Posted by kodabar on Sep 27, 2012; 2:26am URL: http://kodabar-dayz-daizy-single-player-forum.163.s1.nabble.com/Why-do-you-guys-play-single-player-tp5p9.html
When I first played the multiplayer, the joy of discovery and working things out was a large part of the draw for me. The mod was still new and I didn't know anyone who knew much about it. My mate, Lex, bought Operation Arrowhead for me and we started playing together.
I had a blog, so I wrote an installation guide for my friends as it was pretty tricky to get it going at the time. I was posting blog articles every weekday back then and I devoted a week to DayZ. I heard about someone doing a single player mod, so I thought it worth covering. I was suggesting to friends that they might like to play single player for a bit to familiarise themselves with the controls and stuff.
Lex is quite a prolific author of gameplay videos and I felt encouraged to make my own. I decided to make one with a zombie as the presenter. Goodness knows why, but I did. We were very keen to get our hands on a helicopter at the time, so I used single player to practice fixing them so that, in the event we found one, we could get it up and away (hopefully) before we got slaughtered. So I worked out the easiest method to get a helicopter in the air and made a video with the zombie presenter. It would have been very difficult to do this in multiplayer, so I did it in single player. Here's the video (oh and I am trying to put on an accent - that's nothing like my actual voice):
I wasn't really playing single player very much at the time, but I started using it to test out various guns and things so I could decide what to go for in the online play.
My article on installation was getting quite a few hits by then (it's up to almost 500,000 now) and the second most popular one was the single player. And then Kronzky (the single player author) fell out with Rocket (the DayZ dev) and it was removed. I was getting a lot of people posting saying that they wanted the file. So I modified the article to explain how to keep it running and suggested that people could still get a copy from me if they could guess my gmail address. I was getting enough emails every day that it was worth writing a template reply to save me time.
Around this time I got hit by my first hacker. I was fully kitted out and suddenly I was in mid-air and heading for the ground, just like everyone else on the server. Damn it.
A couple of people popped up on the blog to say that they wanted to modify single player and they seemed to think that I was some kind of expert. I really don't know much about editing ArmA pbo files at all, but I tried my best to help them. I spent a lot of time with one guy trying to add AI players, but we had real trouble getting them to fire at zombies without them shooting at buildings, loot, garbage, etc (you might notice that you can't pick up loot after summoning bodyguards in Unknown's version - this is because the classes are changed to enable targeting - I think - something I could never figure out).
I was now getting killed by hackers quite often, so I was playing more single player just for fun.
A while later Unknown turned up on the blog with his version of the mod and my flagging interest in the game was revived. I must stress that he does all the coding - I just do a bit of testing of preview versions and provide space on the blog.
I haven't played multiplayer for a while. I'd got killed by hackers so often that I was quite expert in getting kitted out in a hurry. Normally within two hours I could have my favourite M16 ACOG, ghillie suit, nightvision goggles, G17 pistol and all the supplies and ammo I could need. And then what? There really was nothing for me to do other than hunt players and I don't like to hunt players. I am happy to take out fully-kitted opponents who are hostile, but I loathe the kind of inconsiderate types who hang around the coast sniping newly-spawned players or beginners.
So I've pretty much been playing single player ever since. I still drop into multiplayer from time to time, mostly to deliver supplies to friends who are a bit stuck. I guess I might get back into multiplayer when the standalone comes out - if they deal with hackers. And that's my (very long) story. I've made three other DayZ videos since and I've got another two, all shot in single player (one of them with a custom version of single player - thanks Unknown!).