FreshmeatDK

Flint lock at ten paces.

Technically no. It would make you a thief, but I think most people would go with the temptation. For all we know, the tents might be abandoned.

Actually, I am on vacation from DayZ for the exact opposite reason compared to the OP. The game requires a tremendous time investment to get good gear if you don't want to kill people. I have a good estimate of my abilities in a firefight, and that is rather discouraging. So I spend hours travelling the map, getting good gear from deerstands, heli crashes and the very occasional trip to airfields. Eventually I get killed by a mistake, and have to start over again. Having a job and a family, I simply cannot get to endgame due to time constraints. Like Minecraft, surviving is relatively simple, but then you start getting ideas. Motor transport, stockpiles, distributed bases. And due to the scope of the map, these things take time. Encounters are truly frightening experiences, because you can lose days of work in the blink of an eye. All in all, if I had the time, I sure would be playing. But at the end of the day, I just play casuals because this is to immersive. (Hate it all you want, but CoD is exactly what it says on the tin. Nothing more, but definitly nothing less. I just stick with what I got instead of paying on a yearly subscription basis)

I've used a dice and a fossil on occasions. Enables me to do the laundry meanwhile.

I am taking a break from DayZ, and have an ATV and a couple of tents from previous lives, including a packet of antibiotics that I stole from a tent near Klen. The tents are located in the woods south of Berezino, approx 112063-112067 or so. If getting it turn out to be an adventure, please report back. Enjoy. It might be a trap, but that adds to the thrill.

I got a chuckle out of this. Had an ATV once, and the temptation to speed is just so high.

I wonder it would be beneficial to move the restart time back one hour. Right now, the servers go down at 8 o'clock CET. If you eat around six and has to tidy the kitchen, It is a little past seven. So you can start playing, and then the server restarts, and you have to wait another fifteen minutes before you continue. If it restarts at seven, you are just in time after dinner for an evening of fun.

It is the most common hacked weapon in the game. The honorable thing to do is to place it on the next dead zombie you see and then hide the body, thus ridding DayZ of that tainted abomination. While you will not get globally banned for using it, everyone will think of you as a hacker.

So, I finally managed to find an ATV on the server I frequent. Kind thoughts to those who parked it in plain sight along with the rest of their vehicles (a sedan and another ATV), just shy of the placed that should not be named. However, when I took it, it had a whooping 50 jerrycans in its storage, so I kind of suspect duping. So in order to keep my conscience, I'd like to ask how many jerrycans would be a realistic amount to steal from a low grade camp. Then I can dump the rest. I think I have seen around five cans in my career of DayZ, but then again I have not done a lot of industrial raiding. On a related note, I think that vehicles should despawn if they are not saved for a week. Then, people who are good at hiding them but quits a server will not accidentally deny the rest of us vehicles for life.

Nice story. Keep them coming, makes for an entertaining read. And yes, having been a boy scout for some ten years really makes a difference when you try to navigate Chernarus.

I have arma for steam and operation arrowhead non-steam. Works fine, Dayz goes into OA directory hierachy.

I think it is wrong to take anything you know is hacked in, and I would server ban you if I was the admin. Personally, I don't take things I just suspect is hacked in.

Well, I do. I loathe cheaters, and I don't want their taint. And while it obviously was their fuel truck, I still think it is suspiciously many.

Very good read, thanks for sharing. Well written as well, gives a good feeling of suspense. Moments like these are one way or another what makes DayZ, and the following loss of gear is minor compared to the battle over it. And while you should not get too attached to your gear, it means that you should not quit the game when you eventually loose it. Reading the story, I suspected a frag ending it, and I always strive to keep one on my person for emergency room clearing. Major kudos for staying around for 30 minutes, I would log after a something like five if it was past bedtime (But that is a matter of priorities, I need to stay awake at my job). I have been holed up in a supermarket once in a similar situation, but luckily the guy thought I was behind the counter instead of in the back room. So while he tries to sneak up behind me, he actually walks right past me. It ended badly for him.

