Cach

Yes for the sole reason that this is alpha. If after a week the desired result is not achieved roll back to a previous version and try to figure out a new solution.

This forum has such a bad problem... I have never seen such rampant swearing, trolling, an inability to discuss ideas coherently, people dismissing opinions with a "**** off if you don't like it" and the sarcastic (elitist) circlejerking that occurs whenever someone tries to discuss a legitimate issue with the mod. This seems to happen particularly around issues regarding pvp/banditry and stems from people on either sides of the fence. Since neither side is right I'm going to stand on top of the bloody fence and hopefully generate a sensible discussion here. Alright so this game (I know its a mod, I know it's an alpha version and yes, I know what alpha version is) has seen a significant increase in banditry as of late. I've also seen a fair amount of people sobbing on the forums asking the devs to punnish the bandits. These threads also attracted a fair amount of people who seems to take pleasure in words such as 'faggot' and 'fuck' and 'noob' (this is the internet and we are all tough guys here, amirite?) The purpose of this thread is not to discuss these people but I bring them up now so that the sensible forum goer would be able to recognize these antics and ignore them. It does give us a valid starting point for this discussion however, as it is these people hurling abuse left and right, that take an elitist viewpoint on issues such as pvp and realism, and pvp and realism is what this thread is all about. Let me start by saying that a game which has a character spawning at the edge of the map followed by running into the nearest town killing somebody, getting killed in turn then spawning back at the edge of the map to run back in and repeat, breaks down any semblence of reality. This type of gameplay is called death match NOT survival, and please don't say it's brutal survival. You are clearly controlling a character whose sole purpose is to run around shooting people and get shot in return, all to respawn and repeat. This happens around the coast and especially the big cities but the sole fact that this type of gameplay exists anywhere on the map detracts from any semblence of a realistic and brutal survival simulator. And we all know how it happened, and what would happen because of it. We may tell ourselves otherwise, we may point fingers at different people and accuse them of crimes proven or unproven. But the reality is everybody contributed to it knowingly or unknowingly. For sake of thread clarity I will briefly outline the process: While pvp was a key feature in the game from the start people were just as likely to come together to group up and and tackle situations together as they were to kill each other. Player killing stemmed from more extreme reasons than just 'for the lulz' or 'I was bored'. It carried with it the stigma of being labeled a bandit and beeing shot on sight, increasing the difficulty experienced compared to a normal survivor. Once the bandit skin got removed those people who preferred a bandit playstyle did no longer have to worry about increased difficulty. Life continued as normal for a little while longer in DayZ, but slowly more and more people started dying at the hands of bandits. This then created the shoot on sight mentality which was initially driven by paranoia. Later this paranoia got replaced with loathing as people who normally go out of their way to help others ended up getting their hands bitten more and more often. These good Samaritans stopped caring after a while (not all of them) and joined the shoot on sight mentality. You can see that the game mechanics at this stage does not support coorparate play (I understand you can coorporate with people who you personally know over steam or teamspeak/vent but the level of Cooperation you saw earlier where two complete strangers can meet up, loot a town, heal and help each other out of tight situations, has dwindled significantly and you would be lying to yourself if you deny that this is the case). Does this mean that the people who are calling for no pvp/pve only servers and punishment systems are justified? NO definitely not. DayZ is harsh as is life and people have to learn to adapt. But what of the people engaging in coastal death match? I can think of no realistic justification for this type of gameplay. So how can we reduce their occurence? (I dont want to get rid of all out firefights but make them rare occurrences with a suitable risk/reward system for engaging in them). DayZ is supposed to be brutal right? How about ramping up the difficulty a couple more notches. Instead of spawning people with a weapon and ammo on hand, spawn people with nothing but a couple of band aids, a water bottle and maybe a flash light (you can get rid of the flash light if you want). No longer would people be able to spawn and run to the nearest death match town to raise their stats. People would be forced to slow down and search. With no weapon on them they would be forced to take things cautiously till they have armed up, lest they run into someone carrying a gun. Zeds will become an even greater threat than they currently are, all without increasing their numbers or programming new ai for them. The purpose here is not to make the game impossible but extremely brutal and all the more rewarding when you run into weapon and ammo stashes. But let's not stop here, in the game as it is currently, it is really easy to come across stashes. Weapons and ammo are quite common, why not decrease the amount of spawns for weapons and ammo? while we are at it the devs should decrease the spawns of food too (give an incentive to hunt). Medical supplies seem to be just right and seem relatively difficult to come by (as it should be). so they don't need much tampering with. This spawn decrease would make survival significantly harder. No longer would there be servers full of bored people shooting each other for fun, we would have servers full of people scrambling for resources and shooting each other for the rounds they carry in their pockets. Sure there's always going to be some people who just don't care and would still shoot for no specific reason whatsoever, and thats fine because there are people like that in real life. But out of place deathmatches would no longer be a problem in game. (I'll say again, this does not mean that these kind of all out fire fights are impossible as that would be a shame, but they would be rarer and more intense when they do occur as you stand to lose everything and gain everything from them). We would probably see an increase in highway robbers, people who would rob you at gunpoint because they don't want to waste the few remaining rounds they have. Higher tier weapon spawns should be made extremely rare and made to spawn only in the middle of the map and as far away from each other as possible (maybe even have a cap on how many different higher tier weapons that can spawn on the server? Eg. Only two sniper rifles allowed per server) Whatever method is chosen these weapons should be made extremely rare and their ammo even rarer. You guys were claiming DayZ was supposed to be harsh right? there you have it. As for people engaging in server hopping, why not have a system in place where every account has a limited number of turns that they can server hop for before getting locked into the current server? Say 25 tries per account. While it wouldn't eliminate server hopping it would (like everything else in DayZ) carry consequences for those looking to abuse game mechanics. Server hopping will require thought and would not be something that would be carried out often. People who want to play with their friends would have to decide on a server beforehand. This carries the added problem of a group of 50 idiots clogging up a server and locking it off, which means there has to be some way of cleaning a server. What I would suggest is giving the admins the power to kick anybody out of their server that has already used up his/her 25 tries. This would give the kicked player 1 more try so they can rejoin another server (just not the one they were kicked from). Not perfect, but it is the best I can come up with. Maybe you guys can think up of a better solution. I have been lurking these forums for a while and while there are several threads all discussing this, none of them managed to do so coherently, and almost all went along the line of "punish bandits" and "GTFO if you don't like it". I hope this thread won't turn into one of these and people would be able to engage in a healthy discussion.

