Heiduk

Are you sure you want BI to make a base building game? http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/09/take-on-mars-the-martian

After quickly browsing some content by the "Combat Evangelists" I can't be the only person thinking this video should be required viewing before being allowed to participate in the scrum. Whether or not you agree with Dslyecxi I don't think anyone can argue that perspective doesn't influence combat. Meh, I guess I'll check back in another six months or so to see if any design steps have been taken to bring back the intensity, and occasionally fear, that first attracted me to this game three years ago.

This is easy to fix, just stop playing in 3rd person.

Pretty much this. The common definition seems to be: Bandit == Anyone who isn't me.

You can see your breath even when the temperature is well above freezing: https://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/scienceqa/archive/20040427.html

If the game actually developed in this way it would be an extremely authentic result as this is pretty much always what happens historically whenever law and order breaks down. The strong subjugate the weak and put them to work to improve their own position. Think forced labor rather than leveling up skills, but the behavior would be remarkably similar. Certainly this behavior would be much more authentic than just killing everyone they meet. So what? Life, and DayZ, isn't fair. Besides now the heros have a worthy goal: Rescue the poor medical test subjects. Regardless, the game is already heavily skewed in favor of the bandit (mass-murder) playstyle and the minimal inconvenience that death poses is one of the reasons. In the real world most people don't go around killing everyone they meet. Without a respawn button the few people that do tend to have a fairly short life expectancy and often disappear quickly without passing their genetic material on to the next generation.

Pfft, horses, what we really need are dogs. No, wait, wait, rats; what we really need are rats. Oh, hold on a minute, I REALLY think we need cats, or maybe carrier pigeons. Yeah carrier pigeons, they would be so useful, and totally authentic. But then we need falcons too for intercepting enemy pigeons, and hunting rabbits. I NEED a trained falcon NOW!!! My biggest fear, lack of focus by BI's project management.

I don't know what the solution is, but it seems to me that if DayZ's goal is intended to be the extremely authentic "survive as long as you can" the developers need to figure out a way to simulate the driving biological imperative to do just that which is present in nearly all living creatures. In the real world death is an awfully sharp edge. In this game it's barely an edge at all.

On Steam DayZ is described as: As the OP and the RPS quote point out, currently there is very little reason for a player to make surviving as they can a goal, let alone their only goal. Therefore, although it may have aspirations of one day becoming a survival game, right now it is just a hybrid-MMO that some people play as a survival game.

This is largely how I play too, but realize that playing this way requires a conscious choice to roleplay as if you were in the situation. There are very few mechanics that actually encourage players to approach the game in this way. As a result the illusion of survival tends to break down as soon as you encounter other players. The problem was nicely summarized in one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun's recent articles: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/20/into-the-wild-dayz-adds-berry-picking-balances-stomachs/

The benefit is that you're helping Bohemia save money so they can dump more into development. You're also allowing the community another server to play on. I've been trying to figure out what Bohemia's long-term business plan is for this game. Relying on the charity of other people renting servers for them doesn't seem like a very good strategy. Bohemia is marketing DayZ as a persistent MMO, why aren't they taking steps to fund the ongoing infrastructure expenses that such a game requires, e.g. by charging a monthly fee? I'm all for a locked-down hardcore vanilla DayZ, whatever that ends up being, but how will relying on a very small percentage of the playerbase's charity to subsidize the cost of the game for the rest of us freeloaders lead to anything other than what happened in the mod? There will be increasing demands for more control by server admins until eventually they are given that control and then how long will it be until 95% of servers are 500+ vehicles, 24 hour daylight, spawn with an M4... Are there any other examples of successful persistent MMOs that rely on volunteer admins to run servers while giving those admins very little control of how the game is played on their server?

Of course paying for something doesn't make the rules go away, but when I pay for any of those things I receive some obvious benefit. What benefit do I receive when I rent a DayZ server?

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Agreed, the end of Dslyecxi's original SHACKER series where he finally dies, switches to IR observer mode and pulls back to watch the remaining survivors stumble headlong in to a hoard of Zeds at the hospital could be the final shot in any zombie movie.

Yeah, he isn't nearly enough of a douche bag for this game. :) Honestly, he is one of the few streamers I can stand watching and in terms of tension and drama I would put any of ShackTac's co-op zombie runs (non-DayZ) up against any DayZ video you could find.