cellphonegaming

Im mixed so far. I'm finding the Ai to be mixed bag, bad pathing weird sight issues. Strange that some can see me from far away, while others walk right past me. I find solo, you can't get anywhere near the airstrip where the barracks are, you are stuck to barns, deer stands and outhouses. I learned that its kind of loosely based on this approach for SOLO: GET THE HELL OFF THE COAST AND GO NORTH. Find something like a barn, stand or outhouse FAST Check around you ALL THE TIME. I find I get zombies spawning right next to me after I thought it was clear... Exit strategy, if I am going to a building I have to scout it heavily for zombies and other players... Slowly enter a building, proning all the way there (takes forever but you really can't crouch much)... LOOT FAST AND GET THE HELL OUT That seems to be the routine, I've killed myself off on purpose several times to see where it sticks me and I got spawned on the coast by a town store. Found a gun, never used it as I got sniped. I figured out on servers that have about 20 or more people on it, major towns seem to be camped out. If you go into smaller servers where its like 6/40 then it's a good chance you won't have that issue. But then at that point it's mainly zombies and not as interesting. I guess I'm not sure about this right now, there are a lot of gaping holes in the playstyle. I know WarZ is on the horizon (maybe, who knows I doubt if they will make the fall schedule they said, too ambitious if you ask me) so that's got a lot of people talking. This has the potential to be great (talking about DayZ here , not WarZ) but I think it needs a lot of work. I look forward to seeing it progress, and will continue to log in and poke around but I think if you want major gear you need to mount an offensive with a group otherwise you just get NAILED trying to approach anything worth a damn lol. -Nick

A lot of people focus on the network, network network. I work with complex protocols every day (BGP, MPLS mostly) on ISP side. Yes, this game uses UDP that's a given. TCP is there for browser stuff, and (im 3 days in) after running wireshark on some test it's using both. Whatever, not concerned with that. Perhaps the biggest jump, I notice on any server I build in our datacenter is hard drives. If you are still running 15k scsi sas drives or whatever, that's still OK. If you REALLY want to increase your load times, then you better invest in a raided SSD set up. I just set up a 3x raid 0 + 1 (so 3 SSD drives, datacenter grade writes at over 640 and reads at over 700) and that BLAZED anything I could throw at it. 3 drives all sharing the load, and doing simple mirroring over to an exact set. All that goes out to a SAN (storage area network) via fiber cards. If you truly have a 100mbit connection (most people don't lol, they assume the nic says 100mb that's what they have) is it REALLY a 100mbit connection? The upload is the most important, I've seen 100 download and then.....20 upload. Most of the time if you are running a ds3 or higher (48mb connection) you will get duplex. If ALL That bandwidth is yours then that's awesome, if you are in a datacenter then no way are you getting that hah. The foundation of the server is going to be CPU / RAM and STORAGE. It's silly when I see dual quad cores, 32 GB of ram, and then......15k raid 5 drive arrays. Compare that and just replace those drives with SSD and it's insane boost in performance, we are talking 50 to 200% difference in access speeds. Of course, yea don't take my word for it I just started playing yesterday but I just wanted to add this in there, relying on 15 years of datacenter / network engineering / server etc experience. I didn't see ANY mention of SSD (And yes if you do go SSD, you will break them in about 1 to 2 years, it's an ongoing investment if you will IF you are HEAVY usage, our record so far is 2 years 3 months hah). :) -Nick

So far so good. My first 5 minutes, I found 3 corpses (I read to listen for flies haha) and I found a bunch of stuff. I spawned by an island which had a light house. I swam out there and explored, went up on top and got a good view. I have no idea wtf I am at, but that's ok it's really sweet. I'm sure I'll be dead soon as I see a big town skyline, I'm sure that's where the action is. We shall see! -Nick

I'm about to find out :) I'm basically forced to play solo (just about to play, I launched it for 3 minutes just to make sure everything was working) due to being married and having a 11 month old son. All my time during day is spent working, then come home hang out for 2 hours, then they (wife and son) go to bed, then from about 8:30pm to about midnight I can do whatever I want. I'm working on iPhone apps too, writing music etc etc, Now I have THIS to do haha. With a tight schedule like that and getting maybe 1 to 2 hours in either daily or every other day you can see someone like me is made to do solo. If you haven't seen the movie "The Road" it's about some unknown thing destroys the environment on earth and everything is dying slowly. So the whole movie its about a father and son trying to just survive. When I saw videos of this game after watching that movie about 5 months ago I was like HOLY CRAP I can kind of live out that survival fantasy. I'm launching now, so I'll report back on what I think as a first timer. But first, I have to configure my controls since all the defaults are a case of wtfbbq. I read a survival guide, watched a few tip videos. I'm going to trust no one, and just try to get supplies and see what happens! Turned music off :) Here I go..... -nick