ZedsDeadBaby

I think everyone who gets involved in squad-based interaction, especially combat, has been there at least once: in the heat of the moment you turn and see three players when you only expected two. You have a split second to decide who your friends are and who the hostile intruder is. The situation in SA is a bit better than it was in the mod, because now we have hats, masks and backpack colors to coordinate and help identify our friends, but the options still feel somewhat limited - especially when you consider that certain headwear is more functional than others (i.e., thinking specifically of the ballistic helmet). I hope to see options in this regard expand significantly to allow people to identify their squad mates quickly and effectively. I also think expanding these options will add a very interesing secondary strategy to the game - carrying a variety of clothing around so you can try to quickly change clothes to look like groups you come across, then infiltrate them in a daring look-alike raid. Some ideas: 1) Armbands There are tons of colorful shirts, pants and hats scattered around the map. Let me rip them up to create colored strips of cloth. A strip of cloth can be tied around the arm or hung from the belt and give people a distinctive flash of color. Ripping up a shirt could produce more strips than hats; strips could stack up in groups of 5 or 10. 2) Iron-on/sewn-on patches Patches for backpacks, jackets or even pant legs. These could be simple and crude - again, made up of colored patches torn from other clothing OR they could be actual military patches (such as this) which could appear among military loot or be harvested by killing infected military personnel, then applied to our gear to help give our squad personality and a unique look. 3) Face paint Let us use clay, crushed berries, shoe polish or dyes found on military bases or on infected military personnel to apply a variety of face paint patterns. Could wash off over time or w/ water. We should be able to look like this badass. 4) More masks! Masks are great. Not only do they look awesome, but if there's eventually some way to visually identify players (such as the one I posted here), masks will become very sought-after by criminals as a way to conceal their identity. 5) Headbands, helmet bands Strips of cloth tied around the head or the base of a military helmets. Again, simple strips of cloth put to good use. Imagine a strip of cloth wrapped around a helmet, such as here, but a color of the player's choosing. I posted a similar (much shorter) thread back in the mod days, before we even had colored hats! Other threads with similar ideas: Item suggestion: Face Paint from seniorshred Arm bands(Ways to tell who's who) from l0ki Customizable I.D arm band from Tweaker hunter Simple Buddy System from Tig.fairy Editable Clothes - Clan system - Reconize system from TaranGamesic Suggestion: Clan Insignia for shoulder sleeves and hats/caps; tattoos even from laughs Like to See Squad.xml Added from Dobrowney Face Painting from dinostaRR If you have posted or read a similar thread which isn't listed here, please PM me and let me know so I can keep this list running.

The joy of contributing to the development of the best zombie-themed survival game in the history of mankind. Believe it or not, some people do things even when they don't receive something in return. It's called volunteering.

You don't seem to understand what the word responsibility means. People have the opportunity to host servers; it's entirely optional. If people weren't willing to do it, Bohemia would. But, people are willing, so Bohemia takes advantage of their generosity. That's not "wrong," it's smart business. The money they save on server hosting costs can be invested in furthering the development of the title. To OP, you buy or rent a server; the software is the property of Bohemia Interactive. It's a really obvious distinction. Just because you pay for a hotel room doesn't mean you can take a giant shit in the middle of the bedspread. Just because you pay to rent an apartment doesn't mean you can tear down walls and make modifications to the structure. Just because you pay for a taxi doesn't mean you can tear up the seats and assault the driver. In short, paying for something doesn't make the rules go away. I'm sorry if that's a hard concept to wrap your head around but please do try because we're all sick and fucking tired of having this conversation every two or three days.

I feel one or two large rivers or man-made canals would be an enormously interesting addition to the landscape of Chernarus. The potential benefits are many and varied. I would like to suggest some in this thread. 1) Bridges If a one or two large canals or rivers cut up Chernarus, bridges would need to be added at junctions with roads. I think this would be a very interesting addition to the game, because bridges create natural chokepoints. To save time and keep their equipment dry, players would want to find a bridge to cross on foot rather than swimming the length of a waterway. Further, vehicles would have no choice but to use bridges. Both of these facts would make bridges incredibly interesting focal points of player interaction. Great care would need to be taken before chancing a bridge crossing - especially by vehicle. Squads would benefit enormously by sending ahead scouting parties to scan the area and ensure it's clear before making a run for the bridge with a vehicle. Bold bandits could even try to set up checkpoints and extract tolls from players attempting to cross. What could possibly be more iconic bandit behavior than shaking down travelers at a river crossing? 2) Transport Medium A river would provide one of the fastest possible routes inland from the coast, given the proper equipment: 3) Survival Resource Granted, this would require a fair amount of new feature implementation, but I think it makes too much sense not to do it eventually. Fishing should be possible in the ocean, and rivers would provide more "survival real estate" for this activity. Items required could include rod, line, hooks & bait (which could be dug up from the ground, or improvised from existing food soruces). 4) Visual Variety A slightly less tangible but still very real benefit to the existence of a river or two is simply the fact that they would break up what can sometimes be a visually tediuous and repetitive landscape in Chernarus. Rivers look awesome, and also provide for navigation way points. Lost travelers could use rivers to get a sense for their location and direction of travel.

