hatfieldcw

I'd like to be able to salvage parts from derelict vehicles. It's a little absurd already that the same tire works on a bicycle, a bus and a Ural, same with engine parts and fuel tank parts. Why not go the extra mile and let me pull parts from one and stick them on another? To avoid using it to repair stuff for free (Orange engine? Pull it off and reinstall and you're good to go!) the parts themselves could have HP, like magazines or stacks of chemlights can be depleted, so you go up to a tractor with a yellow engine, pick "Salvage engine parts" and get a half-stack of engine parts, leaving the tractor with a red engine. Then you go use that on your UAZ with the orange engine and it goes up to green. Same with siphoning fuel and partially filled jerry cans. It's more data for the server and hive to track, but if they can keep tabs on all my 1911 magazines, this shouldn't be too tough.

ArmA2 has a robust base-building system in it. Industrial or military sites could spawn construction materials, tarps, camo netting, lumber and other handy stuff, and then it could be assembled by players using the construction controls into makeshift forts and zombie-resistant barricades. Zombies or players could destroy them (Good use for ax/crowbar/toolkit) but they'd make for an interesting new cooperative project when gathering gear and fixing cars isn't enough. I'm obviously a huge fan of augmenting vehicles, as well. Scrap metal for makeshift side skirts to protect your bus wheels, a brush bar to reduce engine damage in the event of a minor collision or gunfire, armor on windows, that sort of thing. A Ural with enough metal on it would be like an APC, you'd be smashing fences and deflecting sniper shots left and right.

I'd like to see a little more oomph in the guns. When everyone has a primary, then it seems okay to me. A spray of AK fire is about as good as a well-placed Enfield shot, the AKM is boss gun until you get into the realm of the 8k weapons like the FAL or the almighty Mk.48 mod 0, and .30-caliber sniper rifles are just what they ought to be, taking a guy out of the fight with one shot at incredible range and pinning down enemies as long as ammo lasts. Pistols are stupid weak, though. I like that you need a headshot to kill a zombie, that's great. As much as I enjoyed clearing whole towns with the M1911, it was way too easy and safe. But for PvP, the sidearms simply don't do their work. Even the PDW can't really win fights with its 30-round magazine, because even with ten of them landing on target, you can be beaten in a shot or two from most any primary. Shotguns could use some love as well. Pellets are fine, the 2000 damage per pellet is good, and I'd say that's about where a 9mm pistol shot should be. But the slugs? A .72-caliber, one-ounce projectile should approach the damage of a .30-caliber rifle, even with the disparity in velocity. Why not up the 870 and 1014 and double-barrel to 8k damage on slugs? I assume the 1866 is chambered for .45LC and firing .410 shells, so less damage is okay, as long as it gets a reduced noise signature to match. I'd recommend putting pistols close to where they were pre-nerf, say 1800-2500 for Makarov/9mm and 3000-4000 for the .45s. I'd also suggest removing the ability to swap ammo for revolver/1911, maybe by making the revolver a .357 magnum instead of a .45 ACP. That'll make it more difficult to keep them fed and prevent ammo manufacture exploits. For rifles, it's pretty much okay right now, except that AK variants are very weak when compared to other rifles. I'd bring them up to around 4k, just a hair above the 5.56 rifles. Finally, a flanking maneuver on the subject: Player wounding. Shock is good, I like it the way it is. Pain is good, too. I'd like to take another look at incapacitation. When you go down and get the little hourglass, nine times out of ten you're dead already, it's just a few seconds of watching the blood trickle out. If you're down but not out, you're still very much in the fight, since it's a short timer and you come back ready to re-engage. So if a guy goes down, you still can't turn your back on him, you have to pump him full of lead until the flies buzz. I'd like to see a little more gameplay centered around losing a fight. When you take more than 6k damage in any 5-second period (butt numbers, stick with me here) you get knocked out for an extended period of time, maybe five full minutes(butt number). This means a couple things for you and for other players. For you: You get the hourglass and have to wait it out, but your controls aren't totally locked up. You can still access the respawn button and just die on the spot if you want to. Additionally, when you get within 30 seconds of regaining control, you can access chat and voice, giving you a chance to curse your enemy or thank your savior. Finally, blood loss from wounds will be slowed drastically and stopped after two minutes, making it less likely that you'll bleed to death while unconscious. For other players: Your body can be fully looted, even though you are not dead. There will be a contextual menu option for "disarm", which will cause your primary and secondary weapons to be dropped a few feet from you, so they don't have to do "inventory of Hanoi" to get your guns away from you if they don't want to take them. "Check Pulse" will give an estimate of how long he'll be out, as well as a rough indication of his current health total and the ailments that he has, like, "Unconscious and unresponsive. Weak pulse, heavy bleeding. Fractured leg," or, "Unconscious but stirring. Nominal pulse, light bleeding." This way, it becomes possible to knock a guy out of a fight with a couple ax whacks or a single M24 round, get his stuff and peace out without having to take the big humanity hit of murdering him. If it's your buddy, then you can get him all doctored up before he stirs, and it might become necessary to start carrying epinephrine or dragging him into a building to wait out his nap time. ArmA also has a CPR feature, doesn't it? A lot could be done with this. So, in conclusion: Rebalance weapon damage. I feel sure the DayZ mod can do this with custom weapon profiles, just like the DMR's zeroing and the AS50's encumbrance were taken out, just like the ax and crossbow were put in and just like the backpack capacities were altered for the mod, so can the M1911_DayZ file be edited to have 3999 damage instead of 1389. Add content to wounding and unconsciousness/incapacitation to deepen and enrich PvP post-game. Yeah, there'll be a certain amount of teabagging, but the respawn button's right there if you don't want to stare at some guy's scrotum for 90 more seconds before he axes you. Dealing with wounded survivors would make the medic's job more interesting and important, and would add a lot to gunfights or zombie attacks.

