Fired up DayZ for first time in a few weeks this weekend (wife away on family biz - she is the main reason I die in DayZ, not bandits or zeds.)

- Had the drum mag for my AKM, switched it out for a normal mag to reload it, put it in my backpack. Logged out to make a coffee, logged on again, no drum mag in the backpack. Logged out, in again, still no drum mag. Grrrrrr.
- Dropped an AKM on a supermarket floor to take a drink from a bottle, and it disappeared into the floor. They are so rare now, that just sux. Grrrr
- All the warming up, cooling down stuff is just dumb. If you have the right clothes for the mountains, you will overheat on the coast and vice versa. Yes, kind of like real life, but seriously boring if this becomes a clothes management simulator.
- Persistent servers aren't. I spent a couple hours loading up on ammo of various types, filled a backpack with it, stashed it on an official server, persistance on. Came back later, backpack still there, all good, loaded up with some of the ammo and went out bandit hunting again. Logged out for a loo break, tried to log back in, the server is no longer in my server list. Checked again Sunday and today, still not there. Kinda kills the incentive to create a stash when persistence is server dependent, and you can't rely on it being there from one session to the next!
- Zeds are still too dumb, can only kill you if you are newly spawned with no weapon/bandages and now you can lock them in.
- The only time I interact with other humans is when I am newly spawned and have nothing to lose. 99% people online seem to have a KOS attitude

I get its an alpha/beta (btw is that eternal or does it have a release date target...)

I get the fact that the game is slowly becoming a huntin', fishin', farmin', clothing, sickness management sim with a few Zeds thrown in. That aint interesting to me, I bought a zombie game not a farming game.

I'm easy to please.

I want more, hungrier zeds. In flocks. And not just in big cities and towns. I'd love to be trekking cross country and suddenly come across a swarm of zeds, on the hunt.

I want the auto weapons back so it doesnt take forever to find one.

If the devs want people to cooperate, there has to be some sort of sanction for bandits. PvP kills equals kick, lockout from serverfor X hours, or some such.

H

I haven't played DayZ in months. Not because I got frustrated but simply because there wasn't enough content to keep me interested. The game is still FAR from finished and I recommend to simply taking a break until more content is added and the game has received some more polish and fine-tuning of features.



Here I disagree. IMO automatic weapons should be very rare, and ammo even more so. I want a zombie survival game, not Chernarus deathmatch with everyone toting souped-up M4s with a ton of ammo.



While I agree that DayZ needs something like the "bandit skins" of old the idea to kick people for PvP is IMO wrong and contrary to the very core of DayZ.

Only talking auto weapons in the case of better and more zombies. Can't imagine taking on ten or twenty rampaging zeds with a rifle, even if you were a team.

Don't know what 'bandit skins' means but if that is a way of marking bandits so they are flagged, I like it!

Right now I work on the principle that if you are tooled up, in mil gear/weapons, with a stupid mask on, you are a bandit.

H

IMO you shouldn't take on twenty rampaging Zs at all.

I remember in the mod days we went to the airfield with a 6 man group, all tooled-up with automatic/silenced weapons and tons of ammo. This was in one of the versions where the Z respawn rate was ridiculously high. We barely got out of there alive, with hundreds of rounds fired and the Zs chasing us. One of the most memorable moments in DayZ for me.



In the early days of the DayZ mod PKers would get a "bandit skin", the German KSK scout models. So player killers were easily recognizable. You could get rid of it again by giving someone blood. Problem is you could get the bandit skin while simply defending yourself. Rocket removed the skin because he wasn't happy with the implementation.

Last time I played I tried to look as civilian as possible. No camo clothes, no automatic weapons. I had FAR more friendly, non-lethal player contacts than when running around spec-ops-style.

I had a character a couple of days ago who lived for almost a week.

