Zing Freelancer

If there is a possibility of 50 players per server, nothing should be ultra rare. Current HCS mechanics need to be reworked to be a live event, instead of a spawn object on server restart.

Have RV1 RDS Optics. P 1x 40rnd CMAG. P 1x30rnd Mag. P 1x25rnd PM73 mag. P 1x30rnd AK74 mag. P 1x15rnd FNX mag. P 1XFNX MRDS (Red dot sight). P 2x75rnd Mag. P 1xFlashbang. P Want AK Handguard Rail P ATLAS Bipod P 1-2 mags for 1911 P PSO-1 scope P PM me for trade, I mostly play on European servers.

Hunting backpack is wider, while tortilla is deeper.

Well it does not affect me. I got 4 canteens and 6 packs of caned peaches. I guess the biggest change was that I stopped stacking tactical bacon in favour of canned peaches.

Actually am only looking for crash sites so I can find smesh vest and combine it with smesh backpack. I was simply disappointed by the loot when I first discovered 100% untouched helicopter.

Tunnel vision much? Don't hate Peace

What should people do if they spawn inside a building where all doors are locked?

There are barracks type of building with loads of bunk beds in one room and loot that clip through the floor. Found my 1911 mag lying inside the floor. Had to walk around with inventory open to spot it.

I don't think that is a good idea.

Actually, I think it will change a lot. You can mange current zombies easily, even 3-4 of them can be killed with melee. But if you add a horde of say 8+, then suddenly you will be wishing you had a friend with you. Moreover if gunshots would attract more zombies to your location and trigger new zombies to be spawned, then lone players using loud weapons won't be able to stack up enough ammo to survive constant zombie onslaught. I think that big cities will only be braved by most experienced loners or groups of players as there will be largest amount of zombies present with greater spawn rate. Also using loud fire arms would attract zombies inside the city as well as cause new zombies to spawn. Same goes for the airfields, consider them the last bastions of mankind, locations where people gathered in hopes of getting a ride out when things went out of control, so these places will also have a very large concentration of zombies. It will be difficult and time consuming to loot them on your own or without a silenced gun. I wish to believe that if infected pose enough of a threat and outnumber players 4 to 1. Then when you see another player lurking outside Elektro, you can approach him and ask if he wants to work together without being paranoid about getting killed. KoS will still be in the game, but it will have consequences and banding together with other survivors will have meaning. When the game have meaningful and challenging enough player vs environment system, where getting killed by infected, disease and starvation is just as common as getting killed by players. People will start playing smarter and perhaps have a change of attitude, the meta will change more towards groups vs group fights.

Well, think of yourself as a hatchling. Like a turtle hatchling who just got into the world and has to get to the sea as soon as possible or get eaten by the predators lurking around. You know, survivor of the fittest and all that jazz. I want to believe that later on in the game, when loot and survival aspects are more fleshed out, people will start travelling to less obvious locations, and you will be travelling to less obvious locations. But only one of you will be exiting these less obvious locations alive....

