hatfieldcw

I like the animations for running and crawling. They're the same in first an dthird person, and they look fine in third person. If you hold Alt and look around, you can see your body and watch the animation. If the animation was changed to something like a CoD animation, designed to convey the motion from first person, it would look silly in third person, with your guy always holding his gun or his arms right up in front of his face.

If you want to save every penny, you can get Arma2 Lite, then get Operation Arrowhead. You'll get low-res textures on a lot of things, making the game look crappier than it should, but it's a couple bucks that stay in your pocket. For my part, after playing DayZ for a while, I really fell in love with Arma2 and went ahead and bought all the DLC. DayZ textures get a boost, plus you get a lot of content that DayZ doesn't use, but is entirely fun. Campaigns are a little weak, but the other online game types are just lovely, and definitely worth looking into. Also, many other mods, some of which can be installed from the SixLauncher without any file shuffling, are fun to play.

Multiplayer's the problem here. Also people are too clever. Like others have said, a tent that I and my buddy both use would be a shame to lose if the guy who pitched it died. Thinking realistically, if two hobos share a campsite they might have their shared possessions stored there. Hobo A shouldn't lose his bindle just because Hobo B got the chills and got 'em bad. I just ranted forever on the base building thread about the offensive nature of persistent inventory. I hate that I can die and respawn and re-equip at my body immediately. What's worse, any measure against it will be beaten by clever people and multiplayer, unless it's so draconian that it hurts everyone unduly. If I had my druthers, I'd reimagine DayZ as being totally anonymous. Take out the player names (or replace them with randomly generated names are character spawn), take out all communication except pre-recorded macros and gestures and emotes, and make us play entirely in the world, entirely with strangers. Every death and logout should result in a ban from that game session until everyone you've ever met there is dead or logged out. You'd never be able to get back together with your posse, you'd never be able to share skype or TS info and go to another server together, you'd never be able to bring your EvE corporation into the game as a unit. All organic, all direct, all raw social experiment, like that Endless Forest thing, but with zombies and rifles. Hell, I'd like to see a procedurally generated map, so you can't even bring your knowledge of where the good guns are.

Too persistent. I'd be all for it if there was a way to prevent people from using the base after they'd been killed. Being able to respawn, report to base and be restored to 100% of what you were takes so much more away than it contributes. It gives you a sense of accomplishment and cooperative goals, yes, but it takes all the survival out of the game. Look at Don't Starve. You survive, you collect, you craft, you build, you achieve, and you get a real sense of satisfaction out of what you're doing and making and becoming. If you die, though, then you're all the way back to square one, and you start over. If you could respawn infinitely in that game, then 90% of gameplay would be making fancier and fancier floor plans for your next palace, not trying to stay alive. In a multiplayer game like DayZ, permadeath isn't an option. You can't very well ban players from the server when they die, and you can't make the player forget where their tent/car/corpse is, so they get to keep their gear and loot unless someone willfully destroys it. This effect is magnified by cooperation. Your squad is never diminished (except temporarily) by casualties, so if you have four or five dudes rolling together, you'll never need to recruit or cooperate with anyone else, since you're all immortal. As long as you hold the field after every serious fight, even an 80% casualty rate results in all of you being healthy and equipped again in a couple minutes, plus whatever loot you get from the guys you defeated. Base building will compound this basic problem with the game, and I'm against it for that reason. Survival is meaningless if you cannot fail to survive. As it stands, the only things people are afraid to lose are ghillie suits, because they're tough to farm and can't be reclaimed. Guns can be scooped off corpses, vehicles can be camped and regained (especially if you're the only group who know that helicopter is due for a respawn) and food/drink/medicine can be stockpiled in vast quantities. As a result, squad play is anathema to DayZ. It's inherently antisocial in the game world, it renders DayZ's challenges (zombies, looting, survival) utterly trivial, and it's boring enough that you eventually amuse yourselves either by hoarding finite resources (vehicles, chopper crash loot) or by griefing less organized survivors (who are seeking a more honest DayZ experience). Both of these activities impoverish the server, either by denying gameplay (toast a car once a day, you'll always have a reason to hunt for tires. Hide it in the woods and nobody has anything to do except look for your camp) or by actively inconveniencing survivors who are trying to survive without the benefit of a platoon's worth of eyes and rifles. The only way to really hurt serious clan players is to smash their tents and hide their bodies before their buddies wipe you out. Having a base that rewards and encourages small groups with out-of-game comms and implicit trust will, well, reward and encourage that style of play, further disenfranchising less organized players and the organic, noteworthy experiences they have in the game. The clans will get an even stronger foothold and will proliferate and choke out the weaker organisms, and then it'll just be slow Wasteland. If you want squad vs. squad combat in Arma2 with high-quality weapons, you can do better than DayZ. If anything, I'd like to discourage and punish serious, fireteam-level play. Have a system that detects badass commandos and directs zombies or reduces food and ammo spawn rates when they're rolling in a pack. If you have five bandits with M24s and Mk48s and M4 SDs, then you've got to get the stuff you want from killing people and taking it. Anyway, rant over, bases are cool sometimes, but not in DayZ.

