying "Daisy". As others have noted, though, people periodically perk up and try to talk about Jay-Z, which is always fun.

One of my pet peeves in DayZ is when someone makes a big deal about whether or not they had geared up before they got killed. A guy on the coast with a patrol pack and a bandage is not a "new player". ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he's an experienced player with plenty of hours logged in DayZ, and there's no telling what he's capable of or inclined toward, so approaching him is only safer than approaching a geared player in the most immediate and superficial way. As a fresh spawn, I'm swiveling my head and looking for signs of other players during the roughly five minutes it generally takes me to find a primary weapon, and once I have a rifle, if I can remember where I saw a car or a tent or a guy with a nice backpack, that may well be my next stop. With regard to KoS, it's a jungle out there, and without side chat you have to be well within most player's sphere of influence before you can make peaceful contact with them, which means you'll be dead before you can introduce yourself almost every time. KoS breeds KoS, and I can think of several times when I've hidden in a bush at the first sign of players, then opened up on them at 200m (well outside communication range) if they look like they're headed my way. Three guys with military rifles traveling together will almost always shoot you rather than risk leaving you armed and behind them. Side chat, I think, fixed a lot of this. It broke immersion to a degree, to be sure, but being able to say, "Hey, guy running West through Prigorodky! You wanna come bloodbag me?" or, "Hey, if anyone's working on this Huey in Elektro, I've got three pieces of glass in my pack," facilitated a lot of peaceful, cooperative interactions. As to the hero skin: With few exceptions, a hero skin only indicates that the "hero" plays with a pre-made squad that enjoys farming humanity. It takes days or weeks to come by a hero skin helping strangers, and about ten minutes to farm one. If I see a hero skin unarmed on the coast, I know that guy is probably serious business and almost certainly on Teamspeak or Skype or something with a group that is coming to pick him up in an offroad truck or chopper and give him his M249 back. If he doesn't see me, I beat feet, and if he does, I shoot him, then beat feet.

I don't like the idea of persistent storage. Heck, I'm not really a fan of tents or instanced underground stashes. I play on a private hive with structures way out in the woods, where camps are often placed anyway. There might be some camo netting to make it tougher for helicopters to spot a vehicle, or an overhang where a tent can be tucked. That's nice, because it codifies the "hide stuff in the woods" minigame and disempowers the primary camp-hunting tactics without encouraging exploits.

Unless you're able to demonstrate to the other player that you are worth something alive, it's a no-brainer to shoot you, since you represent a threat to him. Even a "new spawn", at the coast, with just pain pills and a flashlight, is a potential threat. Turn your back on him for a minute, and he can have a Lee Enfield. If he saw you, then he has a Lee and a good idea of where he can trade one of his bullets for a map, a bigger backpack, a sidearm, some food and drink, and a better primary weapon. Are you going to leave that guy behind you? Should you? If I'm a new spawn and I see a guy with gear, it's in his best interest to do one of three things: First, he can befriend me, show that he's friendly and interested in teamwork, and maybe we'll roll together for a while. Second, he can kill me, so I might spawn farther away and not be able to kill him and take his stuff. Third, he can run like hell and hope I can't find him after I am armed. All of these actions are fair and decent, and I'll never whine about any of them. I myself use a mix of the three once I'm equipped, and have enjoyed success will each of them.

I say make them a stack item, like chemlights. You throw them, they pop after a couple seconds, and zombies are drawn to them, like a whiskey bottle on steroids. About as loud as a Makarov, maybe. Should they require matches to function?

