dunkhan

Thanks for your input. A few comments though: Player clothing as loot will not solve the problem unless a) people spawn with a random set of it and b) there is enough different clothing options to make player recognition possible in most cases. Given the hash collision problem this means on a 50 person server you will have to have hundreds of possible skins. Chat and BIS patch, yeah that would be good. It still doesn't 100% solve the problem but it at least moves it to being a player issue, ie some people don't have microphones or just suck at communication. "You said a lot about the problem, but you didn't suggest many fixes." If you can get me a copy of the source for both ArmA and the mod I will try to investigate solutions. Till then I will stick to outlining the problems. "I dont personnaly like your dot system" Any comment as to why? It was just an example system so if your problem is with the dots themselves then it is not a dealbreaker. The point was when I see someone irl, I remember their face, and if I see them again I go 'hey it's that guy'. I was trying to envision a way of simulating this. Having some way of marking a player in a way that can be seen from a distance of say 30 meters, and maybe only from the front, would do that nicely and should not be terribly hard to implement.

Wow a lot of anger and aggression. I guess Rocket's tears cup is filling up. I was actually someone who advocated for removing bandit skins for realism purposes, and now that they are out I will continue to be friendly. I expect to get killed more often because I don't know who to run from and who to approach, but collecting cool gear is mostly what the game is for and if I don't die every now and then I will not have anything left to collect. I do have a couple of things I would like to add to the discussion though. The new findable skins idea is good, but not great. You are going to end up with all new characters looking the same, and also with the most common decent warm clothing being worn by most others. Kind of like the alice pack previously, and now the coyote backpack since that has become more common. I think the most important thing to consider with skins above all else is the ability to recognise and identify players by sight. This would change the game completely, and it would do so perfectly in line with all the ideals that the devs and the community are aiming for. Clothing as loot is not good enough. What I would suggest is having a huge set of clothing that you can choose to spawn with. So that each player can customise their character's look from the outset. I don't want each player to be unique, mistaken identity and disguise should be at least possible, but in general you should recognise people you have met before. This will enable so much more player interaction and cooperation the effects can not be underestimated. I have also suggested earlier a system where it is possible to mark a player in some way that only you can see. I still think this is worth considering.

My suggestions are also boring: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=5915

This is a high cost suggestion in terms of implementation I think. It would be totally awesome though and probably well worth the effort. Also respect for playing as a doctor ingame.

World of warcraft is not fun... what are you even talking about? If you have internet tourettes please don't think me insensitive.

Hmm not a single comment. To me this is absolutely the most important list of things that break cooperation. I also know that a lot of people want to encourage cooperation. No one wants to discuss these things?

I guess it must be broken then. We could fix it by simply shutting down all the servers though.

Can we please stop misusing the term carebears. Carebears is internet slang for people that avoid pvp in games that have pvp, and prefer to try and get by without it, usually by hiding in safe places and grinding pve content. The people you are complaining about are the ones whining about dying all the time and wanting the game to be easier. The internet slang for this group is crybabies.

I disagree that day z provides no incentive to cooperate, cooperation gives you a huge tactical advantage in combat, it makes zombies way less dangerous (if you get knocked down you are not automatically dead), and cooperation with strangers is exciting and scary, as well as having a good feeling of RP/immersion and also feeling like you helped someone out. Having said that I support your suggestion and think it is a good idea.

This is similar to the take a town idea but much more practical. To get it across all servers would be hard and only realistic in the long term but to set this up on a single server I think 5 people would be enough. South of Kamarovo at the docks is a big industrial building http://picacid.com/arma2/imgs/Land_Tovarna2.jpg which is easy to defend. It has two exits, one of which can be wired off. It has multiple rooms all of which have high windows that snipers cant see you through. It also has roof access. It is near many of the spawn areas. My suggestion for this as an outpost would be as follows: two main guards who stand watching the main doorways (yes more than two would be better), two people to go foraging and recruiting, and the 5th guy with a CZ some distance off, able to spot, report and neutralize bandits approaching the main building. A spotter on the roof would be useful too but also a dangerous job. I think if we use this location as the standard base, or choose another location but make it the official survivor location, we could make something fairly persistent. Yes bandits will attack sometimes, that would be exciting and realistic. But we should be able to fight them off most of the time. The biggest advantage of such a setup is that even if some of the defenders get killed in an attack, if the defence holds, the dead can come back after respawning and collect their stuff again.

