DayZ is a great game. I love it. In this game I am more emotionally involved than in any other game I have ever played. But there is one aspect I have to disagree with... Now it may sound ridiculous, but DayZ is no survival game and it never has been. What?! DayZ no survival game? But there is hunger, you can die of thirst and all that kind of stuff! It is super realistic! Now hear me out, I will explain why DayZ is no survival game very soon, be patient. Examples You are Herberd, a guy who is running through the woods far, far in the north. You are hungry, you are thirsty. You survived for 200 hours, because you are a careful person. You don't have any ammunition for your weapon and your gear is mostly ruined. A friend is calling you "What's up man? I am at the coast, let's meet up!". Your friend at the coast? You would have to run hours to reach him. So you think: "What am I going to do?". Well, there is a simple solution, isn't there? You go climb up a tower and jump off the roof... YOU ARE DEAD. You respawn. You are Janine, a woman who survived for 500 hours. You are a very skilled person. You know how to survive any combat situation. You use an M4 and really common gear. When you run up the stairs of a building you fall and break your right leg. The next hospital is far away, it would take you hours to limp over there. Instead of crying for help, you go on the roof and jump down... YOU ARE DEAD. You respawn. You are Mohammad, a guy who is always friendly to everyone. You survived for 1000 hours, your friendlyness is impressiv. But one thing you hate is other people telling you what to do. You walk along the coast. A group of 4 people is running straight at you. You never carry a weapon, so nobody shoots you on sight. Your are so funny that you managed everyone that engaged you to just leave you alone. They tell you to stop. You make some jokes, but it seems they don't care about you. They tell you to drop your pants. Dropping your pants? You won't do this, you are a proud Mohammad and you would never do such a dishonorable thing. So you tell them "Go f*ck yourself", you are not kind anymore. One of the guys shoots you in the leg "DROP YOUR F*CKING PANTS AS*HOLE!", you have nothing to lose. No weapons, no gear, nothing. You simple tell them "Go on, kill me.". YOU ARE DEAD. You respawn. You are Jack, you heard DayZ is a survival game. You start playing it. You find some gear, food and everything you need to survive. You run around in unpopulated areas so you don't get killed. You do that for 5 hours. Boring. Why are you doing it? There is no point is surviving. You decide to go to the coast and expirience something exciting. YOU ARE DEAD. You respawn. I think you get the point. DayZ is no survival game because there is no point in surviving. If a player tries to survive at all costs, he will realise that the game is just boring. A life is simply worth nothing, the only thing there is are weapons, vehicles and houses. And as soon as you can store them, people will go maniac because they cannot lose anything if they die. A veteran character does not differ from a fresh spawn character. But let us assume that there was a point in surviving. What would happen? If survival was more important than obtaining gear etc., people wouldn't run around the coast or hotspots. They would populate the whole map just to not encounter so many people. But as they do it, encounters will get more rare but also more unexpected. You are more likely to encounter a player at Shakhovka, because he will think the same as you think "I will go there because nobody is there". He wants to survive just like you, but you may encounter unwillingly. Secondly people will act way more authentic. If I have a broken leg, I won't simply kill myself, I will do whatever I have to to survive. And if I have a 100 hours character, I may even kill my friend just to survive. These things happen in real life, but no way it would happen in DayZ. If you look at a character you spent weeks on, it may change the perspective of some players. But how do we add the urge to survival, no matter what? The only way to do that, in my opinion, is adding a value to a characters life (obviously). And how to we do that? The only way is progression, meaning that the more you play a character, the more valuable he is. If I have a 100 hours character he is more valuable than a 10 hours character. The most important question now is, how do we manage that? How do we add a value to a character? What would a player really care about? Solutions? Statistics: It could show your friends how long your survived. But I don't think that would solve anything. How many people actually care about statistics, especially in a game like DayZ? Appearance: Your character could change his look the longer he survives. Not a good option in my opinion. Who cares about looking like a survivor? And more importantly, how do you want to differ a 100 hours character from a 1000 hours character? Skills: This is the only way to go in my opinion. The more you do something, the better you get in it. The more you craft things, the more chance you have to craft prestine things. The more you treat wounds, the less likely it is that you make a mistake while doing it. The more you repair engines, the more likely you are to repair a helicopter. etc. Problem with this is, you have to balance it. We don't want immortal super soldiers, but the additions have to be good enough to add a real value to the character. It has to be more valuable than a really rare weapon. Doing something faster is not enough, because people don't really need that. They will still risk their lifes and do stupid things, I mean who cares if something is taking you 10 seconds or 9? And the other thing is, if someone survived for 500 hours, hasn't he deserved a really good boost? I would give such a person the ability to shoot like a robot. Problem I am talking about is that the more your survive the better has to be the reward. If you survived 100 hours or 500 hours you want to feel the difference, otherwise it gets pointless and boring to survive longer. ???: ??? If you have ideas for solving this problem, for adding value to a character, go on and present it right here. I think this is the most important part for the game to change. We have to find a solution, or we will never have a survival game as Dean Hall intended it to be from the beginning. (I know there have been similar threads like that, and I made one about character value myself, but in this one I wanted to point out what is wrong about DayZ in its current state)

