Heiduk

Fair enough, I actually wouldn't mind if all the weapons were much better at making players combat ineffective either. Um, you do know that this exact same argument can be applied to the original post in this thread, as well as most of the others? As has been noted repeatedly, this is ultimately a design decision that only the developers can make based on what they want the game to be. Some of us have made a best guess at what the developers design goals are based on their public statements and tried to argue that current mechanics do or do not support these goals but these are still just our opinions. To say that personal desires and opinions don't have a place in the debate seems to be missing the point.

So should every weapon be upgraded to a one shot kill?

The only way I would want defibrillators is if people start randomly dropping dead from cardiac arrest if they don't get enough exercise, campers I'm looking at you. Electric shocks are not a treatment for trauma.

Most people aren't arguing for the complete removal of sniper rifles. People are arguing for the removal of the .50 cals because as represented they have huge benefits and very few drawbacks. This is not authentic, in the real world they may have large benefits but they also have large drawbacks. I think this gets to the heart of one of the main issues. Sure adding stamina and inventory systems similar to the ACE2 mod would be the best solution, but until then removing the .50 cals would be reasonable. Although it isn't necessarily realistic carrying around a DMR+M4 (18 lbs without ammo) is at least plausible compared to a AS50+M4 (38 lbs without ammo). Similarly, firing a DMR with reasonable accuracy from an unsupported standing position is plausible, firing an AS50 is not. Support weapons like the DMR are also much more widely used than weapons like the AS50 so in-game abundance is easier to justify. In addition, sporting rifles with characteristics reasonably similar to DMR class weapons are common in rural areas, at least in the US. AS50s and M107s are really in a class by themselves. The .50 cal sniper rifles are not represented in a plausible way in this game. This fundamentally alters the way people behave and if the goal is authenticity they should be removed or fixed.

I'm not sure this would add much to the game and it certainly wouldn't be very realistic. The most common cause of death in DayZ is trauma not cardiac arrest and CPR or an AED won't help a trauma victim much. Even if people were dropping dead of cardiac arrest (maybe we need a cholesterol statistic), CPR is not very successful in the absence of advanced medical care. The numbers I'm remembering are on the order of 2-5 %. AEDs do boost success rates significantly but should need a power source to recharge them after use.

Umm, I'm pretty sure you would find pretty much what you can find today. Except for the zombies, you would probably find more zombies. Unless the zombies were made by aliens, in which case you could probably find awesome laser guns too.

Sniper rifles should be a part of the game and I agree with the points about new players, PvP, and zombie killing. I don't agree with most of the OP's other points. I had a long rebuttal written for each of the other points before realizing that all of the other arguments boil down what the game is about. Is it deathmatch at a SOCOM sniper training facility that has been overrun by zombies? Is it an authentic survival game against a hostile environment and players in a post-soviet satellite country? Is it hide and seek in the woods? The designers can invalidate any of the arguments made in this or similar threads based on what they want the game to be. For the record I would like to see the .50 cals removed. Rocket has consistently indicated that he is most interested in authenticity and these weapons are by far the least authentic in terms of abundance, performance, and logistics. Well except for helos.

I don't have any problem with efficiency. If you're fighting fair you're doing it wrong. What I do have a problem with is that difficulty aiming at short range is pretty much the only downside of .50 cal weapons modeled in DayZ. An AS50 is well over a meter long and weighs nearly 15 kg empty and yet I can haul it around just as easily as a pair of G17s weighing less .7 kg each. Not to mention I can fire it with the barrel unsupported with only a slight decrease in stability. If you want to use an AS50 for its killing efficiency great, but just getting into position should take significant effort. Modeling fatigue and the other negative aspects of these guns would be great, but until then I would much rather they be removed as they are by far the most unrealistic in terms of handling and logistics.

But that's just one player, there were almost 200,000 players in the last 24 hours. Even if each of them only spent 1 hour in game that's still nearly 1000 new AS 50s. Duping is a problem, but it isn't the only problem. 4) Cap the number of a given weapon based on player population. For example, if there were 500,000 players during the last week and the cap is 1 % don't spawn any new AS 50s until there are less than 5,000 AS 50s in the Hive. Of these options, the only one I really dslike is #1. Combat is an important part of the game, perhaps the most important part. The weapons available to them strongly influence how players approach combat and ultimately the rest of the game. I don't see how you can expect to ignore a core component of the game and expect the rest to be unaffected.