Zelenogorsk to Gvozdno, where I found some at a heli wreck. First heli wreck I ever found, all looted except the meds. Double lucky. I'd only been playing a few days, had no idea how much easier it would have been to just die and start over, I didn't have anything you can't find in a barn or market.

I haven't tested it lately, but back when I tracked this sort of thing, damage inflicted caused a variable amount of humanity loss and a kill gave a flat penalty. Shooting a guy with a DMR costs more than shooting him with a pistol, but you'll lose the same amount of humanity for dealing the same amount of damage. If a player has a murder on their current life, or has wounded you personally before you engage them, you do not lose humanity for shooting/killing them. Bandit skin drops them into that category at spawn, so even if they haven't killed anyone that life, they're fair game.

My favorite server has been heavily modified by the admin, to roll it back to "early outbreak" status. The roads are mostly clear, there are more functional tents set up around various hotspots (not much loot, but ambience) and there are NPCs. They come in different flavors: Bandit and base soldier NPCs fight everyone, survivor and airstrip soldier NPCs just fight zombies and bandits, but if you shoot one they all know you're a douche by telepathy, and you have to fight them all. Truth is, it's chased away a lot of players. Seasoned bandits don't like getting jumped by NPCs, because even though they're low-skill bots, they might get a lucky headshot on you, an dif you can't get to your body, nobody loots it, and you can't find the guy who took your DMR and kill him to get it back. It's intimidating for new players. They see a "Survivor" running past Balota and open up on him, then two minutes later NPC squads are hunting them through the woods. Once you get used to it, it's actually quite fun, there are some NPC military bases where you can get ammo and guns more reliably than from barracks, but there are always patrols, and they'll kill you if they see you. You can creep in under cover of darkness, but if you get spotted you're totally dead. A squad of eight or nine guys might get in, grab a couple sniper rifles or SAWs and get out with a few casualties, then divvy up the loot after everyone respawns. It's fun.

I'm all for flashlight+pistol, but it wouldn't be easy to do with the current inventory system. You'd have to combine the two into a new item that can be equipped as a secondary weapon, then use that, with a variety of custom animations and arm positions. as far a dual-wielding guns goes, I want to see a Tetragrammaton Cleric fighting zombies just as much as you do, but it's not a great fit here. Too overpowered.

I'd like to see the ACE mod's sniping dynamics, but it's one of those cases where a dumbed-down mechanic takes the place of a dizzyingly sophisticated one. Sure, the view doesn't swim as much in the game as it would in real life, but in real life I could use a tree or fence or rock to steady the rifle, which is impossible in DayZ. I have breath control options not limited to "Huff and puff until you're okay" and "Hold your breath" in real life, and I can look at grass and trees to approximate wind direction and speed., not to mention feeling the air moving.

The game started out as a mod, and even now I'm doing most of my playing on a highly customized server, immensely enjoying the changes the admins made to the map and mechanics. I think a lot of the game's appeal and longevity can be attributed to the community's treatment of it, which has been, in my experience, a uniquely PC-game experience. A console game very much like DayZ could be made, and could succeed, but DayZ as a project will always shine brightest on PC.

Everyone who's ever bloodbagged a buddy is qualified as a hero, and everyone who's ever shot a non-bandit who didn't shoot them first is a qualified bandit. I consider myself to be both a hero and a bandit, and I have neither skin, so the correct term, I suppose, is "survivor". I've been on plenty of teams with heroes and bandits in them, it's worked out to a greater or lesser extent, and the success is almost never influenced in any measurable way by the skins of the squad members.

