So i've played the alpha and now the beta but never tried the Dark Zone until this morning. As it happens my Xbox Live subscription lapsed just as the beta launched so Dark Zone was a no go until my new subscription code showed up in the mail this morning.

I had no idea what to do when i first jumped into the Dark Zone so i elected the stealth route to start with and began observing. Before long, i heard gunshots in the distance and began weaving my way through abandoned cars and barriers to finally spot 2 players (working in a team) who had gone rogue. The red skulls on them and the UI made them easy to ID as hostiles. They're currently involved in taking pot shots at what I assume were other players but this allowed me to get the drop on them. I took position on their left flank, zoomed in with my Marksman Rifle and fired the first shot which hits the first guy causing him to need to take cover and attempt to recover health. The hit player immediately takes cover behind the nearest car and his buddy charges toward me and takes position behind a dumpster between me and his original location trying to gain a better position to return fire on me. As luck would have it, the dumpster was up against a wall and the only available cover for him as a backup was a shallow alleyway. I readied a frag and chucked it directly on top of the dumpster guy. Boom, he's downed and crawls into the alleyway to wait for a revive and then his buddy finally rejoins the fight.

What happened next was a better long distance firefight i've had in any multiplayer game in years. Glass on windows break as we both take shots at each other. It's like a scene out of Heat. After a few seconds both of us take damage but as i fall back to the nearest car behind me, he tries to close and flank me around my left side. By the time he does, i'm already lining up my downing shot. As he comes around the corner, I fire and he collapses. I draw my sidearm and empty it out into him as i close the distance between us. Then i quickly reload and finish off his buddy who's waiting to be revived in the alley. Collect their i'll gotten loot, and i headed to an extraction zone.

I really hope the rest of this game ends up being this fun.

I didn't care much about The Division, but watching the GB video really got me interested. The brief DarkZzone stuff seemed neat, as well. Glad you and others are having a good time with it.

Yeah I finally "got" the dark zone. It's interesting, but I have accidently gone rouge twice now, and it's SUPER frustrating.

The latest time I fought off 7 NPC's by myself. I fought them for about 6 minutes, and got backed in a corner by them. I finally killed them, picked up some great loot, and then I saw another person. I got scared, shot at them, and then noticed it was a human player. I then got corned by two other guys, got killed, and lost the loot I just got.

So first few minutes into the Dark zone folks are at the extraction zone near by and stuff it just happening and folks have gone rogue which soon are dealt with me and my friends end up shooting a guy that was shooting me in the bad, yet the game bugged (Beta) and made US the rogues. So we killed him before we noticed we could have evaded the rogue status and end up fighting off the other people around us before running away (we killed a few) ran down some alleys and escaped.

Still Rogue we meet a lone dude and do not shoot him he sees us and doesn't take much care about our rogue status and we carry on, 90 seconds left till we are free. We meet a few other folk who also do not shoot us and we do not shoot them all is cool. We find a little place to hide its out of the way and no one should bother us..........untill someone walked up we looked at them then he just fully shot me in the body which got him killed before me as me and my friends shot him. A few other people do similar and again are killed.....then we have a manhunt status. EVERYONE KNOWS WE ARE NOT GOOD AND HAVE LOOT!

So we still hold out as a gang of 7 odd random people who probably only a few know each other start fighting us for the bounty and loot, we held out for 5 minutes and killing 6 people only to have new people replace them untill we were overwhelmed and taken down one by one, we lost our loots when we just wanted to be peaceful....PRETTY COOL LIKE!

Dayz I had to be shot on site 24 times before I got any sort of story going with another player, which that story was I had broken my legs and was looting with an axe only to find two people crouched and without weapons at a doorway watching me a little scared as I am the dude with a hatchet.

Another I had a hatchet running from a place to another place and a gunshot rang past me, I looked and saw a dude with a pistol on a small mound near me...I ran at him and ended up in a benny hill chase of me and 10 zombies with me shouting on the mic "ITS ME OR THE ZOMBIES! ONE OF US GONNA EAT YOUR BALLS!" he eventually bled to death after I got some hits in him and so did I from guns shots.

So far with the division I have a few good stories already and that's just the beta vs my ENTIRE time with DAYZ and I have had a lot of time with Dayz.

Its always cool to have these player made stories.

@ssully: that's happened to me a few times too and i'm willing to bet i'll get more trigger discipline the more i play. was watching 1 guy approach then suddenly another pops up and i thought i was being rushed so i shot, turns out i ended up being the jerk and paying the price for it. Fun mechanic though. especially when you have 1-2 rogues trolling and a squad of 3-4 can quickly turn the tables on them and just absolutely mess them up.

It looks like there's a little bit of a forgiveness mechanic where if you can disengage and wait for a cooldown timer to run out, you can reset and not be rogue anymore. I've had a situation where one guy (friendly) threw a incendiary grenade and i wandered into the AoE of it and took damage. The game turned him and his 2 squadmates all rogue for a few seconds. So, there was a very tense 1v3 standoff for about 7 seconds full of "whoa whoa whoa!...we're cool, we're cool, bro. it was an accident".

Very cool ideas.

@oldmanlight: Yeah it's a learning experience; just frustrating for now. Someone on these forumns pointed out to me that agents with low health have their health bar turn red, which makes them look rogue. I definitely went rogue for shooting someone with a red health bar when I first got into the dark zone; at the time I just assumed I hit someone behind him.

The few seconds to cooldown off rogue is helpful if the other people near by realize you made a mistake. In the situation I mentioned in the initial post you responded to, I tried hiding behind cover after accidentally shooting someone. My timer was 5 seconds away from ending until one person starting suppressing me, which resulted in my timer going up (this is interesting in it self. I kind of like how the timer climbs when a non-rogue shoots/suppresses you) .

I agree the ideas are cool. It's frustrating now, but I think this is something that will just be learned over time.

Until you get ganked by rogues...

That, and not making many credits.

I feel like some stuff needs to get ironed out in terms of "accidentally" going rogue while trying to take down a rogue yourself, but that's probably just something that will have to be tweaked as time goes on.

Loved the DZ stuff though. Heading in there solo was SUPER tense at times. Randomly crossing paths with a crew of 3 guys is pretty unnerving, since there's always half a chance they'll see an easy opportunity and come after you. On the other side, more than once I came across one or two randoms and helped them out with a rogue or a group of CPU enemies, and even without mics we formed a makeshift team to watch each others' backs.

After years of mostly playing games with clearly defined teams of allies and enemies,, this was a heck of a change.