Even without duping, desirable weapons are going to proliferate really quickly if the only limit on abundance is spawn probability. My understanding is that helo crash loot only spawns on server restarts. Does anyone know how many crashes there are per server? Without knowing that lets assume that on average 1 helo crash is found per server restart. If the server restarts every 6 hours someone is finding a helo crash, with a 0.87% chance of an AS 50 four times a day on that server. After 7 days, the probability that someone found an AS 50 at a crash site on that server is 24.36% After 30 days it is over 100%. DayZ Commander is currently showing 3779 servers. If all of the servers follow the probabilities given above, and everyone takes the AS 50, a legitimate AS 50 from a looted crash site would be added to the Hive every 11 minutes. How often do those weapons get discarded? Of course, without any data on how often helo crashes get looted all of the above are just guesses. So lets assume four lootings per server day is way to optimistic. Instead, assume someone finds a helo crash only once every 7 days on each server. That still means a legitimate AS 50 gets added to the Hive every 5.1 hours. I have little doubt that more AS 50s have been found in DayZ than were ever produced by Accuracy International. If weapon availability is supposed to be even slightly realistic there really needs to be a cap on the total number of each weapon in the Hive in addition to just spawn probability.

I haven't read the entire thread so maybe these have already been suggested, but how about some statistics on weapon usage? With all of the complaints about hacking and duping it would be interesting to know what percentage of players are equipped with "Rare" weapons. It would also be interesting to look at weapon load out versus character age or number of kills. What exactly is the gap between the haves and the have nots in this game? How about the most popular combination of weapons? Hell, there are to many interesting questions, maybe we need an API to the anonymized data.

This 1000 times. I've just started a new character and its the first time I've used the hatchet much. It is absolutely brilliant. Of course it helps, that I just spent the last 2 hours raiding every deer stand, barn and farm house in my path and the only other weapon I found was a double barrel.

Do all of you making suggestions about how to get gear for a crash site really not get it? We all know the workarounds for these bugs, repeating them doesn't help. You may have noticed this was posted in the Suggestions forum not the How Do I Play This Game forum. I'm sure the dev team is fully aware of how broken zombie behavior is. If it was intended for the zombies to walk through walls and materialize from thin air they would have given them a different skin and called them ghosts, or fairies, or freaking leprechauns, not zombies.

Clearly you've never been in a helicopter. Technically, a random guy could also attempt to fly the space shuttle but that doesn't mean his chances of success are greater than 0.000001%. Most people probably wouldn't get the chance to crash. They wouldn't even be able to find the fuel shutoff switch before being eaten alive. I support this idea and would also propose requiring a Maintenance Manual before being able to repair helos. Just because you can change the spark plugs in your Ford doesn't make you an aviation mechanic. Helos are a huge asset and should come at a huge cost. Nontransferable skills like Rocket has talked about would probably be a better way to address this but I think manuals would be a workable short-term solution.

I not so sure it is, people may claim the Bandit or Survivor flag but there are a lot of shades of gray in between. As others have said there are no innocents in DayZ. This is something a bandit skin system will never be able to capture. It's also an aspect of the game I really like. In real life the line between the good guys and the bad guys is rarely clear cut and by taking a mostly hands off approach DayZ does a reasonable job of simulating that. I like this proposal becuase, if implemented well, it could increase the complexity of social interactions beyond simple deathmatch without taking away your choice to play a character that is black, white, medium gray, or anything inbetween.

I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet but what a great reason to go spawn camping. Why carry your own gear when you can recruit slaves?

I agree about the hard sell, I'm not even sure if I like it, but it's all I could come up with. I do tend to think that if the goal is an authentic experience people should have to think a little more before betraying someone. Even if it's someone you just met, I think, for most people, it is much easier to betray some pixels and a voice on the phone than a real person.

With my apologies to Clint Eastwood: Little Bill Daggett: Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch! You just shot an unarmed man! Will Munny: Well, he should have armed himself if he's going to decorate his saloon with my friend, and probably will in a minute. For the record, I won't SOS under most circumstances but most survivors seem to be either psychopaths or cowards so sorry, no invincibility for anyone.