Back in the mod days, I posted a long thread about a potential "Player Identification and Classification system." I thought it would be a good time to revisit the idea and bring it up to date with the DayZ SA. Rather than try to revive the old thread, I'll just post an updated version of the idea here. Goal Give players the ability to "Remember" other players that they have seen, provided they can get close enough to make a successful visual identification. Philosophy Two common comments or suggestions that show up here on the SA forum are 1) players really need a reason to value their characters and try to stay alive longer, and 2) it would be hugely beneficial to have some idea of another player's intentions when you meet them. I wanted to think of a system that could be a win in both of these categories, but in a way that felt authentic for DayZ, and came up with the ability to remember things you witness. First, a memory of events you have witnessed would immediately make survival more valuable. The longer you stay alive, the more you manage to see and survive, the more information your survivor will carry and the harder you will struggle to survive. Second, it seeks to just be an authentic stand-in for real human memory. There's no magical all-seeing eye that delivers information to you about other players, and no Santa Claus of Chernarus who watches over everyone and keeps a naughty and nice list. The players themselves control the system because they are in charge of witnessing the events and making judgments about what they mean. Last, but maybe not least, it also makes optics hugely valuable. Binoculars were already amazingly useful in the mod, but this would make them even more sought after. How it Works If you can get within 20m (or equivalent distance with a scope, binoculars or other optics) of another player and see their face, you can choose to "Remember" them, probably from the mouse-wheel menu or whatever in-game interface is available moving forward. Once you "Remember" someone, you can assign them a tag and a category (these are all of your own creation, you don't record their survivor name) and perhaps make a small note or quip about them. Later, if you see that player once more (again, from 20m or equivalent), and their face remains uncovered, you will see a small on-screen indicator of which category or tag you have assigned to that person. For instance, if you're watching Chernogorsk from the hillside with a pair of binoculars and you witness a murder, you could "Remember" the assailant and assign them a category of "hostile" or "untrustworthy" with a note like "Cherno killer." Likewise, if someone offers you assistance and follows through without chopping your head off with a fire ax before the episode plays out, then you could "Remember" them and assign them a category of "friendly" or "trustworthy" with a tag "Shared beans and stories." Again, all of these tags are written by players - no automatic categorization takes place. Players have to decide what to call their tags and whether or not certain actions qualify to have players remembered in such a way. Ideally, some color-coding system would be available, so you could assign tags colors as well, which would be visible once you "recognize" someone in the game. The on-screen information could be basic and subtle; as simple as a small dot above a player w/ a color corresponding to the category to which you have assigned them. I realize it's more of a HUD than Dean would like for DayZ, but I think it's worth it under the circumstances. What if... You die? When you die, your memory is erased. You forget everything you've witnessed and recorded about other players, and will no longer be able to "recognize" them in the game. You will have to make new identifications. This should add value to survival. Someone wears a mask? Masks will effectively prevent identification. This has the simultaneously cool effect of making masks way more valuable and awesome, but also assigning a very clear in-game meaning to them. They're no longer just decorative head pieces, but true and earnest attempts by people to conceal their identity from others. You can make your own decisions about what that says about their intentions when you meet them (I suggest you assume the worst). Someone I've previously identified dies? This is a tough one. My instinct is to say that they're erased from everyone's memory because that "makes sense," but of course this allows a simple exploit where psychopaths just occasionally suicide in order to start with a "clean slate." So, I think to be effective your memory of someone will persist through their death, but not yours. I think it makes the system less exploitable and more robust, without stepping too far outside the bounds of realism (if you can buy that people get reincarnated instantly upon death, then you can buy that I know what the 'new them' looks like, deal?). Other Thoughts Maybe classification requires a pen and notebook carried on the player? Or this allows "notes" to be added, which is otherwise impossible.Injury or sickness could make players "forget" some of what they have remembered. More reason to stay well and well fed!In the future, cameras or recording devices could allow us not only to recognize players ourselves, but to share what we've seen with others (granting them information in the process - imagine trading information about other players in exchange for food or water!). Here's a link to the original thread, if you want to read the discussion there. There are also a lot of similar ideas linked from my post. Credit to Mutonizer for reminding me of this here (coincidentally also suggesting 20m distance), and giving me the idea to call it "Remember." :thumbsup: Other related threads: Thinking beyond only facial recognition from Chauz Survivor's brain from Zalexey

