Fector

I'm definitely interested how this will play out. Count me in. edit: Afaik, non-hive means not connected to the official hive, as in it's got its own isolated hive and the persistance is simply locked to the specific non-official hive/server.

Yeah, the hardest thing seems to be picking the way to play this game. Too much choice...

Thank you all very much for the helpful information so far, especially Grezvany13 and Spockrock. Fair enough. So the best course of action would be to start with vanilla CO and maybe later to expand on that, right? ACE's features and the community opinion of it sound very good to say the least - it's a pity to have to wait. :) Btw - when we say 'vanilla' - does that imply, that I do not even use the Arma2 OA Beta patches? I would guess these should be used always, right? Another thing that struck me was: Srsly? Because that would've been my next question - is it possible to conveniently play with my 2 DayZ mates vs AI in missions or campaigns (side question: is 3 men even enough to have fun in coop?)...I guess the answer is no, then? Why is that so? I've seen (ACE)Arma2 communities, where people seemed to be able to show up with a whole platoon or even a company of organized players to play tailored missions, be it PvE or PvP and I understand this might be the 'ultimate' way to play the game and it seems to be the ultimate way to play it. As nice as this may be, I am looking for something a bit more accessible and less time consuming to play with 2 friends. Do we have to go multiplayer dm style to achieve this or is there another way? Unfortunately, I do not own BAF. How comes, that the campaigns quality differ to such a degree? I've only tried out the beginning of RH and OA and they felt a little like a mixture of CoD (the quasi cinematic bits) and...DayZ, as in doing nothing for the most part (don't get me wrong, it feels right in these games). My squad seems to employ a very careful and slow approach to things and I am a bit puzzled on my specific duties during the mission. Getting to the waypoint is quite obvious, but whether I am supposed to scout/cover a certain direction/etc is not very clear to me, yet. But I guess this is normal and a feature, as opposed to the mentioned headaches, right? I have to add, though, that my playtime was very limited (only waiting for mates to come online/server to come up) and many things might clear themselves up after prolonged play as well. Thank you. I'll give those a try. Shame on me.

No, it's actually 3. The third being the easiest...time. An infection can also just cure itself. For me, it happened after approximately 30 minutes ingame, without logging off or anything. And I am not talking about a cold, but a zombie-bite induced infection.

Duping is not solely done via tent/vehicle stashes, you know? As I said, it's useless to wipe everything until we get to a point where things can't easily get duped - be it intentional or unintentional - anymore. Also, I do not think that there even is any argument about this. No legit player wants duping to happen. The dev(s) don't want it to happen. It's simply a technical issue. And simply wiping the tents/vehicles just won't do (unless the various other duping methods have been adressed, too). Hopefully, this issue will resolve itself with standalone.

Ofc I care, otherwise I would fall in line as well, wouldn't I? :D As you may or may not know, the best course of action against the omnipresence of retards is to ignore the constant noise of their qq/rage/flamebaiting/trolling, instead of feeding it. Postsl ike yours are kinda like a mirror image of these, but tend to result in the same - ragefilled, useless forum clatter. Unfortunately it's not like that we're gonna change anything about these people's behavior by calling it out. It rather gets fueled. I am posting this fully knowing, I am breaking the very principle I am preaching at the same time...xD

Hell no. Next thing you know, there's Pandas as playable race...

Now I feel stupid...xD

/deleted

Sigh. Both the 'flush' and your advice might help some people some times. Everyone should at least try, but do not advertise it being a fix for everyone. You see, some don't even have artifacts, some can temporarily make them disappear with those or other fixes, for some (e.g. me) flush can even make it worse. It's not meant to come off as rude, but it's simply annoying to read posts, caliming those things would be absolute fixes. They aren't and its spreading misinformation, you know?

Distance is 300m to the object for zombies and loot to spawn and 300m to the zombie for them to despawn.

Wiping without fixing the various duping bugs/exploits beforehand is useless. You seriously can't see this?

Voted both 1) and 4)....without realising, you are part of the problem, op...

This is probably not the sensible thing to do...but I just have the urge to tell you, that you are possibly too stupid to play the game anyway. Sorry.

Removal being the most interesting part.

Well, there probably are as many zombie apocalypse styles as there are people phantasizing about them. While some might prefer slow'n'shambling (e.g. me), others do prefer the runners (e.g. Rocket...damn :(...), some might see themselves in a desolated environment, spending whole days without directly meeting another human being, others want to see themselves in a tight spot, crowded with other survivors lurking behind every corner. It really depends on the map size, the player cap/server structure, the incentives for player interaction of both the friendly and the hostile variety and the overall situation in standalone, I guess. My point more or less is, that your idea might be a viable approach to the current situation, but probably won't be needed anymore, when standalone begins. In the meantime, with all the bugs, glitches and various issues, I'd say - let it be as it is in that respect, so people are able to avoid the aspects, they dislike the most. edit: I agree with most gear not being needed, really. But again, with the current duping situation, it is hard to assess how it would really play out, if everything was going as intended.