@ the last 3 post in the order they were posted. Yes it is boring, but if sitting around for 5 hours and nothing happening is not your cup of tea then Day Z is probably not the game for you. Having said that I would definitely support this idea of doing it as an event in addition to trying to set it up as a more permanent thing. Yes I have thought of bandits server hopping. There is nothing I can do to prevent them trying it. When I think of 'sufficient security' in this project I am bearing his in mind however. Sufficient would mean every room is covered by a guard. When you spawn you sit there for a while before you can move or shoot. I have been killed on the loading screen before myself. To be honest any bandit that tries this once we have enough guards is just donating his stuff to the cause. Yes we will need a doctor. I will keep you posted. I was even considering allowing exactly one bandit to come in as a doctor if they wanted to get their humanity up, but that system is changing now so we will have to wait and see what the situation is with that. I will personally be going on or sending others on runs to cherno hospital (unless the new spawns in balota have blood) for bloodpacks and such when we get up and running. I also plan to supply food and drink and possibly ammunition if we can spare it.

Ok the new patch seems to have resulted in huge lag issues. This combined with server instability, communication being nearly impossible, and not being able to identify players, makes ideas like this something for the future, maybe. I am not giving up, but I am putting it on hold pending development changes that enable this kind of action.

I plan to have another crack at this today. Please post interest in meeting up. I am available now but I won't be going on or choosing a server yet as I want to try and get some people together first and not just hang out there waiting.

So a lot of tall talk from bandits. Anyone got any claims of actual action or is it just all 'I'm gonna'. Whoever said a helecopter raid was coming, could you send one to my survival outpost too? It would be really nice.

What time zones? I am in Berlin and would love some help setting up this project http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3722 I feel that if we successfully run something like this for a few sessions on various servers it could become a trend, meaning that there will commonly be a safe area on most servers and also player roles like administrators and merchants for those of us who want to do something different. Plus I expect some bandit fights.

The bandit threat is exaggerated. They like to play up their reputation on the forums and in chat because smacktalk is part of the whole bandit thing, and fear and distrust make them stronger. The truth is bandits are around 10% of the population, and being unable to work together outside of the occasional small group, inherently weak. I help people all the time and rarely get shot. These horror stories are isolated incidents, and although shocking backstabbing is fairly common, the story where the guy doesn't turn around and shoot his saviour is even more common.

So what news from this project? Any luck? My experience so far has been that the bandit threat is somewhat exaggerated. For a start bandits are unable to work together, and also very paranoid about dying. In a properly patrolled zone individual bandits are more of a resource than a threat.

OK I am stopping for today. Learned some things. The problem with the servers going up and down and only being joinable for a short amount of time is a major hassle. Not much that can be done about that though. There was some interest, I had about 3 people making their way down to me, but no one arrived. There was one survivor, just exploring, who came by. He looked at me a while and then shot me in the head. The lesson I learned from this is don't try to be the first member of an outpost if you have a nice looking backpack. I was expecting that to happen at least once though so no biggie. The funny thing is after losing dozens of good items to save failure/rollback in the last couple of days, when I respawned on another server I was still alive and hadn't lost anything. I guess that bug goes both ways. It means I still have a nice backpack though so I will probably get shot again by the next survivor who comes along. I used new world order's teamspeak (they have a thread with details in this forum) which worked out well. I will try this again next time I am online. If we just had two people instead of only one, players coming in and trying to kill us wouldn't be a problem as the second player could just shoot them while they loot. Like I said 5 people would make this really defendable. Being alone kind of sucks. Anyway progress was made, but not much. Watch this space. Edit: Someone suggested leaving contact details here, My steam name is Duncan, but a steam search for drunken4ever is likely to lead to less false positives.

http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3722&pid=36240#pid36240 I speak German come join me

Ok so I am going to be on Seattle for a while at the factory building, that is south of kamarovo in the docks. I will be on a few hours. If you are wearing a bandit skin you will be killed on sight. I may be able to allow friendly bandits later if this plan works out, but for the moment stay away. I am using coms (ts3), you can pm me on the forum for the details or just come on down and ask me on direct chat. I will not be advertising coms here, and I will not be advertising the safehouse in side chat until I am confident we have enough guards. Edit: NY2 was having major lag problems so I moved to virginia2, which then went offline so then I went to virginia 4, and after a while had to move to seattle. Guess this is offpeak for the US, so won't be surprised if no one shows up. Nevertheless, I will be here a while longer.

