Positronica

One metric that would be really interesting to see is what the break down of DayZ's player base is at any one time... specifically, what percentage of players at any one time are relatively new, and what percentage have been playing the game long term? I might be wrong, but I have a feeling that the ratio for those numbers skews very heavily towards lots of new players, and only a small core of long term players. Or in other words, of the players who give DayZ a try, only a small number stick around in the game for an extended period. Now, maybe those numbers are ok for DayZ, but I'd say for any game, the higher your churn rate, the shorter your shelf life is for continued development. How this all pertains to the OP's post, is that I think a strong case can be made DayZ's strong hardcore nature when it comes to death and starting over completely from scratch does not foster long term appeal for the game. I know that there's plenty of players who will say they like it the way it is, and there's plenty who will say they even think the hardcore/permadeath nature of the game should be taken farther, however, I will make the claim that such players are a minority when it comes to gamers. Now, maybe that minority is enough to support DayZ, but if you look at the gaming industry in general, there really aren't any success stories for multiplayer, character driven hardcore/permadeath games. Maybe DayZ SA will be different, though. Maybe the early game will be dynamic and enjoyable enough that players won't mind starting over from scratch every time they die, even after playing the game for months, but personally I doubt it. My prediction is that once the initial hoopla over DayZ SA subsides, what we'll end up with is a highly churning player base of newbs doing the early game grind a bunch of times before they move on to another game out of either boredom or frustration, while the small number of long term players in the game bypass the early game either by always running to their corpse/tent, getting free loot from a friend, or by only making use of the game for the dash-and-grab PvP battles in the starting spawn areas. Maybe that will be fun enough for some people, but if DayZ really wants to leave a lasting mark in the gaming industry, then it's going to need a way for players to make long term achievements in the game that aren't as fleeting as the next sniper's bullet.

I expect there will be more threads coming with people suggesting features from Origins. Frankie's latest series of DayZ videos involve him doing a bunch of stuff with the custom vehicles, the NPCs, and the player made structures. Since his videos routinely get in excess of 1 million views, I expect there's going to be a lot of players who are suddenly going to like a least some of what they see.

No offense, but something like that would be terrible for the game. For every one person that took another player hostage for some sort of story or roleplaying based encounter, there'd be 99 who used it purely as a way to grief. You'd have roving gangs of bandits who's only "goal" in the game would be to take hostages and then taunt/torture them until they rage quit, either to go to another server, or to another game. The game doesn't need any features that allow one player to essentially remove another player's ability to do anything besides watch the game for potentially hours on end. It would mean that every time you got attacked, you'd have the risk of essentially being stuck with an indefinite respawn timer before you could play again, and during the whole wait you'd have to deal with some 14yo insulting you. No thanks.

I'm gonna vote no. It's already a part of the game that's too tedious and boring as it is. It doesn't need to be more of a time sink. The only good fix would be to just replace morphine with a wood splint that could be crafted by anyone who uses a hatchet near a tree. The healing time shouldn't be extended though. If shouldn't take any longer to heal, or be any more complex game play wise, than it is for a player to remove any of the other status effects in the game. Or better yet, get rid of the broken leg mechanic altogether and just replace it with a more abstract trauma/dazed mechanic which would be more inline with the very abstract bleeding mechanic already.

Unless the reliability of connections to the server is significantly upped for the SA, I can't see them implementing anything that's all that harsh. I'd be willing to bet I get dropped by a server close to once a day, regardless of what server I'm playing on. Sometimes it's due to a lag spike, and sometimes it's due to bugs in the game. And it's not just me. If I'm teamed up with other players for anything longer than a couple hours, it's virtually guaranteed that at least one person in the group, if not more, will get dropped or kicked at some point while adventuring. The only penalty I could see them adding in the SA would be that your character persists in the world for X number of seconds if you lose connection while in combat, or possibly a restriction that you can't rejoin a server for five minutes or so. Auto-death or gear wipes would lead to endless streams of rage posts on the forums every time someone got fucked over by a bad server connection or a bug. I also can't see them barring a player from rejoining until after a server reset. There's no way they'd put something in the game that allows the consequence of bugs or lag to be that a player can't play the game for hours, if not days. I think more than likely they'll give combat logging a small amount of attention in the SA, and if it's still a problem, they'll leave it up to private admins to handle once private hives are allowed.

