Hello everyone. An issue that I've noticed with the game is that when looting you constantly encounter the same items again and again, most of the time within the same building, and often even finding multiple of the same item in the same room.
These items seem to most commonly spawn in batches of 2-3, but at times I've found 4-5+ in very close proximity.
I encounter this issue every time I play DayZ and it's getting very annoying at this point, it makes the loot distribution feel terrible and I find it's very damaging to the flow of the looting experience and how enjoyable it is overall.
While this can be annoying to any player I also wonder if this is part of the reason that new players complain so much about the loot and say things such as "there's no loot" or "all I can find is 5 shirts" "there's nothing good" etc, because there IS loot on official (it's everywhere) but a lot of the time it's duplicates of the same item (and when that item is a trash one it feels terrible) from what I've experienced you can have 0 of a particular item in your town, but the next town over will have like 3-7 of them bunched up, so you can really go from 0-100 when looking for certain items.
Some examples of this happening to me -
- Looting sheds for 2 hours trying to find a spark plug and nothing, upon entering the next town I immediately find 3 spark plugs back-to-back-to-back.
- After checking 3-4 medical buildings for tetra and finding nothing, I enter one more and suddenly find 3 different stacks of tetra (4 pills each) in the same building. So I went from having 0 for a few hours to instantly having a full stack of 12.
Before continuing I'd like to link this ticket from sanguine00 here.
https://feedback.bistudio.com/T152626
While this ticket is very old, I believe it's relevant as it seems this exact issue (or something very similiar) is still occurring on official servers today.
While this issue appears on official servers where the majority of items have a restock value of 0, his ticket also suggests that this issue occurs even after increasing the restock timer, so either way something seems to be broken.
As you can see with the AK74 example, he sets the restock to 3600 seconds (1 hour) and yet 3 of them are spawned not only at the same time, but in extremely close proximity too.
Matěj and Adam also experienced this issue during a livestream where they found 3 Skorpions in a police station between only 2 rooms.
https://clips.twitch.tv/OnerousFaintStingrayPanicBasket-EfUfz_RwuWJfkR_U
I have various images/videos that I took in-game while playing on official Chernarus servers displaying this issue.
(Items were moved into piles for easier screenshots, all items were either found within the same building or within a small compound of nearby buildings)
#1 - After finding a Military Train I gathered up all the loot and checked for duplicates, here's what I found.
3x Engraved Kolt 1911 (2 Pristine - 1 Damaged)
2x USG-45 Magazine (Both Badly Damaged)
2x PSO-1 Scope (Both Worn)
2x 1-M8 Smoke Grenade (Born Worn)
2x Red Flare (Both Badly Damaged)
#2 - When looting the very small Military area of Tri Kresta I found many duplicate items.
4x Pistol Flashlight
3x Combat Sights
2x Officer Hat
#3 - Here's my reward for collecting an entire NBC suit and looting Pavlovo gas zone..
4x IV Start Kit
3x FX-45 Magazine
3x Baraka Sights
3x Combat Gloves
#4 - While looting at Bashnya I found FIVE combat knives in the same barracks..
This barracks spawned a total of 8 items, and 5 of those were the same thing..!
#5 - Mass spawning of gas masks and firefighter axes at the Severograd firestation and the garages right outside to the east.
4x Firefighter Axe
3x NBC Respirator
#6 and #7 - Duplicate items from medical buildings
4x Surgical Mask
2x Surgical Gloves
3x Epi Pen
#8 - While looting at Zvir I found 4 plastic bottles within close proximity, I took a screenshot of iZurvive to show where each of them spawned.
#9, #10 and #11 - Various times I found 5.45x39 rounds spawning in bulk (both boxed and loose)
#12 - 3 Smersh buttpacks right next to each other at Bashnya (1 in the jail building and 2 from the truck outside)
I could go on and on but I'm sure you get the point, once you start paying attention (especially gathering up loot into piles like this) you realise just how often this is happening and how bad the issue really is.
While the CLE technically works (items spawn in the world and you can loot them, sure) I have to wonder, how much more enjoyable would the looting experience be if these items were evenly distributed?