No to bandits=zombies. They aren't the same just because they're both things that survivors try to avoid or kill. Banditry should be sustainable. I shouldn't have to go bloodbag someone every few minutes to retain my ability to fire a gun, ride a bicycle and walk without shambling. There's no reason why being a pragmatic apocalyptic survivor should turn me into a monster. As for playing as a zombie for any reason, it doesn't feel right to me. These aren't Left4Dead zombies, they're mindless drones, wandering around looking for delicious warm brains to feast on. A zombie that can think and plan and coordinate is an aberration, and should not be tolerated. Although it would be cool to gain the ability to walk through doors and barbed wire and hit people though walls. And yeah, your system is definitely going to punish bandits. You say there's no punishment in it, but the other side of your mouth says that we have to "think more about the consequences," and "balance your Humanity level". If there's a consequence for a behavior that renders that behavior impossible, how is that not a punishment? The point of going full bandit is that you abandon your humanity level, you act based on what you need and what you fear and what you can safely take. There's no balance, there's no remorse or compunction, there's just survival at any cost, and that mindset, even if it's not yours, forms a key part of the zombified world we share here.

Now let's think about suicide options and inventory requirements: Hunting knife/hatchet/broken whiskey bottle: Emocide Multiple morphine/painkillers: Die High Full jerry can+matches: Self-immolate Tub of beans: Eat a tub of beans Body of water+engine parts in backpack: Swim Fail

I'm in favor of this. ArmA 2 has a lot of great functionality not used by DayZ, and it seems like it should be relatively simple to co-opt the strong suite of features to enrich the mod.

It's a tough call. I like the idea of player skill coming into play whenever possible, as with sniping or stealth, rather than a simple roll for success. But when you're doing something that has no real option for failure, like lighting a fire or putting up a tank trap, it can be assumed that your character learned how to fix a fuel tank the same place he learned to fly a helicopter and reload an M249 and administer a blood transfusion and set up barbed wire with his bare hands, and just let him do it on his own. It would be annoying to have to learn a dozen minigames just to be able to skin a rabbit out in the woods when nobody's around. It wouldn't add anything, really, and if there's a way for server desync to mess up my tent-pitching, I'm gonna flip my wig when I finally get it to start going up and then lose it when my click is misread. A progress bar for these things seems more appropriate.