It's fine if you want civilian-style weapons, but no, it won't have any effect whatsoever on whether or not people want to kill you. The only round that would be "much" less of a threat is the .22; everything above that is still going to be a 1 or 2 shot kill at center mass and a 1 shot kill in the head. That's how guns work. Whether it's a "military" gun or a deer rifle, if I shoot your face you are going to fall over and not get back up. Even the .22 is no walk in the park. It's not a pellet gun. You take a .22 long round to the sternum and you're not going to fix it with a bandaid and neosporin.

As opposed to the "easy abuse" safe zones that are created if zombies can't climb ladders. I would rather a chokepoint than let people avoid any and all danger from zombies just by getting up on a roof.

The entire game does basically suck in its current state. Even Dean said it's a mess and people shouldn't buy it. It's not really that controversial to say that there's not much to the game right now besides walking around, gathering loot and shooting folks. Yes, you can play a bit of "pretend" and get together with folks and do goofy shit like starting cults, having "Wiggling" parties, and staging Fight Club style contests between unarmed newspawn but really that's not playing the game, it's playing in the game. You could just as easily load up WoW and get together and play pretend if that's what you want to do.

It's a fair question. I have played Fallout 3 (and every other game Bethesda has ever created). Consider that in Fallout, Skyrim, Mass Effect and other similar games, there's a really good reason the camera zooms in to a distance of about two meters when you're in conversations. It's at this distance that the facial geometry looks distinct and amazing. Move to a distance of 10, 25 or 50m or more and the distinctiveness quickly fades away. As you move away, the LOD is dynamically reduced to allow for efficient rendering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail). Of course I would love it if the developers could pull off facial technology which permits successful recognition at authentically human distances. I would never claim that my proposal is superior to a system of actual human visual recognition. What I do believe strongly is that my proposal is feasible and reasonable given the team's assets and timeline. My idea would take a few weeks to implement, while a complete rework of the character customization system, facial geometry options, character rendering code, etc. would take at least several months to pull off (and might still end up not really doing the job). Consider also that my system has the added benefit of encouraging long-term survival. The longer you live, the more people you recognize. I think it's a really important aspect to my proposal. If DayZ is "about" anything, it's survival, but it seems like the team is struggling to come up with ways to make people care. Right now there's really only two reasons to stay alive: 1) keep your position on the map and 2) keep your "stuff." I think we need to look really hard for ways to expand this list if we want players to value their lives rather than just the latest cool gun they found.

The myth that banditry is a "no risk" style of play was consistently debunked by the DayZ team during the mod. People were making this claim constantly - that because bandits shoot before they ask questions, they play on "easy mode" and don't take risks. The DayZ team cited statistics showing exactly the opposite. Bandits had much lower average life expectancies and much higher death rates than more neutral or friendly players. The reason seems pretty obvious; if you're constantly jumping into firefights you're going to take a bullet yourself sooner or later. It's a much more dangerous lifestyle than good friendly players who are quiet, observant and careful about who they approach and often get a chance to let agressive players pass by while they remain in cover unnoticed. Now, of course, players who think being "good" means you just get to waltz up to every random stranger you meet in the game waving your hands around and "wiggling" your way to happiness might not feel this way, but that's because they're being idiots and idiots get shot roughly as often as bandits.

Great image, solid idea. Upbeans!