I overstocked a tent, but even though I looked for it, I could not recover the spilled items. I guess they appear below the tent, and are thus unreachable unless you are really desperate.

First off, it depends on the player. If you can headshot a charging zombie every time, G17 is probably the best weapon. However, for people like me you need to aim for the body to ensure the target goes down. I have tested the .45 sidearms extensively in the latest patch and I am absolutely confident that a single body hit is enough to down a civilian zombie. I am pretty confident but not certain that it takes two body shots on a military one, but I mostly have to kill those at deerstands. There, you can use a long gun without any problems. I stick to the M1911 for sidearm for the readily available ammunition and the style points, but I might give the G17 a spin tonight and count the body shots needed.

I would never consider a weapon where ammunition only could be found at heli crashes. FAL is a trophy weapon. I like the AKM for the large damage it does, brings down zombies nicely at range. For close work, I always use a .45 sidearm, as it OHKO civie zombies with little apparent noise.

I think this discussion has run foul of the original argument. SillySil has stated an indisputable fact: A lot of people kill on sight. Enough people kill on sight to make teamwork between strangers a very rare thing. He also made a model of the game that nicely explains why it is so. It does not matter how people ought to behave in the current game, unless we have means of enforcing said behavior. It matters how they do behave, and it matters that if we change the underlying premises of the game, we will change the behavior of the average player. As for SillySils model being wrong: It explains the data nicely, namely that people helping one another are far more rare than people killing each other. DayZ is not your average board game, granted, and we have a broad spectrum of options, but we still have a game where banditry is more profitable than non-banditry. As for real world morals somehow influencing the game, a sad fact is that a lot of people use their anonymity to do things they otherwise would abstain from. We cannot change that. Without going into a metaethics discussion, our morality is to a high degree founded on the expected reactions from others (unless you want to drag God into the mess). As Jex stated, he would get angry with a player who griefed him if he met him. Here, that statement only serves to demonstrate the impotence of RL morals on the net. What we need is mechanisms based on self-interest that encourage cooperation in the short term instead of the long term, because long terms only exists on a few secluded servers and inside clans.*) Can we agree that we would like to encourage people to cooperate, but leave the profits of banditry high enough so people know cooperation is risky, but rewarding? I think that discussion is far more fruitful than whether morals enter into a game. *) On a side note, this is what makes clans so ridiculously powerful within the game. Cooperation on a long scale yields vehicles, choppers and loads of high grade weapons, and even two players traveling together is enough to deter most single players from attacking.

