Dayzo

So I tried re-fuelling. At the end, some zombies were standing around the chopper as usual - aggro'd, but they don't enter the rotor area. But when I got in to take off, one zombie attacked the chopper. Four glass are now yellow. That's ridiculous. I must assume that the devs are so bad at the game that they never manage to get themselves a chopper!

This is a really nice lower population server. When there are 20 players on it, and a few small teams on teamspeak, it's really fun and challenging. The admin spends a lot of time getting the latest version stable and the gameplay balanced. The moderate player count with the higher vehicle spawn means you have a good chance of gearing up nicely, whilst still experiencing some exciting, unexpected, pulse-inducing PVP encounters. You can also usually manage to keep your vehicles and choppers for a several days (sometimes weeks for well-hidden motorbikes and ATVs). Tents were set to stay 99 days after death, but now they will disappear 4 days after death regardless of whether they are regularly accessed. So maintaining more than one or two tents is not really practical any more. The focus has therefore switched to obtaining and keeping one or two of the 35 vehicles, which seems to be providing the reasons for most PVP moments lately (although a few players need no reason!). It would be great to see 10-25 players on the server most nights, but just now it is fairly quiet; mostly hovering around 5-10 players. If you're looking for a good survival server, you should definitely try WIREWORLD as an alternative to the death-match focused, high-population servers.

You seem to be suggesting that loot is better/more abundant shortly after a restart, but I disagree based on my own observation. If you clear loot spots completely, the respawning loot is the same whether the server was started minutes ago or hours ago. Obviously though, if you have 40 players on the server for five hours and they are taking only good stuff, leaving the bad, then only the bad loot will respawn when another player comes close. So in that respect you're right - after a few hours, many buildings would have been looted and would keep respawning the same rubbish. You'd need to clear all the existing loot from a building and wait 10 minutes over 30m away for it to spawn any good stuff again.

Yes. The private-hive server I play on rolled back to v1.7.2.6 because v1.7.3 was too buggy.

Yes. This happened on the private hive I play on. The admin had to roll back to v1.7.2.6.

> WAS a fun server. Seems to have been infiltrated by a rather unpleasant bunch who call "Friendly," then open fire on players > completely unarmed. And with no side chat there is no way to inform others of their activities and get a posse together to deal > with them... shame, really enjoyed it. The side chat was disabled to encourage players to join the Teamspeak. At the moment you join a channel in TS, and the rule is, "don't shoot the players in your TS channel". Everyone else is fair game, and you can deal with them as you wish, with banditry or with mercy depending on your personal taste. Keep your tents, vehicles and bases close to your chest though. Create a temporary passworded channel for the players you trust if you need to discuss that sort of stuff. Remember, a random player who you teamed up with last night in the 'survivor' channel might be playing on the opposite side tomorrow night. Death messages are now enabled I think (I haven't died since the roll back, so I'm not sure if they've been set-up again yet). So if you get killed by someone who claimed to be friendly, then you'll know who it was and can complain or confront them in TS. If you join this server, if at all possible join the teamspeak because it makes the experience much, much better.

Just need to vent... I've always got about five tents that I keep stocked, pitched about 1km apart. I spread my weapons out between them for redundancy; when one is found and looted it doesn't affect me a great deal because the others are left untouched. One of the few places you can pitch tents is inside groups of pines in quiet areas of the map. I've found this very effective, and some tents have lasted three or four weeks without being discovered. However, there's a bug that is driving me crazy. The first week or two, all the tents stay put in the middle the pines; they're seemingly stable, so of course you fill them with gear. But after one week, on every server-restart they'll start to inch closer to one of the trees until eventually you can't access them. I'm finding myself in a continual cycle of rescuing my tents from becoming inaccessible, and I don't like it at all. I've done the work getting the tent and finding a good place to pitch it. I shouldn't have to put up with this bullshit of finding replacement tents and transferring gear between them every few days. Also, I've lost a load of gear, representing many dozens of hours of my time, to this bug before I noticed what was happening. I posted in the bug forum but it didn't get past moderation. Does anyone know if this problem will be worked on? Anyone else getting fed up with their tents moving?

Yep, thanks for the verbose explanation, and for the hope that one day my tents will not be eaten by pines. I think the admin of the server is updating to 1.7.3 today or tomorrow, so I'll take your advice and not manually save them any more.

Yes, they tend to follow the slope. What gets me is that the movement is exponential - they start off moving incredibly small amounts so you can't even notice if, but after twenty restarts, they are suddenly jumping a half a foot at each restart. A tent that seemed to be okay for a week or two can suddenly become inaccessible over the course of one day if the server reboots every six hours. I lost another one about an hour ago. >:( I don't PvP very much, so setting up camps is what I do most of all. But this bug is just killing the scavenge/survival aspect of the game. If you can't hide tents in pines, then you may as well just pitch your camp in the middle of Cherno!