How about people who hate beards? How about people who don't give a f*ck about beards? Do you really think anyone would give up all his gear just to safe his beard? "Please! Don't f*cking shot me man, it took me 40 hours to grow that freakin beard man! Take EVERYTHING! I AM GOING TO BE YOUR SLAVE! JUST DON'T KILL ME!" Yep, totally authentic...

No, my post is referring to the road map and game design decision made now, in the past and in the future. Why?

Even a game in development is still a game... judging the roadmap of a game in any sort of way at this point can be very productive.

So, just because it's alpha or buggy, it's not a game? :lol:

Well, I can store the NVGs, and I will, because I won't take the risk of dying by stupid KoS, right? So you are saying the game turns into a survival game when you find NVGs? So, you need one of the rarest items ingame to have a survival game? Okay... Plus... DayZ is a game yet.

What people don't realise is that you can add an infinite number of features that make survival harder or make the game seem more "realistic", if there is no need for survival, the game cannot be defined a survival game (IMO). Why? Because, even if you get hungry, even if you die of thirst, even if you lose some stuff when dying, if the death doesn't really matter, nobody will ever care about survival. The whole design of the game makes a real intense survival expirience in end-game almost impossible: A) You can store everything you need on a server that is always empty due to central hive servers and (later on) tents/bases -> Death means nothing if you have established a camp B] You can survive for however long you want, in the end it is ONLY the gear that defines the value of your character C) It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to die if you TRY to survive, if you focus ONLY on survival, this game is the biggest peace of cakes in gaming history, I have very high doubt that this aspect will ever change, no matter how far in development D) The focus of the game is keeping the gear you have, not having your character survive, you don't use the gear to survive, you use your life to keep your gear For me C) is the reason why DayZ NEVER was and NEVER will be a real (hardcore) survival game. If you try to, you can survive forever, the challenge is zero. Surviving in DayZ is the MOST boring thing you can do. If surviving in a game is by far the most BORING thing you can do, how can you call it a survival game?

It is.

I just realized, whining about whiners is as bad as the original whining...

