hatfieldcw

Today's generation? The guy's 47, and he's not a moron. Some kind of file corruption, installation wouldn't finish. Downloaded it a couple times, same result.

Grenades are best when used in conjunction with long barns and swarms of zombies. Just make sure the first one does the job, because follow-up nades can lead to what you see in that video.

I can't figure out why the ArmA2 grenades show the reticle at the angle of the throw, while DayZ just plants it in the middle of the screen. Weird. Anyway, getting killed by your own grenade after a glitch is hilarious. D/Cing because you got hurt is for little babies. The M16 isn't that great. Rant was short and the profanity was unimaginative. 2/10

Heheh, yeah, the survivor's quite the renaissance man. Ride a motorcycle? Check. Gut a boar? Check. Repair an ATV/Truck/Helicopter? Check. Fly that same helicopter? Check. Perform a blood transfusion? No sweat. Start a fire in the rain with just a hatchet and some matches? Been there, done that. Run a 4-minute mile ten times in an afternoon? Done. Score consistent headshots at 25 feet with a pistol? 800m with a rifle? Who do you think you're dealing with, here? This guy is probably being played by Gregory Peck.

I love flying planes in ArmA2, but DayZ isn't a good fit for them. To tough to secure. Maybe a VTOL plane, so you can land it in a field, but what mission would it fulfill? Recon? No good for troop transport. I guess you could use it for fighting, but it'd be super powerful for grieving (strafe that coast!) but less useful for support. No zombie fighters to shoot down, after all. Anti-chopper work would be about the size of it.

Mi-17 is cool, yeah, but it's another big, clumsy helicopter, almost like a reskin of the UH-1H. I'm a fan of it, though. I'd like to see every server have two big helicopters and two small helicopters on it, at the very least. Since choppers tend to be fragile and difficult to operate/fuel/hide, and don't hold much stuff, I think that they can be counted on to be used and smashed on a semi-regular basis, allowing them to contribute to gameplay and not suffering the Ural's fate of "tent with wheels in a bush somewhere". Also, if we could arrange for vehicles to be disabled, but not freaking explode GTA-style when they're broken, that would help a lot. I hate driving anywhere, because if I come under fire, I generally don't have enough time to stop the vehicle and get out before it goes nova. I don't mind getting badly hurt when I hit a wall at 50km/hr, but some jerk shooting my engine with an M107 should be more of a, "Oh, no, everyone out and head for the trees!" sort of situation rather than a "BOOOOOOM" situation, you know?

I got ArmA2 on Steam ages ago, wanted to fly that A-10. DayZ was free for me, and really, give ArmA2 a chance. Just fire up the armory and go bombing around in a helicopter, or play the EW mission, which is pretty sweet. The campaign's not very strong, I agree, but it's worth playing online or checking out the user-created content (including DayZ, of course). So to answer your question, buy it electronically. A friend of mine bought it straight from BI and had terrible trouble getting it installed. He wound up buying it again on Steam when the sale was on, and had no trouble then.

Great gun, my favorite. Same basic performance as the M14 in terms of sight, noise and power, but that 100rd belt that only takes up 2 inventory slots beats having 5 slots worth of DMR mags and 4 reloads to put the same amount of lead down range. Looks sexy. Automatic fire is a wall of death. Finding ammo isn't even that bad. I had one a few deaths ago, and I actually had to leave some ammo behind. It spawns in industrial sites, so you can find it without braving the military zones, and it lasts a very long time, even if you fight a lot of zombies. Totally legit spawn in DayZ, no scripting needed. If you get one, put it to good use.

Cherno's great, but I tend to prefer Elektro. If I start at Prigorodky or Cap Golovo, I head East and hit Elektro because I feel like I might be able to meet someone there and either have a talk or have a fight, either is acceptable. Cherno's a reliable source of loot, and it's pretty easy to avoid getting murdered there with a little practice, but it takes me longer and the dangerous bit is leaving the city, so I might spend fifteen minutes getting my kit together then get whacked as I head for the tree line. Either way, a city start is almost always the right answer. It's not even worth heading north, I say, until you have a couple morphine injectors, because a fracture in the wilderness pretty much ends the game for me. SInce cities are the only reliable source for such things (military loot and zombies are not to be trusted when you're in need and tent resupply is odious to me) it makes sense that every play-through starts with a run through one or the other city. It's worth it to learn how to hit them efficiently and well, and it's also worth learning how to get your PvP on in the urban environment. I find it very gratifying to just roll up there with an Enfield or something I found at Balota and try to bust up some bandits. Pro tip: If you see a guy on top of a building shooting down into the street, don't introduce yourself. He's not fighting the undead. There, I just saved you a respawn.

I think we should have a meet-up in Povrly. Picnic lunch on Sniper Hill, then we go into town and throw tin cans at the hospital windows.

