Jetlaw

Can we at least get player names and what was logged that led you believe them to have been cheating? Would make it a little bit easier to find stuff in our own logs and alert us when "confirmed" player names (Even if multiple people share the same name, at least it gives an indication that we may want to check the logs a little more often than usual) enter the server.

Well at least it was enough for you to warrant reading over say "op is rite i agre zombiz 2 hrd dey kil u in lyk 1 atak n is dificult 2 run awy frm dem". I understand their movement patterns are unpredictable due to grid based pathfinding (the original ARMA 2 doesn't seem to contain suicide bombers or berserkers and thus exact-coordinate pathfinding was not implemented). A small amount of random chance is fine, but when used for small mechanics. The issue with random chance for big mechanics is similar to balancing of RPGs (and in a massive case, balancing of e-Sports titles) - A chance for something big to happen can completely wreck a game in the wrong direction. If the chance for a zombie to break your leg is 10% - On average over an infinite number of zombies technically if every zombie you encountered hit you twice your leg would be broken once every 5 zombies. So you could technically encounter 10 zombies in a row and the first hit from each zombie could break your leg (AMFG ZOMBIES TOO HARD). Likewise, you could encounter ten zombies in a row and be hit ten times by each and suffer no ill effects at all (AMFG ZOMBIES TOO EASY). The same is true with bleeding. You could constantly bleed from the first hit of every zombie you encountered, or you could be 12k>0'd by a zombie and not lose a drop of blood. And with being knocked down - And with the knock down timers. Once I got knocked down from 10k blood and had a 15 second timer. I've been knocked down from 3k blood and had a timer that was near enough one second. Having blood be a modifier for effects seems like a viable balancing choice. If your blood is below, at or above certain thresholds then the effects applied can differ. At >9k blood a "break" could be shock. At 6k < blood > 9k a "break" effect could be a broken leg. At < 6k blood it could be a break and being knocked out. The same for bleeding. At >9k blood a bleed effect could be mild. Then major. And at low blood it could be a massive hemorrhage that finishes you off. And for being KO'ed at >9k blood it could force you prone as a knockdown, but with no timer. The a standard short > mid duration knockout. Then a mid > long duration knockout for low blood. At least if the effects on-hit are done so in a random nature at the whim of the Random Number God the nature of the effect is buffered or amplified by your blood level so you don't get 10k broken legs - At worst you get shock.

Yes they will because otherwise solo play will be just too straightforward - Especially with hospitals having upwards of 30 blood packs in them if you're the first person to raid it on a server restart. A blood pack restores you to at LEAST 11k blood (It should be straight to 12000 every time but sometimes bugs). It's one of the simpler "rules" written into this experiment that drastically alters the dynamic of it - It allows a solo survivor with everything he could possibly need to still be rendered entirely helpless and be left with nothing they can do on their own. It's one of the only hard mechanics in the game where teamwork is necessary.

I agree. Sometimes we have Kirby zombies that are literally mentally retarded. You can sprint up in high noon and tickle their nutsack without them so much as batting a mottled, maggoty eyelid. Other times you get Captain Falcon zombies that see you from the other side of Chernarus in midnight, during a rainstorm, when you're silent and metaphorically invisible, jump into their racers, hurtle towards you and hit you so hard that not only do you have a miscarriage - Your miscarried son's alternate-reality future wife's egg suffers a miscarriage. When you've just spawned in, the first 2 zombie attacks will with almost unerring certainty force you into bleeding. After that is bandaged up, it's up to the Random Number God whether you're Mike Tyson biting the ears off zombies or whether the zombie is Mike Tyson who uppercuts you so hard your testicles pop, you fall to the floor and start to hemorrhage blood, your leg snaps, your eardrums rupture, all the colour that you're experiencing in the world just drains away and you're nicely greeted to the death screen shortly after.

It's fine. The server will restart and all their tents will be back.

Overall, perhaps a small concession would be to have an "adrenaline" mechanic. When zombies aggro on to you, you start to "use" (ie. Lose) adrenaline but your maximum run speed is temporarily increased. When you run out of adrenaline your body just gives out on you and you collapse to the ground for 5 or 10 seconds (similar to a broken leg) while you recover. It won't drain while you're not running, but won't recover for as long as you've got a zombie aggro'ed to you. Make it last say... 30 seconds from full adrenaline to dry (and it should take a reasonable time to recover, say 10 minutes to full although you can also put adrenaline shots in hospitals). If someone wants to round up all zombies in a town then they're forced to race against the clock because your adrenaline is pumping and a candle that burns twice as bright only lasts half as long. The mechanic should allow you to shake zombies easier in shorter bursts but has a heavy price to pay if you're repeatedly running from zombies. It won't affect your ability to cross-country sprint normally and will only trigger on zombie aggro. Then you don't have to make zombies harder - You add a reasonable limiting mechanic to the player that is tied intrinsically to pissing off zombies. You piss off a zombie and your blood's gonna rush a damn sight faster when you try to high tail it away - But eventually something will give and if it isn't the zombie then it'll be your legs. Taking it slow and steady you won't be running and your adrenaline won't be draining (but won't be refilling when you're under zombie aggro) so you can still keep it topped up.

