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I know all this, but it is not important for the depth of the game. It is not important for survival, killing or getting killed. It is a time sink only to me. The depth of the game is being created with the freedom strategies and the adaption of these strategies to the server and environment you play on. All the stuff that is not visible in the Standalone yet because its not yet implemented and the game is based on public hive with server hopping and basically meeting random players only yet. Noone of the non casuals is gonna play in a cheating enabled environment long term. As the cheating problem wont get under control the only solution will be private hives with 24/7 paid admin control. You gonna pay for your spot on one of the good servers. In these environments you need to adapt to who is playing where on the server. It requires great skill to know the movement patters of the dangerous teams on the server and search your own niche to build up stuff (will it be a network of tents or a base like in epoch in the end). It is of no importance if your jacket is pristine or damaged. If you get shot in the head you die 1 shot and if not you gonna survive the first hit. Thats all that matters. The rest is time sink for noobs.

The thing is you have basically no idea what you are talking about. Saying Epoch or Origins is casual is just giving evidence for this. They are in no way casual but even way more complex and difficult to learn and play than what you do in the standalone. Talking about depth: The depth of a thousand very similar and useless items is superficial (e.g. the hundreds of different boots, shirts, jackets and kind of foods that all have the same purpose). Only a casual himself could confound this with depth. The debth is fake. But you can't know this as you don't know that it is of absolutel no importance if your screwdriver is pristine or worn when you kill or get killed. It is of no importance if you have one kind of food (tins) or 100 different kind of food that all have the same purpose. It is of no importance if you can find a gascan and a boiler if noone is ever gonna use it due to it being a big time sink only. The depth in this game is created by the strategy in survival as well as combat only and not by the colour or condition of items you have in your inventory and the necessity to search and replace the least important ones over and over again when you find one because you got nothing else to do ("Oh great I can replace the used screwdriver with a pristine one, its do deep"). After the first serious hit you take most of your stuff in inventory turns into damaged anyway so aside of weapons/ammo and some other core items you can basically just forget about all this stuff. There is no depth in shaking to death when running through the rain for 15 minutes because you cant find a raincoat or anything else that prevents this from happening. There is no depth in hopping servers for this reason and for the reason of looting and gearing up faster. It bores every experienced player to death as it is a waste of time. In fact playing hide and survive dayz is as casual as it gets. It is mostly playing vs the ai and following, learning and abusing the loot tables while dodging pvp whenever its possible. It is boring. But you probably can't know this as you most likely have never experienced endgame epoch/origins/mod teamplay at all and all the sophisticated logistics, tactical/strategical plannings/maneuvers/knowledge about opponents that is coming with it. You are the casual that enjoys to run through the wood and search food and hide from the rain for a couple of hours in the evening and not the other way round. You are the casual that enjoys replacing the blue backpack with a green/orange one because you think opponents will now spot you less likely and you made big progress and enjoy to spend another 5 minutes to move everything from A to B while the high skilled teams/players mostly would give a shit about this because they win due to superior tactics, movement, positioning and knowledge or just team dominance. Once the casuals have moved on this will be the predominant style of playing. Once the casuals have move on the skilled players will move to private hives where there is no server hopping, no random players/noobs joining and basically everyone is belonging to a big team. Then no matter how dean hall's vision about the game is/was, the game will be played the same way as the original mod was played in the higher tiers which lead to modders creating epoch and origins to exactly serve and push further this less casual and deeper style of playing DayZ that includes lesser focus on casual tasks like searching food and hoodies or caps. This is why and what I am demanding from dean hall to take into account already now when developing the Standalone, because it is anyway gonna happen with no doubt and gonna be the thing that will be defining the success or failure of DayZ in the long term. But of course a noob can't know this. Noobs even hope for cheating, glitching, duping and abusing (e.g. hopping) can get under control in this engine somehow one day. And this way even Dean Hall is one of these noobs because he is spending way too much time on all these things that he will never get under control. The only viable future of dayz will be on private servers with 24/7 admin supervision and rule enforcement that involves most likely monthly fees for them to compensate. A noob can't know all this. Dean Hall instead must.

As a final note to this thread: I know that dean didn't develop origins or epoch and that he has a different vision of the game. But this is exactly what I am blaming him for. He seems to not have recognized the development and improvements that these mods introduced to DayZ. Standalone is basically a replication of the original DayZ mod with imo way too much focus on not relevant things like if an item is worn, used or damaged, what blood group a player has and so on. Players are forced to spend endless amounts of time with tasks that are basically not fun or necessary and lower the gameplay such as sorting the inventory and replacing a screwdriver with a tinopener and moving stuff from the backpack to the pants, from the pants to the ammobox, from the jacket into the medical box and so on. All this in the environment of 100s of houses that you can find stuff in which most of course have to be almost empty in order to not make the looting to easy. This ends up in you searching food drinks and can openers for hours after every respawn. It is obviously condemned to fail if the game stays like this. Being stuck on a 3 year old idea that has been already been done in the mod isn't progressive. I'd like to see a progressive development of standalone that builds on top of the improvements that epoch and origins brought to the game and push this further. Survival aspects would anyway still exist then and people who wanna play pure survival could keep doing so.