I think the best and simplest solution would just be that if a pilot in a helicopter goes DC, the helicopter automatically goes into auto-hover, and when the player logs back in he's back in the pilot seat, and as for cars, if the driver goes DC, the car automatically applies the brakes until the car has stopped. That would probably fix 90% of the issues, and it wouldn't involve the vehicle doing anything it wouldn't have been able to do if the player was still actively piloting it.

Why? What does it add to the game? There's a reason why pretty much every game that allows player to player interaction takes steps to limit pure griefing. As I explained above, the only purpose of such a feature is to fuck with other players. There's no strategic or personal benefit that a player gains by contaminating a lake. And with the nature of the gameplay and the Chernarus map, there's almost no realistic character driven reason why someone would contaminate a lake beyond saying they're "role playing" a crazy psycho. Therefore, if a feature has no gameplay based reason to be added, and if it has no story based reason to be added, why spend the time coding it? If your playerbase treats the world and it's story as real, and tries to play their character realistically in that setting, then it's a feature that will almost never be used, and if your playerbase decides to game the system, and just fuck with other players any way they can, regardless of the world's story, then it's a feature that will be abused and will likely need to be removed. Under either situation, it's a waste of coding effort. And on top of that, even if you really believe that in a post-apocalypse setting everyone would just be total assholes that tried to murder and poison random strangers, while generally trying to fuck up the world anyway they could, and therefore allowing such behavior to flourish in DayZ is totally great and real, you're still stuck with the fact that the easiest way for other players to solve the challenge of poisoned lakes is to just avoid the entire water mechanic altogether.

The primary purpose I can see for such a feature would be griefing, and the game doesn't need features that are only good for that. The PvP strategic value of contaminating a lake is almost non-existent. There wouldn't be any "starving out" of players, because there's enough mobility, and enough options for hunting for water/soda that a single location, especially a lake, is almost never critical to survival for a single player, much less a clan. On top of that, water is already more of a hassle than just using soda to fill your thirst needs. Soda is often found during the course or normal looting, while filling a water bottle requires a detour to a water source, plus boiling the water, and then wasting an inventory slot on an empty bottle once you've drank it. Adding a new time sink of having to meticulously search a lake to make sure it's free of zombie bodies before taking water from it would just push people to use soda even more than they do now, which is already a problem with realism in the game. The other big problem is that the player interaction it creates is way too far removed and next to impossible for players to base their social interactions off of. The contaminator is almost never going to know who he poisoned, if anyone, and the contaminee is almost never going to know who, or even from where, he got poisoned. And if you take that into consideration, all it would add is more unrealistic psychopath behavior to the game. The dissociative nature of video games already allows people to turn off their conscience much more than they would in a real life situation. If you add a feature to a game that can be used to hamper another player with almost no risk to the instigator, and almost no chance of being judged, shunned, or even found out by other player, then that feature will have a very high chance of being abused.

This has been suggested before, and it's something that definitely needs to be done. In fact, I'm surprised it wasn't done first instead of adding the new machete.

