I generally like the game but I had my worst PC game experience ever today

[TrangleC 0]

I played DayZ for the first time today and although I like the game in general and in theory, it was a horrible experience.

First of all I needed the whole day to get it to run. I apparently encountered every single error message that is addressed in any troubleshooting guide and tutorial I could find. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.

Finally I got it to run and because I thought it might be better for me as a newbee to try the game without more experienced players hunting for me, I first tried the DaiZy singleplayer mod. That was a mistake. I didn't know that the fact that I'm the only human on the map would mean that I would encounter 41 (that seems to be the maximum allocation per player character) Zombies everytime I came near a spawning point. Even worse was that I found absolutely no supplies or weapons, not even in the stores, pubs or on towers. I tried it 5 times and basically all my characters died of thirst and starvation. (A combination of endless running from zombies and no available water.) 5 games without finding anything but empty tin cans. That must have been some kind of bug. I just don't get why the cans spawned but nothing else. I have watched Youtube videos of people playing DayZ but when I played it myself was the first time that I saw absolutely empty grocery stores. Not a single thing spawned in there, not even cans or a single bandage.

I realized that playing against humans can't possibly be worse and I tried the normal mod.

The first time I somehow managed to spawn within a house and when I say within a house, I don't mean in a room, i mean inside the walls and floor of a house. After a few minutes of trying to get out of the wall I suddely took damage and died. Then I was stuck in the "You Are Dead" screen. Everytime I tried to open the menue and restart the game, another death got added to my statistics till I finally used the task manager to shut down the game.

Then, after restarting the game, finally I spawned in the open and could actually play the game. I got killed by a sniper only a few steps away from my spawning point, but although I don't get why somebody would kill an unarmed beginner without any loot, that was still yet the best game I had played so far. At least I didn't suffer any bugs and actually was playing the game.

The next and final game started well enough. I had a decent spawning point near Otmel and I went into the hills to go to that barn near the dam. (Yes, I checked a map in my browser.) It took me a while to get there because I was careful and for the first time I actually found something useful! A hatched! Halleluja! For the first time today something went right and my spirits returned. And before I could get up from the point where I had found the hatched, my connection to the server got cut. I tried to get back into the game and later into others, but with no success.

I'm not just writing that to vent and to whine and not to bore you, but I'd like to know, is this normal? Is this what I can expect from this game?

Besides all the bugs I encountered, aren't the zombies a bit too sensitive and tenacious to still allow for a fun gaming experience? Is it really neccessary that they are able to follow you from one end of the map to the other?

At times this game felt like one of those deliberately ridiculously hard FLASH jump and run games that aren't supposed to be fun but only to boost the ego of weirdos without a life who spend weeks memorizing their patterns.

I like a challenge in a game as much as the next (normal) guy, but when in a game like this sneaking and stealth becomes next to useless because the zombies can see you from hundreds of yards away and there are so many of them that it becomes impossible to evade them, then what is the point?

[Hetstaine 10852]

Meh..you are just having a bad run :) Zeds will become easier to evade as you get used to the game, to the point where you are running around them in circles while taking pot shots at someone trying to kill you or grabbing loot whilst they surround you and then gettting out unscathed. If the zeds got any easier they might as well take them out.

Time man time.

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

I'll try and answer your questions:

Zombies are hard to deal with at first but once you figure them out you'll be sneaking around like you own Cherno, stick with it. Also, you can lose them by running through trees and blocking their line of site. If you find some empty tin cans or a whisky bottle, throw them and the zeds will head that way to check them out.

If every building including supermarkets are empty it sounds like the server was due for a restart. Best to change servers next time.

I rarely lose my connection so it might be an issue at your end. Sometimes when servers restart (twice a day usually) you'll get a "connection lost" with a timer. Just log back in in a few mins.

It's a steep learning curve but well worth it. Good luck.

[Anemosology 18]

It's not normal, All pow'rful Rocket stareth down at thee with scorn.

I'm kidding, but it really seems like a huge stroke of bad luck. The best you can do Is team up with a friend or someone in the forums.

As for snipers, some people have never heard of mercy in their lifetime.

[DemonGroover 8836]

Welcome, survivor. The apocalypse isnt easy.

Before you know it you will be geared up and possibly sniping noobs yourself.

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

When you get good you'll get a lot of pleasure from sneaking up on snipers and hacking them to death. Your time will come Grasshopper.

[Grandpa Jimmy 20]

Enjoy these days, when you don't know the map, you don't know the spawn locations, the Zed are f-in scary. Ditch the map until you find one in game. Try playing 1st person view only.

This is when the game is at its best, even if you get sniped.