So, we all know that this freakin' main hive thing causes utter destruction to all gameplay elements of DayZ SA. There is no need to argue that this character server hop bullshit is just contraproductive. I am not here to discuss it, there is simply no need because it's obvious and from a game design perspective the choice of having dynamic character positions (connected servers) is just stupid, in terms of what the game tries to be. My question: I highly doubt that it's hard to implement servers that do have persistent characters (so you cannot join with a character from another server), my question is, why do the developers wait? We all know that in the end almost all servers will turn into private one, as in the mod. Alright, we don't know, but it's a very reasonable prediction. So why do they force us to play this bullsh*t "let's go and loot EVERYTHING because we can switch the servers". The server hopping thing will never end, there is just no way to solve it. Who cares about 5 minutes waiting? Seriously, who cares about 15 mins waiting? If someone wants the best weapon, he will go north and hopp servers, go loot empty ones so nobody can kill him. This destroys everything. My problem with all this is, that the developers think "Let's just wait until we add modding and people will figure it out themselves". That's so stupid in my opinion. I don't want to play on servers with 10.000 cars or M4s everywhere, I want official support for "private" hives (hives with non transverable characters). It cannot be hard to implement, unless the developers really screwed up the workline from the beginning. It's a days work, ok maybe a week. We all know and see the cons of having a main hive. Don't get me wrong, a main hive is a good idea, because you need to controll loot spawns and such, but why the character swaping? Why not have servers, or alteast the option, that do not connect to all the server hopping crap? And the other thing is, the developers optimize the whole game around this connected servers bullcrap (can't stress that enough) and then, when they allow server to decide to do whatever they won't, there won't be any server left with the connected server bullcrap, simply because it's bullcrap. Sure, I don't have any evidence for this claim, but this game is alpha, the developers could put the files out there and see for themselves if non-connected servers are more popular. If so, they should support it. Why do all the work now, if you are probably working TOWARDS the problem and not against it? I want a persistent server, with persistent players and persistent loot. Let's look at endgame: We probably will be able to have bases in the end. So when my clan builds a base, there is a chance that a 15 person clan just joins the server and destroys everything we worked for. We could've been honest players, but these guys could be server hoppers who just switch servers until they find the best weapons. Same with helicrashes, cars, basicly everything. The worst thing, and there is no way you can change that in a proper way, are empty servers. So everyone can build a tent on an empty server and just store everything there, with a almost zero chance of ever being spottet. He can store everything, he can us cars on the empty server to drive around, and if needed he switches the servers and does whatever he wants. All this connected server bullshit is ridicilous, it didn't work with DayZ Mod and it won't work in SA, I guarantee it. And even if I am wrong, this is just too important for the game to be just discussed. We need actuall evidence. We need them to test it. Like I said, that's what an ALPHA is there for. Better test it now, than regret it later, because some Dean Hall thought that he knew better. What are they waiting for? The sooner they know, the better. They should focus on the very core elements of the game, before they start to optimize something, that in the end maybe doesn't even need optimization, because it's freakin removed from the game. So again, why are they working so much against the community and not like other very good indie developers, that actually use the alpha state to test things out?

I don't know either, but it is by far the biggest problem. And I don't think it is an advantage to have cross-server clan raids. It unbalances everything. Imagine your clan is playing on one server, looting, building a base etc. The economy is very balanced, there is another clan on the other side of the map and they are your rivals. You always try to destroy each other and it's fun. One day, a 20 person clan comes to your server, basicly destroys everything you both have, and goes on to another server. These guys had the best weapons ingame because they stored they're weapons on a clan server. You will never see them again, and you will never be able to have any kind of revenge. I don't think it's fun. I don't like having random ass people destroying everything. I like to have connections and actual politics. If you are bound to one server, you cannot just go and say "let's search another server and store our loot", you have to deal with all the people on the server. And you will get to know them. Maybe you meet some people twice, as they play on the server. Maybe you get friends or enemies. This is what DayZ was about for me. The long term player interaction. With connected servers, the likelyhood to see a person twice is near zero. And the worst thing, people who will play the game legimitimatly will be punished by people who store loot on a low population server. Real raids will never occur, because people do not store their loot on the servers they play on. Don't shit were you eat. You don't wanna have everything you worked for on an unsecure server right? Well, I do not enjoy that at all.

Oh, that's what you meant. Well, terrible idea too. People would spawn on the coast and kill each other. What would be the point of having connected servers? And the problem with low pop servers wouldn't be solved. People could still switch servers and store the best weapons on servers nobody plays on.

