This is a map.
![Image](http://i42.tinypic.com/6fnjfb.jpg)
F is me, L is Legendary, and B is our meetup.
Not playing DayZ you the scope of the map may not seem like much. The long and short. It should take me about 20 minutes running to reach the meetup. It would take legendary about 30. But this server has been heavily modified, so there's trouble waiting in the forest. Not zombies or other players. But big bad NPC bandits. Regular players become bandits for killing other players, and losing 'humanity.' NPC bandits are just bitches. If they spot you, you have about 3 shots before you die, from rifleman, and 1 shot from a sniper. No missing, no computer stupidity to give you a chance.
So what happened? Well, my side of the map is bandit heavy. Legendary's is mostly clean. Bandits on the west side of the map, regular survivor NPCs on the other. It took me 3 lives to actually reach the meetup with legendary. 2 times I underestimated the size of the NPC groups. And the 3rd I stopped to save a real player who returned the favor with a bullet to the head.
When we finally met up, there was a server restart. This is good because a) loot spawns refresh, so good stuff comes back b) any destroyed vehicle will respawn in 1 of 500 random locations. (Remember the map is about 100 SQ KM in size.) When the server restarted a clan was complaining that someone destroyed their base, and they lose a large cache of vehicles. This makes towns around our meetup prime locations to find new said vehicles. But we really didn't plan out our trip. our first, and biggest mistake, was to not go and find weapons. After all the crap I went through in the cities to find gear, I didn't bother the 4th time around. Legendary's route didn't take him to any major areas that would have military barracks, or other places that would spawn decent weapons. On this server, heavy weapons are mostly everywhere, so we started out heavily out-classed.
This was our trip route:
![Image](http://i42.tinypic.com/fvl476.jpg)
Again the scope. Taking this trip took 2 hours. Not prime towns for any weapons, food, or supplies. So nearing the end, we decided to hit up the airfield in the north. This is probably the only good part about the story. And teaches a DayZ lesson. Shit never goes as you planned.
As we approach the airfield we find our first goal. A car... But it needed parts, and we had no parts. Nor a toolbox to fix said car. As we got closer we finally spotted some real players. By spotted, I mean heard gunfire. Always dangerous as most people in DayZ will kill you on sight. Whether it's for your beans, weapon, or the cloths you wear.... Much like Detroit. We made it to the small modded town by the airstrip. Picked up some medical supplies, but again didn't find a single weapon. We also had a real player start talking to us. Luckily he knew we were there, but didn't know our exact location.
We approach the airfield directly. 3 players are in one of the military barracks, and move on to the airport control tower. Up in the tower I find a new weapon and drop my old one. Legendary is still carrying his bolt action rifle. These become 2 important failures for the day. Generally when you move around you catch the zombies attention. Then they swarm you when you go into a building. Generally you use sidearms to take care of the zombies, because it's quieter than rifles and assault weapons. Again, we didn't prepare. By the end of our trip we were both low on hand gun ammo, and swarmed by zombies. An AK is loud. So every zombie I killed with it brought a few more. Legendary's gun, on the other hand, is nicknamed the 'dinner bell.' It gets the attention of any zombie within 1km.
At this point Legendary is downed. A zombie broke his leg. We both run out of ammo, but I manage down the stairs and out of the tower. Legendary is still alive. No ammo, I run around the building and climb the ladder to get my old gun. The day is saved! I get the zombies off Legendary He bandages himself and fixes his leg. Then he stands up, goes close to the stairs, faints (he needed blood,) falls down the stairs and breaks his neck.
The end
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)
Seconds after that happened. The 3 other players near us came to the rescue. Obviously too late to do anything. I wasn't really savvy on the 10km walk back down to where Legendary respawned so I let the zombies eat me.
This is the sad part about DayZ. You can have some of the most intense moments in gaming. Or you can spend 3 hours playing a running simulator and accomplish nothing. The server we were playing on was pretty neat. Mainly because they've added a lot of building to places that don't normally have them. Military barracks for example only exist in 4 spots in Vanilla DayZ. There's about 40 in this server. Stock DayZ also only has about 25 vehicles. This server had about 300 but we couldn't find a single one in working order. The very odd part is Legendary never physically saw a real player the entire time. There were 40+ people on at one point. And the map is big. But the important places, and areas around the coast are usually swimming in douchbags and bambis looking for cheap kills.
Finally. Another difference I had a hard time learning. NPC players. 3 types Bandit -attacks regular survivors, Regular- attacks bandits or people who shoot at them. Military - shoots bandits. I was always under the impression bandit NPC groups were 3-4 max. Both groups I died to were in the 6-9 range. I would see 2 or 3, take them out and get flanked by the rest of the group. This made it so me and Legendary didn't actually meetup for over an hour.