Some feedback

[B00tsy (DayZ) 19]

I started playing Dayz again after not having played it for 6 months to see how it has been improved over the months and I definitely notice many improvements, but I also notice some things that could be improved (for the stand alone version). I am not going to type down all the good things, because they are obvious, better to type down feedback about things that could be improved (if thats possible).

The loot spawning is still a bit glitchy. It happens sometimes that i access a building that should contain loot, but there is none. When I go back to the building 2 minutes later the loot has spawned. It is probably a trigger activation that checks if a player is present and activates to late (countdown). Maybe the trigger radius needs to be bigger or the countdown a bit shorter.

You start now without any weapons and that is fine, but it's not so fine to get killed by bandits while you are unarmed. Maybe some code could be added that notifies the other player that the one he is aiming at is unarmed with a floating text or something. Or even better, that it is impossible to shoot someone that has no weapons (probably not possible).

In the hours that I played I got spawn killed 2 times (again I was unarmed), by now everyone knows the spawn locations and some players abuse that. Maybe it's an idea to spawn the player in a bigger random radius of the spawn locations (markers) and not the exact spawn point location.

As for the weapons I find it still a bit unbalanced. I am sneaking around with a hatchet and a pistol with 1 clip and I get blasted away by some dude with a grenade launcher. I rather see the available weapons more limited. No scoped weapons, no machine guns and semi/automatic rifles and no grenade launchers. It is totally not needed. For killing zombies basically the hatchet is enough or a pistol or a shotgun. In practice the heavy weapons are only being used against players that are often underpowered and that kills the fun. Save the heavy firepower for military mission/mods. I mean with a M249 I can pawn everyone too if they only have a pistol, it's a bit lame.

Also in the hours I played I got teleported by some hacker (or an admin abusing his tools) that had a shitload of weapons and ammo on the ground. I also had my character with good loot at a remote location, when I logged in I got shot within 30 seconds after logging in by a hacker that teleported to my location. Overall battleye and other anti hack scripts takes care of most of them, it's not as bad as it was last time I played it.

The server list is a mess, there are tons of different named server and private hives mingled in the server list. Would be an improvement if all the servers are logically named or at least that server name starts with private or public, game difficulty and timezone. As for the private hives, I don't like it. I login to servers that are a mod of a mod. The private hives I tried are very unbalanced and *fs up the setup and intentions of the Dayz devs. You start with an overkill of weapons and a map, there are way to many vehicles. Again the ' lame factor', it's lame that there are heavy duty gunships and SU-25's and stuff, not really post apocalyptic imo.

And last, it happened a few times that I logged in and all my loot was gone, but I did spawn at the place where I last logged of. It was really a bummer to have the whole inventory gone that took me hours of looting and sneaking around to get. I also had a couple of times that I logged in and had to create a new character while my old character did not die, my progress was apparently not saved. It would help to get some confirmation if my progress is saved before I decide to logoff.

Dayz is a fun mod and it gets better and better while the Devs keep working on it. Considering that ArmA is not designed to be a zombie game it is pretty impressive of what it has become and it contains some very smart scripting so cudo's to the devs!

[maxamillion12345 21]

1. The loot spawing is being fixed in the standalone, the problem was the engine was never deisigned to run a script like the loot spawing so once they have a dedicated engine it will work much better.

2. I don't think a code should be added because it kind of takes away from the realism. Also if a bandit sees you are unarmed then that could just mean he gets an easier kill so it may not deter people. I agree that there needs to be some sort of consequence for killing unarmed players and acting like a bandit, but it is difficult to decide on what it is. We will have to see what the deelopers come up with.

3. Realistically those weapons will not be removed from the mod as they do make it more fun at times to have a high powered weapon. The devs have done a good job of removing items such as thermal to make it a bit more balenced, but I agree that maybe the military loot needs to be reduced. However I also think that nobody will want to play a game where you run around killing zombies with hatchets and pistols as it isn't as exciting as blowing soemones head off with an as50.

4. Hackers are everywhere on the normal hive at the moment and it is really bad, but this will be reduced for the standalone.

5. If you want to filter the servers in a coherant way use dayz commander as you can filter specific settings that you prefer. Also in my opinion private hives have saved this mod. The hackes got very bad on the main hives to the point where the majority of servers were unplayable, the private hives have good communities of regular players and have more control over banning hackers and exploiters since there is almost always an active admin on, on the majority of these servers. I agree some privste servers are a bit non survivalish with more vehicles, military loot etc, but people like these servers so you can't say they are wrong. If you search the private hive section of the forum then you can find servers that are private but are just vanilla dayz on chernarus if thats what you want to play, but some of the new maps are pretty good.

6. I don't really know what happened there never experianced it myself. Maybe you logged in on different private hives? Anyway this is not a common problem as far as I'm aware so I don't really have any advice for you.

Also I recommend checking out some the developer blog posts to see the new features that are being added for standalone which may interest you.

Edited January 27, 2013 by maxamillion12345