ZedsDeadBaby

Ahh, good 'ole Virfortis is back. I almost thought you were finally done for good. Right back to claiming the game is a deathmatch and everyone kills each other constantly despite there being stats right on the front page of this very website showing that 82% of active living players are not bandits, there's a 90:1 zombie to player kill ratio, and the average life expectancy has been consistently rising since bandit skins were taken out of the game several patches ago. Only about 15% of survival attempts end in murder. Yet, somehow it's a "constant deathmatch." Why don't your ideas get implemented Virfortis? Because they're bad ideas. That's why. And because you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

I promise you it's not. I will pop your thinksauce out the bank of your skullbox with a Makarov before you see me with your fancy schmancy whatever the fuck. Loot is irrelevant. Play the game. Have fun.

Do it.

This represents a huge jump. An almost 52% increase since the last patch. Is it accurate? If so, what's the cause? Could it be the removal of the starting Makarovs have quieted the constant fray on the bean coast? Not exactly the bandit slaughterhouse folks claimed it would be if they took away our starting guns.

Sounds like a pretty exciting and interesting story. Other than the fact that you died, which is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, why are you so upset? Everyone dies eventually. Don't worry so much about your stuff. Worry about the stories and experiences. And you just had a really interesting one, right? One you can tell other people about later? One you will remember for a long time? One that might make you think about humans and the way they treat each other? Seems like great success to me.

Well, the other stats seem back to normal, and expectancy is now 39 minutes. Not quite 47. But still a damn lick better than the 28 we were at prior to removal of the bandit skin.

Only if they alert me to your presence because they can smell your salty tears and soppy wet vagina.

How can a game without an end have end-game content?

There is some way of doing that. Attempt to socialize and cooperate with someone. If you succeed, you have successfully identified an individual who wants to socialize and cooperate. Beyond that, what do you want? Magic powers that allow you to know ahead of time without putting forth the effort? Finding ways to make contact and establish trust will be a big part of DayZ in the future, I expect. There aren't going to be any magic powers that tell you from a distance whether someone is going to be a friend. You will have to reach out, make contact, and, yes, even take the risk of being wrong and paying the price. Even people you DO link up and cooperate with may be suspect. How do you know they're not playing a long con, just looking to get into your group so they can access your tent storage and steal vehicles from you? You can't, and you shouldn't. Infiltration, betrayal and mistrust will also be a part of the game. If you are unwilling to make the effort of making contact and not willing to accept the risk of being wrong or being betrayed/lied to, then you will be relegated to your existing circle of trust. Any system that does this for you - conveniently categorizes players into nice neat little piles for you like over here we have the "huggy-hugs" and these ones are the "nasty-bads" and you can tell who is who because the good guys wear clown suits and the bad guys have horns and forked tongues is going to undermine the authenticity of DayZ and bypass much of the human emotional element that is, in my understanding, meant to play a central role in the experience of DayZ. Basically you want to skip over all the social and emotional challenges and get right to "playing the game." But you're ignoring the fact that the social and emotional challenges are just as important to DayZ as shooting zombies.

Better solutions here. And here. Not immediately knowing others' intentions is part of what makes this game intense and emotional. Asking the magical intentions faery to fly around painting everyone pretty colors so you can tell exactly who they are and what they're going to do from 1500m away is crude and unnecessary. Also, please search. This topic is covered ad nauseum in 50 other threads on the forums right now. Cheers.

I think my fix is pretty solid. Feel free to add your comments to the thread. Link in my signature.

Sounds like you're having fun, bami. More power to you I guess. But, you're not playing DayZ anymore. You're just playing a different game that steals assets and script from DayZ. You say there's still an element of the unknown, but I hardly think you're really living in fear of your coworkers betraying and murdering you, or stealing your vehicles, or emptying your base, or getting the drop on you while you're distracted fighting zombies, or any of the other myriad of ways in which unknown players can affect your game play. You can't strip away all the most challenging elements of the game and create an environment of complete safety and security that you have total control over and then call it "serious." The serious action takes place on legitimate servers. You're playing in the kiddie pool. Which is fine, have fun splashing around and stuff, but serious? No.