[DubPlate 38]

Sounds like alpha testing is not for you friend wait till the stand alone is finished/in a more user friendly beta.

[Stigmata87 2]

Zombies are easy to come by with. yes if i go over an street i press Z and lay on he ground, once i'm over it i press my C and run further, you can walk past zombies behind them, if they dont see you in line of sight.

if you see a zombie agro from for example 20meters away, you yourself run 10 meters further in an open area. you will see behind you 10 meters the zombie stop for a second, then continue running cause probably your still standing and running in that open area

If you would Run to a bush, and then to the next bush if possible, press C and walk further or Z and crouch further, then you probably lost the zed. i run through 3 bushes or pine trees. and im sure i lost those 15 zeds behind me

Zombies allways run to the point they see or hear you, then they look further. so if you can run around a corner and "walk" a little. you probably lost the zed allready.

practice a bit. its all in the stances and your walk/run method

[VDOboy 0]

To be honest my experience was similar to yours (and most people I know). I was about ready to quit forever, yet my friend convinced me to stick it out. I started getting better (playing ARMA 2 really helps) and noticed I was dying less.

I met up with my friend and we've been surviving for weeks now. Well we do like 2-3 hours a night every other day... But I've had some of my best gaming experiences out of it. Once you realise how easy it is to lose everything, you cherish staying alive that much more - that's where the tension comes from.

So in a way, DayZ almost HAS to rip you down and say "look, this isn't like other games ok?". Including bugs (which I've lost many items to bugs).

Get past the hump, I'll team up with you if you want, I'm a hero! Bandits are horrible human beings, but a part of dayz.

Stick it out

[TrangleC 0]

Thanks for all the replies, especially the encouragig ones.

Unfortunately I can't really play the game with my real life friends because the few of them who are into gaming have too different working schedules from mine.

The problem with finding other people to play with online is that I'm just not very good in general. I basically haven't played any computer games in the last 7 to 8 years. I had played the original Operation Flashpoint a lot when it came out (was still a student back then), so when I only recently discovered that there was a sort of sequel to it in 2009, I wanted to try that out and this is how I got into playing DayZ. I still remember spending all those hours running away from Russian Speznaz who chased me through a forest or having day long sniper duels with other players in Operation Flashpoint, so I think I still have the right mindset for playing DayZ and it still felt quite natural and familiar, but I still doubt that it would be easy to team up with people who don't know me at all. Also my English pronounciation is probably pretty horrible, hehe.

Well, however, thanks for the encouragement and the advise.

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

You'll be surprised. There's actually many groups willing to help out noobs, one is specifically set up to do so. It's called TMW (Trusted Mentors of the Wasteland), they're a spin-off of the Medics clan. Also, while your getting to grips with the controls (which can be a nightmare at first) try some of the Arma tutorials. You can practice basic movement, shooting and even skydiving. All without the risk of starving to death.

[Zeppa 562]

Where are you actually from?

If we got matching time zones and stuff I would more than happy to play with u sometime. My english pronouncing is bad tho.

It can be frustrating at the beginning but soon it gets "too easy", at least on low population servers.

Edited September 19, 2012 by Zeppa

[joeoblong@yahoo.com 614]

Also, while your getting to grips with the controls (which can be a nightmare at first) try some of the Arma tutorials. You can practice basic movement, shooting and even skydiving. All without the risk of starving to death.

Fraggle you beat me to it! I was gonna be all nice and not troll... Now all I am left with is to troll!

Quit QQ'ing ya noob, it's the zombie apocalypse for undead Jesus's sake! Rawr!

Seriously just beginners bad luck give it time steep learning curve etc etc.

Edited September 19, 2012 by Pendragon

[CM LEGION 29]

"i got a new pc and i"

Well, theres your problem.

Reminds me of a kid who came into a lobby literally saying "k guys i spawned, i see green trees and a coast, where do i go from here?"

You got a hardcore survival game, that to my standards isnt hardcore at all. You shouldnt expect fluffy ponies or magic at the end of the rainbow. In dayz, chernarus doesnt give a fuck about you, it will move on if you live with a ghillie suit and high end gear and it will move on if your brand new. Heres my advice. Stay away from the coast and make loot routes. Get your buddies, from there prepare to die often and prepare to die due to glitches,hackers, and server farts.

Oh and don't alt f4. You can server hop and all that, but you dont learn from your mistakes i find.

[shagohad 124]

hey man

play a non-hive server and just ask any questions on sidechat/ maybe meet up with some other noobs

side chat can really help, met my best DayZ buddy back in the day when side chat was around still, ran from elktro to cherno to bbag and morphine him, best friends for ever after :)

you are also less likely to get shot by an AS50 (but only marginally so :))

Edited September 19, 2012 by Shagohad

[jason_m_perry@hotmail.com 38]

Takes time to figure it out. The problems you are having happened to us all (minus the login problems for me). z - crawl, x - crouch, c - standup/run are your friends. Also, this game is very mousewheel oriented. Get used to using your wheel.