It's called authenticity. Afaik, it's not supposed to be your typical survival horror game ala resident evil. The formulaic gameplay element of 'healing' doesn't have to aplly here imo. Bloodbags 'healing' bullet wounds already puts some strain on the suspension of disbelief and if you get a bullet to the head, no steak will save you anyway, not even in the current game. I wouldn't call the removal of 'eat 2 whole cows to go from he brink of death to as good as new in less than a minute' gamebreaking, if you catch my drift. Good idea, actually.

Nice one!^^

I'm all for full character customization (face, body, civilian clothing). Even better, make this choice permanent, as well as the name, at account creation (to help with identification - every char carries an ID, showing name and portrait, inspectable after death and possible to actively show to others when alive. Also lootable to fake ID, if the portraits look similar - metagame inc). Helps the gameplay without sacrificing authenticity. Give us choices and make them matter.

Technical reasons aside, maybe make it so, that 'hide body' works like moving an injured person. That way it can still be used strategical, but in a more authentic way. Wouldn't help with the server strain, though.

Voted no for working trains. Broken down ones for asthetic/landmark reasons? Why not.

I support this. It really takes away from the authenticity. The removal of the ability to regain blood on one's own might very well force players to interact more and depend on each other. I wouldn't call the encouragement of friendly player interaction 'unfair'. Restricting the amount of food/time that can be consumed, while maintaining the ability to 'selfheal' some blood would be a nice middle ground between gameplay convenience and authenticity and imo to be preferred to the current state. Now, if only we had the need and mechanics to eliminate as well (standalone only ofc)...having to take a dump during a firefight, infections might come with diarhea, etc....the more I think about it, the more I come to like this idea, actually... This is supposed to be an anti-game, right? And I remember being able to take an ingame piss as far back as Duke Nukem 3D - now make me have to do it...xD

I am sorry, that I am too lazy to provide a link, but Rocket said that he currently envisions the construction of sophisticated underground bases as endgame content. So in a way, your suggestion is already part of the plan (if I may say, in an improved way - fully fledged bases>bigger tents imo). Don't know about the spawn point saving, though. On the one hand, I'd like to see every life start anew, in a desperate situation, on the other hand, I see me going through several cycles of excitement and content with the game and might at one point very well be fed up of rushing through low tier again to meet and play with my friends, so this is really dependent on how the content tiers will feel like and how one will be able to progress and meet up.

I'm kind of torn on this. Although it is sound reasoning, from a 'pvp balance' kinda pov, in my opinion, players should have the freedom to choose their playstyle without getting penalized for it. This different playstyle might get interpreted as pve vs pvp - and as such, not in the intentions of the game. But favoring a certain level of population might also be an individual player's way of customizing the game to his or her respective vision of a zombie apocalypse. In the current state of the game, it seems as if there was an unusual high amount of snipers, camping the cities. Those players allegedly choose to do so, because they have nothing else to do, aka boredom. And even if it's not my personal cup of tea (might as well be, because I'm still new, though), I couldn't blame them. This boredom is a known problem ofc and is going to be adressed, partly by giving players the means of creating things (crafting, base building) in standalone. My guess would be, that the current state of affairs (e.g. players avoiding highpop servers) will change drastically anyway. Not by penalizing players on lowpop servers, but by giving the players incentives and means to cooperate or to engage in pvp (not the onesided kind). People avoiding highpop servers, no incentives to cooperate (trusty friends aside), the fear of getting spawn camped near the cities, the lack of goals/content in endgame (e.g. player created content, like bases) are obviously all linked together and I am quite confident that this will get fixed by the introduction of new features and content in standalone. It is very likely, though, that we'll see different problems in the future, but we'll be here to spot and fix those as well, I guess. That being said, I do not think that the 'problem' of players choosing lowpop servers isn't really a problem imho and even if it was, it doesn't have to be adressed specifically, as it'll sort itself out in the above described way. On the topic of server hopping and avoiding night time, I have a similar prediction and opinion. With the duping problem we are experiencing, nvgs are abundant. Starting out on a night server, though, running through the dark with the tiny beam of your flashlight and an approximate 30 people can see everything, clear as day...and they're hunting you, because they have nothing else to do...is not everyone's favorite playstyle. Some might enjoy the thrill of it anyway and with the freedom to choose the timezone of your server, everyone can find the right server for his or her playstyle. At the moment, the only thing that encourages players to stick to a specific server are tents and vehicles, aka camps aka what is announced to get expanded on and (hopefully will) transform to be a fully fleshed out endgame content in the standalone. The more players will be able to shape their environment, the more faithful to the server they will be (think minecraft maybe). I'd personally like to see another feature, though I am not too sure whether it would be technically feasible or even wanted at all. Bigger maps (including some way to allow people to group up easy without being exploitable as quick travel - but that's another story) and higher player caps - some middle ground between mmo style and the current fps style. Put this together with base building and possible other minecraftian elements and I'd not only be one happy zombie, but players would be forced-by-incentive to play on a chosen home server (ofc keeping the ability to switch servers, unlike mmos). But again, this might be neither wanted, nor technically feasible.

Great read! The spotting with a mildot reticule reminded me of an old SWAT game, where this kind of thing was an actual part of the game (after several, extensive sessions of both theoretical and practical training, you were deployed as a swat sniper in a 'real' mission). Fond memories. For its time (90s..), the game featured a high degree of realism and thinking back, the complicated sniping was the most appealing aspect of it. Would love to see this in standalone.