Fully kitted out with enough supplies to eat,bandage and repair for the entire map.
Ammo up the wazzoo for 3 weapons (Mosin/scoped/suppressor, Repeater and a Magnum pistol)

Started overheating so i walked into a lake thinking the depth wasn't that deep near the shore.
Automatically lost both rifles and my backpack. Managed to regain the Mosin lost pistol repeater and 3/4 of ammo and med supplies. Walked into nearest town swarmed with zombies. Since i only had one bandage with me it went quick after repeated attacks. Managed to kill them all but couldn't repair last hit from outside of building while i was on second floor....

Lesson learned...don't walk into freaking lake to cool off.

This is where I think they've gone off the rails quite a bit. They're putting WAY too much emphasis on the clothing, the food/water and the physiology. When people were playing the mod, I don't think anyone was saying "the eating/drinking system is way too straightforward", or "I wish I got hungry more often", or "I wish my shoes would wear out every 200 metres".

I see there being two distinct aspects of the game - the survival and the adventure. The adventure aspect is what people are playing for. The survival aspect is supposed to be a component of the adventure aspect, creating immersion by adding danger and challenge. It's not supposed to be the main objective.

People liked the balance of of survival vs adventure in the mod, that's why it was so successful. Now they seem to have tipped the balance way over to the survival side, which is not what people want to play. They've made simple survival the main goal by making it overly complicated, demanding far too large a percentage of the player's time and attention, leaving little for the adventure aspect. Exploring, interacting with other players, finding valuables, PVP, these are what people play for. The survival aspect is just supposed to be an obstacle that makes it a little more challenging. It's not supposed to be the main event.

Like I said before, there was nothing wrong with the old physiology system. But I think rocket was hell-bent on creating something he could call a "simulator" without properly considering whether people would want to play that, and they ended up fixing something that wasn't broken. They should just cease and desist on that aspect of the game, use a simplified version (like what they had in the mod), and move forward with the aspects of the game that matter and that really need fixing like the zombies for example. All that effort spent building an over-modeled, super-high fidelity gastrointestinal simulator meanwhile we still have zombies attacking us though floors and walls. They gotta get their priorities straight.

In the mod there was/is a humanity system. If you did something like murder another survivor, your humanity points would drop. But if you did something good like give a bloodbag to another player, your humanity would go up. If your humanity dropped below a certain number, you were officially considered a "bandit" on that server/hive, and you would spawn with a bandit skin. Likewise if your humanity went above a certain level, you'd become a hero and spawn with a hero skin. As well, in some sub-mods, being a bandit or a hero opened up bandit and hero camps where you could buy item exclusive to those classes of player.

This was pretty handy because it allowed you to identify bandits and heroes visually so you could avoid them where necessary. It also added an incentive to not be a bandit because most people have no qualms killing a bandit on sight, especially since it earned you humanity points to kill a bandit.

Humanity/bandit system was easy to rig though. Raid a hospital and stash up on bloodbags and just pump them into each other until you got the hero skin, then run around being a bandit

I am giving the game a break for a bit atm..been going pretty solid at it since may 2012 including pre alpha testing. I logged in two nights ago on exp and was hit twice by zeds well after i had moved away and was behind them, had a ' OH FEKKING C'MON ! ' moment then wandered into buildings and buildings full of so much loot i was fully geared and healthy within fifteen minutes from logging in.

AK74, SKS, two derringers,357, Sporter with a thirty mag so i ditched the AK, full camo clothing, lockpick etc. Decided it was time to put a couple of updates between me and my next session.

Totally agree. Scope creep kills so many projects.

Flight sim Cliffs of Dover under Maddox/Shevchenko bankrupted themselves and provoked the producers to call time on the project (forcing a bugged release) because among other things, they spent too much time on non-core coding:

Modelling of suspension and undercarriage, on ground vehicles
Dedicated damage models/hit boxes for each ground vehicles and ships, including invisible damage under the waterline in ships
Drivable ground vehicles (never made it in final game)
Underwater wave dynamics for shorelines (never made it)
Crewable AAA guns (never made it)
Full atmospheric weather modelling (never made it, not even basic rain made it)
Farm animal and bird animations (made it, unfortunately - cows and sheep on rollerskates.)

