Point number 3 on your list: Very hard to shoot down.

No other vehicle has this property. None. Not even the Mi-17 takes as much gunfire as the biplane on this server does.

I have flown biplanes, Mi-17's and Hueys around, along with a couple of Little Birds. Each and every time the people shooting us down in the helicopters didn't have to do this by being only expert marksmen, but they had superior firepower. Firepower which was available to even loners.

Everything from the AKM to a Mod 0 can take down a little bird/Huey/Mi-17. That's a lot of weapons.

The biplane? M240, M249, MK 48 Mod 0, M203. That's it. The only guns capable of even hurting the plane. And the most commonly available weapon, the M203 with launcher, requires a LOT of skill to use. Even more than being able to aim for the cockpit and reliably hit that with the latency.

If you have a vehicle in the server that is only effectively taken out, while in the air, by 3 very rare weapons, you're doing something wrong.

I've pumped a lot of AKM/Sa-58 clips into the engine of a stationary biplane on the ground on this server. I've used five grenades on the hull (M67). Zero fucks were given by the plane. Shooting the pilot shouldn't be the only way to take out a plane in a game where knowing people's positions is worth any gun I can find.

And should you even get the chance to shoot him out of it, what's Omen's next move? With 5 or 6 possible spawns, he quickly runs to get another one, rendering your accomplishment useless, as he's in the air within 5-20 minutes. For comparison, there are less fixed spawns for the guns able to shoot the plane down.... than spawns for the plane. For this reason, I think the move to severely limit them is a very good one.

Result: Massive advantage to a pilot who knows what he is doing and has clanmates he can give priceless intel to while remaining unharmed. Were this different, Omen, your skill in the plane would be more appreciated.

This post is here so it's not only Omen's post and everybody agreeing with it. Thank you for making it more rare Seaweed.

the M203 with launcher, requires a LOT of skill to use.

i don't think 1 plane is enough to be honest, needs to be at least 2 of them

if people whine to much tell them to load up the editor and learn to fly the damn thing themselves. Half of my deaths on this server are from me attempting to land a biplane (at least i'm trying, unlike most people. I actually managed to land one in the field next to devils castle the last time i tried, got it stuck on a tree though ) and I've never complained about it, our only encounter with omen and his silent death plane ended in a draw...

You guys have said yourself that most of the people you kill when your flying around are people that shoot at you first, if people don't want to be killed by it, then why are they shooting at you?

Well, since someone seems hell bent on banning all of my responses here, here's an alternate account. If there's a rule I broke, do notify before banning.

@ Limbless_torso:

You are right, flying that plane takes a lot of skill. However, I'd like to argue that the training to accurately hit with an M203 takes far more skill than flying the plane.

And I did say there are(were) more fixed biplane spawns than fixed spawns for the guns to take it down. Seaweed had it at 5 spawn sites? The guns to kill it reliably spawn at NEAF, NWAF, Stary. I am not counting crashsites since they are not fixed spawns. But Seaweed adjusted both, by giving more variable spawns and lowering the amount of planes.

The slightly demoralizing thing about the plane is, as I said, even if you manage to shoot it down, Omen'll be up in fifteen minutes again because he knows all the spawns. So even if you manage to shoot it, the results would be minimal. And at the argument of realism vs game, I'd say this falls under game aspect. Having such a plane in real life is a very good thing. In the game? Not so much, because it gives a massive advantage, skewing the balance. That should be minimalized now and give people more of a window to breathe clear if they take down the plane.

The advantage of a player in an online game should come from his skill, not from the fact they are hard to kill due to some game mechanic. And while undoubtedly Omen has skill, I had a feeling most of his hard-to-kill ability came from the plane.

-DMZ-

Not sure what all the "fairness" complaints are. I thought the point of games was to have a challenge.
Bring it on Death Plane.

It lived up to that name last night that's for sure

We got squad wiped by a tree so I am no longer the proud owner of shortboys ghillie suit

lol, so you guys got wiped in the same way i did on the same day? sweet

You can live in mine for a bit if you can catch me

well there is currently only one plane, as i crashed the other (doh, bloody invisible hitboxes :/) so now more then half of my deaths are from crashing aerial vehicles , im assuming the other will respawn within another couple of resets

lol, so you guys got wiped in the same way i did on the same day? sweet

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/103845-rolling-changelog-for-community-builds/#entry1329362

We get these things?

wow, that update is so full of win i don't even know where to start, though i hate the way he posts the changes... would be better if he only posted the new changes in each post. Posting all the ones from the previous posts makes them hard to read :/

Weapon attatchments... wtf? I thought that wasn't possible with the current arma 2 engine,
the best change is the loot cleanup one imo
oh and the zombies in the wild being removed for now... can actually set up proper ambushes again

The new loot changes have been making me consider doing a server wide gear reset on release. We will probably run vanilla code to start with again to see how the new loot table is, and that's a lot harder when everyone already has a geared character from pre-patch.

As a hoarder this destroys my hearth