The current zombies are fairly balanced and can be dealt with in a variety of ways. Being able to craft your own story is an important aspect of DayZ and these zombies facilitate that aspect nicely. It's a massive social experiment - And I'm pretty sure Rocket is not trying to found out how players react to scripted zombies. Aggroing zombies alerts nearby players that there's another player somewhere close. Shooting them sends out a pretty legit audible message too. I do not believe zombies are too easy, I believe they are possibly very straightforward to deal with (straightforward to dodge, shoot or simply infinite run from) but ultimately you have to make concessions between zombies being the focus of the game or players. If zombies were the focus of the game, this wouldn't have a minimum requirement of 40 (30 in underdeveloped internet countries) players per server. The current zombies encourage player-to-player interaction while still remaining a threat. If you ignore zombies, they will kill you. If you shoot them, they and other players will hear and swarm you. If you run from them, you better hope another player doesn't see you because you'll be in no position to defend yourself with zombies hugging you. The tedium should, in my opinion, come from dealing with other players - Not from dealing with zombies - As a majority of your interactions will be with zombies until you're geared up to "ignore" them - And if you tune zombies to be difficult for fully geared players then you're eliminating all ungeared players from the game completely. Ultimately - Zombies are only easy because you've outgrown their mechanical difficulties. If their difficulty was beefed they'd be hard until you outgrew their new mechanical difficulties. That is you as a player evolving - But the game needs to be sustainable and I can't count myself within the group of players who'd love to die 9 times without gear for every 1 time I managed to acquire equipment to fend off zombies. Such an experience would be frustrating and be counter-intuitive to the experiment in my opinion. The only feature in this game you can't mechanically outgrow are the other players - Out there, there is always another player who'll be able to one-up you. If a single player can't do it, then a group of them will. So what do I think we need? Fewer servers with more players on each individual server - But that's an entirely different problem.

Ban it. Doesn't matter to me. I'll sit here with my netbook open, a DayZ map loaded, Skype loaded and I'll continue to metagame. While talking to the guy sat next to me. And looking at his screen. Haters gonna hate.

I sit in the same room as people who play DayZ. You smartasses haven't come to a conclusion for that one now, have you. Before you go running off screaming OH MY GOD SAME IP ADDRESSES, do note this gaming house has multiple ISPs. If your God damn VoIP hatred circle-jerk due to metagaming and exploiting is going to continue, at least let us poor sods who are sat in the same God damned room have a break. I'd hate to game in complete silence. While having to have blanking plates over everyone's screens because we can sure as hell see those too. Bannable for playing in the same house as anyone else who's on the same server as you. BAN THIS. B=========D ~~ ~~ (I trapped it in the window :<)

I usually play with 4-6 other friends, a couple in the same room as me. One of us got killed and respawned a mile away so he went on his own adventure for a bit to meet back up with us. On the way he found a crippled survivor. He went to the hospital, got some morphine and got him back on his feet then brought him to us to group up. Upon learning he had GPS I immediately shot him so I could take it for myself. One half of my friends were "You're a cunt." and the other half were "Mother fuckin' GPS, dude!" We later bumped into him raiding the Balota airstrip after we went to loot the deer stands. One of my friends felt bad for him and armed him up with a spare Lee Enfield we had and a couple of clips of ammo, a spare makarov and some clips, a spare water bottle and a couple of cooked meat. In real life I wouldn't have done it. But to be honest, in DayZ I'm fucking bloodthirsty. I only trust my friends and even then it's more a case of "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" when it comes to them. I'm normally an incredibly cooperative player but there's just this sense of satisfaction I get from killing... Well, anyone. Whenever I die in similar circumstances I'm really quite careface about it. Truth be told I love the part where the game is challenging in survival versus the environment. When you get your first hatchet, matches and water bottle you stop being so worried because animals provide plentiful blood supplies and pools of water provide hydration it just becomes a murder simulator. There's not much else to do beyond that. Would be nice if the fight for survival against the environment never truly stopped.