Slamz

I grew up in the country. Nighttime is dark. It's not this goddamn dark. Even on partly cloudy nights with a few stars out, you can see the fucking ground and tell the sky from the dirt. In this game, nighttime is absolutely pointless unless you have night vision goggles. Most of the "dark" servers are empty now except for a handful of noobs / night vision goggle owners. It's overcast most of the time, raining half the time, and you can't see shit. I'm all for hardcore realism, but logging into a screen that's 100% fucking black is absolutely pointless even for the hardest of hardcore games. I would love to try the 24 hour cycle but it's totally pointless after dark. I have a hard time believing that the game creator spends much time playing this game at night.

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. So, yeah, that shouldn't happen. We should be able to drink directly from wells and being in a downpour should refill our thirst-meter.

1) Sort by most populated server 2) Retry til you get in 3) Never play at night again or 1) Open up your video driver's control panel 2) Set gamma up in there. Goes MUCH higher than in-game gamma (still works with the latest beta patch) Really, though, they need to address a few things like: * Flares and glowsticks in your hand blind you more than they help you see anything. * Torches (flashlights) cast a magical beam of non-reflective light that only illuminates a tiny cone in front of you, totally unlike how real flashlights work. I think they could simulate a real flashlight better if it cast 3 light sources: bright, narrow cone; dimmer, wide area cone; much dimmer circle around you. That would look more like what I see when I turn on a flashlight in the real world.

In the game, flashlights send out a narrow beam and that's all you see. In real life, light reflects so a narrow beam illuminates a whole lot more than just what's in the beam. Suggestion: Turn flashlights into 3 light sources -- * Narrow beam (as now). Intensity "10" (full light, as now). * Wide-angle beam, perhaps 160 degrees. Intensity "4". * Circle of light centered on the holder, 360 degrees, 10 meters. Intensity "2". I think this would result in a much more realistic look to the flashlight and make it a lot more useful in general (especially indoors. I turn on a flashlight in my bedroom and the whole room lights up. I do this in the game and all I can see is a tiny narrow beam and the rest is still pitch black).

The inability to find a water bottle is irrelevant. We should be able to drink from wells because drinking from wells makes sense, as does not dying of thirst in a rainstorm.

We no longer start with water bottles. In fact' date=' I'd run from the beach, cleared a castle, two deer stands and a village (numerous spawns including the large barn) and didn't get a single bottle or soda. There was an obvious pump well in town but I couldn't use it. And the reason we can run forever is because we are actually aliens from Omicron-7, disguised as puny humans. The mighty Omicronians have no shortage of stamina! This also explains why we aren't infected by the zombie virus: because we aren't humans. You can come up with all sorts of nonsense explanations to cover gaps in the game design but it's probably more sensible to close the gap. Not being able to drink from wells is an oversight from the days of everyone starting with water bottles. I see you don't go outdoors very often. In a light rain, you'll struggle but there are any number of common tools to help -- gutters, roofs in general, pieces of tarp, large leaves... basically you can quench your thirst easily enough in a rain using items so common that it's probably not worth representing them in a game. In a downpour (like the one I was in), your hands would work well enough. So again we can invent outlandish explanations (Omicronians do not drink water! Water bottles actually transmute it into bleach, which we do drink...) OR we could maybe just address an obvious oversight.

I don't see a problem with a blood regeneration scheme. It's a lot more realistic than the current system. Encouraging people to hide in the woods isn't a problem in a realistic zombie survival game -- it's exactly what they WOULD do. Maybe cooked foods could provide a modifier to your regeneration rate, though. Regular food: 1.0x regeneration rate Cooked food: 2.0x regeneration rate Blood bags would still be useful for the quick fix but anyone with beans and water could eventually reach full health (without needing to somehow shovel down 20 cans of beans).

Problem, as Rocket mentioned, is that the spawner is broken. I experienced the deer stand too. Expected the usual 3, ended up with around 18... Later I fired a shot in Cherno and ended up disconnecting in a building with what looked like around 30 zombies coming up after me.