Hmm, yeah, you are correct, thanks for explaining it in such polite matter :) Last time I checked, they grossed in something like 35 million euro on early access alone. On top of that BI made a lot of money on extra Arma 2 sales due to DayZ Mod popularity. I can only imagine the struggle DayZ team went through in order to try to meet their costumers expectations. What I would do? Sit back, reassert my situation and draft a new fighting plan. Then expand, add more talent to the team. You can take a look at Rust, they pretty much decided to remake the whole game from scratch in a new engine after they hit jackpot and these guys did not have the luxury of having DayZ name in the back. But does it do anything at the moment? I don't think so, please correct me if am wrong. You can also disinfect your clothing and pretty much every item. I think it might be something they will do in the future expansion of item status. Maybe like making item being dirty or infected, maybe. I like the idea of having to clean my knife before opening a can of beans or cutting up that boar. Its like in Walking Dead, it always bothered me how Daryl just uses his arrows to kill walkers, pull them out, reload, and then kills some wild animal with it. This is why I would like to see more "Player vs Environment" features implemented, features which would make survival more meaningful. Having more "player vs environment" features such as zombie hordes, better zombie AI would most certainly affect how people experience game and address many aspects of KoS. Because fighting against a lone zombie is easy, even 3-4 are manageable with a fire fighter axe. Now going up against a hoard of say 8+ zombies can be done with a gun, but when gun fire attracts even more zombies, now suddenly you wish you had a friend with you. I hope that all of the above would snowball into reducing KoS and encouraging player cooperation without having to mess around with loot tables. Limiting gun spawns in hopes of artificially reducing how often people kill each other, is the next best thing they can do. I believe that I have pretty good understanding of the situation now (partly due to your help) as I skipped on some dev blogs during my absence from games. Still makes me wish they had planned and anticipated that DayZ could become a huge success. It's kinda difficult to explain, but when Dean announced his plans to use Arma 2 engine instead of Arma 3 engine, I understood his reasoning. But still thought to myself that his decision will come back and bite them in the ass later on. That it would be more beneficial to build DayZ on more advanced engine like Arma 3 engine. Even if they had to do a lot of adjustments to nett code, renderer and controller, the engine was still more advanced than its predecessor. The next thing I read on the dev blog is they got programmers from Bohemia Interactive upgrading DayZ engine, because you know, "reasons". I was watching one of the earlier dev blogs with Dean showing and talking about zombie path finding (something like a year ago) and it was clear from the video that they were struggling with it. I know how hard it is to make good AI, I tried it myself using RAIN AI plugin for Unity engine. It's really complicated to account for all the states AI can be in, path finding and obstacle avoidance. Not to mention they want all AI calculation to happen server side and I don't believe they will be able to do so. I don't want to sound like a guy who does not have faith in their skills, am just saying that I am expecting a half-half solution. Some basic calculations will happen on the server, while some calculations will happen on client side and then they synchronize, if client data is not matching server expectations there need to be systems in place to double check it, maybe even resend lost packages or de-sync/kick player from server. Might be a good idea is to contact Turtle Rock Studio and get some advice on how they solved their zombie problem. While they are at it, maybe talk to some engineers at Unity to get advice on renderer, as unity can have dozens of simultaneous animations without causing huge performance drop. Well, am sure they have more then enough talent to draw from Bohemia Interactive :) I also understand what they are actually doing with alpha, at least I hope I understand. They are putting features in, testing them, checking how they work, discovering complications and creating solutions. It's a pretty new process for us players, who is used to get a working game right away and then complain about Y and X, and balance, and bugs. Now we are part of the process and get to experience both the good and the ugly side of development, I bet this experience is even more "unique" to DayZ team than us. I can only imagine how trilled and conflicted they might be feeling right now, at one hand they have all this interaction with community and desire from people to play their game. On the other hand they see problems and experience constant delays while wishing to deliver the best game possible. Still, even knowing all of that I can't help but get upset because of the constant delays and lack of progression. Especially when there is some nonamemoneygrabbingaholecompany that earn loads of money by making a cheap DayZ knock off. I want them to succeed, I want DayZ to be the best zombie survivor game there is, I want all the future zombie survivor games look at DayZ for inspiration for years to come! I want next "The art of Game Design 2.0" to contain quotes from Dean "Rocket" Hall and DayZ team. Well I guess it's a bit of Bohemia Interactive fault, they acquired DayZ IP because it was a logical choice both financially and PR wise, but they choose not to commit more resources to development of a proper DayZ game then they thought was necessary. Anyway, I am writing myself in a corner now and need to get off, get some sleep, Monday tomorrow, sigh! Your very welcome.

Yeah, Freedom were the one using foreign weapons.

