hatfieldcw

Map interior, near (but not at) the top of wooded hills. They offer no vantage point and the annoyance of having to walk up the incline makes people prefer to go around, so the only reason anyone goes up there is to check the top for tents or vehicles, which they do in only the most cursory manner. I had some stuff on a hill near Stary Sobor for almost a month before it got scooped, and I later found out that the guy found it because he was following me through the fog with thermal when I visited it. I do not miss that L85 AWS one bit.

Hide in a bush so you don't lose your epic lewts. Alternately, put up a fe tents and start shoveling gear into them so that you can re-equip immediately after you die, so you don't have to bootstrap yourself ever again.

Yeah, but I'm guessing ArmA3 will have the same trouble with scripting that ArmA2 has.

It's a disparaging nickname used by people with low self-esteem to make themselves feel big and tough. Dollars to doughnuts, the same guys that say "Bambi" will be the ones to cry when you kill them unarmed at the coast. On the topic of Frankie, he's almost certainly a hacker and he doesn't know basic DayZ mechanics, but he's a very good DMR marksman.

Nighttime, coming up on Zelenogorsk from the South, stopped by that barn on the hill looking for food. Flare inside. Gunfire. I hunker down behind the big rock, watch as three guys run in and out of the barn for a couple minutes. All had primary weapons, I had a pre-nerf revolver. When they moved on down the road toward Z-gorsk, I headed into the barn to see what they left behind. Picked up some flares and a jerry can, then walked around a stack of crates to see a guy laying prone with an AK leveled at me. Flipped my wig, emptied the revolver into him, ran into the woods without even looting the body. Didn't look back.

If I may talk out my butt for a moment... Arma2 transmits every unit's location and heading to every client at all times, it's one of the reasons map hacks are so common. SA will have a server-centric architecture, which means that your client will only get data for the units that are nearby, and that should help a lot with population-based lag, for zombie and player populations alike. Also, a lot of the game mechanics for command interface and squad structure and all the other stuff that DayZ uses, but only in the most superficial way, will likely be streamlined. And of course the rebuilt engine will take advantage of newer driver support and DirectX and whatever else, so that'll help some, too. I'd expect the standalone to be much smoother in performance than the current mod build, for sure. Not a lawyer, just an optimist.

Only if throwing Lee Enfield ammo results in ten dead zombies, Hot Shots-style.

I'd be okay with that, but in order to switch to a gun in the bag, you have to put the bag on the ground, take all the guns out of it and set them down, switch to the gun you want, then watch a two-minute progress bar while your character packs all those guns back into the bag and hoists it onto his back. Also, no running with the bag on. Encumbrance, don't you know?

I'd support vehicle flipping for ATVs and motorbikes, but not for proper automobiles. You flip a UAZ, man, that thing's gonna stay flipped. Inventory should still be accessible, though, and we should be able to siphon the fuel out.

Yep, follow the clouds. If you're on Steam, you can set auto-run by hitting shift+tab while running, then not hitting w again after you return to the game. Then you go get a beer, read a book, otherwise amuse yourself and you'll be back in South Zagoria again in no time.

You know that your first and second points cancel each other out right now, right? I'm all for more melee weapons, but hand-to-hand combat with a zombie should be more dangerous and difficult than it is right now. As it stands, the hatchet's arguably the best anti-zombie weapon in the game. So if melee weapons become more common and easier to use, they'll have to be less effective than the current hatchet, that thing is too awesome. Hunting knife as a secondary, with pistol-level damage, would be a good example.

It's worth the Steam price for the chance to play DayZ, I'd say. If you like Arma2 (there's a lot to like) then that's all gravy. It's less than a case of Yuengling, and it'll provide at least as much entertainment. If you can afford the game and the beer, get both, it's a great combo.

Yep, probably got cleaned out. Chopper wrecks only spawn loot when they're placed at server restart. Some servers restart many times a day (4 hour intervals is not uncommon) so they'll have choppers with goodies almost all the time. Other servers will have few restarts, so a chopper might be picked clean for a day or more before they respawn at a new location. The loot spawns under the tail section and right under the fuselage (first-person prone will help you) are the most often missed. You'll also find that many chopper wrecks have guns, but no ammo. Clans that maintain tent cities will often scrounge FAL and Bizon magazines, but leave the guns behind due to storage constraints, so it's not uncommon to find an FAL left behind with no mags for it.

