Slamz

Here's the real reason it should be changed: If I go into my nVidia control panel and set the gamma up to about +2.5, it's bright as day. Granted the colors are basically black-and-white but with gamma that high there's plenty of shades of gray to distinguish a player at literally 300 meters and more, no problem. This is way, way higher than the maximum in-game gamma setting (which says "2" but is nowhere near what I get from my nVidia control panel at gamma +2). In effect, darkness of the current level creates a huge gulf between people who can and will use their video driver gamma settings and those who don't know how. It also creates a gap between players simply based on their monitors. Some are naturally brighter than others. I have a dual monitor display and I can put the game in windowed mode, drag the window to cover both monitors and see the difference between them. Now that I've realized the power of gamma settings, I can play just fine in darkness and in fact have no need for any of the light sources. But it really shouldn't be that way.

Common farming technique: Take everything from the loot piles in a building and pile it somewhere. This causes the loot piles in the building to respawn (after some minutes). The net result is a huge pile of crap that seems to take a long time to despawn. It would be easier on the server AND the players if we just had an option to "destroy loot" (or maybe "hide loot", similar to "hide body"). Even if this action took several seconds to perform (like building a fireplace), that would be better for everyone than the current solution of "creating giant loot piles". Alternatively, whenever a player opens a loot pile, just start it on a 5 minute timer (reset anytime anyone opens it). When the timer runs out, the loot pile destroys itself and the normal respawn mechanic takes over. This way players examining loot piles would eventually cause them to recycle on their own.

It doesn't go away for quite some time if that's what you mean. Go to the tents of Sobor and if there's a farmer there, you'll see what I mean -- piles of what is easily dozens of pieces of junk loot. You take everything from the tents and put it in piles so that the tents respawn. It's tedious, but it's how you get good stuff. How he can "fix farming" (as in stop people from farming), I can't imagine. If I take stuff from a pile obviously it needs to respawn or else anyone coming after me won't have anything. If anything, I think the problem is that loot is TOO static. I go through a building, take all the good stuff, then wander off. You come 10 minutes later and all the worthless crap I left behind is still there. The only way it will spawn new stuff is if you take EVERYTHING from the pile and drop it somewhere else.

Nevertheless, it's the normal thing to do. And what's the alternative? I loot everything and nothing spawns there ever again? That's realistic... sucks to be the 2nd one through any area of the map, though. Respawning is a fact of the game. The question is whether it clutters up the servers with junk piles or not. Currently, it does.

Coke dehydrating you is a myth. The myth is based around the idea that caffeine dehydrates you. This is technically true -- if you took a caffeine pill, it would dehydrate you. Coke, however, is almost entirely water. The amount of hydration is vastly more than the amount of dehydration caused by the tiny amount of caffeine in it. You could go for a long jog, drink coke to hydrate and you'd be fine.

"Humanity" points were a flop. Let's try to think of something better... Think: Facebook (or Yelp). Communities. Friends of friends. Bob and Jim hang out. Via mouse-wheel interaction, Bob and Jim add each other to a friends list before logging out. The next day, Bob and Smith friend each other before logging out. So the connections look like this: Jim <--> Bob <--> Smith The day after this, Smith sees Jim. They have never met before. Mousing over him (from a safe distance), he sees "(Mutual friends with Bob)". Smith realizes he has a connection with Jim and so he may take a chance of friending him. They've both friended Bob in the past so there's at least a little bit of a connection. Killing someone removes that person as your friend automatically and additionally removes any mutual friends you may have had. If Smith kills Jim, he not only loses Jim as a friend, but also Bob, even though Bob isn't even online. The connection after this interaction would be this: Jim <--> Bob Smith is out of the loop because he killed Jim. The net result is that communities start to form. Survivors who tend to want to cooperate will start automatically recognizing each other through networks of friends, making it much easier to trust strangers. Bandit communities may form as well, but they probably will have few, if any, links to the survivor community. A new player with no friends will look a lot like a bandit (no friends in common), and bandits can still infiltrate, but they'll lose connections fast if they start killing people. "Going bandit" will basically be like "going noob" in that you lose all of your community connections and have to find someone to trust you again so you can start building up a friends list. The goal isn't to stop banditry or even punish solo play, but rather, to give a way for communities to form in a relatively natural way. People who want to group up will have an easier time identifying low-risk buddies versus high-risk unknowns.

I treat players something like zombies. I see you, you don't see me, I don't need to be where you are, I move along without disturbing you. I see you, you see me, I'll be shooting forthwith. I see you, you are 5 feet away from me, I'll shoot whether you see me or not because I don't want any sudden surprises from you. I see you, you are in my way / on my farming territory, I'll shoot you if I can, unless you are clearly headed away. Basically I see no reason to cooperate with anyone in this game. The small possibility of gaining safety from company is outweighed by the likelihood and ease with which you could just shoot me instead. In fact, having you with me just makes it that much more likely that we'll agro zombies and have to shoot them and make a lot of noise that wouldn't have been made if you hadn't been with me, agroing zombies. Even if there WAS a mechanic that made it useful to group up, I think a lot of people would use it to group up until it was time to log off, then they'd shoot whoever they were with, take their stuff and log off. The community is too spread out with no accountability so there's nothing holding people back from this. The way I see it, I'm just playing the game that was given to me, and the game that was given to me pits me against other players for far more reasons than it puts me together with them.