Doesn't add up. He farmed loot for two hours to get a ghillie and never found a weapon? He was at the coast like that? You drove for two hours and didn't run out of fuel? If it's true, it's futile, he can just abort at the loading screen and respawn at the coast. If he knows how to exploit loot spawning mechanics, he probably knows that.

I prefer using the mil dots on the DMR for adjusting my aim, makes me feel smart. I think it would be cool if you had to sight in the scope, too. Find a CZ, you've got to take a few rounds out and adjust the scope before you can use it effectively. If I find a rifle in some dude's barn, I'm not going to expect it to be a tack-driver the first time I put it to my shoulder. On the topic of pumps, it seems to me that you're not just dipping the jerry cans in the tank, and they don't have a spigot on them. It implies the presence of some kind of manual pump for siphoning fuel out of the storage tank. I don't see why we couldn't just pull up beside it and get a "Completely Refuel GAZ" option, then fill some cans for the road. It takes a long time to gas up a Ural. Or maybe find a jumper cable in an industrial site and use the vehicle's battery to power the pump? Is that something that can happen?

One of the more common causes for this is combat logging. If you shoot a guy and he logs out, he'll sometimes log back into that same server a few minutes later, instead of server hopping. If you're angry enough at him for Alt-F4ing, you might sit there a little while and wait for him to respawn on that spot. If he does, and you pop him as he loads in, it'll be listed as friendly fire. It's somethign to do with the ArmA squad structure, since all survivors are considered BLUFOR by default. On a related note, I think it would be cool if bandits were automatically switched to OPFOR, so that bandit/survivor fights could result in outcomes like positive vehicle destruction scores.

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Two tractors? Hippie bus? Just parked out there? Your trophy room impoverishes the whole server, taking a big chunk of the most interesting gameplay and social dynamics out of action. It's the least interesting thing you could possibly do with vehicles in DayZ. I'd firebomb that in a second, and take off on the dirt bikes. Next server restart there would be eight new vehicle spawns for people to cooperate and compete for, giving the server a big shot in the arm.

I'd support removal of anti-materiel rifles, along with the Alt+F4 problem, obviously. One-shot rifles are a little beefy in my mind. I'd say keep the CZ 550 and the M24, as well as the DMR and SVD. Lose the .50s and call it a day. I'd definitely play on a server that replaced all .50 rifles with SVD, DMR or M24 rifles, if the option was presented to me. Heck, I'd love to find an SVD, I've never used one in DayZ, and now that I know how the PSO scope works, it's my favorite rifle in ArmA2.

Golf could be a lot of fun as an ArmA mod. Fire a shot, teleport to where it lands, shoot again. Holes could be barrels or landmarks miles apart.

It's a shame you feel that way, but you're playing an alpha, not a finished product. All you've done and achieved is vapor. None of it matters. I can see that you feel strongly about your streak, but your feelings about your character cannot be allowed to get in the way of the game's development. If Rocket's got to think about everyone's feelings all the time, he'll never be able to realize his vision for the game.54 days, 87 zombies, no player kills. What have you been doing all this time? Living in the woods eating boars and drinking pond water? Sticking to servers with population under 5? Sitting afk in bushes waiting for your friend/alt to deliver supplies? Your playstyle is valid, of course, but there's no way development should be impeded by a guy who's enjoying about 3% of the content. Your participation in the game has almost no value, since nobody can see your score outside of that screenshot and you're not likely to spot bugs or corroborate reports from your lean-to. In fact, I'd say the best thing for all involved would be for you to ragequit after a hive wipe. You can retire, confident in the knowledge that your system is flawless and your streak could not be broken except by a game reset, and everyone else can get on with playing the game free of scripted-in gear and admin tent cities.

The big problem with ArmA2, and with many first-person shooters, is that the controls and mechanics that work so well at range become very clunky up close. How many times have I danced around a guy while he shoots at me with a revolver? Without a melee attack, it becomes a comical ballet of sidesteps and misses, since the target's radial velocity becomes so fast and unpredictable that it's almost impossible to score a solid hit in a situation where the fight should be intuitive and straightforward. If I've got a rifle and he's two feet from me, I'd naturally want to thump him with the rifle. His instinct would be to grab the rifle, and we'd be wrasslin'. Even with a hatchet duel, you both wind up swinging like madmen and circle-strafing all day. Some way to engage at contact distance would be good for DayZ, where a lot of the conflict takes place inside of barns or houses.