The reason I chose the location I did, and not a barn or an airstrip or anywhere else as suggested above, is that the location I suggested can be defended in such a way that to shoot the defenders you have to enter the building. A barn has huge open doors and the airstrip is even worse. Bandits will arrive in the surrounding areas and just snipe you from the edge of sight. With this building they have to come inside and assault. This also means if their attack fails you can safely loot their corpses. It is interesting to note that almost all the people saying 'you will get owned if you do this' are bandits themselves. I am not saying that they secretly think this is a great idea and are worried it will succeed, I think they genuinely believe it will fail. The mindset that makes someone a bandit in this game is that you can't trust anyone, people can't work together, everyone wants your loot and no one wants to collect their own, etc. If they were right about this then yes, this idea would be doomed to failure, but they are not, they are just jaded. Bandits, you will have a chance to prove me wrong, be patient. Try to find assault weapons though as you will not get me at long range. You may get visitors/foraging parties coming and going from the base though so don't throw away all your rifles.

Part of the point was to get it going on multiple servers. I am not available to try this again for a while, I will post here if I go there though. All you need is a small group and you can go there on any server and start advertising it as a safe haven. Please post any attempts here, I will do the same. There will be fights with bandits so it is recommended that it be pioneered by people who have just spawned and don't have lots of good stuff to steal. Also zombies may be spawning inside the building which may make it unsuitable. Not that there are buildings where zombies don't spawn so we may just have to live with that.

Having just died, and being bored of surviving which has become too easy (I was already bored of surviving before I died, so I went to NW airfield), I decided to try to set up a player controlled outpost. Not in the sense of a hidden place where a group of friends stash their stuff, but a place on the coast that everyone on the server knows about, where friendlies can gather in safety and trade and help each other. This didn't work out too well so far, but not for the reasons that any of the naysayers said it wouldn't. I went through about 6 servers looking for help before I got any response other than 'the bandits will just kill you'. There was even a lot of hostility and rudeness. I am aware the bandits would attack, that was part of the attraction of the idea, I wanted a challenge and it's not like zombies are really stepping up to the plate on that count. I finally found a server where some players expressed interest and on offered to meet me. So I went out to the location I had scouted and waited there. While I was waiting three other players showed up, one was even a bandit. No one shot me. Also no one stayed to build a community. When the first guy finally arrived, I was getting rather bored. He didn't want to stick around anyway because there were zombies spawning at the base location and I wasn't going to argue as the whole cooperation with other players thing wasn't going very far. In summary I think I proved the "zomfg a huge army of bandits will storm out of the hills and slaughter you all" people wrong, most of the people I met were fairly friendly. I also think that if we had got a small community together more people would have come. The initial stage of getting it off the ground seems to be the problem. I was trying to think of ways the developers could make this easier, but I can't think of any. The community is jaded about cooperation. More than that, any activity that doesn't show immediate entertainment/reward is generally given up on, regardless of the future gains or the realism/rp to be had. This is clearly a problem with the community, not the game itself. It is also not a day z community thing, I see this problem in almost all games. Organising something like this on the forums might make more people come, but then you really are likely to get an army of bandits. Oh there was one thing that I thought the devs could look at, we need a way of identifying players. The name tags thing sucks as it enables you to see through walls and bushes, but all players look identical. It would be nice if people could customise their outfits, or if you could enable certain players so that they, and only they, could see a name tag on you. Some way of telling if that generic survivor you see is your best friend who just came back from scavenging, or some random who is about to panic and shoot you.

I think many people here are missing the point of the OP. It seems almost as though they read the first few words and the title and then posted, but no one ever does that so it must be coincidence. Yes the OP says he doesn't want to see any changes, but when I read the OP the message I get is 'trust the devs'. I doubt he would argue against adding content if the devs planned to add it. In the context of a million new players on the forum all screaming for pvp restrictions, pve only zones, different maps, tanks, map markers, nerfed zombies etc I think he has a point. I think people are overly emotional on this forum in general. I think it might be an age thing.