I really like the idea of per character memories and think it would add a lot more attachment and value to the gray beards. I agree with those who are apposed to sharing memories though. It gives the clans one more thing to hoard and it isn't very realistic. It's well documented how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, especially when said witness was under stress. I also have a couple issues with the details of the system proposed here. The main problem I see is that once you've IDed someone, any kind of automatic visual indicator puts the IDed player at a major disadvantage. Even if the system simulated your characters line-of-sight it will always be better at picking out those few pixels of the player's head peaking out from behind a bush than your eyes. Even just a text message in the log, "So and so is nearby", puts you on alert when you might not be otherwise. The proposal addresses this by limiting the range at which indicators can be applied and seen. This is certainly necessary, but what should the range be? Ignoring optics, if we go with 20 m, realistically the only players you will ever tag are Friends and maybe Acquaintances. 99 out of 100 times if you are 20 m from an Enemy only one of you will be walking away. Unfortunately, the more you increase the range the less it mitigates the disadvantage to the other player. Given that most engagements occur at fairly long ranges, most players probably won't risk trying to get within 20 m to ID a player. They will either attack or retreat. With these issues in mind I propose two modifications. First, the IDed player's tag should not be shown automatically when within range. To see the tag you should have to hover the cursor over the player for a couple of seconds before it is displayed, just like when you are initially applying it. This, along with LOS checking, would help reduce the perfect computer vision problem. It also means you still need to mentally keep track of your buddies to prevent friendly fire casualties during group operations. Second, I think the previously proposed "consensual tag" sharing would work better than being able to tag everyone you meet. For one thing, I don't think you would really lose any granularity. As noted before, in practice I think you would end up with only two groups no matter what: Friends and Everybody Else. In addition, giving someone your tag becomes an overt sign of trust, something that is sorely lacking at the moment. One issue I see with this is that it doesn't necessarily remove the strong incentive to befriend someone then shoot them in the back. After all it doesn't matter if I gave you my tag if you're dead. Maybe that's not a problem, but I do think that we are generally better at reading the intentions of people in real life than we are over VOIP. It's a little gamey, but to compensate perhaps a respawn could remember the name of his killer, if that killer was a Friend? As a side effect of those two changes I think you could safely increase the ID range to a more useful, and realistic, value. I might not be able to see their face but I can pretty easily recognize my friends, based on body type how they move etc., at 100-200 m and significantly more under the right conditions. Thoughts?

+1 for shopping carts, the urban SUV.

Interesting idea, but I can't see it having much of an impact on the game as a whole. The problem I see with this, and all of the other vigilante groups, is one of intel. You are essentially fighting a well armed, and in some cases well organized, insurgency. To make matters worse the insurgents don't necessarily have any goals other than watching the world burn. They have well defined target zones, loot and in some cases player spawns, and can choose when and how to attack anyone who shows themselves in those zones. Given the nature of DayZ it is difficult to identify and target individual players, therefore, the vigilantes' rules of engagement typically limit them to responding to observed attacks on noncombatants or running the rabbit themselves. To have a meaningful impact on even a small number of the 100s of servers out there you are going to need a huge number of regulators. You can go on all the patrols you want, and you may win a few battles, but if you don't know how this turns out I refer you to Algeria, Vietnam, and Afghanistan (pick your favorite decade). The only way I can see any of the vigilante groups having any impact, outside of a few isolated areas, is by taking the server hopping approach of Dr. Wasteland, except swapping blood bags for guns. Bandits won't report themselves though, so somebody needs to setup the Citizen CIA. Knowing that "There are probably some snipers hanging around Cherno" is fairly useless but knowing that "On server US 4000, at 1837 UTC 27 July, two individuals wearing ghillie suits and armed with an AS50 and SAW were observed at 063128 firing on survivors entering Cherno." is actionable intelligence. If there was a webpage collecting reports and showing little red dots on a map for reports within the last hour, yellow dots within the last 3 hours, and gray dots within the last 24 hours all you aspiring vigilantes, and bandits, would have a nice convenient list of high value targets. Would the reports be reliable? Sometimes. Would it eliminate banditry? No. Would it encourage sever hopping? Maybe. Would some people have fun at others expense? Yes. Would it break the game even more? I have no idea. Good luck out there,

Heh, zombies are people too. Just because a large portion of the humans in Chernarus are psychopathic snipers doesn't mean that the zombies don't just want to be left alone. Sure, some of them are rage fiends, but others are more than happy wandering about town munching on beans, so lets not start stereotyping. How would you feel if people kept breaking into your house trying to steal your carefully collected beans and empty soda cans? I played for a couple of hours yesterday on the new patch and I think the new zombie behavior is much better. It does make it tougher on new players but I think there are better ways to adjust that than nerfing the zombies.