Spew bullsh*t? It's more like you taking this whole thing way to serious and sensitive. I never called them amateurs, so get your arguments right. And btw, SOE is a joke -> that was my point. I am not nesserarly speaking about expirienced game designers, but more about game designers who have studied game design. You know, it's easy to call yourself a "game designer" just because you have a few ideas. It's a whole other thing to be a good game designer. It's not just "art", it's also very much science involved. There is visual design, level design, gameplay design etc. everything subjects you can study at an university. Just because you studied game design (or have expirience) doesn't mean you would be less creative and open mindend then others. Infact, right now if you study game design, you have to very creative and very unique to even get pass the entry qualification. You are not open minded and willing to try out new things? Well, you better go study history. Actually, many expirienced game designers these thays had never even the chance to study game design. I am very curious how gaming will evolve in the future. You know, when the first movies came out, nobody knew how to make movies. These days people can study each subject matter within movie making. The same happens to games since a few years. Sure, there are many casual movies out there, as there are casual games. But there are also amazing indie games, made by people who had the chance to get to know how to create games.

It's a terrible idea. In the end, people who server hopp will always have the advantage over other. The rarest weapons will be stored on empty servers, with admins who kick everyone who tries to join.

So, just because SOE has made like 20 games, it means they are perfect at doing so? Not so much mate, that's not how game development works. And no, I will not allow anyone to "spew garbage" over any of my projects, just because of my private opinions. Especially in a forum where people really try to hate each other. No thanks, this account will never be connected to any part of my real life. Why am I even writing this...

You are missing the point, we don't complain about the state of the game, we complain about design decision made by the developers. And yes, I have worked and put enough time into game development to know that some of the decisions made were very contraproductive to the goals they want to reach. They made mistakes, like I said, that amateurs make. It has absolutly nothing to do with the size of the team, neither with the state of the game, it has to do with the competence of certain individuals within the team. I am crazy if I think that the majority of people who want to play DayZ would like deathmatch, but I am not crazy with the assumption that most people who actually play the game right now, are enjoying the deathmatch aspect of the game. We both have no evidence whatsoever, calling each other crazy is just an childish attempt to take this conversation to an agressive level. I will not tolerate that and your comparision to battlefield just shows me that there is no need for further discussion. I will not change your opinion and you will most likely not change mine. I don't see any point in continuing this, which is why I will stop talking to you within this subject matter.

Yeah, I agree. Sure, Dean Hall had a good idea and obviously the right engine to support it. But him as a Game Designer, I don't know how he got there. To me almost every decision seems like made by an amateur. Do they really do that in group discussion? Like, how amateur is that? Do it f*cking properly and get someone who actually knows how Game Design works. The connected server bullcrap, the way how they handle updates, everything seems like they don't know what they are doing. Sure, there are very talented people in the team, but there are others who, atleast that's how I perceive it, are just bad in what they're doing. I don't know, let's just wait for modding and make the game right ourselves, obviously the developers do not know what the players want, we just need to be patient. Also I want to point out how important the early access is. Obviously most players who will play the game already bought it and everyone gets used to how the game is right now: A deathmatch in the east. The implementation of the M4 was a terrible idea, because the M4 is actually a really good weapon, but everyone had one multiple times. Even if they make the M4 rare, at this point nobody will give a f*ck if they find one. It's like in the mod. Once a weapons was common and made rare afterwards, it just lost value because everyone already had it so many times. I don't wanna run around with an M4 anymore, even if it is the rarest weapon in the game. I don't care. The same thing with deathmatch. Right at this point there are so many players who expect the game to be what it is now. They have fun with it. Others do not. But these players will be very disappointed when they turn the game into a proper survival game. Many people just want to go full retard and kill everything on sight, because that's what the game is about at this point. And obviously these players will carry over to the finished product, being disappointed because they cannot do what they always did: Go to the nearest town, find a SKS or Mosin and have some exciting time within a very short amount of time. Well, hopefully it works out, but the way they are stucturing the game is just ridicilous. "We don't want you to do deathmatch guys, so we will change the electro spawns and put you to the eastcoast, so you can do deathmatch over there" Oh comon, whoever thought of this idea has NO idea how to design a game. How stupid is it, to restrict people on a part of the map, if you actually want the players to run around the whole map? How many months do they need to get it into their heads? If we had spawns in the north, atleast players would actually SEE the north. But like I said, it's kind of too late now, because people will respawn until they are in an area where everyone kills each other. And right know this area is berezino.