Getting vehicles and not hiding them. Fix it up, blow it up, or park it on a main road near Kamenka for someone to find and get trashed. I like the idea of stuff happening in the game, and having all the busses and trucks parked permanently up by Pobeda Dam makes that less likely. So I go find camps with vehicles, get one for each guy I'm with, blow up the rest and head for the coast, honking and partying the whole way. If we die, no sweat. If we live, we fill the car with volunteers and go do something stupid.

It'd be nice to not need a weapon to defend yourself. Some kind of grappling minigame where you grab a guy and try to wrestle his gun/ax away from him would be neat. Doesn't quite fit with the ArmA feel, but it might be worth trying. How about making it a kind of tug-of-war game, where you play some kind of minigame, be it button mashing, paper-rock-scissors, etc. and the victor gains more advantage. I run up and grab a guy's revolver, then he tries to shoot me and I try to disarm him. I win that round, then he tries to headbutt me and I try to take us to the ground. Both succeed. Then we tussle a bit like late-match MMA guys until someone gets on top and knocks the other guy out. I'd also like to see more ways to incapacitate without killing a player. Maybe have a little emergency zone between 0 and -2000 blood, where you get the hourglass and have the option to respawn then and there, and when it runs out you die. If you get bandaged in time, you go up to 1 blood and can receive a transfusion. It would be nice to be able to resuscitate team members after a fight if we hold the field.

You're on the DayZ forum, so we're likely to be biased in favor of the game we play, but I'm going to throw a big thumbs up into the mix for the sake of it. I played ArmA2 and OA for months before DayZ came out, and enjoyed both, but never really got that far into the campaign. I fiddled with the editor and made little maps where I'd experiment with laser-guided bombs and remote-control UAVs and stuff, almost always using air units to stomp on ground targets. I still fire up the armory in single-player and tear it up in a Harrier or something for an hour or so. Good times. DayZ has its share of problems, but most of those problems don't even bother you until you've found a DMR or fixed up a car or something. After all, if I'm hiding in a barn at night with no food trying to figure out how a crossbow and two bolts can get me past 38 zombies and into the woods, a hacker isn't going to make my situation a lot worse. Once you've got zombies figured out and know the map, then you set yourself little missions, like hitting up the tents at Stary or trying to find a tent city and steal a car. WHen you get hit by a script kiddie during a 2-hour mission, you get miffed. I think you'll have a good time with the game. If you have friends to play with, that's awesome, and even if you don't you can learn the ropes on your own. I advise you to try the ArmA2 tutorials and get a handle on the controls. Hopping over a fence, switching stuff from your inventory to your pack, accessing a corpse and even just going up a ladder are a little trickier than you might expect them to be in a first-person shooter, so some basic training will go a long way. If the hacking really eats your lunch, and hilltop dickheads are ruining your good time, consider a private hive. Find one with side channel active and use it (Only type in side channel, don't use voice chat or else you'll lag the server and get hated on) to get tips and meet friendlies. Don't rage when some sociopath kills you, just start over and learn a little from it. The game's fun. Play it.

I'm in favor of a wipe, not just of the hive, but of servers. No point in wiping the hive if I can just log into my favorite old server and regear, then spend some time shuttling the old stockpiles to new servers where I'll be up against a bunch of 1866-wielding nubcakes. Wipe vehicles, wipe tents, wipe wire and tank traps, wipe it all out. At the same time, completely revamp item IDs, so that anything that's scripted in that has the wrong ID can be spotted and eliminated, and the scripter banned. Cheaters will catch up, but it'll give us a few weeks, maybe a month or two of unadulterated test time, to see what the game can be without the wiggle room.