Another problem with night... Even if you are suicidal enough to use a flashlight, they suck and are totally unrealistic. Go grab a real flashlight and try it. You get a narrow beam. Light bounces, though, so you end up illuminating quite a wide area and not just the beam. In this game, light doesn't bounce so you illuminate NOTHING outside of the narrow beam. Flashlights should really throw off 3 light sources to be somewhat more realistic: * Narrow cone. Brightness 10. * 60 degree cone around the narrow cone. Brightness 5. * 360 degree sphere around the user. Brightness 2. I think you'd find this to look a lot more realistic and incidentally make flashlights more useful (albeit still suicidal).

If you disconnect / log out while in "shock" you get 5 minutes of being K.O. That's normal. Is that what happened to you people with high blood values? For me, I waited literally 30 minutes (until the server booted me, presumably due to inactivity) and never got out of it. I'd probably still be stuck except I was in a popular enough bandit area that someone finally shot me and finished me off. The "respawn" trick while waiting for server response never did work for me.

It's a bug/problem with individual servers, not really a capacity issue. The "central server is overloaded" rumor was based on bad information (and was obviously not true -- all you had to do was try a less popular server, say, in France, and you'd load right in). I wait for up to 5 minutes. If I don't get in by then, I switch servers. Ones that are freshly reset are best so if you ever get disconnected from a server, go right back to it -- it's probably restarting and you'll load right back in once it cycles, which only takes a minute or two. I would love to see a 500 seat server though. There's another rumor that ARMA 2 technically supports up to 1024 players on a server. Maybe those slots are being used by the zombies, though, I dunno. I wonder if it's more bound by server bandwidth or server CPU...

Things do persist provided you stay on the same server. Stop and consider how your suggestion would actually work, though, moving things from server to server... You make a base on VA 16. You move to VA 14. You want your stuff to move with you? What if someone else on VA 14 already has his own base setup on that spot? Is he standing there having a nice time and POOF your 15 reams of barbed wire, 2 tents and a helicoptor plops down on his head? Persistence is per-server. It has to be like that. Whatever you build on VA 16 stays on VA 16. It's supposed to persist through server crashes and resets but may be buggy still. There is no reasonable way to make things persist on all servers as it has a lot of potential to interefere with what other people are doing. (Although I do agree that you should be able to log out and take your vehicle with you if you are sitting in it when you log.)

This is related to the "bandit problem" but I think is also realistic in general: You should really want to avoid being shot. At all. You can't just put a band-aid over the spot where you got hit with a shotgun slug and expect to be all better. I propose the following: * Reduce all "shot" damage. * Increase bleeding damage * Bleeding stacks the more you get hit (not sure if this is already true) * Bandages reduce bleeding by a set amount per bandage (1 bandage is not guaranteed to stop all bleeding) * Bleeding reduces on its own at a set pace based on how hungry/thirsty you are * Food no longer heals you. It provides regeneration. Cooked food can boost you to a higher regeneration rate than canned food. * Wounds can lead to infection. The net result is that you don't want to get shot. Firefights with other players will be dangerous if there's any chance you might get shot. Even if you rack up a bunch of kills are are awesome, taking a few hits yourself may be deadly.

Simple solution: Decrease "shot" damage. Increase "bleed" damage. Ideally, the amount of time it takes to bandage should depend on how badly you are bleeding. I believe the end result will be more "mutual kills". Bandits will be far less likely to engage in a straight up face to face firefight because of the likelihood that they will die as well. Basically it's far too easy to get shot in this game and live. If we want "realistic" then you really don't want to get shot. At all. Anywhere. If the bullet doesn't kill you and the bleeding doesn't kill you, the infection might.

Remove all social features except direct chat. In real life, the #1 reason I wouldn't shoot you in this situation is because it's f'n lonely out there with just me and the zombies. With global chat, I don't need you for in-game camaraderie. I can talk to anyone, anywhere, whenever I want. So shut all that down. The only people you can talk to are those nearby. Want to ask a question or talk about that neat thing that just happened? You'll have to find someone to not shoot. Plus no global chat would be more realistic / hardcore. Shame about the newbies but whaddya gonna do. Maybe there can be some global chat radios but you have to sit in a station in order for them to work (no walkie talkies, just radio sets). They are oddly plentiful near beaches. (Or maybe "offshore rigs" lets global chat work on beaches but nowhere else.)

Kinda dumb that we can't choose to respawn while K.O. Is that a mod error or a base game error?

I have this too. Scenario: I died and went to respawn like normal. "Waiting for server response" for about 10 minutes and gave up and went to another server. I spawned in alive again, at the place I died, but with 108 blood. Now I'm stuck at the hourglass and can't do anything. I think the problem is I am alive and unconscious but with 108 blood it will take hours to wake up. I can't even chat to ask someone to come kill me. I saw this solution elsewhere. Try it, but it didn't work for me (and I need the servers to mess up so I can try it again...) Log in to a server Get the "waiting for server response" screen Quickly: ESC, respawn (kills you), ESC, abort, disconnect. You should be back at the server's main screen. Connect again and you should be back as a newly-revived character. That didn't work when I tried it but someone else said it worked for them.