Dwarf Fortress flashback here. I love in that game when a wounded dwarf's inventory shows "Horse Bone Bolt - Lodged in Upper Arm" and then you can adjust ownership privileges on it so a medic will pull it out and treat the wound. Took me a few tries to figure it out, since by default the bolt belongs to the guy who shot him, so your doctors would just leave it in there out of respect for personal property rights. Fun game. Fun. I'm all for making it easier to reclaim fired bolts. As it is, getting your quarrel back is as hard or harder than removing barbed wire (which should be addressed as well, in my opinion). Adding it to the corpse's inventory is a straightforward fix, and I support it wholeheartedly.

I like the idea, and I have often wished for something a little bit like this, but just a line on the map showing where you went. A little worm crawling across Chernarus, hitting the hot spots and terminating in a big red X would be enough for me, but if it had little icons for significant events, like eating, drinking, bandaging, killing zombies, getting hurt, receiving transfusions, getting in/out of vehicles, that sort of thing, it would be even more entertaining. No reason for it to include information about other players, but here's my pie-in-the-sky addendum: Let the utility load multiple replay files at once. Assuming they're timestamped and flagged by what server you were on, you could have your whole clan, adversarial teams, or even the server admin submit multiple replay files to the same replay, allowing you to view, in retrospect, everything that was going on the whole session. Aftermath of fights, near misses, ad hoc alliances, all would be revealed by the replay. Just the other day I had a fight with two bandits. I got the drop on them and killed one. I wounded the other, but someone died way across the map right at that moment, so I thought I had gotten them both. I didn't verify the kills, so for the next hour this guy was crawling along behind me, using his binocs and his wits to keep up with me as I scouted for chopper wrecks, until he finally got me in his sights as I came out of a barn. How epic would those two intersecting lines on the map be if you could watch both stories unfold at once?

Building structures should be fabulously difficult and costly, either in terms of resources or time. If you had to log in for twenty minutes and be exposed and largely stationary to erect a sandbag wall, or have a team or eight guys working on a wooden barricade for ten straight minutes, that would feel about right. Give each structure a progress bar, and let people work on it like Clonks or SCVs, so you can't just plant a barracks like it's a tomato plant and wait for it to warp in. As with vehicles, make it tough and expensive to build structures, but cheap and easy to damage or destroy them.

I play on a server with 85 or so vehicles, and I rarely see one, because they're all hoarded up in the lousy woods. I'd rather see a server with a normal number of behicles but a 24-hour timer to reset them, so if you don't use a vehicle for a day, it gets dropped back at its normal spawn point. A team would have no trouble maintaining and keeping a vehicle or two, and a solo player could fix one up and drive it around all weekend, but you can't have a Ural parked in your Pobeda campsite all week so you can use it on Saturday and Sunday to store the chopper loot you collect with your motorcycle. Also, bicycles should get reset every time the server restarts.

Hackers gonna hack, whiners gonna whine, ballers gonna ball. It's all about attitude. If you're willing to play the game and lose some fights and get hit through walls by zombies and get sniped by bush wookies and get hacked by script kiddies, there's plenty of fun to be had. If you're a baby and you can't handle humanity without reliable filters, you should stay away.

Third person can be wank in fights when people are using it to peek over walls and around corners and crap, I agree, but 3dp=off doesn't necessarily equal realism. When I can't figure out where my feet are on a rock because my Arma2 robot avatar can't lean forward, that's not realistic. When I can't see what my car's backing into because my avatar can't lean out the window, that's not realistic. When I can't see around a pine branch because my avatar can't move it with his hand, that's not realistic. For every time third-person breaks immersion, there's a time it saves it. Pushing the camera out of my skull and learning what a person would intuitively know about a given situation is a valuable tool, and I'd never give it up, no matter how many times a douchebag stands up from behind a stone wall with his crosshairs already on me. Really, he could have been huddled on that rooftop with just his eyes poking out, instead of hanging his gun and entire torso over the edge to get a look at you. I'm reminded of the scene in Rainbow Six (book) where they're doing VR training and they lose because Chavez's electronic boonie hat gets spotted by the enemy team while he peeks around a corner. He could have folded up the brim, or taken it off, or used a mirror, but because the game required him to expose the polygonal head with the polygonal hat on it, he and his team lost. Third person cameras make up a lot of the difference that good body positioning and wise decisions would make up in the really real world. I don't know of a better way to do it without some incredibly costly work, so I'm all for the third-person view.