Everyone has their way to play. I run circles around zombies. I run and run. When I am searching for loot I am in hall ass mode. Zombies walk when they enter building, so use the buildings to lose/evade zombies. If your in the open use shrubs/bushes/trees to lose them. The reason I run is I am a sniper/bandit and don't like to be in loot areas for long.

Thats all I am going to says b/c I don't want you to learn too much as it ruins the whole experience.

[BigWurm 13]

This is not an easy game and thats where some of its charm comes from.

Sometimes I try to think of it like any other FPS but you life lasts hours/days instead of minutes.

[TrangleC 0]

Where are you actually from?

If we got matching time zones and stuff I would more than happy to play with u sometime. My english pronouncing is bad tho.

It can be frustrating at the beginning but soon it gets "too easy", at least on low population servers.

I'm German and I'm 34 (just mentioning that in case I'm too old for you to play with). Thanks for the offer, I'd like to play with new people. Unfortunately I don't get to play very often. I had intended to play yesterday for example, but didn't find the time. Also I have no idea about how to set up audio communication with other players. Do people use Skype or is there a audio chat function in GameSpy?

When I still played Operation Flashpoint we only talked by typing and I haven't played any multiplayer games since then.

"i got a new pc and i"

Well, theres your problem.

Reminds me of a kid who came into a lobby literally saying "k guys i spawned, i see green trees and a coast, where do i go from here?"

You got a hardcore survival game, that to my standards isnt hardcore at all. You shouldnt expect fluffy ponies or magic at the end of the rainbow. In dayz, chernarus doesnt give a fuck about you, it will move on if you live with a ghillie suit and high end gear and it will move on if your brand new. Heres my advice. Stay away from the coast and make loot routes. Get your buddies, from there prepare to die often and prepare to die due to glitches,hackers, and server farts.

Um... I didn't say anything about having a new PC. And if I would have, what difference would that have made?

The zombies actually only were a problem when I played DaiZy, that singleplayer mod. Because I was the only player in the game, it "assigned" the apparently maximum number of zombies (41) per player to me every time I came close enough to a village, or even only a few houses. That was a bit too much.

When I played the normal mutliplayer mod and the zombies had other people to deal with and I didn't have to deal with over 40 zombies everywhere I went, it wasn't so hard anymore, especially since I didn't find any loot or supplies in the singleplayer game.

To be honest, I only complained about the zombies so much because I didn't want to open a thread in which I only complained about having bad luck but wanted to give others something more substantial to discuss. I'm sorry for exagerating my frustration with the zombies. It just all blurred together after a very long and frustrating day of gaming in which nothing went right.

Again, coming back to Operation Flashpoint, that game was much harder than at least what little I have seen of Operation Arrowhead.

People made jokes about Operation Flashpoint being an Eastern European revenge fantasy and the game designers must have been angry about all the movies in which American heroes easily defeated Russian villains, hehehe. Although you played an American soldier in that game. you were the underdog most of the time and the American side got their asses handed to them so often in the game. For example in the very first mission of the campaign you and your unit have to free a little village of a few Sovjet soldiers. That isn't much of a problem but all of a sudden the enemy gets heavy reinforcements, including 3 Main Battle Tanks and your unit doesn't have anti tank weapons, so you have to run for the hills.

The second mission starts where the first one ended. You got separated from your unit and have to meet up at a evacuation point while being chased by Red Army soldiers. The third mission is the same. The helicopter that was supposed to rescue you got delayed and you have to find a new pick up point, again running through the woods alone, just that this time you get chased by Speznaz special forces.

That game basically made you feel like nothing more than cannonfodder, hehehe.

And it plays in the 80s, so you don't have rifles with night vision optics and lasers and all that stuff, just a basic M16 with iron sights like they used it in Vietnam, 4 to 6 magazines and a few handgrenades.

The good thing was that unlike in Arma 2, you could enter most houses and most of them had second floors with open windows that gave you good firing positions. Of course you still had to constantly change your position.

Edited September 20, 2012 by TrangleC

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

That was a great game and also insanely brutal if you didn't know what you where doing. If you coped with that then you'll have no issues once you get to grips with DayZ.

[applejaxc 2500]

I played DayZ for the first time today and although I like the game in general and in theory, it was a horrible experience.

First of all I needed the whole day to get it to run. I apparently encountered every single error message that is addressed in any troubleshooting guide and tutorial I could find. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.