I think I'm quite trustworthy. I've only ever shot one player who thought I was friendly, and that was a unique case. As to paranoia, what do you mean? Is my belief that a supermarket will not have enough gear to equip two players irrational? When I see a guy and assume he'll shoot me because he's shot me a dozen times before on that server, am I jumping to conclusions based on inadequate evidence? When I'm disinclined to partner up with some meme-spouting squeaker, but don't want to leave him behind me to arm himself and come teabag me, am I delusional? Being friendly and teaming up with everyone you meet isn't just about getting shot or not getting shot. A lot of the time it's about dealing with unpleasant people with whom I do not want to play videogames. If I have to choose between running in a squad made up of the Grrl Gamer, the epic helo pilot with no helo, the kid who wants a sniper rifle, the guy who reads 9gag over direct comms and the guy who uses vehicle chat to play his dubstep or shooting those jackasses and getting a free can of beans, I'll usually take the less aggravating route.

Feign death is good, and a corollary to it might be a "zombie walk", where you lower your weapon and use the zombie animations. Nine times out of ten, I spot survivors by their animations, not by their backpacks.

Yeah, these survivors spent all their life learning how to fly helicopters, gut boars and perform emergency medical procedures, they didn't have time to master sniper rifles and bows, so they went with the rifles. Bows are too hard for a superhuman marathon-running engineer to figure out. I like the idea of the bow, but the engine's limitations have been mentioned before, and we can probably do without it. Crossbow will have to be enough.

I shoot unarmed survivors on the coast for a bunch of good reasons. If the server has nametags and I recognize the guy as a jackass, he's toast. If I have good loot and he sees me, I put him down before he finds a Winchester and comes after my fancy backpack. If he's headed for Balota and I want first dibs on the military gear in there, I drop him. Same goes for supermarkets--there aren't likely to be two maps and two ALICE packs in there, so I'll be taking those and you can have this .303 bullet.

Fluxley nailed it. Drop a tin can or magazine or something to make sure that you're creating an accessible loot pile, then access that pile and do your inventory shifting from there. Never fails. Also, be careful dropping stuff in on or around buildings. If you build a campfire on top of a castle, for instance, it'll usually appear above you and be inaccessible, like doghouse loot.

Spend all day fixing chopper. Take off in chopper. Forget that auto-hovor is on. Hit building with anti-torque rotor. Try all the tricks Dslyecxi taught me about flying with damaged tail rotor. Crash and burn. Weep.

Don't you have access to a .50 rifle? My money's on the HE round. If the bird's on the ground, aim for the tail rotor, few pilots can fly without it and an HE oughta either knock it out or get it close enough to keep them from flying fancy or far. If all else fails and you want to attack the machine rather than the people, just lay into it with any old rifle. A couple AKM mags or even some Enfield shots will ding it up good and proper. Go for the main rotor if you have the luxury of picking subsystems to target, or just pop round after round into the thing and look for smoke. Frags aren't great at anything, truth be told. I've destroyed cars with them, but you have to get the nade pretty close to the mark, and the throwing's a trick in DayZ.

I fell down a ladder and it hurt so bad my hands were shaking. Gobble down a whole bottle of painkillers, and I'm right as rain. I think that water was contaminated, my chest is congested and I'm feeling weak. Scarf down a ten-day cycle of antibiotics at one time, ready for action! Eight steaks at once. Awesome dinner. Ran 10km, got thirsty, chugged a Pepsi. One magazine with two shots, one with four. I wouldn't have it any other way. Room for eight ghillie suits in patrol pack. Two revolvers will not fit. Also: Car engine 20% larger than makarov, 40% smaller than M107. Common toolbox contains all that's needed to install helicopter rotor assembly. Same tire fits bicycle, ATV, Sedan and Ural. Windscreen glass cut to fit any opening. Fuel for motorcycle, SUV and chopper all in the same can. Can run and reload, must stop to throw bottle or holster pistol. Random dude washes up on beach. Butcher, marksman, helicopter pilot/mechanic, medic, marathoner.