I wouldn't mind having less high tech gear either, but given that helos are back I don't think arguing realism, and the skills of the average person is going to help. I've never used a thermal scope in real life but I'm pretty sure if someone handed me one I could figure out how to make it work. I guarantee you though that there is no way I could get a helo off the ground without killing myself. In DayZ all I need to do is find a couple of spare parts, fuel it up, and I'm ready to go.

1. "It's Alpha" is not a valid excuse, it's an invitation to complain. If players who care about the game don't voice their opinions how are the developers supposed to know what is working and what isn't? 2. Right now I think whether or not the game is "easy" or "hard" depends a lot on how you play. If you want to "win" it's pretty easy by exploiting bugs in the PvE system, see ThatGuyCalledReptile's post. My mother would love the fact that zombies are well behaved enough to walk while indoors. Of course, once you win there isn't much left to do except PvP. If you choose to play a different way, life can be much more difficult. I'm not saying ThatGuyCalledReptile's method is the wrong way to play, but I think it's unfortunate that it is currently one of the only effective ways to play, at least in the early game. Better zombies are clearly needed. Rich60's starting loadout could make surviving an option again, but I would rather find my own gear. Just don't make me revert to the dash and grab an hour into a new character because I'm already starving to death. I agree with everything you said except for fewer weapon spawns. If anything there should be more weapon spawns. You should be able to get a shopping cart full of AKs at every overrun road block and burned out HMMWV. Ammo, on the other hand, should be much harder to find. I'd be happy if half the players in the gamer were walking around with their last round in the chamber, just praying to find another full mag. Of course, for this to actually work the ammo management system would have to be fixed too.

I like the idea behind the hunger/thirst mechanic but agree that right now it operates much to quickly. Having the ticking clock is great and adds a lot to the tension but the drastic penalty for not acquiring food and water every couple of hours takes away from the authenticity and artificially limits different playing styles. Right now, with a new character working alone it is fairly difficult to adopt a patient low-risk strategy, retiring to the hinterlands, exploring, and raiding isolated buildings until strong enough to try higher risk targets. If you are a new player who hasn't played enough to know where the spawns are this strategy is almost impossible without looking at a loot map. You're much better off playing dash and grab in the cities, knowing that you can exploit bugs in the zombies' path finding to escape with little or no damage. With the recent ARMA patch that crippled SMGs and pistols, this strategy looks even better as now you also stand a reasonable chance of escaping a close range encounter with a hostile player too. If it fails? Just respawn and try again, you've lost very little. I don't see much authentic about that. Rather than blood loss, I would rather see hunger/thirst implemented as status effects that degrade your operational effectiveness, with blood loss only occurring after a long, but not necessarily physiologically realistic time period. From experience with hiking long distances without enough water, one of the first things that sets in is tunnel vision. All you're thinking about is getting to that next drink and situational awareness goes down hill fast. So maybe after that red canteen starts blinking, instead of losing blood, your vision is permanently zoomed in. Getting hungry, a little low blood sugar maybe? Now you've got the shakes and can't aim accurately no matter how much you try to steady yourself. Haven't eaten for a couple of days? Guess what, now you can't sprint anymore and can barely swing your hatchet. Status effects might not kill you outright, but if done right, could add new challenges and provide plenty of incentive to keep stocked up on supplies. I think they could also introduce some interesting choices. I could try to murder that survivor creeping through the opposite tree line for his beans but my hands are shaking so much I'm not confident I can take him down from this range. It might be better to try sneaking into that cabin over the next hill, but if I agro any zombies there is no way I'll be able to out run them... As an aside, you have to try pretty hard to actually die of dehydration in a temperate climate like Chernarus, now if the plague ever makes it to Takistan that might be a little more plausible.