Day/Night Cycle

[-FN- 2]

I'm new to DayZ (just logged in for the first time yesterday) and while I eventually LOVED the play experience, I was so f'ing frustrated in the beginning.

I'm on the East Coast and my gaming time is almost always guaranteed to be late at night. What can I say, I work for a living :p This is also when most of my friends do their gaming, whether it's evening PST, late EST, or early GMT - that's when my crew of friends generally are online.

So for my first DayZ experience, I found a server with a good ping for me, logged in, and was in TOTAL darkness. My first thought was 'Awesome, this is gonna scare the crap out of me' - but after several minutes of complete darkness, hearing zombie noises, and blindly running for my life - I became very frustrated. What I felt I needed was to learn the game, the mechanics, the overall feel, during a day cycle. I've never played Arma or Arma II so this was all very new to me.

The realtime day/night cycle was finally explained to me and while I do like the premise, I really think this is something that needs a compromise. I eventually ended up on a Russian server with some friends with a crappy ping just so I could learn the ropes of the game. Once I got some daytime play in, it was fantastic fun. Am I ready for nighttime survival yet? Maybe, maybe not, but I certainly think that any player who starts playing DayZ at night, won't be playing very long.

I think the most flexible, yet realistic solution would be to make game time 2:3 realtime. This would make 8 hour day/night cycles. With this schedule, every server would rotate day/night gametime for each day/night realtime.

For example: If I generally play between 8pm-12am EST, every night, my best ping servers will alternate in day/night gametime.

So anyone who games around the same time most days will be able to get a varied day/night cycle and those who play ALL the time will still get a sufficient "realtime" experience. If you play for 8 hours straight and it's dark most of that time, I can't imagine that that's not hardcore enough for you lol

tl;dr

Make day/night cycles 8 hours each instead of the current 12. It will rotate day/night for everyone who plays and still make each cycle long enough to retain the realism.

Edit: This was supposed to be a reply to a recent post on this topic, my bad. Tried to delete this and fix that but the forum won't let me.

[cesar10022@hotmail.com 3]

How about give everyone a military flashlight to start, it's pretty low illumination wise so it's not a advantage in any extreme sense. Have it take up one of the utility slots rather than the pistol slot.

[Mattk50 0]

Realism is nice to have, however it is only a game in the end and the real time cycle hinders the gameplay experience. If people could play 24 hours a day, i'd be all for it. However, reality simply gets in the way. I second FN's solution to the problem, which would allow players to actually live through days and nights as survivors actually would in reality.

[b00ce 5]

Have it take up one of the utility slots rather than the pistol slot.

That isn't possible because in order for there to be a flashlight you need a "gun", which is why the flashlights take up pistol slots. Its an engine thing, unfortunately.