I have two favorites. I love me some DMR. Using the mil-dots makes me feel smart, and it's a great weapon for overwatch while a buddy raids a hospital or supermarket or heli crash site. Not great up close unless the server has crosshairs enabled, and a little loud, but it'll knock out a player so they Alt-F4, making it every bit as useful in a fight as an AS50, but without the humanity loss from killing a dude. My other favorite is the PDW. Eats a lot of different ammo types, can use MP5 mags from primary inventory (so I can have lots of M203 ammo when I'm using that gun), sweet rate of fire for PvP, and can use SD ammo to control zombie aggro. Great piece. But truth be told, I tend to prefer civilian weapons. The Enfield or 1866 can do most of what the M14 can do, and they're more common and more suited to my immersion. The CZ550 is possibly the sexiest rifle in the game. Why would you want a polymer stock when you can have a nice chunk of walnut?

That's weird. All I can think is that there was some kind of glitch, like your fireplace was under the ground polygon and it didn't count you as being in proximity or something like that. I've only done it once, but I enjoyed great and nearly immediate success.

Go, go Little Bird! Easier to fix up, I'd assume, and needing less fuel, it would be a great asset. The Huey's such a big, clunky thing, it's a pinata for all the AS50s out there. The machinegun version might be okay if you have to find ammo for it. I don't know what a "magazine" for a minigun looks like, but I bet it'll take six inventory slots and not fit in any man-portable gun. Schlepping ammo across the map for three seconds of firing that gun might make it worthwhile. Planes aren't a great choice, since there are so few places to safely land them and nobody want to be taxiing all day trying to hide it. (I'd love to see the Antonov chugging down the road to Olsha, but...)

That's the essence of it. They're playing a different game, and their game has different rules. There's nothing wrong with them finding the path of least resistance and making it obvious to everyone where the flaws lay. That's how the team will spot and fix the problems. The bad thing is that the ArmA2 engine is built from the ground up to trust clients and depend on players who want to participate in the activity being shared. They get a lot of chances to cheat and be dicks with relatively little effort, and their colleagues trust them not to do so. In DayZ, with its large, anonymous population, sociopathy arose early and severely, so we'll need some pretty high walls built to corral the drooling masses. That'll obviously require some engine rewriting, probably even some fundamental changes to the ArmA3 engine, which is being developed with the same philosophy that ArmA2 had, in the belief that giving people more power will enable them to more perfectly achieve a shared goal.

I disagree about the mentality. I believe that the brief period of harmlessness at the beginning of a character's life, combined with the utter worthlessness of the character at that time, makes for an amicable player. If I meet another unarmed dude on the coast, I'll definitely talk to him, and I expect him to respond in a peaceful way, since he has no means by which to be hostile. Later, when we've got guns, then there's a chance I'll get a little nervous and peace out when he's not looking, but if he seems like a solid dude, I might play with him for a couple hours, even after we're both semi geared up. The players I meet after we both have guns are far less likely to be friendly.

I played the game when you started with a gun, and I liked it. I play the game now that you don't, and I like it more.

The skill system would be a good counterpoint to the persistence of inventory if persistent inventory were a legitimate part of the game. Without scripting and duping and Alt+F4, the genuine loss of gear would become a real factor, and so there'd no longer be a need for skillpoints and classes to balance it out. I say the better game would be one where gear cannot be obtained illegitimately, can degrade or be damaged and must be replenished from in-game sources from time to time. I disagree, but I concede that this game might not be the best place to tackle that problem. The current playerbase is the one that played and stayed during the game's transformation into what it is, so it can be assumed that they like what they're playing. I'll keep waiting for something big to come along.

My big fear is that I'll find myself in a position where I find a blood bag and I have four empty magazine pouches and two empty grenade pouches and an empty map pouch, but I have to leave the blood behind because my only medical pouch is filled up with painkillers. If it doesn't matter, and the pouches are just slot upgrades for the inventory, then the idea of customization flies right out the window except as a dress-up doll minigame, which could just as easily be played during some new kind of character creation. If it does matter, then the absurd scenario I described above becomes possible. Either way, the costs seem to clearly outweigh the benefits. I'm not enthusiastic about it. Fundamentally, it makes an already clunky UI even more awkward, and the return we'll enjoy is some fun character customization and nonsense restrictions on which pockets can hold bandages and which pockets can hold magazines. The MOLLE rig is for convenience, security, comfort and accessibility. We have all that already, thanks to this being a video game. Making us play a minigame that builds walls between us and the stuff we find will be making us have less fun in order to have less fun. Just like we don't have to zip the fly on the camo clothing or pull the tab on the Pepsi, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops to put a smoke grenade into a pocket and take it out again.