Interesting post by Virfortis, I have not really seen any community control in these forums. Hence the all too often derogatory remarks. Maybe the dev should start hiring moderators either volunteers or people voted. Though I'm unsure whether the devs vision of total anarchy extends towards the forums as well. A cut down on the name calling would make this a much healthier place to conduct arguments. A mature attitude might even spill over into the game through the forums. @Septuscup Zeds that hone in on wherever the most number of players are? I can see this working though it has a few issues namely grouping together with people would be a pain with zeds constantly honing in on you. Increasing aggro range is always a plus (the harsher the better, up to a point at least). Maybe even have walkers that are capable of clambering up stairs, or have the monkey types capable of climbing ladders.

@CrossShade Please stop trying to derail this thread, I see no insults in Cyberman128's post. And my OP asked people to ignore insults and not fall for them. Trying to minimise name calling which would irritate people and end up derailing threads. @Cyberman128 The problem I see with increasing zed count is that there would be more stress on the server. I don't really know how it all works but I've seen it been mentioned multiple times so the dev might be considering it.

This is an alpha version which means the dev is free to try out various ideas before going beta. My suggestion might very well break more things than it fix and the reverse could just as well be true. But we would never know, and conjecture on what would happen would only go so far.

@Ssential While that is a good idea for a mission based system, there's still the problem with death being too safe. This method won't stop the people who find safety in the knowledge that dying would give them more ammo and a weapon. Ultimately what is needed is for the game to focus on more brutal survival, heightened risk/reward and a shift from the current safety in death. If this is not brutal enough have the respawn entirely devoid of items. TL,DR: Make people fear death and shoot out of paranoia instead of boredom @SeptusCap Yes I was talking about suicidal behaviour on respawning. And as for finding weapons I was thinking of cutting down weapon respawning by 50% at least (with higher tier weapons only spawning once, which means you will have to kill the person carrying it to acquire it). Also a system where you would be unable to judge where the best spawns are could be implemented to prevent spawn camping. Instead of having a guranteed spawn every 30 mins (I think) have the spawns randomise themselves. If you pick up winchester ammo from cherno. The server will spawn winchester ammo in a randomised location other than cherno. The server keeps track of spawning to prevent crowding of a particular spot with resources and instead spawns the new resources in the spot that has gone the longest without anything spawning. With people picking stuff up everywhere the spawn system would become too complicated for anyone to predict hopefully bringing down spawn camping. As for the highway robbery that's up to the players to decide whether it would be worthwhile to save your ammo on the off chance the other guy complies or shoot him with the knowledge that he may not have the ammo you need and you just wasted yet more ammo. It's just one scenario which might crop up on occasion.

@CrossShade Yea it was unwarranted name calling on Van's part but honestly I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do about it, we need moderators in these forums. To be honest I was slightly miffed that you didn't read the OP but fairs fair he was wrong and its up to you to ignore him and stick to the discussion (see how easily this thing got sidetracked). Rocket is the dev I'm assuming and it's his vision that this mod is as brutal as possible right? So wouldn't what I suggest make everything brutal for everybody? Lots of information is good, but this isn't. People want to read something information dense. The less words you have to use to get your point across, the better. I'm sorry but english isn't my first language. It's not even my second and I do tend to ramble a lot. I will try and keep the word count down in the future

@ CrossShade I see your point, however it could just as easily be said that the vicious cycle is generated by people having too much power at hand with too little reward/risk at the beginning. They do what most anybody would do when given a gun in a game. Run to the nearest town and shoot anything that moves. There is no problem with dying you will just respawn with another gun and more ammo, honestly this isn't all that dissimilar with other fps games out there. We CAN get people to travel more inland but there would always be those that enjoy fire fighting in towns, just because you can always respawn with a weapon and ammo in the event of death. What I'm suggesting is not to force anybody to a certain play style, as those who enjoy killing other people can still do so. But a change in the collective mentality that is more geared towards survival. Rather than safety in the knowledge of being able to respawn with everything you already need. @Vans Heighten Yup an incentive to survive, or an actual reason to kill each other and engage in pvp