I just don't understand at all why you guys want to prevent the 'rearming process'. I mean, so you just shot a guy - what difference does it make to you if he is back in the game in 30 minutes because he already put dozens of hours into finding, filling and maintaining a couple of tents? The fact that someone has to spend 30 minutes running back to their camp, and then spend another half-dozen hours over the next few days replacing the gear they take from it, is as close to 'dead is dead' as you're going to get. That's quite enough penalty already, considering this is a GAME and you're supposed to be having FUN. Seriously, if you lost all your hard-earned gear from tents and vehicles when you died, who would bother scavenging anything? Most people would just grab a Winchester from the nearest barn and go death-match in Cherno. They'd make no effort to stay alive at all - your suggestion would have the opposite effect to the one intended.

Firstly, I play on a private hive where tent bugs and duping have been fixed for about two months already. So my points below refer to tents as they were meant to function, not the buggy, broken implementation that may still be on the public hive. To be honest, if you are still playing on the public hive you've got far bigger problems to worry about than tent behaviour! With that said... People don't hoard for no reason. I've got six tents. Two are near a factory for vehicle parts. The rest are all 1km apart from each other. My weapons and NVGs are spread out between all of them. The reason is redundancy not hoarding - single tents of mine may be found and raided every couple of weeks, but the loss of that gear will not devastate my character. Half my daily tasks/missions are focused on replenishing the tents and setting up new ones. This approach also allows me to select different gear for different missions, so that I don't have to go into risky situations with my very best gear (or my only gear). That's what I call survival, rather than letting yourself hang by a thread and allowing your character to be destroyed by a little bad luck. Now about the tents disappearing after death. On one hand it might, in theory, make people take more care of their life if they have spent a dozen hours finding, pitching and filling a couple of tents. In reality though, building a few tents would become so precariously attached to your current life that no-one would actually bother to do it. Ergo, they would just roll with whatever was in their backpack, encouraging aggressive play-styles and death-matching, and less survival. I disagree. Sure, post-death I am geared up again after a twenty minute run, but it took me a dozens of hours of play to put myself in the situation to be able to do that. All I'm doing is gearing up before I die, rather than after. Setting up tents and maintaining redundancy is not an easy option, and takes a lot of time and effort. Tents are discovered easily, and I also recently lost three tents (and all the gear) due to a bug where they stay stable for a week or two, but then gravitate toward the centre of the pine tree and become inaccessible. A further point to the OP - you can't penalise tents and ignore vehicles. If tents disappeared after death, then you'd have to do the same for the UAZ, V3S, Ural, which all hold lots more gear than tents do. Can you imagine how pissed off the enemy is going to be after ambushing a vehicle, only to have it disappear in front of their eyes!? Actually, no-one would bother repairing vehicles if they were attached to one character in the group. Even if they did, they would never put it in danger by driving it around, which would encourage hiding it in one spot and leaving it there. You can't 'hoard' as such on Chernarus anyway. There is nowhere to hide tents and vehicles for longer than two weeks on a populated server; they are always found.

Without server hopping, if you're disappointed with the loot at a fire station, supermarket, deer stand or whatever (I mean that you've had really bad luck so far and are desperate to find water, hatchet, assault rifle or tent), what is the best way of going back to the same spot and seeing new loot there? For instance, could you clear some of the spawn points at the location of all the junk you don't want, then move 40m away and wait N minutes for the next spawn 'wave' or 'cycle'? Or would you need to clear all of the spawn points at that location (Eg 24 at a supermarket) for that to work? Perhaps you would need to move 210m away and wait for the zombies to despawn before trying to approach the loot spot again? Or maybe, you don't need to clear the loot spots at all, and only need to keep moving 210m away to repeatedly despawn the zombies before approaching the spot again? I should mention that I've tried for some hours to work out the game's behaviour based on the information in the 'loot demystification' thread, but during the game I haven't been able to test it logically enough to give a clear answer. It seems to me, for instance, that after a server restart, the first times a spot is visited it spawns better loot, but on subsequent visits the loot gets worse and worse until the next restart. True or my imagination? Thanks.

A lone player or small group loot cycling for an hour or two on a public server is fine in my opinion. They are very vulnerable whilst they do it. Also, it doesn't give you what you need half the time anyway. Additionally, it's very boring and so I'm fairly sure most players do it as infrequently as possible. I don't agree with clans passwording their server, loot cycling in large groups for hours, and then taking the guns onto other servers. But even that is a drop in the ocean compared to the hacking and duping; that's what really caused weapon inflation. In my opinion, loot cycling wouldn't be necessary if the other game mechanics were in balance. Personally I play on a private server, and the only opinion that matters is the server admin's. He allows it as part of normal gameplay, but might warn a clan if they did it en masse for hours when the server was empty, for instance.