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

Understanding that loot spawn mechanics are currently placeholder and will be replaced soon, I want to make a couple general suggestions. The goal of these ideas is to keep players in the dark about loot and make it difficult for them to predict or manipulate loot to their advantage. I think keeping loot mysterious and unpredictable will go a long way toward enhancing the experience of scavenging. 1) Servers should start up empty. Restarting a server should not be a path to populating the entire map with fresh, free loot. The temptation for server administrators to exploit this by restarting their server multiple times per day is simply too great and even players online for a restart gain the advantage of information they shouldn't have about the presence of loot. This also applies to helicopter crash sites and any other random loot events. In the mod, it became common practice to start a server, check the common helo crashes sites, and restart once they were picked clean. It should require a certain amount of server uptime for these kinds of loot caches to start spawning in. 2) Loot should spawn randomly in small "pockets" or regions around the map, not everywhere all at once. I might be over-simplifying or making too many assumptions, but when Dean says that loot spawning currently impacts server performance, I imagine he is trying to check every loot pile on the map to see whether it needs to spawn. Instead, if there existed a few dozen smaller "bubbles" of spawn activity, each with its own timer, not only would the burden on the server be far less, but it would be incredibly difficult for players to gain map-wide information about loot simply by observing a smaller area. In other words, if I see that loot has reappeared in Berezino, it shouldn't tell me anything about whether there is fresh loot at the NEAF or in Dolina. Different areas of the map should spawn loot at different times so its always a mystery and predicting loot is difficult. A crude "lootmap" here. 3) Loot spawns should not be tied to player behavior. In the mod, loot only spawned when no players were in the area. Good idea in theory, but in practice this just developed into this weird "loot dance" that players did by looting an area, leaving, and then returning after a few minutes to find fresh loot there. It felt very "immersion breaking" in the sense that we were essentially controlling the appearance of loot with our movements. Yes, it's a bit strange if a player is present for a spawn. Seeing items appear on the ground will be odd and disconcerting, but it's not really any less odd or off-putting to teach them that they have to "kind of be far away" for loot to appear. It's still goofy, just goofy at 100m. 4) Loot spawns should not be predictable. Each loot region should have it's own timer, and each cycle, a new timer should be set with a high degree of variance. For example, a region could have a spawn time of anywhere from 120 to 300 minutes. When loot spawns, a new timer is randomly "rolled" to figure out when to next do a pass and repopulate the region. This will keep players guessing. There won't be a pattern, and no reliable way for players to "figure out" the cycle and exploit it by moving into an area shortly before it's going to spawn loot. This also allows some variation by loot value. Low-value residential areas could "pop" every 45 to 90 minutes, while higher value military or medical areas might only repopulate every 3-5 hours. Coastal cities could have longer timers than inland cities to give new players a more authentic wasteland experience. 5) Doors should spawn randomly open or closed. I won't take credit for this; I saw it in another thread earlier and I'll find the link soon (I can't find this thread anymore, can anyone help?), but I think it belongs in this list. Door state should not be an accurate indicator of whether a building has been visited. Again, this is just communicating information to players that they shouldn't have. If you want to know what a building holds, you should have to go inside. Edited to add ideas of random loot events. To mix things up even more, consider a major expansion on what helicopter crashes did for the mod. The idea of "random loot events" could really be expanded on. In the mod, there were a limited number of helicopter spawn points. Once you had a vehicle and an excel spreadsheet, you could basically check for every known helicopter spawn in Chernarus within 60 minutes or so, and even loot the ones you find. Again, fun but predictable. If instead there were hundreds of possible spawn points for various loot events, each with their own individual chance to spawn sometime after a server start, there would be almost no way to "finish" searching for these. Especially if they had low spawn chances and only appeared every 8-12 hours. You would be forced to continuously explore in the hopes of revealing one of these caches:Helicopter crashes, like in the mod.Humvee crashes. Like helicopters, smaller.Medical supply truck crashes. Tons of zombies, tons of medical supplies.Food/grocery supply truck crashes. Food, mostly rotten. Can openers.Bunker/Stash. Think the scene in The Road where they find the underground stash of canned goods. These could be very hard to spot stashes in the ground, possibly covered by foliage or tarps which conceal entrances to underground bunkers. Could have all sorts of supplies and residential weapons, left behind by the previous inhabitants (they might be there too). Also, a good place to set up an ambush. Here's what coming across one might look like.Train derailments (another idea I saw elsewhere, maybe on reddit. I'll find it).Overturned boats or washed up fishing boats. Maybe have to do some swimming?Edited to mention the great thread here with a ton of ideas for random events.

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

Weekly Friday bump (31 JAN).

