Choobeast

I enjoy the idea, but I think it would be better as an addition. We should add deer as well, as it's kind of silly that we're hunting wild cows now. As a side note, this doesn't have ANYTHING to do with eating poor children! A modest proposal indeed! Hmph.

I've only been playing on US124 for about a week and I've already run into four or five hacker instances. Three times I was suddenly given a whole new inventory. Another time I was teleported high into the air to fall to my death (lost my truck this way). The last time a truck was suddenly over where our truck used to be parked, but I don't know if this was a hack or just an oddity in the server (new color of truck, same style, middle of the woods). Hopefully the hacking gets fixed somewhat soon. I have my doubt that the stand-alone will do any better, as I'm betting that the Anti-Cheat choice is built into the engine, and I don't imagine that they're suddenly choosing a new engine for the standalone. It especially sucks because my friends and I are on opposite coasts of the US and love the 124-127 servers. :(

The fact that the game is being made by Rocket under Bohemian makes me think that it will likely be the same (though modified) engine, which means that hackers are almost definitely going to continue to be a problem. In fact, I'm a bit worried that many of the same bugs are going to be present. I understand that he loves putting out new content, but I think it's time for a few bug squashing and playability patches. Even from an Alpha the horror that is the inventory system is barely forgivable. >_>

I still get artifacts sometimes. The Flush seems to more reliably resolve them, but it's not perfect. They also appear to be more frequent when it's night-time in game, but don't have enough data to determine if that's related or not. I installed by copying and replacing all of the DayZ files. ARMA2 and Operation Arrowhead were not freshly installed. I also have found that tents and vehicles do not seem to save their contents past the initial save, so every time the server restarts all of the items placed in after the initial save are gone. I hope that helps.

The reason that the players are all killing every other player out there is because they're the only game/threat. The zombies aren't a threat and as a result the people instead find it more fun to kill one another. If zombies wandered the wilderness, migrated toward loud sounds (heli/vehicle/gunshots), and if you needed proper shelter things would be different. Heck, everyone starts with the exact same skillset, which means that you don't need ANYONE else in order to accomplish anything, which isn't how it would run in real life and hopefully isn't how it will run in the standalone. Basically, DayZ is just realistic enough to bring out the opportunistic idiot in people, but not realistic enough to bring out the reason that society formed in the first place.

It's pretty clear that all that's being looked for here is clarification. The issue isn't that he wants his clan to have all the vehicles, it's that he wants to be able to play on the server he/his clan pay for and have at least a chance of finding vehicles, rather than a partially functional server. As for "they don't care how many people rent servers," that's just silly. Of course they care. They need people to rent and run servers with their mod so that it continues to get publicity so that when the Standalone comes out there is a community waiting. Without servers they have no community and far fewer assured purchases of the game.

If anyone has a tent available for trade, please PM me to make arrangements. I have food, drink, and a few other things avialable for trade. I'm GMT -7, and won't be available to meet up until around or after 14:00 local time. Thank you in advance.

Oooh, potential birthday release for me. :D

My first experience shooting a player was responding to fire coming at me, so I feel few regrets. I've shot on sight twice now, and both times for good reason (I felt at the time). The first time I was in a building with a friend and saw movement out in a field. A moment later there were gunshots coming toward me and I ducked out the back. When I peaked back at said building I saw a person in a military outfit sneaking along the side of the building, and he then looked at me. I had the drop, and based on my experience of being shot (it seemed by him) less than a minute before I shot him. I didn't feel I had much problem with that one. The second time I have a bit more doubt about, but only in retrospect. Near the same building (we had to run because the gunshots attracted zombies) and my friend and I were approaching to check the guy's gear. We started hearing shots nearby, then a different gun, then the first gun again, then someone died. Then we heard some more shots from the first gun, then a new gun, then another person died. We waited for quite a while and didn't see any movement, so we figured it was somewhere else. As we approached the building someone rounded the corner RIGHT in front of me. He had his gun raised as he rounded the corner, and based off of the sounds it seemed like he had been the aggressor, so I took the shot first. The thing that gives me pause in this one is that it took him a second to return fire, by which point it was too late anyway. (It says I have one bandit kill and one murder, so my friend must have gotten the other kill as he has one bandit kill. Obviously someone I killed had a clean track record. :\ ) I just thought I'd share my experiences. I'm still on my first life, have made only one friend, and haven't had much luck making others (I usually end up running from other humans). If we want people to work together more, I think that we'll need to wait until the zombies are a bigger threat. As they are now I don't feel that they're enough of a threat for people to band up against, and even them coming from weapon-fire doesn't seem to deter people much.