The problem is that you can't "force" players to play a game at all, since they always will have the option of just shutting the game off. On top of that, blocking server hopping really wouldn't do much to prevent players from avoiding night time. Anyone who didn't want to play at night would just make a character on a server where night time occurs outside of their normal gaming hours. Now I'm sure someone will say, "well just lock all servers to the same schedule", but that doesn't work either because gamers all over the world have different local peak gaming times. It wouldn't be fair to say gamers in Europe if everyone there who logs on after school or work ALWAYS has to play at night because every server has it's day/night cycle locked to a US time zone. The best solution to servers being abandoned during their night cycle is to first off make the night experience more fun, and secondly, to get rid of the pointless 24-hour cycle. The number of players who actually sit through an entire day/night cycle during a DayZ gaming session has to be absolutely miniscule, if not completely non-existent. Therefore, we need to be asking why it's even in the game. For arguments sake, let's assume that the average gamer plays DayZ for 4 hours per daily gaming session. When it comes to the day/night experience, those players can be broken down into four groups... A. Players who experience only day. B. Players who experience only night. C. Players who experience some day, followed by a transition and some night. D. Players who experience some night, followed by a transition and some day. As you can see, no players actually experience the actual 24-hour day/night cycle. No one ever "survives" a whole night, or adventures all day from dawn to dusk. And if no one ever actually experiences something, why is it in the game? On top of that, all of the players in groups A and B are never even experiencing a big part of the game. I mean, what if BI announced that they were going to be developing two different games, one called DayZ: Night, and one called DayZ: Day? We'd all be saying that's a stupid idea and that the two games should just be combined. However, by sticking to the 24-hour day/night cycle, BI has essentially set up the equivalent of that situation. The gameplay, loot requirements, and strategy involved during a session of DayZ gaming are varied depending on if it's night time or day time, and it would be good for the long-term health, replayability, and freshness of the game if the average gamer got to experience both situations during an average gaming session. If we assume that the average gaming session is 4 hours long, then the day/night cycle should be changed to 4 hours. (Say 2 hours of daylight, 30 minutes of transition to night, 1 hour of night, and then a 30 minute transition back to daylight.) This would be more immersive, since a player would experience one "day" in DayZ during one day of gaming, and it would effortless add a lot of content to the game, since it would suddenly take the huge number of players from groups A and B from above and suddenly give then each a big new gaming experience to play every session. On top of that, even if night is a little harder, and a little less fun for some players, having it only last an hour is probably short enough to prevent massive server hopping to avoid it, while at the same time being long enough for players to experience a decent amount of adventure and self-story telling during one night sequence.

Obviously I was being sarcastic, but the point I've tried to make a few times is that I don't think there really is a conflict. I judge the playerbase more by their actions then by their words, and judging them by the choice of server selection, the availability of third person view is simply something that nearly the entire playerbase doesn't have a problem with. That being said, the proposed change to third person that gets posted sometimes, and that would probably be acceptable, would be if the camera was dynamic and closed in when you were up against walls and the like. This would only be worth adding if it was programmed well, though, because a lot of games with a similar camera feature end up getting pretty wonky.

By the same token, third person can be left in and everyone will keep on playing the game happily, as evidenced by the fact that virtually everyone repeatedly chooses to play on servers where it's an option, even though they could easily join servers without it. Plus, I think you're underestimating the complaining that it's removal would lead to. Third person view, especially in open world games is kind of a design standard now. Clearly there exists a sizable number of gamers out there who value it as a option, and there's no reason to think that those gamers don't play DayZ.

Yes it is. PvE is still far and away the core of the game. Heck, unless you've got friends or a camp, you can't even PvP without going through the PvE game after every death. And when PvP does occur, it's almost always a quick, short affair and then it's right back to dealing with the PvE world. And even if you're actively hunting for PvP, you're still always subject to the PvE game as you move through the world. But even if you're right, even if DayZ is now just all about the PvP, then that's a failure of the game, plus from the little bit we've seen about the stand alone, I think it's safe to say that BI still intends to make PvE and the zombie experience what DayZ is primarily about. Because if they fail at that, then DayZ might quickly find itself lumped into the vast multitude of PvP/Deathmatch games out there, leaving the door wide open for a competitor to steal their sandbox survival thunder. And trust me, if DayZ SA sells well, there's a good chance we'll start seeing some competition. The War Z, despite all it's massive flaws, proved one thing, and that's that you can bring a zombie survival game to market quickly, mainly because it doesn't need much scripted content. BI will have the advantage, due to the MMO style engine they're putting together for the SA, but gamers are fickle, and they could lose that advantage fast if they don't deliver new content at a fast enough pace, and especially if they fail to focus on the elements of the game that make DayZ unique and special. I would debate that. I think most players, when they know there's a hostile player nearby go into first person view, so that they're ready to shoot accurately at a moment's notice. Maybe you live in an area with terrible ping times to most servers, but the server list is still chock full of servers running vanilla DayZ. But even if every private hive chose to run a modified verson of DayZ, what's your argument? Are you saying its not fair that other people aren't using their money to give you the game experience you want instead of the game experience they want? Also, if you really are unhappy with every server that you can reliably connect to, there's nothing stopping you from hosting your own server, you could even make it first person only. On top of that, keep in mind that the only reason DayZ exists is because Arma 2 allowed for massive amounts of modding and customization when it came to the game. If DayZ SA reverses that, what sort of unexpected future mod might we miss out on? You're right, when it comes to first person and third person view, we should make all servers uniform, and since right now, 99.9% of players have chosen to play on servers that allow both third and first person, we should make that the standard for all servers. Or is that not what you meant? ;-)