I'm thinking primarily about interface issues. It'll take some time to iron out how things like head bob and auto-centering should work. I remember back in the day, playing Marathon and even Quake, it was absurd to think of using the mouse to aim, look and steer, and moving laterally was a special move, not all games even had it. Now we've got WASD and the mouse as the default control structure almost universally, but there were some awkward false starts on the way. Similarly, the VR will take some getting used to, for developers and players alike. Will I be using WASD and the mouse with it? When I drive a car, will my mouse steer while my head tracking looks, or will it be worthwhile to have a toggle or momentary way to bind where I'm looking to where I'm steering? When I look through my scope, will the scope view only appear over my dominant eye, giving me the choice to wink for clarity or keep both eyes open for situational awareness? You can't just slap it on like it's a monitor upgrade and expect to wake up in The Matrix. It's a doodad, just like the Intellivision controller and the Dreamcast's analog shoulder buttons and the Virtual Boy. Sometimes it's awesome and works, other times it's a piece of crap and gets in the way. The dream remains beautiful, but the implementation is a job. I'm stoked for it, but with reservations.

Yep, reskins can be used to cheat. Remember back when everyone manually editted the Quake 3 Arena video settings to way, way below the minimum? It turned the maps into something out of Tron, with uniform ambient lighting and bright primary colors for all skins. You think you're a red solder in a dark shadow under an orange staircase, but I just see a big blue mannequin sitting still under a white polygon. Enjoy my hypervelocity railgun slug.

I've used campfires to fix my chills. Hands stopped shaking, little thermometer icon returned to normal. Outside, at night, in the rain (those are some good matches, I tell you) I got warm pretty quickly, too. Didn't even need to add wood to the fire, the first bundle had me fighting fit before it burned out.

Thanks for latching onto the least salient throw-away sentence in my post. You want me to expand on that? Okay.First of all, a distinction should be made between making it easier and refraining from making it harder. I hope you can grasp that, or else I'm wasting my time with this post. Having modular inventory slots that are collected or hoarded later in the game will bring no challenge to advanced players who have them, since their game will be either the same or easier than it is right now. Reducing starting inventory will make the game substantially more difficult in the early stages, which is the only time it's difficult to begin with. It's the only time anyone really gets killed by zombies, the only time they need to use flares or smoke grenades or tin cans, and the only time that they don't have at least an ALICE pack on. Knocking them from 20 inventory slots to 4 or 5 would be crippling. What's more, it would make military spawns as crucial as hospitals and supermarkets as chores to do after respawning and before heading north, since you'll need a good pack, some morphine and a full complement of MOLLE pouches before you head out, and that means a steady stream of sniper meat jogging through the Balota hangars and kneeling stationary in the big windows of fire stations.

There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, obviously, but I like the idea, for sure. Dayz would be okay on it, but it's seems really well suited to flight sims. I'd love it for flying in ArmA, but I'm more excited about trying it for DCS games.

I hate the idea of points, it's too much to balance, and it'll inevitably lead to a "right build" that everyone will copy and paste. No go. You want new abilities? Find a toolbox. As for spawning with your clan, that's not my cup of tea. If I had my druthers, I'd try to minimize players forming teams before starting to play. A big part of the game for me is being alone and having a chance to meet people who can help or hurt my chances. If I have a reliable team of helpers already lined up, then the risk/reward calculations for dealing with strangers is quickly skewed all the way over to "God will know his own". For the sake of the sociological experiment, I think the game might benefit from a "quick play only" kind of system, where you don't know where you'll spawn, who you'll meet or where your neighbor/brother/coworker is. You can't be sure your tent is on this server, you can't know where you left the Ural, you don't get to carry anything with you, either from the real world or from previous plays. Death is a huge problem then, and survival takes its rightful place at center stage. It costs you some, since you can't play with buddies you know, but you can play with buddies you meet. Letting people spawn in as a platoon just reduces the challenge and takes the focus away from surviving and puts it on... what? Hoarding loot? Massacring solo players and smaller groups? Fixing up all the vehicles and tucking them in the woods? The game gets crappier and crappier the better you do at it. The problem with DayZ is that it's too easy to reach escape velocity and leave the game behind. Then you're in some kind of dumb limbo, where you can't enjoy just staying alive anymore, your actions have no more reward to offer and all you can do is dick around. You spawn in, you tell your friends where you are, they send a guy on an ATV to collect you and you're geared up and in your shantytown within fifteen minutes. That's not easy enough for you? Even if you don't have a tent city and some vehicles, your buddies can meet you with a gun and a map and some food and drink and medicine within ten minutes from almost any starting point. You had something better to be doing during that time? You want to spawn in, take a 1911 and an AKM from a pal's pack and start sprinting for the NWAF?

I've never seen a server that tells who did the killing, just the death notifications. Is that a server-side setting, or is it prevented by the mod?