Nah, I like zombies that have HP and can be killed. Unless you're going to have a really detailed wound model for zombies (and players too, while you're at it), they idea of pumping round after round of 7.62 into a human body and getting nothing at all out of it would feel even cheesier than killing them with bullets. DayZ "zombies", it's been established, are still-living humans infected with a condition that renders them immune to pain and unable to think beyond a desire to kill and eat living people. They're not "dead" by any means. Their hearts pump blood, their lungs breathe air, they need everything a living person needs to stay functional. Destroying their organs will kill them. This isn't just me being a douche about lore, though. I prefer these "infected" to the alternative. I like zombies that are still alive, that can be put down with center-of-mass hits. Often in DayZ, as a solo player, I find myself cornered in a building with ten or more zombies shambling right at me. If I had to headshot each of them to get away, instead of laying into the horde with my AKM and dashing through the hole I made, I'd be having less fun than I currently have. Sure, zombies aren't that big a deal when you're just hitting up the Cherno market or sprinting in and out of the Elektro hospital, but when you're engaging a couple bandits at the Stary tents and trying to manage your fields of fire and zones of cover while staying conscious of zombie aggro and trying to use zombie reactions to the enemies' shots to find their overwatch guy, zombies become a critical part of DayZ gameplay. If zombies were boosted until they're a whole problem all by themselves, then the PvP in zombie-infested areas would be broken. The first guy to shoot would be swarmed by zombies, and the would-be target would either slip away or engage at his discretion, making aggression against players an invalid tactic unless you either work as a team with other players against smaller groups or singletons or snipe from a hilltop hundreds of meters away. Tougher zombies would discourage all but the most odious forms of PvP, making the douchiest tactics the only viable option for banditry. Zombies are great just like they are. They keep you on your toes without preventing you from playing the actual game, which is a PvP sandbox. They are background for the most part, but if you get your leg broken leaving a firehouse or get knocked down in a hangar or have to use half your STANAG ammo to get out of an apartment building or have to fire your DMR in earshot of potentially hostile players, they become a very important consideration.

I'm always a big fan of this suggestion, and I've always assumed that it would be addressed in the standalone version of the game. I don't think I've ever seen a game that did this properly. You get the basic "12/278 reloads to 30/260" system we see in most Halo of Duty games, and you get the Arma/Rainbow Six system where you wind up with four allllmost empty magazines in your inventory, but for a game like DayZ, where managing gear is central and you can't just rearm at HQ between missions, the more complex system fits really well, and is definitely called for.

11 Pellets in 00 Buck? What is that, a 3 1/2 magnum? My 2 3/4s have 9 pellets each. Good shot anyway, nice even spread on the target. Yeah, that's about what it looks like. It's something like an inch of spread per yard to the target for a cylinder-bore shotgun like the 870. Note the lack of holes in the center part of the target. If you were 80 yards away instead of 25, you could have that pattern perfectly centered on a man-sized target and not hit anything at all. Luck factors in. If anything, I'd expect the double-barrel to have a choke in it and thus less spread, or even two different chokes in the barrels for variable spread depending on which trigger you pull. Not sure how to put that in the game, though. I'd like to see pistols boosted up to around 2500-4000 damage per shot and shotguns pellets put around 2500-3000, with slugs coming in around where 30-caliber rifles live, in the 7000-8000 neighborhood. After all, a .72-caliber ounce of lead is going to do damage on impact comparable to a Lee Enfield shot, if less accurate at range. A 12ga slug should hit a head at 50m and a person at 100m without much trouble, with good sights. Pellets should be effective out to about 25m, with dramatic falloff after that.

If you ax politely, people will give you all their stuff. True story.As for easy switching, that's why I think the crowbar's the best item in the game right now. Nothing like having a hatchet bayonet on your DMR or Lee Enfield.

I'd like to see military guns more diverse, but subdivided rather than proliferated. Right now we've got 9 STANAG ARs: M16A2, M16A2 ACOG, M16A2 M203, M4A1, M4A1 CCO, M4A1 CCO SD, M4A1 Holo, M4A3 CCO, and the L85 AWS. What if loot tables had a subset for "STANAG AR", and then the specific type and number of magazines that spawned were determined by a second dice roll? You could throw in the G36 and its variants, the various L85 variants, the XM8 variants and whatever else you wanted to include, and still not have more military-grade assault rifles in the game. Same goes for AKs. More variety without making weapons more common.

Well, light discipline is less dependent on the light source and more dependent on the brain that's controlling it. The current crappy flashlight is every bit the bullet magnet that a headlamp would be, it's just less useful to the user.