Well, everything is a bit subjective and depends largely on personal experience. I believe if had DayZ team had more experience they would have seen the problems ahead of time and taken action to solve them first. Had they had a clear vision and goals for DayZ, they would have understood that their current technology is obsolete, enforcing unnecessary limitations and makes it difficult to create a game they want. Thus we would hopefully avoid having to rewrite rendering and animation parts of the engine 2 years after development. Ah, I get so frustrated thinking about it I want to bang my head on the table. First you design and plan for all the features you want to implement. Then you look at the technology you have at hand. Make a choice, do you cut features or create new technology. This is how you should work and what have they done instead? "Oh we will just take everything from the mod and put it in its own game separate from Arma 2, brush up on anti-cheat protection and release it, will only take something like 3 month". Later on they tell us that "We had some difficulties and decided to rewrite the whole engine to make a better game". Even further down the road "We've rewritten the net-code part of the game and added new server architecture, but we completely broke our server performance". Now we get stuff like "We must rewrite the rendering system bla bla bla". Two words, just two words to describe this... production method: Lack of planning. Junk items are useless, they are garbage, they populate the game, they populate the database and we don't need junk to eat up server performance. Of course they will probably have a future use, wrenches are going to be needed for vehicle repair. Screw driver can be used to open cans at the moment and will probably be used for other things too. But look, we have disinfectant in the game that does nothing except make people sick. Why not tie it up to a survivor function like when you use a machete to kill a zombie, it becomes dirty and requires to be disinfected before you open cans or cut meat with it. Bam, game play value. To be honest, I know charcoal tablets server some kind of game mechanic, but am unsure what. All I remember that when you eaten rotten fruit you would get sick, charcoal tablets supposed to make you better but they didn't. In fact, before when you used to eat them, you actually would get sick. I was not surprised that zombies did not work at the release of the game, but I do feel unsettled when after two years of development zombies are still not working. They are a core element of the game play! Please go read post mortem of Diablo 2 as they explain that they strived to get a working version of monsters into the game as soon as possible. Well the devil is in the details, isn't he? I called these things small because I consider base building, vehicles and persistence much bigger tasks than getting core concepts in working order. I do get your point and I feel really dirty for "ranting" about DayZ progression, but hopefully you understand that I am really passionate about DayZ and hate reading in the news how some second rate competitor (ala WarZ ala Infestation: Survivor Stories) makes money on someone else's original idea. Now we have h1z1, which I shamefully have to admin, looks more polished than DayZ. I mean, looking at the current loot iteration, I bet they don't even have a clue on how to make it work. Deans talk about hive based loot tables and restrictions makes me feel like he is fluttering somewhere in the skies believing he is making an MMO with two million subscribers. They need to take a page or two out of original mod and its version, and remember what made the game so good. Then plan ahead, plan for everything, even their backup plan has to have a backup plan.

Okay so I heard about this bone health bug where your spine bone will deteriorate after taking damage and then eventually snap causing instant death. Then I thought to myself, ever since I have seen powdered milk in dayz, I wanted to take a water bottle and mix myself a milk like substance to drink. I am unsure if this has been suggested before, but wouldn't it be cool if we could take a package of powdered milk, a water bottle filled with water and mix these two together? Then drinking it would hydrate you and provide your body with calcium to heal damaged/broken bones over time! This will also make water bottles valuable in its own way compared to water canteens and canned drink.

Well actually I were talking about everything that is already in the game and is broken in some way or does not have a clear purpose. Medicaments like Vitamins, pain killers, charcoal tablets, cooking stove, radio (which they broke) are all items intended to server some game mechanic. Zombies should have been in the game from the start and they should have been working. Character animation has been a problem from day 1, everybody hates it when your feet are glues to the ground because your character is moving his hands. Small things such as these makes me feel like they don't really have a clear design document they are working from and just spontaneously picks an idea from the box and makes it a theme for the next six month. How could they go ahead and create a completely new rig and new animations without solving these animation problems in the process? The more of these little things they gather over time, the harder it becomes to fix them later on because of all the systems built around them. I know that as I have programmed enough to code myself into a corner where I had a bunch of bits of code hanging barely together. As a result I had to throw all the code out and begin from scratch, planning every function of the program to fit in the correct class and be as flexible as possible. I just prey they have a genius, experienced programmer on board who have foreseen these problems, otherwise we will never see dayz come out before h1z1. Sloppy, just sloppy I say!

