Target Practice (DayZ)

See, that's the sort of thing I was hoping for - this wasn't a thread I created just to have a bit of a whine about KOS, or to complain about all those horrible mean people who stop me from playing on my own on a multiplayer server, I'm genuinely trying to reach out to the wider community to see if we can't actually get our heads together and come up with a fair solution to the problem.

See, I can't really take this 'there's nothing you can do about it, it's here to stay etc' answer, because no-one's ever tried, so how can we possibly know that there's nothing we can do to mitigate it? As mentioned earlier, the closest we've come was when the .50 snipers were removed, and despite all the crying and whinging at the time (mainly by players whose DayZ experience amounted to sitting on sniper hill with an AS50), DayZ came out the other side a better balanced game. I'm not trying some ridiculous campaign to eradicate KOS from the game, and I'm certainly not suggesting that if we just push one magic button that we can make the nasty people go away, what I'm trying to push is that too much KOS is potentially a severe enough problem that it could move the focus of players away from the 'survival' aspect and towards the 'combat' aspect, and that (as Hetstaine quite rightly points out), it's the interactions with the players who don't say hello with muzzle flashes that are when DayZ is at it's finest. Dgeesio, you're quite right - as long as there are at least two people left on the planet, someone is going to want someone else dead, and Hetstaine is right in saying that if you put two people in a small room with a plate of waffles, sooner or later one of them is going to die of suspicious waffle-related injuries - it's the ugly side of human nature, and no game is going to change that. I don't know where you keep getting this 'if you tell people they can't do it, they'll do it more' idea from, though - I've never once suggested telling people they can't do it, and I wouldn't ever propose such a thing. What I'm suggesting is just finding a way of making the 'murderer' playstyle less of the easy option it is now - at least find some way of having a downside to playing that way.

So what you're saying essentially is 'it's going to be really hard to do, so we shouldn't even try'? That's a pretty lousy way of looking at it, however you slice things. As I said in my initial post, I'm not completely against KoS. In some situations, I'm actually in favour of it in small enough doses - for example, I have no issue with being shot at on sight around/near the NWAF - it's an extremely high-value loot spawn, anyone there is almost certainly going to be looking for a high-powered weapon, and there's no way of telling if they're going to be using that weapon to defend themselves or to kill someone else - hell, I've shot first and asked questions later on more than one occasion up there. I'm not trying to stop players killing other players. Hell, I could not possibly imagine a worse move for DayZ - the threat of other players is exactly what makes DayZ the tense and gripping experience it is. What I'm trying to work out is if there is a way of making it a less appealing option - as I said in the post before yours, right now there doesn't really seem to be any reason NOT to just shoot everyone you see, and long-term, I think that's going to hurt DayZ, as players like myself (and I presume quite a few others) who can live with getting shot in the odd robbery gone wrong or by a surprised looter in a supermarket will just get fed up of getting shot in the head every time they go within 300m of a town/city and go play something else, and DayZ will just end up as a giant open-world deathmatch with a few zombies and survival elements mixed in, which I don't think is what it's intended to be.

Personally, I think it's a twofold issue - one, there's currently not enough gameplay to go round for the amount that people are playing it. That's not a criticism, and I do understand that this is simply a constraint brought about by the fact DayZ is a mod, and also that the Standalone will be looking to fix this. People know where the good loot is, and the spawns are frequent enough that you can die, gear up enough to clear out the zombies and get yourself to a military loot spawn inside an hour of play. Once you've done that, your options are either try and find and repair a vehicle/heli (which you can spend hours doing and then find it's vanished/been 'borrowed' when you log back in), or you can go hunt something slightly (although not always) smarter than zombies to pass the time. Mostly, it's the latter. Secondly, (and related to my point about being able to be tooled up inside an hour) at the moment at least, there doesn't actually seem to be any downside to just murdering everyone you see - if you die, you respawn, run back to your body (or the nearest military base) and just find another assault rifle and get right back to it. A 'survivor' player has to balance all the stuff that goes with their playstyle (avoiding zombies, staying alive, finding loot, making sure you're well equipped for as many situations as possible) AS WELL as avoiding getting shot in the back of the head for walking round the wrong corner at the wrong time. A murderer (let's not call them bandits, as there is a clear definition between a 'bandit', who will rob you for your stuff and let you walk away, and a murderer who will just shoot you because... well, because he has a gun, and that's what you do with guns, isn't it?) doesn't really have any of that. Their playstyle involves finding a gun, finding a high player traffic area, and maybe a good hiding place if they have a long-range gun. Kill, die, rinse, repeat. There's probably quite a few players out there that have never played DayZ any other way, and that is abhorrent.