You cannot excuse it with alpha. Like I said, it's a core element and it's done within a day or so. Seriously, there is no reason why they don't do it, "It's alpha" isn't an excuse for everything. And as far as I know Dean has no plans about implementing non connected official servers whatsoever. Why would he go through all the server hopping trouble if he could fix it within a week max.

Read my post, I was not talking about personal servers (which exist right know, btw), but about servers that are not connected to each other. And your point is kind of weird, because yes ALPHA and that's why they should add it in right now to see if it works, you know? Because ALPHA, that's what ALPHA is for. You want to have the core of the game done before you add f*cking animals, because ALPHA and because servers are one of the most fundamental part of the mechanics. And like I said, it wouldn't be hard to implement unless they don't know how to develope a game, and you know ALPHA and stuff. That's why we need it right now, it's top priority and ALPHA is there to test things. I disagree. We don't even need private hives. We just need servers that are not connected to each other. No easy mode. Just having the official servers set to have non switchable characters. Smaller hive results in the same problems as before, just in a smaller amount. There is no need for servers transfer. And yet again I disagree with you saying it's too soon to implement it. Beta is in a year or so, this issue is a core element and needs to be adresse ASAP. And like I said, I cannot stress enough how easy it would be to actually implement something like that. One week and you got it, the developers just don't want to have non connected servers... as Dean once said, he wants to avoid non-connected servers.

Is there any date they are planning to release it? Why don't they do it right now? Delay something thats fundamental and really easy to implement... I don't get it.

Where is the changelog for the new experimental?

Add ragdoll, activate ragdoll by pressing a buttom. There you got your mechanic.

It looked like DayZ SA, with the new AK. It was a russian site, I don't know I started watching a stream and the guy closed the page after a few moments so I had no chance to see the URL. But it was russian... and he said that some modders added cars to DayZ SA. ^^

I heard some guys implemented cars into the game. Don't know where else to ask, does anyone have a link?

First, I wasn't sure where to put this thread, so I just did it here. Before you write, please read the whole post. I should explain the weird title. Yes, I know, we are all wasting our time anyways, but it's really sad, especially in this forum. I may be wrong, but I think the people who develope DayZ do not give a flying f*ck about what we write in these forums. The only thing they do here is posting news. That's it, kind of. Sometimes they answere random question, but I never saw Dean or any other important person discussion subjects that really matter to us. Look at the suggestion forum. So many people, so many ideas. And it really does not look like anyone cares about it except the users. Look at the general discussion thread. We had so many threads about so important elements of the game and many of us were a part of it, just the developers were missing. All the effort the community is putting in this forum, wasted for nothing. The only place they care about, that's what I have expirienced atleast, is reddit. Sure, reddit is cool and all, but there are so many suggestions, ideas and discussions in this forum, that reddit never came up with. Its so sad because many people really think they can make a difference by writing a cool thread about a problem or a concept. But in the end, it's just some beans they get and the attention of some random users. Why is there even a suggestion forum, if nobody cares about it? It's more like a "Complain about the game and waste your time with writing about stuff that we'll never read"-Forum. Maybe I am wrong and with your help, we could proof it. If we have enough people talking about this thread (you DON'T have to GIVE ME ANY BEANS I don't care about them!!) but just keep this thread alive so we can see if they do care about it or not, then we'll find out the truth about them (hopefully). If there is a person who is important for the development and he'll be here saying something like "Well, we are reading what you write", then we can say, that atleast we are not wasting our time. I don't want Dean and the developers to read EVERY single thread, sure they have other things to do. But atleast the important ones. And if this thread gets "important" (which btw, I highly doubt because you guys are lazy ^^) or popular and nobody ever responds to our "protest", well then we will know that nobody cares about what we write or do in this forum. Nobody, except of us and the mods... Just make it happen guys, if not, this thread is pretty much useless and ready for the graveyard. But I guess, it's worth a try, even if as unrealistic as it seems.