AKM is always a good choice. Automatic fire, high damage output, decent iron sights (takes some getting used to in the firing range, but they're precise, if unintuitive) and plentiful ammo make it a great primary weapon for PvZ and PvP alike. If they're too far away for iron sights, I'll go right to a scoped rifle. CZ and ACOG are tough to use and weak, respectively, so I'll generally try for the DMR/SVD/M24/M40 echelon of rifles, M40 above all others. I object to anti-materiel rifles as a matter of principle, and do not use M107 or AS50 unless nothing else is available, although their optics and performance are excellent. I've probably gotten more kills with the Lee Enfield than anything else, it's the casual bandit's best friend. If you aren't hoarding gear in some hidden tent or carebearing all night at the barracks, you learn to score hits with the .303 at 600m and love it.

I go to Cherno hoping to get shot at. If I spawn in and find an Enfield or Winchester, it's Cherno for me! Maybe I'll have a fight, which is awesome, and maybe I'll meet a friendly player, which is awesome, and maybe it'll be a ghost town and I'll get a new backpack and some morphine and wander off into the woods, which is awesome. I wonder sometimes what people do in DayZ. I had my "Just stay alive" phase, I guess, where I lived in the woods and considered a 4-hour session with zero player interaction and one dead cow to be a screaming victory, but it only lasted a month or so. After a while, you look back at your DayZ life and the moments that stand out are the deaths and the misadventures. Since I had that revelation, I stopped living on a hill and I stopped hoarding barracks loot and I stopped hiding cars in the woods. If I find a car now, I'll fix it up and go driving, picking up strangers and getting shot at and honking the horn all teh way through Elektro. If by some miracle it's intact when I log out, I'll park it by the side of the road near a town and put my rifle in it. DayZ is about stories and experiences, you guys. Why not go to where the drama is? Yeah, the first ten times you go to Cherno you're peeking around corners and scanning rooftops and analyzing zombie population density from a distant hill, but after a while you just run yourself down there with your finger on the Direct Chat button instead of your trigger and see what happens. Most bandits miss the first shot, in my experience, so you have plenty of time to shift gears and fight them if it comes to that.

Combat logging is always bogus in my mind. If I'm playing with a guy and he logs out and back in to shed zombie aggro, I'll shoot him when he gets back and tell him he's a jerk. I duped my share of car wheels and glass back in the day, when you could do it by leaving them in a tent over a server restart. Had like thirty car parts in one tent one time. I can't really endorse the practice, but it's widespread and most of the people flying helicopters and driving Military Offroads do it by exploiting the mechanic, so I can't come down too hard on guys who want to compete at that level by using the methods their competitors use. An addition to your Helicopter advice: Fire up Operation Arrowhead without DayZ active and practice flying. The Armory is a great place to start, since it gives you infinite choppers and infinite respawns, making it easy to practice without wasting time in the editor making a practice run. For some added fun and challenge, check out the single player scenario E06: Littlebird. I can play through that three or four times without getting bored, and it offers a great blend of flying, fighting and landing for you to enjoy. Try to fly along the highway at the beginning, and keep your altitude below 10m the whole way to the first town. Finally, head over to YouTube and look at videos. You'll be glad you did.

So solo play should be impossible?

If you don't shoot at people you meet, don't hang out near high-value loot areas and aren't crouched behind a rock with your rifle pointed at a guy from 400m away the first time he notices you, you'll be shot at by fewer than half the dudes you meet. The myth that "Everyone is KoS CoD PoS 24/7/365" is a wild exaggeration. Some crybaby loses his map and ALICE pack and he comes in here and calls his killer a mean name and everyone says he's a sissy, so he has to validate his whining by passing it off as a public service announcement about the State of the Game, which is hogwash. Then all those new players you were talking about come to the forum to find out how the game works and the first thing that they learn from experienced players is to "trust nobody", "fear everybody", "be ready to fight for your beans" and do not, under any circumstances, hesitate to use lethal force to do so. The most poisonous of all is, "I only play with my mates, on Teamspeak, and if we see anyone who isn't on our TS, we assume they're hostile and kill them. It's the only way to survive in DayZ." Grip up, you weenies. You're drunk on fear and you have nobody but yourself to blame. Here's what happens: Someone gets shot and is butthurt. They start a thread about how hurt their butt is. Someone else reads the thread and decides they won't be a victim, they're gonna stay safe at all costs. Then they see a player and shoot them out of fear. The victim starts a thread about his hurt butt. You jerks are making it happen more by telling everyone it happens all the time.

And they fixed the crowbar glitch that used to let you rig up your hatchet as a secondary fire for your primary gun. Man, I miss chopping zombies to death with the butt of my DMR.