Hell, if I could come up with a solution to a problem like this one, I sure as hell wouldn't be giving it away for free on here. :P I'm not saying I have all the answers. Hell, I'm not even saying I have any of the answers. What I'm trying to say is that whereas before I was just convinced that it was a passing fad that would pass in a few months when the short-attention-span guys get bored and move on to the 'next big thing', I'm now not so sure that's the case, and I'm legitimately concerned that this could negatively impact on the whole DayZ experience, and that perhaps the developers need to consider looking at it again. Despite all the complaining and whining at the time, it now seems to be fairly well agreed that the removal of the 50 cals was a pretty positive thing for game balance. Perhaps the next logical step is making ammo rarer than rocking horse shit, so at least the KOS brigade will likely save it for a target that's actually worth killing. What a superbly helpful, reasonable and well-thought-out post. I'm glad you decided to share that with us all. Now please either contribute something worthwhile to the discussion or leave the thread for people who actually have something interesting to say. EDIT: Heh, you must have posted this while I was typing my reply. This is the problem for me - damaging loot is all well and good if the person doing the killing gives half a shit about the loot. The fact is, it seems like a not insignificant number of players don't even care about what you're carrying, they will simply shoot you because that's what they feel like doing at the time, and in that situation, the risk of damaged loot isn't really going to be a deterrent. Sure, it'll make hold-ups more common and just killing someone because you want their gear a little less common, but I'm not sure it addresses the problem of the idiots running round the countryside like Rambo because they've got an M16 CCO and 20 mags' worth of STANAG rounds.

Oh, I'm not talking about robbers. This guy had no interest in robbing me - it would have been plainly obvious that unless I was carrying an ACU full of heroin and gold bullion, I had nothing that was going to make killing me a worthwhile proposition. He was just killing me to kill me. He didn't care about the zombies that were surrounding him or the zombies he was going to attract by shooting me, he just saw another player and everything that wasn't killing that player ceased to exist.

I agree completely, Chabowski - at the very least, the function should be there to use should it be desired, I was simply indicating that the other part that was mentioned (the sheets) would be pretty unlikely.

I'm not saying it's a new problem, I'm saying it's a severe problem, and it's one that perhaps needs looking at by someone actually involved with the game rather than just complaining about on the forums by the likes of me. :)

Agree with the UI points raised by others - the new icons and particularly the gear menu are a little cluttered, and visually don't really suit the style of the game (IMHO, anyway) Had a mild issue with a 'not dying after being unconscious' bug where I was for some reason dropping into 'minus' blood levels but still being able to move around and act normally, that's been reported elsewhere. As far as gameplay goes, all has seemed good so far. I like the direction things have been heading from a gameplay point of view, so apart from the odd hiccup here and there with bugs, it's all been pretty sweet.

I've now twice encountered a bug where after being knocked unconscious and then killed, I will 'wake up' with the unconscious hourglass appearing on-screen (complete with the white filter), but be able to move around as normal. Not only could this be a huge exploit if I was armed (I wasn't, either time), if you have no way of killing the zombies attacking you, then you're actually stuck in some kind of limbo - for some reason you're not 'dead' (at least until you log out and log back in), but you can't abort, because it registers you as in combat. I actually had to alt-f4 out of the game, because there was no other way I could think of to resolve the situation.

Whilst morse code is a nice idea, in practice, I don't think it's been widely used for many years, so I'm not sure if having hundreds of morse sheets just dotted around would be likely. I worked as a Coastguard for ten years and think I heard something transmitted in morse precisely once. The occasions that morse is used (at least in a maritime environment) is generally in single letter codes signifying a specific meaning, and are often used in fog or poor visibility - for example, Morse letter M (dash-dash, I think) means 'I am stopped', or K (dash-dot-dash) means 'I want to speak to you'. Whilst some of those could be carted across to DayZ and could make for quite an interesting experience, I can't see it being widely adopted - let's face it, we're having a hard enough time convincing the playerbase not to shoot unarmed freshspawns in the face under the guise of 'banditry', so I don't think we'll have much luck convincing them that when someone in the dark flashes their torch in a certain way it means they want to talk. :p

How is saying that someone made an unfunny joke being a pretentious dick? Actually, I don't care. Let's not let one terrible attempt at funny derail a pretty decent thread about a pretty decent article.