I think it's fair to say at this point that anyone who doesn't get it doesn't want to get it. Spawning with some form of basic (non-firearm) weapon wouldn't break the game and make it too easy. Right now the starting situation is based almost 90% on luck when you first get in. I did fine my first spawn because I got lucky, while my friend didn't because he didn't get lucky and instead had a zombie on him in no time. The fact that his arms don't work to push, punch, or pick up a rock didn't make him feel like the game was "hardcore," it made him feel that there was a missing feature. The fact that when I found my first hatchet I then spent a minute or two figuring out how to equip it and use it didn't make me feel like I was in a super survival horror game, it made me feel like I was in a mod that had to work with a game that had virtually no inventory system to begin with and they hadn't gotten around to cleaning it up. As for needing to google how to equip a weapon, if this game is supposed to be so hardcore and 'authentic' then part of that will be basic usability. If I charge into a building because a zombie is chasing me (not realizing that they'll start walking), I shouldn't have to fight with an interface to equip a melee weapon. For that authentic feel I should be able to pick it up and use it right away. I realize that this is a game so that won't always work, but my point is that even the need to google something like that suggests that there should be some sort of basic information in game, maybe in the mission objective notes or something along those lines? As Rocket has said, bug fixing and cleaning things up aren't glamorous and don't make a mod appear on magazine covers initially, but it does improve the user experience and improve the odds that more people will stick around so that he'll get a chance to make money from this.

This "authenticity" argument seems to me a bit of a silly one. Yeah, you might not have a hatchet, but what's to stop you from walking up the beach to the rocky ground and picking up a stone? Something basic that lets you fight? Real authenticity would involve punching, zombies grabbing you and you trying to hold them back and push them off of you, sneaking up and bashing in a zombie's brain with a piece of metal you find in the train-yard. Not magical knives that can't be used to attack anything or anyone, only axes and crowbars as weapons while many other instruments would be far more realistic. I'm not suggesting that the devs have done a poor job, I just find your argument to be poor. As well, I want to feel that the game is hard because it's hard, not because the game has been designed to restrict me from functioning in ways that are logical.

As a noob that managed to survive his first night entirely and come out of it, I will say that there is a certain logic to having some sort of item intially. It could be something as simple as a rock that we pick up off the beach. As this game is closer to a simulation than anything else, it seems odd to me the limited number of items which can be used as melee weapons. I understand that ARMA2 did not have melee weapons, but in a real-world situation where you found yourself suddenly on zombie-island on a beach, you may well pick up a rock. It wouldn't be the best of weapons, but if you were to find a zombie sniffing at a corpse with a gun near it, or a bit of food than you would be able to use it to sneak up and bash the thing in the head repeatedly. I'm definitely all for the game being hard, but I also want to feel like it's hard because of the zombies and survivalism, not because my character is too idiotic to figure out that one of the poles from a tank trap (example) would make a fantastic head-bashing club. As well, though this might be a limitation of the ARMA2 engine, why is it that we're incapable of carrying an axe, a pistol, and a rifle? It might be somewhat cumbersome, but in real-life one could manage that combo far more easily than they could manage 5 stacks of firewood, a rifle, and a pistol. Perhaps make the Axe take up 4 toolbelt slots?