I know this sounds suspicious, but experience have taught me that people will find a way around that restriction.

I was asking myself the same question earlier. Why do this when the basic game play mechanics are still in shambles? I guess they have "reasons".

All hail to the tail! I think you are mostly right, but there was one faction in the fist game that had a base inside a city like hub and the other faction had a base outside the area in a military facility. You could get a mission to exterminate either of these factions. The thing is, the one faction were equipped with foreign weapons they looted from the base they were occupying. Secondly soldiers guarding researchers working on brain scorcher were also mostly equipped with foreign weapons. But I think you are right, the foreign countries smuggled their people and equipment to the Zone, I don't remember every single detail any more as its has been a long time since I played stalker.

Hello, after trying new game iteration 0.5 and experiencing rain, heat and cold I want to suggest for developers to implement a poncho. I imagine it would be something like 1x2 slots clothing item that can be put on top of your clothes, that is including tactical short and west. Hopefully Arma 2 can take such type of clothing simulation. Soviet army had "capes". Then we have more poncho like variants.

I don't think they will manage vehicles well in the first 10 iterations. Remember what happened in vanilla DayZ? NO SERVERS had vehicles, they where all hoarded and hidden some place on the map. If you was lucky enough to find a broken down vehicle, you needed to look all over the place to find spare parts. You needed wheels, engine, scrap metal, fuel tank, jerry can and maybe a bit of glass. Now Dean "Rocket" Hall talks about tripling the amount of parts you need for a vehicle. It was difficult enough to collect parts to repair vehicle in vanilla DayZ and keep your vehicle well maintained. But with this new system it feels like they want to make vehicle ownership a complete nightmare and a chore. I am convinced that developers of standalone are determinate to prove you wrong on this one. But you know what they say about hope, it dies last. Here is a prime example of hope, some optimistic individuals still believe that Relic can bring balance to Company of Heroes 2, hah! I was only considering the KoS situation from a different point of view, while doing so I kinda ended up taking this point of view. In reality am the opposite of cold and calculating, I always try to avoid KoS when possible. Yesterday I met another new spawn and really wanted to try stun baton on him, cuff him and molest him, but ended up helping him out and explaining game mechanics. Besides we both entered Solnichniy and there was abundant amount of loot, more than enough for both of us (Birthday party bug). During my DayZ epoch time I was a big damn hero type. Why? Just because something is better than something else why should it be restricted? Look, making certain loot like night goggles, range finder and SD weapons spawn only on helicopter crash sites was a bad thing in the vanilla mod. It made these items very rare and finding them as an average player were nearly impossible. SD weapons was completely useless as it was nearly impossible to find magazines for them or the complete opposite like when you could find STANAG SD mags on hunting stalls, but impossible to find a rifle that could use these mags. As you progress deeper inland you should be able to find better gear, what is the point of walking for miles if when you arrive at a military base and find the same gear you found at the coast? At the same time time rare content should be common enough to make using it meaningful or would you rather promote people into hoarding rare weapons and ammo and never using it? Another important thing is for servers to be self-sufficient and have working loot re-spawn mechanics capable of servicing 30 to 50 players within short period of time. If there is less than 20 players on the server, that means they will have abundance of loot. On the other hand if the server is full up to 50 player, they might have to start fighting each other even over cans of beans. When loot is picked up by a player, that loot is no longer part of the server eco-system, it belongs to the player, not the hive or the server. New loot has to be introduced on the server to prevent loot starvation and migration between servers. At the same time, if well geared player joins a server, it should not affect how much loot is spawned.

Nope, thank you very much good sir for this detailed explanation.

Yes, your observation is the same as mine. Went on a server labelled "Persistence off" and after a restart all the doors were still open and the same items were present. Had to message server owner who in turn submitted a ticket to server provider.

Where did you find tents?

Go right ahead.