This reddit discussion got me thinking; Dean has talked often about his desire to impart a sense of disorientation to DayZ players. He seems to like the idea of players feeling unsure, unsafe and isolated. I think this works really well at the moment for new players. Your first dozen or so spawns, especially if they take place at night, can leave you absolutely confounded about your location. Once inland, it can be really hard to keep track of your orientation and make progress toward an intended destination. I remember one of my earliest days in the mod distinctly; I was trying to make my way to Vybor from Kamenka to meet up with my squad. I ran for what seemed like an hour through darkened forests. Just when I thought I must be getting close to my destination, I heard the sound of waves and my heart absolutely sank. I had turned completely around at some point without realizing it. In some ways, it was a bummer; but in others it was so completely authentic it left me feeling exhilarated. Never before had I played a game where just getting from one place to another could hold so much drama. The problem is, once you've logged a few hundred hours in Chernarus, the effect wears off. I've been over the map so many times, the landscape has become second nature to me. Drop me off anywhere on the map (within reason) and I can give you my location to within a few quads within minutes. The turn of a road, the slope of the land, the apperance of a distant landmark - all these things serve to orient veteran players. Now, in some sense this is a good thing. People should benefit from exploration and experience by being more familiar with the territory. But, it does remove some of the drama of exploration. I think there are some authentic ways we could recapture the sense of disorientation for veterans, and make them work just a little bit harder to keep track of their location. This would increase the drama of travel, but would also make items like the compass that much more valuable. 1) Fog It can be a headache form a performance and implementation standpoint, but I think properly done fog would be an incredible addition to DayZ. Imagine a thick blanket of fog rolling over your area. You're crouch-walking to approach a city with visibility limited to less than 100m. At any moment a zed or player could emerge from the fog ahead rushing toward you. Just typing it makes me nervous and I'm not even in game. Beyond the atmospheric benefits, fog would prevent players from spotting distant landmarks like city skylines or radio towers. It would get harder to keep your bearings in the wilderness. 2) Heavy Rain, Thunder, Lightning This shares many of the same benefits as fog, but unlike fog it also obscures sound which can make listening for nearby footsteps or distant gunshots even harder. This is disorienting not only from the viewpoint of terrain recognition and exploration, but from a tactical standpoint when it comes time to decide if that was thunder you heard or a distant shotgun blast. I think we can all appreciate what rain did for this scene: 3) Snow, Winter Foliage Probably the most complicated from an implementation standpoint, but also one of the most interesting. I think snow cover would be a great way to increase disorientation. It's amazing how even a light snow cover and a change in foliage can make a scene look completely different. You might recognize something in spring or summer that ends up looking entirely transformed when snows fall. Consider the following images of essentially the same location, one in summer and another in winter. Would you immediately recognize this as the same place if you saw it weeks or months apart? --> 4) Building States One of the things that makes it pretty easy to get your bearings is that buildings in Chernarus are very distinct and static. Even something as simple as a small group of wooden sheds at an intersection (I'm thinking of you 112x107 west of Tulga) can immediately be identified by an experienced player. What if buildings did not always appear the same way? If building models had a couple states in which they could spawn, and one of the possible models was chosen at server restart, things would look a bit different over time. Buildings could have a range of states such as: intact, somewhat damaged, very damaged, completely demolished. Barring actualy dynamic building damge (which would obviously be ideal and perhaps possible down the road), one of these states could simply be chosen at server start up. So, passing the same group of sheds by the road might look different from one week to the next. There's a little bit of strangeness here where one day a building might be destroyed and the next back intact, but I think we can overlook that for the increased visual variety this would create (we don't seem to mind gas stations which explode one day and are back the next).

A system which he personally said he disliked, because it felt artificial and punitive toward a particular playstyle and specifically took out of the game for this reason. He added it back in only after he knew he was going to be doing the Standalone, because he knew at that point he would not be devoting more time to implementing a better, more robust and more authentic system in the mod. The bandit skin system was a hacked up bandaid, not a final solution and not what Dean really wanted to do. For a guy who finds any and all excuses to mention how many "fucking hours" he spent playing this game, I would hope you would know the history of these things a little more clearly.

Except it's not a legitimate demand because we already know it's not going to happen. rocket would shut the game down before he put out PvE servers. That's just it. The question was asked and answered like two years ago. Talk about it all you want, but it's a pointless waste of time and keystrokes. He's not after more sales, he wants to make his game and that's a PvP game full stop.

You can rent or own a server, but the software belongs to Bohemia Interactive. The distinction is pretty obvious no matter how many random words you choose to capitalize.

How did this get to 6 pages? Can we just start locking this weekly bullshit thread as soon as it crops up?

Yeah, 'cause this is definitely the first time anyone has posted a similar idea. They definitely haven't been reading ideas like this every week for about two years. They will consider it for the very first time ever after reading your awesome post. Are you even reading your own posts at this point? It's getting a bit fucking comical here on page 30 dude. Have some dignity and let your idea stand on its own instead of posting every 30 seconds about how awesome it is. If it was such a great idea, you wouldn't need to be in here reminding everyone of how great it is over and over again.

Haha, what a self-serving pile of horseshit. "Ignore people who disagree with you and I'm super awesome and everyone else is totally lame." That you were able to type it out is one thing; that you actually managed to click 'Post' and walk away thinking, "Yeah, I totally told them," is downright hilarious.