Heiduk

Ok, let me make sure I have this straight, video games can give us information through two senses, sight and sound. Yet the two HUD indicators Rocket says he doesn't think they can remove are the two indicators that directly duplicate those senses, noise and visibility. I won't be able to tell that I'm bleeding without spending 30 seconds visually inspecting my avatar for blood spots but I can instantly tell that I'm making exactly 2 bars of noise. That isn't immersion breaking at all.

Let's not forget that blood needs to be refrigerated so the chances of finding usable blood supplies in a hospital that has lost power and whose generators have run out of fuel is almost zero. Not to mention carrying them around in the bottom of your backpack. If you want to make blood bags more realistic, just change their color and call them IV Fluid bags. No refrigeration required and they can be given to everyone. If would make sense though if more than one Blood/IV bag was required to return a patient to full health.

It's always interesting to me that people seem to think "Having gear" == "Being prepared". Some reindeer herder in outer Mongolia probably wouldn't see, let alone fire, 20,000 rounds during his entire life but would barely notice a global zombie pandemic. People who live in rural areas and know how to get their food from someplace other than a supermarket would probably do ok. Beyond that, how's your luck? Other than that, mental resilience would probably be the other big deciding factor and I doubt most of the people here have ever been in a situation that significantly tests that. Most of us are to busy dealing with first world problems. "Oh no my game hasn't been patched in a month!!!"

Ha, didn't Rocket mention somewhere that he thought the graphical glitches might be a floating point overflow? I'm starting to see a pattern.

Meh, just different people finding different ways to have fun with the same game. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock's famous distinction between shock and suspense: Shock is charging into town with your Mk 48 on full auto and being shot in the face. Suspense is creeping through town for hours before being shot in the face. I actually wouldn't be surprised if most of the combat loggers are players with young to medium age characters actively looking for PvP. After all, good weapons and gear are much more important for PvP than for survival. Somebody already mentioned it but I have little doubt that most of the really old characters are probably hanging out on Veteran and Merc. servers that have the offensive crutches like cross-hairs and 3DP disabled.

Lets see, the 1.7.2.5 release notes were incomplete. There was no mention of the hero and bandit skins being back. Where there other changes that didn't get listed? Now it's 20 days later and no Pending Update thread for 1.7.3. Neither of these seem like very good signs. Maybe they should wait eight more days, release the patch, wipe the hive, spawn everyone in the Cherno hospital, and declare the mod finished?

Never stop scanning. Ever. My Alt key is probably pressed 80% of the time I'm playing. It's ok to walk sometimes. You are more likely to identify a threat before they see you and if you're surprised by a hostile contact you will be able to return effective fire sooner. I'm on day 22, but that's probably only 10-15 hours of actual game time, so yeah days alive isn't terribly meaningful. All my characters have beat the average life expectancy though. ;) How do you get the hours alive for a character?

Yep, that's why all muggings end in murder, oh wait, never mind. #DayZ Logic

This seems reasonable. I know I've gotten into trouble trying to run from zeds while still crouched when I thought I was standing.

This post nicely illustrates the problem with saying that both 1st and 3rd person are equally valid ways to play, when in fact they are two completely different games. Sure in theory the developers could design the game in such a way that both play styles encounter similar experiences and challenges but in practice it would be much easier to just pick one and design the game around it. Now either nut up or shutup.

Well said. Neither 1st or 3rd person is 100% realistic in terms of a player's view and awareness of their surroundings. While third person lets you "cheat" and makes the game easier, the limits of first person make it harder, scarier, and yes better. If you think the zombies are to easy, try crawling into town in first person, it's a completely different experience. Try limiting yourself to 1st person, you won't feel safe, you might die more, you might not get geared up quite as quick, you might start having fun again like when you were a noob. I find it interesting that many of the people in favor of 3DP seem to justify their position by saying they only use it for PVE and don't use it in PVP. Ignoring PVP, this whole debate strikes me as another side of the issues discussed in the Social Observation: Playing DayZ to not play DayZ thread. When push comes to shove, I think a lot of players don't really want to play DayZ. They want to be special, they want to be the hero who narrowly escapes death. They don't want to stumble around a corner into a random group of Zeds because of dumb luck. They want a sixth sense, or mini UAV, always alerting them to danger and plotting their course through the horde. Absolutely, one of my most memorable DayZ experiences is crawling through the grass on the outskirts of Electro with no weapon and 6k blood trying to evade a walker approaching from my left when I came face to face with a crawler and just about wet my self. Somehow he didn't see me and I was able to escape. I was lucky that day and and it was memorable because of all the other times when I wasn't lucky. That experience never would have happened if I was playing in third person. I'm not hardcore, but I might be a masochist.

Wait, what about melee? How about an AS50 with a bayonet. I'd call it the AS Spear 50 (ASS50). That's not just realistic it's ultra realistic.

I don't know if the mod is dying like some are claiming but the number of players has been pretty steadily declining for the past 10 days or so. From http://arma2.swec.se/game/statistics: It is pretty clear to me that we are in the middle of a transitional period so I'm happy to give Rocket et al., the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, it is also clear that they have some significant work to do to get their house in order and turn this into a functional game. They've demonstrated a good idea that interests a lot of people but can they turn that idea into something that keeps those people interested for more than a few weeks? Maybe the fanboys are right and standalone will fix everything or maybe it will be a poorly executed mess of half-finished ideas, who knows. I'm hoping for the former and I'll certainly be sticking around to find out.