Hell, I love a sick joke as much as the next guy, but that just wasn't funny. Not in a "oh my god, you shouldn't evar joke about someone dying that's soooo not funny" way, more in a "Dude, you're trying too hard" kind of way.

Can't tell if deliberately trolling or just really, really stupid. All I can say for sure is that I really, really hope this is just an unfunny attempt at a joke.

I've generally been pretty positive about this whole project, but I have to admit being a little concerned that the zombies are '0% done' - as supposedly one of the biggest threats in Chernarus, a lot of work is going to be needed to turn them from what they are now (a mild inconvenience at worst, unless they walk through a wall and break your legs) into a feasible threat. Personally, I'd want that to be the first thing they sorted - once the zombie behaviour which is going to form a core part of the gameplay is down, then you can build all the player-centric stuff around that. I could be completely and utterly wrong, and I freely admit that I don't know the first thing about programming - it just seems that as it's an area they've had so much trouble with zombie behaviour in the mod, it would make sense to work on it early and get it complete and out of the way so you can build the rest of the experience around it. Either way, I'm still looking forward to seeing what's coming. :)

Thanks for the transcript, it's much appreciated. :)

The simple fact of it is, the vast majority of those players who bitch and complain that the Alpha isn't here yet are going to be the same ones who would A) complain that the ALPHA isn't polished enough and has bugs, and B) Drop DayZ like a hot brick the second something else shiny and well-hyped comes along and distracts them. The fans/players who understand and accept that anything worth having is also worth waiting for are much more likely to stick around and ride out those early bugs and go on to form the spine of the DayZ community. It's pleasing to see that Rocket understands that.

I can still hear the little bells... :( OH GOD THE BELLS.

I had a quick scout around over a couple of days and picked up enough to be able to translate the roadsigns, but I doubt I'll ever get round to learning much more than that unless the need arises. As HerrJon says, the easier way to know where you are is to learn the art of fixing your position on a map - that way you won't have to learn a whole new language every time you wind up in a different locale, but if you can supplement that skill with the ability to read the road signs, then so much the better. :)

Does this mean that Matt is actually Kiefer Sutherland?! Zomg.

Not at all. I agree that in that case he was just being a whiner. If you're going to point a gun at someone, you should be prepared to use it if they don't play ball. You can't force someone to play the game in a way they don't want to - DayZ is not a RP game, and no-one is obligated to behave in any way. However, there needs to be a balance. If everyone was too nicey-nicey and went out of their way to help everyone, the game would lose a lot of its tension - let's be honest, zombies are not a real threat to any halfway competent player. On the other hand, if there's too much KoS, it's just going to turn into one giant deathmatch, and a big part of what makes DayZ entertaining (the social aspect of the game and working together) will be lost, and that would be a crying shame. Right now, things are okay - there's maybe a little more KoS than perhaps would be ideal, but DayZ is popular right now, so that's to be expected. It'll get a hell of a lot worse when the SA gets here, trust me. :P

You need to speak to Vilayer about that. Why would anyone here know? :)

Agreed. A simple 'official' getting started video embedded on the 'download' page would make things a lot easier for newbies. Installing DayZ can be fairly daunting if you're not particularly savvy with installing mods etc.

That's fair enough, and I understand the reasoning behind it, but at the risk of sounding like a whiner, I do think it could do with a little adjusting - I fully support the idea behind some zeds doing nothing - it makes perfect sense that not every zed will simply be wandering round, and the idea of having to grab loot from more or less right under their noses is an appealing and dramatic one. However, at the moment near enough every other loot pile has a static zed right on top of it. I have no problem with having to sneak right past one stood 5 metres away to get to my loot, but it seems overly unfair and a kind of 'fake' difficulty to have zeds physically standing on top of loot piles, especially with the frequency they're doing it at the moment. It's almost impossible for an unarmed/newspawn player to get loot from rural areas at the moment.

As you're currently in the thread, R4Z0R, I might as well ask, as it's been bugging the tits off me - I presume you're aware of the issue with zeds remaining stuck completely static right on top of loot spawns (particularly those outside un-enterable single-story houses, but it's pretty widespread)? Is this a side effect of the problems that the zombies have been having in 1.7.7, or a new bug altogether (or - please god no - a deliberate feature)?