It was stupid-easy to avoid the 1.7.0 zombies. I could kit out my character with a new backpack, assault rifle, new pistol, plenty of ammo, etc, and often not have a kill a single zombie. Part of what made this game such a "kill on sight shooter (with zombies)" rather than a "Zombie Apocalypse Survival Game" was that you could pretty much just ignore the zombies.

The double barrel shotgun should have a "suicide" mode. It would be a faster version of the regular mode. With as loud as it is and the fact that ammo only comes in stacks of 2, you'll be doing good to kill all the zombies that the first shot is going to agro. Ideally we should be able to carry a box of like 15 shells and the gun would reload, 2 rounds at a time, from there. Alternatively do the ammo boxes and mod in a "create magazine" function (for shotguns only) that splits off new shell stacks, 2 at a time, from the box.

Anyone else seeing problems with the zombie spawner? I went to a deer stand south of Msta and figured I'll kill the 3 soldier zombies there and loot the stand. After killing about 12 soldier zombies I had to run from the remaining 5... it was like they were spawning double and spawning super fast.

First 15 spawns: like now Next 15 spawns: reduced Subsequent spawns: minimalist Starting people off with minimalist spawns will be particularly hard on newbies who have no idea where to go or even what buildings have loot.

I'm sure they'll close these loopholes eventually. Maybe there's no such thing as a 100% secure system but the average hacker is not a special ops technician willing to parachute in the data center to gain physical access to the machine. Once the holes in the code get found and patched, the hacks should stop (same reason you don't see "mass kills" happening in games like WOW, which would be an epic maneuver for any hacker to pull off -- with good code, it's just not possible short of busting into the data center with a machine gun and a laptop). The real problem is probably that ARMA2 was never popular enough to really get hammered by hackers, so the network code is probably full of undiscovered holes. It's also likely that the guy who designed the network code simply wasn't coding it with hackers in mind -- just wanted something functional. I'll be surprised of rocket can do much to fix it, short of identifying who's doing it and forcing them to keep buying new copies of the game. (Although they may be hacking that too. I think it was Rift devs that one time explained that surprisingly large percentage of their sales were going to fraudulent/stolen credit carts -- hackers get in and companies get shafted on the money. I guess that's Steam's problem, though.)

Yeah FRAPS hasn't really been keeping pace with the times. It's still single-threaded which means the bottleneck for most people is going to be CPU -- I pegged my CPU 100% and recorded no better on an SSD than I did on a regular drive. I improved FRAPS performance greatly by overclocking my CPU.

Names don't matter anyway. I can change mine right now and log in as a new name (discovered that when I made a new profile to see if the game allowed more than 1 character....nope, just logs me into my existing character with the new name). I think the key to avoiding mass-kills is to avoid playing during Russian prime time.

Shots should definitely agro from further away. I hear a shot clearly and zombies near me just ignore it.

Shoot you, log out, go to bed. or Shoot you, log out, go to another server. This suggestion doesn't have legs. I agree there somehow needs to be accountability of some sort but the proposal here won't help.

Currently, I can turn the nighttime into the day by going into my nVidia control panel and setting my gamma up to about +2.5. It's a tremendous advantage over anyone not doing this. I can literally walk into a barn at night with absolutely no lighting and shoot you in the head the second you walk in -- that's how much difference it makes. (Edit: for a screenshot of how it looks with gamma turned up, see page 3 here.) Gamma correction works because the game is drawing shades of gray that normally you can't see. There's "black" and there's "black+1" that's so close to black that normally you can't tell the difference, but the difference is there. With gamma, black is black and black+1 is an entirely visible shade of gray, far removed from "black". It's like playing during the daytime with all the color washed out, but you can distinguish features that previously you couldn't. (This is easily demonstrated here: http://www.colorserver.net/articles/info_fs595_calibration.htm Look at the grayscale and play with your video card's gamma setting. Whether you see a lot of black on the right side or just 1 bar of black and a lot of gray depends on your gamma setting.) So one solution to this would be to set a threshold below which everything will simply be drawn as "black". If it's supposed to be "too dark to distinguish" then don't draw it as a really really dark gray -- just draw it as "black". For example, in computer terms, colors can be represented with a hexadecimal number (for 24-bit color) -- #000000 is black #FFFFFF is white #101010 is a shade of gray a tad away from black. If I put #000000 and #101010 on the screen next to each other you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference -- unless you turned your gamma up. So currently the game draws a lot of shades of "almost black" that really can't be distinguished without turning your gamma way up. The solution, therefore, is to set a point, say, #303030, below which nothing will be drawn. #2F2F2F will be rendered as #000000. It won't matter how much you turn the gamma up because everything under "normally visible gray" would simply not be drawn at all. I don't know that Rocket can do this in the mod, though. It might require a patch to the base game to change the way night works, but it would be one way of ensuring that gamma correction can't be used to create unfair advantages in the game. Until then, "NVG" just stands for "nVidia Night Goggles" to me.