People have been doing that all along; it's nothing new to 1.7.1.5 and wouldn't account for the sudden upswing.

Those deaths are ignored and not counted among the average. You would think! But here we are. Maybe not everyone is playing the "run and pray" style you describe. Maybe the lack of a starting weapon has made people slow down and be more considerate about their initial actions. I know when I start weaponless I'm very methodical - quietly get off the coast and move towards the nearest deer stand or high value farm building.

PLEASE not another thread. Please? Go post in one of the other threads. There are so very, very many already.

Yes, except with the skinning system YOU are not the one monitoring reputation. You're asking the game to DO IT FOR YOU. A superior system would allow players themselves to recognize individuals, note behaviors, and make their own judgements and classifications. Read this idea from HardTarget. One from myself here. Don't ask the game to observe behaviors and make judgements for you. Do it yourself. "Skinning" systems are ugly, require magical intervention on the part of a third-party judge, and are prone to false positives. Player identification systems are authentic, immersive, player-driven, and any false positives/negatives will be due to the player's own inattention, not an inherent flaw in the code. Discuss.

If you want information about other players, gather it yourself. Then you can do with that information what you will. No magical faeries should be whispering information to you about actions you did not personally witness. Great idea from HardTarget here for identifying individuals you have seen previously in the game. One from myself here about classifying players you have seen according to behaviors you have witnessed. One can conceive of the ability to "describe" individuals to other players, so that you can pass on information about crimes you have witnessed to friends and colleagues. All of this and more are far more elegant and immersive mechanics than the bandit skin which was a lazy, inelegant, brute-force approach and prone to labeling players bandits for very un-bandit-like activity. There's absolutely no reason to bring it back when it could be replaced by superior systems that don't have the same magical properties of a third-party observer and judge. Make your own observations. Make your own judgements. Take your own actions. Enforce your own rules. I've watched this forum argue in circles for weeks about how great the game was when the code tried to do all this work for us, yet life expectancy was lower back then (with half as many players no less) and calls of "Friendly?" were not nearly as effective as folks seem to remember. This mythical utopian society that people seem to recall never existed. "Friendly?" was as like to be met with a clip of makarov rounds as it was to result in an awesome bout of cooperative gaming. I can say with confidence that the bandit skin is not coming back. Not because I have inside information but because I trust the team to recognize the inherent weakness and bluntness of the system, and the benefits of a more player-driven, player-controlled form of behavior classification.

Too right! The question is, do we want the game developers to swoop in on fiery warhorses brandishing golden whips and start enforcing magical, divine law? Thrashing anyone who steps out of the pre-defined boxes of acceptable play? Or do we want them to provide us, the players, a means to do something about it ourselves? To create our own system of law and our own means of enforcement? I prefer the latter, personally. Why should the designers have to do our dirty work for us? Give players the means to recognize/remember players whom they have witnessed commit crimes, and they can do whatever they want with that information up to and including enforcing their own brand of apocalyptic justice. Once you start calling for the designers to wave their magic wands and "punish" anyone who acts in a manner discordant with the will of the machine, then you've lost me and you've lost much of what makes DayZ great.

Because I don't want the life my my 40-day-old survivor and everything I've accomplished in the game to rest on the whims of some 15-year-old who nicked his mother's credit card. Unless and until hosting becomes "official" and centralized/standaridzed (which is a long way off, if ever even feasible), then asking people to tie their lives to a single server is simply unreasonable. There are too many variables, too much uncertainty and too many ways in which the owner of a particular server can disrupt your experience in the game.

Yeah; I don't necessarily think people should be building cities out there, but I don't see anything wrong with traveling through. If you have the fuel to spare and you're willing to risk being completely and totally exposed to fire from over 2km away in any direction, then more power to you. It's almost never going to be the most efficient route, but sometimes it might help to pop out and take advantage of the increased vehicle speed.