flimsypremise

Don't make your problem someone else's problem.

Actually, you're not entitled to anything here. You have a certain set of privileges, and if the mods think you are abusing them, those privileges will be revoked. Trying to start a silly 1st vs 3rd debate in a thread dedicated to the discussion of new features in the experimental branch is probably not counted among your privileges.

I've noticed that a lot of new features tend to get added in their most extreme form, which seems like a bit of a miscalculation from a development standpoint. New features tend to be buggy regardless, and constraining their impact in the initial stages would help reduce player frustration. I'm sure the constant level of harsh criticism is very stressful on the development team, and it just seems like they could save themselves a lot of trouble by, say, making shoes degrade at 1/10th the speed they do currently.

How did the player manage to survive quite some time into the apocalypse with only a flashlight?

I'd like to see plastic bags that you could carry in your hands, but that you needed to drop every time you wanted to hold something else.

I feel like ya'll aren't thinking this through. If there's inventory for an item, it will have the same chance of spawning on any server in any location where it can spawn. So it's not like the NVGs have a great chance of spawning on some servers than others. They have the same tiny odds of spawning in every valid location across every server until they're all found by players. So if you're looking for engine parts, you can just rely on the respawn mechanic on a single server if you want. The only items that you would potentially need to server hop to find would be incredibly rare items that you'll probably never find anyway.

I don't think you understand how this process works. Builds don't magically become bug free. What we are doing right now is providing the data that the developers will use to fix bugs before release to stable. If the build wasn't buggy, it wouldn't be experimental. When you are playing experimental, you are by definition playing a build with bugs in it that the developers will work to resolve based on your reports and the statistical data recorded about your in-game behavior.

You really think it's appropriate to demand 24/7 uptime for the experimental branch servers of an alpha game? I don't think this is a matter of old-school or not, but rather expectations that are divorced from the reality of the situation at hand. There's just an astonishing amount of entitlement in assuming that anyone is going to be working over the weekend to keep the experimental branch running. Go do something else.

It's friday night. Nobody is going to be at work on Friday night fixing bug so that you all can play on experimental. If it's so terrible just go back to stable.

So here's a question. I can see how it would be colder in the winter. But why would it be harder to get energized and hydrated? Energized I can kind of see, but hydrated?

How is it possible that every innocuous thread on this forum devolves into a petty argument on the first page? This game must just attract pedantic shitheads or something. Get over yourselves, seriously.

I said that the loot scarcity is probably not a bug. The hydration and nutrition issues are probably a test of some sort, and I doubt they'll go to stable in their current form. You can file all the bug reports you want, but unless you're one of the very few people who knows how to file a usable, professional bug report, you're probably just pissing in the wind.

Player bug reports are not really the point of experimental. Most of the people playing don't know how to file proper bugs anyway, so it's generally garbage. The purpose of experimental is more akin to load testing. You're generating log data that provides feedback for large-scale issues the development team is working on. I think people get the impression that this works like tech support, where the dev team is reading your bugs and fixing them. That's not what's going on here for the most part. The developers are building new features on a timeline, and probably aren't going to divert to fix bugs that aren't immediately relevant to getting the new features in a playable state for stable. The stuff that people are complaining about in here probably has a lot more to do with a player population that is a lot larger relative to the number of available servers than stable is, which is why experimental almost always has loot scarcity problems along the coast. It's not going to be fixed because it's not actually a problem.

Having never run my own DayZ server, I only have a vague concept of how the persistence mechanic works on the server side. It's my understanding that items that would ordinarily persist over a server restart end up wiped if the server crashes, and since the servers crash pretty frequently, it's very difficult to get items to persist. Is there any way to distinguish whether a particular server is relatively stable? Are there servers that are better about creating regular backups and restoring them after crashes?

Just randomly lock/barricade structures around the map, that way players won't necessarily know that a given locked structure is someone's storage area, and will have to pick and choose how to spend their time and use their resources.