I like that. "Find an AS50 and..." AS50s are common to the guys who farm helo crashes as their main method of enjoying DayZ, but I only ever get them by killing a guy who has one, and since guys with AS50s are rarely wandering around Vybor in AK range, I don't kill more than one or two such guys a month. A player or clan with a helicopter can scoop rare loot and relocate their whole team very easily. They can grab those helo crashes and AS50s within minutes of them spawning, and they can maintain camps that are very difficult to reach without air vehicles. The helicopter is a huge advantage in PvP because you can scout quickly, insert infantry and harvest equipment in one. Because the guns are only marginally effective, they're going to be used to grief more than they're used for anything else. It's inconvenient to get out of the chopper to loot, it's unlikely that shooting a hostile player with that gun (due to its difficulty of use) will be more effective than just flying over a ridge and getting away, and there's pretty much no reason to use it on zombies except as target practice. Chopper gunner seats are for roleplay and ruining an underequipped player's day. In a smaller bird, where the guns are operated by the pilot, there's absolutely no DayZ use for the armament outside of very high-level asset destruction. You could use them to smash tents more quickly than landing and hatcheting them, you could use them to destroy a Ural on the move, you could use them to kill boats at sea... I'm out of ideas. For every valid application of air-to-ground (or air-to-air, for that matter) firepower, there will be a thousand instances of these warbirds being found in camps, hijacked by dingleberries, and used to patrol the coast blasting fresh spawns until someone brings it down with a .50. The transport and aerial view are plenty powerful in DayZ. Guns are not called for. If you want to shoot chopper guns, fire up the armory and enjoy some Arma2. If you want to grief newbies, take your AS50 to Dobryy. If you want to add content to DayZ, consider the big picture.

I'd like to see this in the game. Require a toolbox to start a car, maybe. I'd also like to be able to leave my engine running when I get out. Maybe it takes a couple seconds to start the car, so if you're just filling your canteen or want to be ready to make a speedy getaway, you leave it on. In your example, I'm guessing the guys piling out of the car to machinegun a stranger wouldn't take a moment to pocket the keys, so maybe your daring theft was more believable than you think.

I'm going to deviate from the topic a bit to call your bluff on this one. You can move and shoot in Arma2, and it feels annoyingly like trying to move and shoot in real life. The bouncing sight picture, the tunnel vision, it all feels about right. Try it out some time, aim down the sights of any pistol or long gun (or just use your finger if no gun-like object is handy) and see how fast you get going before it gets hard to keep it where you want it to be. Master Chief is a space cyborg, so he can obviously do it very well, but I know I struggle with it, and I always prefer to move and fire at different times, at least when my goal is to hit something specific.The things that eat my lunch are stopping to sling a rifle or throw a flare. I'd like to be able to drop a smoke grenade on the ground as I run, or draw my pistol while moving. There are a lot of interface hiccups like that in the engine, maybe some will be ironed out in the standalone game.

Someone once told me that Chernogorsk means "Black Mountain City" and Zelenogorsk is "Green Mountain City", so I've always thought that. Dunno if it's true. Isn't there a photoblog out there someplace of a few people going there on vacation and taking pictures of each other doing DayZ cosplay with cans of beans? I'm pretty sure I saw something like that once.

I thought they were Chernarussian zombies speaking English with a Czech accent.

Probably more akin to "casuals" than anything else, really. I play a fair bit of DayZ, and I routinely run down the coastal highway, jog across whole open fields and wander through Cherno with just a hatchet. I don't consider myself bad at the game or stupid, I'm just recklessly indifferent to my safety. The fact that I never seek top-level military gear and will give away any DMR or M24 I find as quickly as I can helps as well, since I never need to fear death and I don't worry about playing without my buddies on.

Mk48 is the best of those, for sure, but it's so hard to get it's not a really good "favorite". I have trouble finding M14s lately, too. I only ever get them from dead players anymore. When I'm actually playing, I'll drop anything for an AKM. Common ammo, serious damage ouput and easy-to-use sights make it a great choice for killing players and zombies alike. When I have an M16 ACOG or M14 I always feel like I need to be more conservative to protect my prize, but with the AKM I'm all battle, all the time. No need to hang out on rooftops or go around cities or find a silenced pistol, AKM does the job.

My favorite part was how annoyed he started to sound when the guy didn't immediately take the bait. He sounded like he was finding it hard to believe that the guy would be suspicious of such an unusual situation, even though he was definitely planning on being a douche. The guy in that video doesn't know how fun works, and is a moron/jerk. 0/10, wish I could take my view back.