In my experience, the bandit skin is a badge of honor, an achievement. SInce humanity regenerates over time, you have to maintain your bandit status by banditing. Many of the guys who cry about Alt+F4 denying them kills aren't worried about loot or winning fights, they're worried about not getting their douchebag points. They aren't going to go over there and take the hatchet and makarov from the dude they sniped, they aren't afraid he's going to do them harm, they aren't going to starve without his beans. They want that negative humanity, and they feel bad about getting -100 for shooting a guy instead of a bigger score for killing him. In EvE Online, the security status (functional equivalient of humanity) is capped at +/- 10.0, and a pirate who rolls around with -9.9 is often ridiculed by his mates and called a carebear. They'll avoid doing things that'll gain them sec status, because that blinking red skull and the perfect -10 is the mark of their order. Once the duping and scripting goes away, so that it's tougher to spend 95% of your play time on a rooftop or hill picking off newbs, it'll become even tougher to keep humanity low, since finding and killing dudes when you don't have an AS50 TWS with infinite ammo will likely require a certain amount of effort and skill. If they can get that skin and keep it, more power to them, I say. As for the people who get it accidentally or want to avoid being recognized as bandits, there's always the camo clothing and ghillie suit. I've been finding camo every other life lately, and I really like the look. Just don't forget to drop your pack before putting it on, unless you want to be rocking the patrol pack.

My old shantytown had six tents in it, all full of gear. Tools like compasses and pistols also count as weapons, so they fill up pretty quickly when you want to have toolboxes and maps and hunting knives for everyone on your team each server restart. Add in a tent with just medical gear, for when you don't want to risk a city run, and you'll only have room for a few copies of each of your favorite guns. Reducing the capacity of tents would just require more tents to be built in the same spot, making tent cities bigger and easier to find. The most important thing to do with them is get rid of the bugs, so they don't restore their contents after a server restart. If smashing tents actually destroyed them, like with vehicles, then they'd be tolerable. It's inevitable that people will be caching gear to beat death, whether it's in tents or cars, but if it's vulnerable, that counts for a lot.

I think sidearms should take less space and primaries should take more, or not be packable. It's silly that I can carry eight ghillie suits, but not two makarovs in a patrol pack, and it's totally absurd that I can cram two AS50s in an ALICE pack. I'd say a secondary should take two slots max, no more than an M240 belt takes. Even one slot, like a hatchet, wouldn't be amiss. Pistols are small, dude. Smaller than canteens, even. Inventory's kind of weird anyway. Standalone might fix it.

I don't like tents much, because they embody my least favorite element of the game: Persistent inventory after death. In my mind, when you die in the game, you should start over like it's your first time playing. Having a persistent tent stockpile breaks immersion for me in a very serious way. I think of DayZ as a multiplayer roguelike. If it was single player, I'd want the world to be reset every time you die. Vehicles, tents, loot, barbed wire, all reset. Since it's multiplayer, it's not fair for the world to get wiped out every time any player dies, and it's not practical to ban players from a given server when they die on it (although I think that would be rad). Tents aren't the only problem, either. Vehicles, knowledge of teh map, even a posse of buddies on the server all break the "fresh start" ideal of the roguelike model. The fact that I can play for a while, then die, then respawn in the same world is ruinous for me. I'm never a lost survivor on a foreign coast trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. I'm always "Near Kamenka", and then I use my uncanny hunches to run into the wilderness to a spot that should not, logically, conceal a camping tent with an M14 and a map and a compass and some morphine and some beans and a full canteen etc. and find exactly that. Spawning with the knowledge of where a fueled motorcycle is hidden flies in the face of the spirit of the game I want to play. Tents allow me to bequeath my assets to my next incarnation when I die, and that makes my character immortal, which makes the threat of death insignificant. No fear, no horror, no suspense, no fun. The worst that can happen to me is I'll have my helicopter blown up. I never get sent back to square one. I never lose anything important. If I play with friends, I don't even lose that much time. It allows people to play the game at the highest level of intensity, doing Cherno deathmatch or sniping Stary or farming the barracks with the full knowledge that whatever they achieve, be it negative humanity or a new rare piece of gear, that little tick toward 100% completion on their progress bar will be preserved forever. Most of use are usually around 80% amazing, with the tools for infinite survival, military-grade firearms and as much food and medicine as we could ever hope to need. I want us to be scraping by at around 15%, feeling good about having food but worried that we're not ready for a hostile player encounter, or hiding on a hill praying that the next guy to walk by has antibiotics we can kill him for. The guy with a GPS and a ghillie suit and a DMR should be the exception, and he has become the rule because he is eternal. A bullet in his face? He takes eight minutes to hit up his tent and he's everything he ever was. Find his tent, painstakingly empty it out and save it? He takes thirty minutes to switch servers, get gear from a different tent, reconstitute the one you attacked and return to service. He is a juggernaut, a force of nature. He'll always be on that hospital roof with that AS50 TWS, because those things are tied permanently to him. So I hate tents as they are. I'd be okay with them if they were unbugged, fully lootable, destructible, etc. If you put stuff in a tent, you should be about 50% sure you'll never see it again. You might stash some stuff there while you raid a loot site, or deposit something you want a buddy to pick up later, but the idea that you can cache gear for use in a future life is poison to me.