Finally I got it to run and because I thought it might be better for me as a newbee to try the game without more experienced players hunting for me, I first tried the DaiZy singleplayer mod. That was a mistake. I didn't know that the fact that I'm the only human on the map would mean that I would encounter 41 (that seems to be the maximum allocation per player character) Zombies everytime I came near a spawning point. Even worse was that I found absolutely no supplies or weapons, not even in the stores, pubs or on towers. I tried it 5 times and basically all my characters died of thirst and starvation. (A combination of endless running from zombies and no available water.) 5 games without finding anything but empty tin cans. That must have been some kind of bug. I just don't get why the cans spawned but nothing else. I have watched Youtube videos of people playing DayZ but when I played it myself was the first time that I saw absolutely empty grocery stores. Not a single thing spawned in there, not even cans or a single bandage.

I realized that playing against humans can't possibly be worse and I tried the normal mod.

The first time I somehow managed to spawn within a house and when I say within a house, I don't mean in a room, i mean inside the walls and floor of a house. After a few minutes of trying to get out of the wall I suddely took damage and died. Then I was stuck in the "You Are Dead" screen. Everytime I tried to open the menue and restart the game, another death got added to my statistics till I finally used the task manager to shut down the game.

Then, after restarting the game, finally I spawned in the open and could actually play the game. I got killed by a sniper only a few steps away from my spawning point, but although I don't get why somebody would kill an unarmed beginner without any loot, that was still yet the best game I had played so far. At least I didn't suffer any bugs and actually was playing the game.

The next and final game started well enough. I had a decent spawning point near Otmel and I went into the hills to go to that barn near the dam. (Yes, I checked a map in my browser.) It took me a while to get there because I was careful and for the first time I actually found something useful! A hatched! Halleluja! For the first time today something went right and my spirits returned. And before I could get up from the point where I had found the hatched, my connection to the server got cut. I tried to get back into the game and later into others, but with no success.

I'm not just writing that to vent and to whine and not to bore you, but I'd like to know, is this normal? Is this what I can expect from this game?

Besides all the bugs I encountered, aren't the zombies a bit too sensitive and tenacious to still allow for a fun gaming experience? Is it really neccessary that they are able to follow you from one end of the map to the other?

At times this game felt like one of those deliberately ridiculously hard FLASH jump and run games that aren't supposed to be fun but only to boost the ego of weirdos without a life who spend weeks memorizing their patterns.

I like a challenge in a game as much as the next (normal) guy, but when in a game like this sneaking and stealth becomes next to useless because the zombies can see you from hundreds of yards away and there are so many of them that it becomes impossible to evade them, then what is the point?

I have 110 hours logged in ArmA 2 OA. Things get worse before they get better. You learn to play or you don't.

Be careful around stairs and ladders. Never sprint or run indoors, unless you like broken legs.

When at night, throw flares constantly away from you on low-population servers; this stops zombies from attacking you (mostly)

[Sakka 28]

Hey man if you live in US of A and you would like some help sometime just sen me a PM on here and I would be down for helping you out and trying to show you some tips and tricks. I live on the east coast and game usually at night but sometimes during the afternoon. Let me know and good luck out there.

[Auslovich 48]

When I first started playing DayZ I stuck to barns and kept away from cities, and it was boring as hell.

I came back a month later, and had an awesome time. Been playing for six months since I came back, and none of that time was wasted.

[GotBeanZ 45]

I tried the DaiZy singleplayer mod. That was a mistake. I didn't know that the fact that I'm the only human on the map would mean that I would encounter zombies everytime I came near a spawning point.

Uhhh, what did you expect?

[aussiebobby 82]

I first tried the DaiZy singleplayer mod. That was a mistake. I didn't know that the fact that I'm the only human on the map would mean that I would encounter 41 (that seems to be the maximum allocation per player character) Zombies everytime I came near a spawning point. Even worse was that I found absolutely no supplies or weapons, not even in the stores, pubs or on towers. I tried it 5 times and basically all my characters died of thirst and starvation. (A combination of endless running from zombies and no available water.) 5 games without finding anything but empty tin cans. That must have been some kind of bug. I just don't get why the cans spawned but nothing else. I have watched Youtube videos of people playing DayZ but when I played it myself was the first time that I saw absolutely empty grocery stores. Not a single thing spawned in there, not even cans or a single bandage.

I play that mod and wish Dayz was like it.

Its so frigging hard at times and not like run into cherno and fully kitted out in ten mins like Dayz is now.

I died alot as well before I found food and drink.Fire one shot from any gun and you will have the guinness world record of zombie conga train.

Its has AIs(bots) that will hunt and kill you.