Exactly, and even when it does turn into savagery it's rarely the "I'm going to kill everyone I see." variety we see on the internet, even in places like Somalia. If for no other reason than the people who do that tend to have a fairly short life expectancy and they don't get to respawn. Face it kids DayZ is not an accurate predictor of human interactions.

Have some beans. I can't imagine the data are showing anything other than: Given a choice of any weapon in the game players will kill each other with the one that does the most damage with the least amount of risk.

My understanding is that right click zoom is meant to address the problem that we are playing the game through a monitor that gives us an unrealistically narrow view of the world. The normal view is intended to represent a realistic field of view but is confined to the small window of your monitor so it must reduce the size of everything to fit it in. The zoomed in view is meant to represent objects at the correct scale but must sacrifice FOV to do this. In other words, a 1.8 m tall person 100 m away will appear to be the right size when zoomed in but you can't see nearly as much of the world as you should be able to. Almost all modern LCD monitors have native resolutions of ~90-100 dpi so effectively we are all playing on the same hardware. Anyway back to 3DP, I still don't understand why people like it so much. Most of the people responding to this thread didn't give a reason why they like it. Of those that did the answers seem to fall into: 1st person makes me sick/I heard it makes some people sick. I like watching my character. It gives me a better, more realistic, FOV. Sometimes this include the caveat that it only applies while traveling. There isn't much to say about 1 other than it seems like most FPS engines give some small percentage of players motion sickness. There are some games I can't play for long because they make me sick. As for number 2, really? You like watching your randomly generated, completely generic, avatar run around like a slightly spazzier version of Forest Gump? Every time I see the running animation in this game I think of my old track coach telling us "It doesn't matter if you feel good as long as you look good." Survivor man has terrible form. Finally, 3DP doesn't increase FOV, it only moves the origin, increasing what you can see locally. In other words it's a short range wall hack. Once you're looking at anything past 50 to 100 m the change in FOV is tiny, see the screen shots below. Note I lined up the left side of the box with the tree in the mid-ground but if you look at the buildings in the background the FOVs are almost identical, similar to the right edge of the box. Do those of you who like 3DP use lean and free look? ARMA 3 allows even more incremental player movements, e.g. half-crouch, will they be used? For the record, I would consider myself a pretty casual player. I don't play everyday and usually for only a few hours at a time when I do. Desync, good luck with your server. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to try it with the old setting as it looks like I get better pings than the one I have been playing on recently.

The number of players has definitely been decreasing over the last 30 days, and especially over the last 10 or so. See http://arma2.swec.se/game/statistics. The peak number of players over this last weekend dropped by about 4000 compared to the weekend after the July 26th patch. I hope this ultimately means the game will stabilize into something a bit little more sane than it has been recently.

Just because everyone can use it does not make the field level. 3DP gives defenders/campers a huge advantage. As already noted they can gather intel on anyone approaching their position with no risk of detection or harm. A player approaching their position gets no benefit from 3DP and is, in fact penalized due to the inaccurate crosshairs. In a game like ARMA where the outcome of an evenly matched battle is often determined by who fires first that's not a trade-off I'm willing to make. I can understand why snipers like 3DP but I honestly don't understand why anyone else would willing expose themselves to that level of risk.

For a second there you had my beans. Then I realized this would just lead to artificial scarcity. In the same way that diamonds are highly valued because of monopolies and marketing. I can already see the server admins logging on right after a scheduled restart, looting NWAF, and then logging off after stockpiling that loot. And the entire HIVE being forced to deal with their shenanigans instead of just one server. How is a cap on possession rates any more artificial than specifying a spawn rate? If you don't want item inflation you either need to remove items at the same rate they are being added or you need to cap the total number in circulation. Anything else will just change the rate at which inflation or deflation occurs. Capping the total number, based on player population, is probably technically easier and largely invisible to players. When there are to many NVGs in circulation, players just stop finding them in spawns. Their gear doesn't break or disappear into a wormhole when they die. Of course, there also needs to be a way to get gear back into circulation from players who abandoned the game while their character was still alive but that is certainly solvable. As for unethical admins getting all the best gear, well that just means we will have to pry it from their cold dead fingers or steal it from their tents. I don't see a problem. I could imagine some servers turning into gear ghettos but spawn rates could be dynamically adjusted to address that if necessary.

Don't give in to the whiners who want their "hardcore" game, but without all of the features that make it hard. No nametags, no crosshairs, no 3DP. Ever. What's your server? I might stop by.

I'm not opening my wallet until the standalone is more than a few vague promises in a reddit thread.

What! Trees weren't designed to kill me? I agree 100%, the game should be hard because it was designed to be hard not because it is buggy. Of course, bugs also introduce the wrong kind of easiness too.

+1 for exploding neck collars and danger zones.

Exactly, not to mention it's pretty difficult to get valid results by testing a broken system. Probably 95% of players currently exploit bugs in some way, zombies walk indoors, poor path finding, unlimited ammo etc. Do you really think people will play the same way once those bugs are closed? Dogs might be useless for anything but target practice now, but if ammo started getting rare and scavenging in towns was more dangerous they might be more valuable.

What about some kind of system where your spawn location when switching servers is randomized based on how long you've been offline? For example, if you've been offline for less than 1 minute spawn at a random location within a 1000 m radius of where you logged off. If you were offline for less than 5 minutes spawn within a 200 m radius, less than 10 minutes, within 100 m. If you were offline for more than 1 hour spawn in the same place you logged off.