In the spirit of the hardcore social experiment aspect of DayZ, I have a vision for the future where every life is played on a different server, different map, different players. No friends from past plays or real life, no handy DayZDB loot map, no idea what the heck is going on or where the good stuff is, just a foreign shore with dudes you do not know. Is it conceivable that the ArmA3 engine could be supplemented to include the ability to spawn an infinite number of procedurally generated maps? Terrain, roads, buildings, loot spawns, all that stuff, made on the fly? You die, you respawn, the game makes you go to a new server and download a new map and you wind up in a totally alien environment, fighting and searching for the duration of your life. When you die, you can never log back in to that map. If all buildings are going to be enterable, it becomes possible for loot to be much more dense, so that we can eke out a living in a fraction of the map. Instead of trekking from Kamenka to Cherno for a map or ALICE pack and morphine, then trudging up to Stary to get a decent weapon, then venturing to NWAF to farm military loot, make all the necessities available in any given 4km^2 area, with military look tucked around where it makes sense. You raid a police station, you get enough shotguns for all your friends. You raid a supermarket, there's as much canned food there as you can carry. Take away the randomness of the slot machine loot spawns, and replace it with the randomness of the environment. If I find a military supply depot, I don't want to have a .11% chance of finding a DMR. I want to have a 98% chance of finding a DMR and a 1% chance of finding a military depot before I die. No well-known sniper hills, no predictable vehicle spawn locations, no reliable farming routes. Only mystery, danger and zombies.

My idea for the model, if we can ignore the technical challenges for a moment, would be a bank of maybe a few hundred servers. Each server generates a map, and when you create a new character, you're locked into a random low-latency server for that character. You've never seen the map before, it's populated by a bunch of people who have never seen the map before. You go on a fun-filled adventure spanning minutes, hours or days. You meet people, you exchange skype info, you bro up and fix a bus, but whenever a member of your team dies, you lose them forever. They'll never ride that bus again. They have to make a new character, start on a new server with a new, unfamiliar map. I would say have each server run either until it reaches a certain population density or for a set amount of time or until a helicopter gets built or whatever, then stop accepting new players and introduce the end-game ultimatum: One week until the nuclear sterilization or something, and you have that much time to "win" one way or another. You might fly out on a chopper, sail out on a boat, walk out through the woods or repair a radio tower and generate enough power to make an emergency transmission for military evacuation or something. Whatever you do, it's a non-death end to your character's story on that server, and then when everyone's gone, the server closes, whips up a new random map and starts accepting new spawns. If you died last time, you spawn on the coast like a newb. If you escaped, then you spawn in a reasonable place. Hikers emerge from the edge of the map, chopper pilots appear at a chopper crash (with their buddies if they all got out together), sailors run aground at the shore. You lose the vehicle, but you keep your personal gear, giving you an accelerated start on the next play. It would encourage ragtag bands to form and stick together, but it would also require them to suspend their shoot-on-sight policy in many cases in order to recruit allies to replace fallen team members. I think it would make for some pretty interesting zombie surviving. The high-density loot would allow players to play their entire story without having to see every corner of the map.