First off, I think this is one of the most intelligent arguments why banditry exists I have seen. Why is game design always obvious when you get it explained? The analogy might have a few rough points, but why not try to address the points made for suggestions to improve the game. First problem: An unaware player is an easy source of every kind of resource you want. An aware player turns you into an unaware player the second you take your sights off him. My proposal would be to introduce a lot more uncertainty into firefights. With extremely few exceptions, players should never be certain that first shot was a decisive factor, and every bullet should have a healthy potential to incapacitate a player. From the lowliest Makarov to the .50 rifle. Then every firefight would have a fair chance of putting you into disadvantage, even if you got first shot. Another point would be a possibility of shouldering your long gun, making it significantly more time-consuming to get it into action. And holstering your sidearm, but making it quick to draw. This would lead to more close betrayals done with handguns, making the outcome less certain (see above). Second problem: With hunting, it is quite to easy to get self-healed. Thus, if you get hurt, you tend to isolate instead of seeking help. Solution: Every major source of healing should come from other players, forcing you to rely on them. It should take easy to get resources for healing, but requiring cooperation to use them. It could be as simple as enforcing a restriction on the amount you can eat, rename the blood bags to something plausible and scatter them everywhere. Third problem: Weak zombies guard important resources, all of which can be carried away by players. This is an interesting dilemma. We need to make the zombies strong enough to represent a real threat, and further a threat that is more easily overcome in groups. In the current state of the game, I can as easily loot a spot myself by sneaking in instead of teaming up. If I arouse a zombie, a few rounds of .45 ACP ends the discussion, usually without waking the entire neighborhood. On the other hand, if getting those resources from the zombies are to difficult, it is easier to turn into banditry. My proposal would be to have much stronger zombies guarding geographically fixed resources. It would be a lot more interesting to run vehicles if you had to fill it up entirely at the gas stand, with no jerrycans. Then you would have to fight off zombies while doing it. I think more resources should be similar, forcing cooperation. A hospital could have high grade medical equipment for advanced treatment. See below for another example. Fourth problem: No cooperative long-term goals. A few lucky groups have choppers, but most people reach the pinnacle of their gear in a few days. I have a hidden tent, a sniper rifle, a couple of assault rifles and handguns, and loads of medical supplies and food. While I might start a likely unsuccessful search for an ATV, I cannot achieve more in DayZ, and the move that has the most positive influence on my status is playing Minecraft instead. One proposal would be to include a lot more vehicles requiring a whole lot more of maintenance. Imagine having to fix car in a repair shop while zombies are approaching. One guy mans the generator, one does the actual job, and two others needed to guard against the approaching horde. If cars where common, they would not have to worry about stealing the other guys cars, because everyone brought theirs. Another proposal are fortifications. I think these would be great, especially if you could deny zombie spawning inside the fortifications as long as they where manned. Then people could make safe zones that would need guards, but everyone else could put away their weapons and ease the tensions a bit. The downside is that every firestation and barrack in the game would be fortified; but if everyone could pass the fortifications, this would matter less. Barbed wire is a good idea, if it worked as a slowdown, not a block. Fifth problem: No persistent identity. This is the major reason for trolls all over the net. They can abuse other people behind their anonymity. And although you have a persistent account in DayZ, you have thousands of servers to pick from. I think the bandit system goes quite some way there, but it is far from finished. And while an argument against it is that people with different morals IRL does not have a sign saying so, we would have a much smaller group of survivors IRL, and word gets around. This would of course slant the gain towards cooperation instead of KoS, but I think bandits would still be able to make a fine living by sniping others and taking their resources. It would just be easier to see the profits of moving in groups, and especially downplay the dangers of meeting strangers.

I experienced a tent being there for a couple of restarts, then disappearing completely. I pitched a tent thursday evening and fill it with stuff. I got myself killed by glitch saturday on logging in. I reclaim my corpse, put new stuff in the tent. Don't play yesterday, and today the tent has gone poof. Is the expiration of dead mens tents lowered that drastically?

While the winchester or a remmington are absolutely solid choices for solo play, I lean towards assault rifles for their greater magazine capacity. It takes less slots to have enough ammunition to feel comfortable. As for sidearm, I prefer .45 above 9mm. I don't reliably get headshots on charging zombies. Civilians go down in a single body shot from a revolver, while I seem to pump round after round from a pdw before they notice. MP5 mags offset this, but are hard to come by. Someone suggested an axe. I prefer to be able to occasionally take out a zombie or a cow from beyond the reach of a sidearm. Everything here is on the premise that you avoid other players. I have no real experience in PvP.

Rocket has acknownledged this bug already in a tweet. A server side fix only, and on its way, iirc soonish.

He hopefully has fixed the artifacts, but he thought so last time as well. I am not saying that the fix is a botched, just that if things are not perfect, don't rage. Further, I have not seen hard evidence that the bugs with the Hive is gone, only an indication that progress have been made. Still, I am pretty exited about the update. Currently, I am packing two tents and have found a nice location in a thick forrest with no real waymarkers to give it away. I can raid fine with restarts, but I had to leave behind a FAL because I had nowhere to store it.

I'll eat my words then Nom nom nom......

In other news, Rocket came back to work last night. Last tweet around 6 o'clock in the morning, still working on artifacts. I would be quite surprised to see a patch today, as he hopefully is sleeping now. Well, at least he is able to do something now.