You must know what you are taking about. I myself have never even touched WoW and the only CoDs that I played for a very limited amout of time were CoD2 in MP and modern warefare 1 in mp and sp. Call of duty is a game where you pick your gun before the start and mass kill opponents in 2-5 minute rounds on small maps. WoW from what I know is about charackter leveling in linear themepark environment and questlines in big groups of 40 ppl. Both is in no way connected to Epoch or Origins. You are clearly off topic here mate and you probably even know this yourself. Go open dayz commander or steam and count dayz vs epoch+origins servers and active players. There are roughly a thousand times more epoch/origins players than standard dayz players around for a very long time already. Even before standalone released standard DayZ was literally dead. But to end this. I know where you are coming from and its alright. You shall get your standard surivial dayz with focus on searching food and pristine items, hunting deer and hiding from the rain. But think of my words in ~1-1.5 years from now when the game is released and epoch+origins for standalone release as well and this game is gonna be that dead that not even you gonna stay.

Comparing Epoch and Origins with WoW and CoD seems a bit stupid and off topic to me. Got no other arguments? I played original DayZ as well for some time. But this was already about having a tent infrastructure all over the map in medium sized teams and fighting other teams for the dominance on the airfields or other locations for hours and not looting food and screwdrivers for hours in pristine condition and escaping the rain and zombies. Epoch and Origins developed exactly these aspects of the game further, that everybody was favouring and how everybody was playing and wanted to play dayz. The proof for this is that everybody went to epoch and origins when they released. Because it became the clearly better interpretation of dayz. In the Standalone I don't see how any of this is taken into account yet. It is a big mistake and probably will be the reason for a big failure (not financially thanks to alpha sales) of this game if nothing is gonna change. If nothing is gonna change, this game is gonna be as dead as original DayZ is dead once the epoch/origins mods for standalone are being released.

It is because epoch and origins support the gameplay that people wanna have. This is as well some surivival elements (limited) as the tactical warfare for loot and team domination of zones and areas. It is defenitely not hunting deer and cooking water while hiding in the wood and worrying about blood groups and if your items are pristine or worn I can promise you. It is a newb's perspective to believe that these elements can provide any long term fun. On the other hand I know people widely agree that the current state of the game is a big waste of time with hundreds to thousands of different items that you gotta loot in hundreds of different locations with its differerent condidtions, within hours of time spent (when not server hopping = promoted by this style of game), just to lose it in a short firefight. The relation of time spent on these different things isn't working out and thats quite obvious to any experienced player. Exactly. Running around and hiding from zombies (cause you can' kill them with your crowbar without getting beaten half dead) is only fun for noob players. The mastery of DayZ is teamplay with knowing what each of your teammates is doing, where exactly they are located and how much you can trust in each of them to fullfil a certain task in the group without much communication taking place. High end groups use kind of military language in order to minimize noise and the amount of words spoken in teamspeak. People are having tasks (spotter, sniper, heavy, pilot, driver, ...) in groups what others rely on and expect them to fulfill perfectly. Where is all this in the Standalone? Dean Hall, do you really wanna programm this game for some noobs that move on to another game after 2-3 weeks when they get bored of looting or do you wanna support and push further the aspects that made this game one of the best experiences one could ever get out of a computer game in terms of strategy, tactics, teamplay, skill, reliability, precision, overview and variety of choices in tactical combat etc?

You are right, I was a bit overextending. But as a matter of fact the demand is deciding about what DayZ Standalone should be. Let me direct the question to you: Why do you think everyone went from original DayZ to Origins and Epoch? I can give a simple answer: Because repeatedly searching for food and drinks for hours after a random death is neither fun nor challenging. It is boring as hell. The game that focusses it's gameplay on this is gonna be boring as hell. @the guy who says everything is subjective. I am quite sure it is not subjective that all players moved to Origins and Epoch for reasons that I mentioned and dropped DayZ. The same is gonna happen to the Standalone once the modders come up with their stuff. Basically only newbie dayz players find it fun to search food and dodge zombies. Those wont be in the game for long anyway. The game is what players make out of it. This is not hiding in the wood and cooking your meat but tactical team warfare in an open world environment that is built upon surival elements.