Everyone could choose to play on servers with crosshairs and nametages, but tons of players don't. Everyone could choose to play on servers with maximized loot spawns and all sorts of starter gear, but tons of players don't. Everyone could choose to play on No-PVP servers, but tons of players don't. Everyone could have thrown a fit and whined and pouted when peripheral dots were removed, but they didn't. And the same can be said about the removal of thermal scopes and other items. The point being that the playerbase has demonstrated that they have the ability to judge what features make the game more or less enjoyable. And if they tried adding a radar to the game, I highly doubt people would flock to it and say "awesome". I think you'd see the opposite... most servers would refuse the patch until the radar was removed or an option to turn it off at the server level was made available. If what you've describes happens all the time and it's a huge detriment to the game, how come players aren't flocking to the first person only servers?

Well, first off, removing a globally popular feature is a bad idea in any game. (Note: this has to be a measurement of the feature's popularity across the entire playerbase, taking into account that different players are going to have different subjective levels of affinity to a certain feature.) And secondly, my reply was in response to a post that was arguing in favor of gimping third person view entirely from PvP based arguments. DayZ is primarily a zombie survival PvE game, with PvP as a consequence of it's open, hardcore world. The PvE game is far and away the game's focus, though, and thus design decisions should be made with how they will impact PvE taking priority over how they will impact PvP. Because when it comes to PvE, a player's choice to use first person or third person has no impact on someone else's gameplay, and a player who doesn't like third person in his PvE experience can play entirely in first person on every server in the game. The ONLY reason to argue for the removal or gimping of third person view is for PvP reasons, or because you're a narcissist who can't stand the thought of other players not taking your advice on how the game should be experienced. As someone above me posted, how often have you actually seen what you describe occur? To be honest, I can't think of a single time that I've been ambushed by a bandit in such a situation. 99% of the times I've been killed by another player it's been by a sniper at extreme range, or a sudden surprise run in with another player where we both stumble upon each other at close range. Sure, in theory third person view can grant some significant ambush advantages, but only if you absolutely have to stage the ambush from a very specific location. Pick any spot on the map, and there's likely a ton of locations from which you could stage an ambush with little chance of being spotted without needing to use third person, and the locations that only work if you use third person probably have worse escape routes, too. The point being, that I think it's a stretch to paint third person view as some sort of exploit that's drastically influencing the nature of PvP in DayZ. I don't enjoy playing on those type of servers myself, but I'm guessing the multitude of players who do frequent those servers think that they're a better gameplay experience than the vanilla servers. And who cares if they do? It doesn't impact mine or your gameplay. If anything, it helps our gameplay experience, 'cause their support of the game leads to a larger investment in development and expansion on the part of BI. "Easy mode" is subjective... and as I stated above, DayZ is supposed to be fun and enjoyable to play. That's all that matters. Granted, that's a subjective measurement, too, but the best way to maximize enjoyability for the playerbase is to give server operators and players more options, and not less, on how they experience the game.