I agree to the extent that I would like to see "good loot" spawn more in random spawns that pop up randomly around the map and less in set spawn areas. Like create a list of 500 possible "wrecked humvee" spawn spots all over the map and have 10 of them up at a time. Loot one, it goes away and another one spawns in its place in one of the 500 random locations. Getting good military loot would then consist more of searching and exploring and less of just going to one of the few known good locations and camping it. I love the PvP but "sitting in one spot farming tents" is lame no matter how you look at it. Similarly, civilian loot could show up in random wrecked cars, random corpses, etc. People should want to move around more rather than looting the same shop over and over and over.

Suppressed guns are way off in this game anyway. This isn't a Bond movie. Guns with suppressors do not really go "pfew" like a chipmunk farting into a pillow. Nothing changes the fact that a gunpowder charge is going to go "bang" really loud. You won't find a suppressed weapon that's quieter than a small firecracker. It can be a substantial reduction in noise but it is by no means "pfew". Basically, if realism and simulation is your aim, be aware that the current implementation of suppressed guns is 100% Hollywood.

Well... to the extent that's realistic, I guess. You can't use .45 caliber ammo in a 9mm gun or vice versa. (In fact, you can't use .38+P ammo in a regular .38 -- even though they're the exact same size round, the "+P" ammo explodes with more pressure and can cause a gun not rated for +P ammo to literally blow apart in your hand.) But yeah, for the most part, a 9mm pistol takes 9mm rounds, not "Glock rounds". The game already does this to some extent. The 9mm PDW can accept all of the 9mm pistol ammos. The big change would be that instead of getting an MP5 magazine, I would get a box of 9mm rounds and decide for myself if they should go to the MP5 or the PDW, since they use the same rounds.

Was just going to post something like this myself. We should find magazines and "boxes of ammunition". Right click the magazine and if there's an appropriate type of ammo available, you'll get an option to fill the magazine. When the magazine is empty, you keep it so that you can refill it. And yes, you might throw away empty magazines, but it's up to you. You could keep 3-4 magazines and simply carry around boxes of ammo to refill them but it might be more practical to simply have 12 magazines and keep topping them off every time you come across a new box of ammo. The important thing is you could find a box of 9mm ammo and decide which magazines you want to fill. I'd rather refill my 30-round PDW magazines than keep finding 15-round pistol mags that I have to use instead.

I like it. It would put an end to "farming". Currently I know an area with two guard towers not too far apart from each other that most people don't know about / bother with. I just run between them, taking all the loot out and throwing it on the ground so that they keep spawning stuff and keep myself outfit with top end weapons and plenty of mags this way. With your solution, it would make more sense for me to branch out and try to find an area nobody has been in lately rather than just keep farming the same area endlessly. Maybe a house, instead of generally spawning crap, could potentially pop out top end weapons and ammo if nobody has gone in there for several hours. It might also lead to amusing situations where snipers camp out their favorite area for an hour waiting for it to "get better" and shooting anyone who tries to loot it too soon! Could do the same thing for zombie loot too. Maybe zombies like to pick things up as they wander around (not literally, but loot table wise). Kill a fresh zombie, get a tin can. Kill a zombie that's been around for a while, maybe he has night vision goggles.