Dean Hall, you have obviously lost all sense for what is making dayz a good game and what not. Ppl don't play DayZ to collect berries from bushes go hunting and bother with endless amounts of useless items like screwdrivers, tinopeners, caps and boots in various conditions, bothering with blood groups and so on. Noone wants to search endless amount of empty houses for some thousands of different items that all in the end have no use and value for the gameplay that you want. DayZ is not fun by maintaining food and drinks and dodging zombies. DayZ is meant to be an open world team tactical shooter with few realistic elements like eating, drinking and a better health system than usual shooters have (0-100% life and medipacks that resore some % of this life) and not the other way round. Ppl. don't wanna carry all that crap around. Surviving by finding food and dodging zombies is neither fun nor challenge for any veteran dayz player but promotes abuse (server hopping, duping, cheating) to exactly dodge these non fun parts of the game. Still this is the biggest challenge and the largest amount of time you spend in the current DayZ Standalone. Did you even think about why noone is/was playing original DayZ anymore but epoch and origins became very popular? Your game sucks by now. Less is more: - drop the blood groups - drop the thousands of different items that only serve the purpose of wasting peoples time and moving stuff from left to right and top to bottom in the inventory and in the end losing it due to glitches, server restarts/rollbacks, unselectable stuff on the ground etc. - make stuff easier in general, I don't wanna have 15 different flashlights and methods to craft them when in the end anyway noone with brain is gonna use a flashlight for the reason of not revealing their position to others. - drop the conditions of items. If you at all wanna keep it make stuff having 2 conditions: broken and working. I don't care about pristine, used, worn, damaged, badly damaged, etc., are you serious? - focus on the important stuff. This is vehicles, item storage (safes, tents, lockboxes, ...), base building, TACTICAL GAMEPLAY, SMOOTH GAMEPLAY. Don't the hell tell me its an alpha version. It is very clear where the game is going to at this point of time and it is not what players want and nor is it any fun. It is hell boring what you plan to do with this game. Again look at epoch and origins and there you see what people wanna do. Melee fights: Are you kidding me? I just played 2 hours of Standalone and I met a guy in the firestation who had a firefighter axe like me. The first 10-15 strikes we didnt managed to hit each other while being directly in front of each other and moving in circles. Seriously ... If you had any idea about what you are doing then you would implement a system of blocking attacks instead of these crappy little hitboxes that prevent you from hitting and make the fight purely luck based. When I am in front of someone with an axe I am going to 80%+ hit him and not 5-10% as it is now. Increase the hitboxes and make melee attacks blockable instead so that 2 ppl with melee weapons can block each others attack and don't instantly die to a hit. Zombie fights: You can barely hit a zombie with a melee weapon when moving. When you hit it, it doesn't do any damage e.g. when hitting with a crowbar or a hammer. This needs to go. The game is not fun when you die to the first 2 zombies that you see while looting the first 150 houses for barely any loot cause you can barely hit them with a crowbar and if so you need like 10+ hits to kill it and get beaten half dead. The AI of zombies doesn't allow to trick and get rid of them anymore as it was in the old dayz. Slow movement inside buildings was a great thing to have actually. Again: Focus on the fun stuff. Fun stuff in dayz is sitting with 6 guys in a helicopter and flying to the sector B (origins) while knowing there are probably 1-2 other teams arriving there which will end up in a big firefight between AIs vs Group 1 vs Group 2 vs Group 3. Fun stuff is to drive with a silent camo suv close to an opponents base and set up an ambush as you know these guys come back from a mission (epoch) to bring back loot to their base. Fun stuff is to build bases. Fun stuff is to be able to store items and not having to search 150 houses for finding 3 tins of foods, 17 pairs of shoes, 12 pants, 13 hoodies, 7 biker helmets, 12 wool caps, 3 screw drivers, 4 rotten banas and a crowbar and all that crap in like 10 different conditions. I am hell serious about all this.

* Server this happened on: - DE 1243 * Time that it happened including your timezone. - repeated hack activity between GMT 10.30 pm and 11.30 pm * What happened during the incident. 1. mass teleport to a place left of kamyshovo followed by ~8 kills (those guys who didnt log out fast enough) 2. Friend and me managed to log out fast enough and whe decided to relog on the same server to see what is going on as we both didnt have any valuable gear that we could have lost. We looted some stuff from the dead bodies that where laying around and hided in the bushes. Then we saw a team of ~4-8 people coming with vehicles and helicopters trying to scout and loot the cheating place (likely friends of the hacker who collect the gear (they where obviously well organized). We started shooting them killed 2 and I got killed finally, my friend logged out. 3. After revive Electro had a burning texture layed over the city 4. a bit later the hacker let everybody dance 5. a bit later the left people on the server where lifted in the air 6. after restart mass teleport to the hacker again with killing of about 3-4 people (only) again (this was ~ 11:25 pm gmt time) edit: during relog the message "angela merkel the goddess of europe lets you dance" was shown as well as during those dancing episodes itself. -------------------- now since 11.30pm gmt it seems quiet (since 10 minutes) but I will report further activity here! Why the hell cant I identify hackers on my fucking own server and ban them? It is ridiculous. This all happens on our (me and the friend who played with me) own server. Why do we fucking pay for it if we cant even ban hackers? p.s. is there any trick how to identify the hackers name when such stuff happens?