When they were asked why they were devoting time and energy to stupid stuff like this in a combat flight sim, they arrogantly responded that clearly if you asked that question, you did not understand that in software development not all sub-projects are interdependent, so that working on drivable ground vehicles did not mean work was not progressing on core elements of the sim. Yeah, right, except it wasn't.

So here we are with DayZ, and you can grow tomatoes and have to swim to cool off if you've been running too long, but zeds can still teleport through walls and hit you from twenty feet away - it's all too familiar.

Basic project management 101 teaches you that scope creep sucks you dry of resources and introduces interdependencies where you don't need/want them and rarely adds value vs the original scope.

H

Something a tad irritating happened to me yesterday in DayZ.

Humble char
Backpack with food, canteen, bandage and stuff. 1911 in hand, 3 rounds in clip.

Minding my own business in a barrack searching for high-value loot. Checked all rooms, not much besides the odd cap and banana.
Entrance door is closed, 3 Zeds manage to walk through the walls. They hit me with their long-distance attacks.
Empty my clip into them, Zeds are dead.
Bandage myself. Sweet.

The darn dead Zeds block the exit right by the shower room.
I vault, crawl, crouch, nothing does it. Nevermind, let's be patient.
I turn around, a farmer-like fellow with AK at the other end of the corridor.

Black screen, harsh

Cheers,
Slug

...and all made 100000x worse by the fact that if you try to point this out on the DayZ forums, you're immediately pounced upon by fanboys and drowned out by "But its a simulator, it's not meant to be easy" or "You just suck at DayZ!", leading me to believe the devs are up there in their ivory tower, insulated by a court of sycophants who are telling them they're doing the right thing.

A pretty bad sign is when you make a criticism along the lines of what we're talking about here, and the very first reply is a troll from an actual forum moderator. That doesn't inspire a lot of hope. DayZ is lost, and the core fans are striving to keep it lost.

I'm guessing you are Ham Sandwich ? SmashT is ok overall, he puts up with a ton of sh/t all day long on the Dayz forums is all over the steam forums and reddit as well as on the dev/prealpha tester skype chat constantly chasing stuff down and even on the the hacker forums. He is an Aussie as well, we thrive on sarcasm ..sorry

I think the big thing about the core fans is we don't want DayZ to be easy and watered down..but are just waiting for the devs to find the right balance.

Your post was fair though, but some will keep their blinders on and rise to defend everything regardless.

STFU NOOBZ! LOL the Dayz forums have always been a passionate place like any dev forum.

I just fired up the experimental branch, spawned, immediately chased by zombie, she follows me through a closed door, I run out of the house, find a hoe, equip it, can't stop swinging it, she hits me with a super-long range strike, no worries I'll just use the constant swinging to take her out, land first blow, game crashes.

I'm sorry, but that's not about me being a noob or the game not being watered down.

No, he's a troll when he's supposed to be a forum moderator. When forum moderators set the tone of trolling and flame-baiting anyone who criticizes their game, that's a pretty sad state of affairs.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending this game at all with what I'm about to say. I think they are way further behind schedule then they should be. I don't know all the ins and outs though so I won't get into that any deeper. But anyway:

You are talking about playing the experimental branch of an alpha game..... expect that exact thing to happen ALL the time lol

I've actually joined a private hive server group here http://falcondayzrp.enjin.com/home

Pretty active server, and they play dayz I think the way most of us wanted it to be. It's not perfect, but I enjoy it a million times more then I do regular public KOS every 5 minutes servers. Feel free to check it out if you like

Yeah still plenty of issues with a lot of things, hence why i have been on a break for a few weeks now and will probably extend that to at least a few more patches before i dive back in.

I was joking about the noob comment but you clearly are a noob so stfu!

No seriously this game has a lot of issues which is why I've been playing other games lately while waiting for the patches to catch up. That said its cool to be able to participate in the alpha process even if that includes the warts and all the frustrations that go along with it. My first three month old character in the mod days died from going prone under a tree. He was fully kitted out and I was like "Nooooooooooooo, damn it, its not fair"!