I had the same problem until I joined a whitelisted private-hive server to avoid hackers, and started hanging out on their teamspeak. I befriended a couple of different groups on there (at different times though), to the point they trust me with their base and vehicles. I still keep to my own little survival missions most of the time, just listening to them on TS (which can be entertaining in itself), but sometimes join them when I hear they are doing up a chopper or going on an adventure into bandit territory. Occasionally I'll offer them lifts back to base when they die. I just let strangers go by most of the time - trying to befriend them at your first meeting is too dangerous, and killing them is fairly pointless. If they're heading into the middle of nowhere, I'd try to follow them back to their base and raid it later. Or maybe to steal their vehicle. The only time I'd confront someone is if they were trying to loot the same place as me, or searching too close to my tents.

When you pick up a gun that you don't know well, practise with it offline using the shooting range mod: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=14616 One other thing to note - if you are playing at low frame rates (Eg. 16-20) and/or have double the ping of your opponent (Eg 100ms vs 50ms), then you are disadvantaged before even firing a shot.

Find a good passworded/whitelisted private hive (they do exist). You're just totally wasting your time and effort playing on public hive servers. If you find a decent private hive, you at least stand a chance of a nice game.

The servers are listed in Dayz Commander. http://www.dayzcommander.com/ Not only is that the best way to search and find servers, but also the easiest way to change your Arma2/DayZ versions and install the new maps.

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/forum/64-private-hive-discussion/ Especially the first pinned post. Been on one of these for four weeks and couldn't be happier.

If you disconnect during one of the loading screens, you risk a respawn with or without your gear. So personally, I'd leave it for 5-10 minutes, and only disconnect as a last resort.

What is the correct thing to do if the in-vehicle HUD says the vehicle has damaged wheels, for instance, but when you get a wheel and bring up the repair-actions list, all the wheel options are green? What's the best workaround or fix? Do you log out and back in, or something, to clear the bug? Maybe a server restart clears the bug? Do you just guess which parts are damaged, and risk wasting the parts repairing things that aren't broken? Thanks.

Wow.... if that's correct then it sucks. How is a lone player supposed to find so many spares that you can afford to apply them, not knowing whether you're wasting the part? (Rhetorical question) Thanks for the info, anyway.

I was on a private hive server and on the side chat channel (blue). Suddenly a off-white message displayed in the chat - Civilian: "Hello" and a robotic voice said hello. Does that mean there was a hacker on the server?

I always shoot them, but I feel like I'm wasting ammo because 9 out of ten times they'll just have tin cans, and the tenth time just some AK or DMR ammo. Has anyone actually ever got NVG from a pilot, or is it a myth?

Are all buildings of the same type equally good at spawning certain stuff? Or are some worse than others? Eg. Does one supermarket seem better at spawning tents than another? Does a 'workshop (3)' with seven spawn drops sometimes seem worse than a 'workshop (1)' with three spawn drops? Does one deer stand seem to give out assault rifles more than another? Basically moved my camp to a supposedly better position, so I could raid better buildings around it than my old camp. But a week's gone by and all I'm getting is trash loot. In my old camp I would have had three or four tents, a stock of vehicle parts and a few rifles by now. I haven't found one tent, one wheel or one rifle at the new location yet!

lol... whatever. I can only play for an hour a day, and if decide to do a raid on a control tower that only has trash in it, I can't wait until the next server restart (or usually next evening) to try again. I'm going to do the sensible, practical thing - clear the junk and wait ten minutes. Sorry, but I've got a life outside of DayZ that I need to attend to. If I didn't do a little cycling, DayZ, which is a game that I like to play for fun in my limited free-time, would not be fun at all. Building and maintaining a camp which lasts more than a couple of weeks is very difficult with a bit of cycling (if you're only playing an hour a night). Without cycling, firing up DayZ would be completely pointless. I'm not trying to gain an advantage over other players. I'm trying to close the gap on the disadvantages of playing alone and so sparingly. To be honest, I'm fairly pissed-off that you think I'm a problem player who's spoiling the game, considering I've just put up with two months of hackers, cheaters, dupers, bad clans and bad admins. If I were to put what I'm doing on a scale with that stuff, I'd be a 1 and that other crap would be 90-100. Let's get a little perspective here. I'm a purist as much as possible, but I've also got be practical and realistic about how much time and effort I can put into this game. I try to catch server restarts, but real life does not permit it most of the time. The admin of the private hive I'm on knows that I cycle a bit, and is perfectly happy with it. His is the only opinion I would bother about. When doing a bit of cycling makes the difference between playing the game or not at all, then I'm afraid your opinion has to be ignored and your piss will not be drunk.