catgut

Gotta say, InfiniteGrim, it's really suspicious that a post on that hacking forum was made with your username weeks before this stuff started.

Really it came to me as I was thinking about DayZ in comparison to a 'real' apocalypse. I know that if I came upon a small town crawling with zombies in real life, and I was alone, my first reaction would probably be 'can't stop here, gotta find somewhere else', not to try sneaking in and looting the place. Why? Well, because surely there won't be zombies everywhere, so I can probably find somewhere else that isn't infested. Because the presence of zombies in DayZ is a predictable factor, nonexistent in the countryside, but always present in towns, they're possible to 'game'. A player can, armed with the right knowledge, avoid the zombies entirely, and every town exploration plays out largely the same, with the main variable being what you find- that's why humans are the main threat in DayZ. It's not that the zombies aren't dangerous, it's that once you learn how to deal with them you're safe, whereas humans are tricky. I think if zombie presence were more random, and players didn't know what to expect, zombies would be more of a perceived threat without actually being more dangerous. Having a one in a hundred chance of bumping into a horde in the countryside or in a seemingly empty town would keep players on their toes, even if it were offset by having some towns be scarcely populated to keep the overall difficulty the same. And nothing gives players reason to keep moving and stay quiet quite like the possibility that fifty zombies are about to move in on the town.

Personally I think reduced food and water spawns encourage players to kill each other for resources. In previous versions, I often would scavenge for a while so I could load up on food and water, and then go off into the countryside. But if I were starving and dehydrated, and I saw another player, I'd kill him in a heartbeat on the off chance that he has something I need. You can see the same thing in real life- any scarcity of resource causes people to turn on each other and a breakdown of public order. People don't cooperate unless their basic, selfish needs are met. I'd be for a slight reduction in the spawn rates of food and water, as I never had any trouble finding large amounts of either, but enforcing scarcity won't lead to people cooperating.

This was another concern, which I addressed in the initial post. If you want to go alone, not only could you still do so, but in some ways it would be easier. Specifically, you could skip towns that look too 'hot' until you find one that is empty or near-empty, and loot that town in relative safety. If you want to try to sneak through a zombie-infested town (like all towns currently are), you could still do so, but it wouldn't be your only option. What working in groups would offer would be the option to hit every town along your path, zombies or not, clearing them out and fully looting before moving on. They would be able to acquire equipment and supplies more rapidly, but at the cost of both increased combat and of course using food and drink more quickly. The game would be harder in that you wouldn't be safe from zombies just by staying out of towns and could run into them anywhere, but it would be easier in that not all towns would be zombie-filled deathtraps. The idea is not to make the zombies more dangerous per se, but to spread out that danger and make it less predictable so that you're never truly safe.

Exactly. Increasing the zombie difficulty considerably, and making it extremely difficult to avoid combat by stealthing, would make teamwork much more useful in surviving zombies. But I don't think solo play should be impossible or excessively difficult, which is why having some towns sparsely populated would let the solo players avoid the heavily populated ones. If you're not trying to scavenge enough food and drink for two people, you can be a little more selective about where you hit. The danger of alerting the horde encouraging people to seek interaction that doesn't end in gunfire would be a nice bonus, but without punishing banditry.

This is my biggest concern with the game, how zombies always spawn in predictable places with predictable numbers, and while their detection isn't always predictable it's still simple enough to sneak past them. I made a thread with a possible fix if you care to look/comment.

Also, I'm not familiar with exactly how the ArmA 2 engine works, but would it be possible to store global zombie positions and movement in an array structure, then spawn them in to these positions when players come within visual range? It would allow the zombies to be persistent across the whole map without massive server overhead.

As I think about it more, I believe that the reason players are much more willing to kill each other than cooperate is that the zombie threat is primarily based on stealth and detection. Having another person may help in a firefight, but having another person is also more likely to get you spotted by zombies. You may be more likely to win a fight, but you're also more likely to have a fight in the first place, which can make other people seem like unnecessary risks- and having to give up half of the supplies you find doesn't sweeten the deal any. Until the zombies are dangerous enough that working with other survivors significantly improves your odds of survival, shooting first and eating beans later will be largely the extent of player interaction. As of the latest patch, zombies are much more dangerous as sneaking has been reduced in effectiveness, but the overwhelmingly most effective strategy is still to sneak, which does not favor groups. Players still prefer to work alone, but waiting for other players to make dangerous town runs before shooting them and taking their newly-acquired supplies is more effective than before. If, instead of the current spawn system, we had random straggler zombies around the world, coupled with larger mobs of 10-50 roaming around everywhere (not just towns), and the zombies could see and hear well enough to make sneaking past them difficult at best, I think the survival dynamic would be much different. Having dangerous numbers of aware, intelligent zombies possibly lurking behind every corner would mean having to fight or run would be an inevitability, not just the result of botched stealth during a town run. Not having every town chock-full of zed would allow solo players to decide a town is too risky and move on to the next instead of being forced to sneak past very lethal zombies for supplies (keeping the difficulty reasonable), while groups of armed players could hit every town by clearing out the zombies, allowing them to gather more supplies in the same amount of time but with more danger. Lastly, it would add a new dynamic to player interaction, as the possibility that fifty zombies are lurking unseen around the corner or in the forest just waiting to be aggro'd makes the decision of whether or not to pull the trigger on another survivor a much more difficult one. Better yet, if the groups of zombies moved around, wandering from place to place, just scouting out a town would not ensure its long-term safety, without using a game-y mechanic like having zombies suddenly pop into existence every so often. In short: Instead of hyper-aware zombies spawning in large numbers in every town, but nowhere more than 100m from a building, have small numbers of individual zombies everywhere (but more likely to be found in towns), as well as larger groups of 10-50 spawning everywhere as well (but again, more likely to be in towns), leaving the possibility that any given town will be empty or contain just a couple of zombies. And have these zombies move around, so that swarmed towns could clear out, or human-controlled ones could be attacked. Some towns would be crawling, some would be empty, giving players the ability to keep searching for a quiet, 'safe' town to loot, while others could go guns blazing, loot every town they come across, and thus amass more supplies- should they survive, which would be aided by teamwork. Staying out in the wilderness or up in a tower would not guarantee safety. No matter where you are, gunfire would have the possibility to bring an angry horde down on you. Zombies would be less predictable and thus more of a threat without being individually more dangerous, players would have a good reason to think twice before shooting another human but without artificially punishing bandits, teamwork would be much more useful without becoming a necessity. From a 'realism' standpoint, it makes zombies the omnipresent threat they're supposed to be, makes their locations in the world more random and natural, allows them to have near-human senses of sight and hearing without making the game impossibly difficult, and allows threats to be seen and avoided, not suddenly pop into existence when approaching a town. What do you guys think?

Remember, kids, being a survivor is just as easy as being a bandit, so long as you create a Steam group with a large population, organize server raids so you can fill up with as many of your people as possible, coordinate extensively with other players out of game, and make sure only to join servers that don't have any bandits on them. That's definitely just as easy as shooting everyone you see and living large off their beans, because SeptusCap said so. And if you don't, you're fucking stupid and fucking lazy and anti-social and terrible and an armchair developer and a worthless shit. Gee, I wonder why some people think this game has a terrible community. I can't imagine why.

He's right, though, from a purely practical standpoint there's no reason to have along a guy who can't help fight zombies, short of using him as bait and even that is questionable if he's going to aggro the zeds and need you to shoot them off. If you're both unarmed you have nothing to gain by teaming up. If you are armed and run across someone who is unarmed you have nothing to gain by having him with you. If you are armed and run into someone who is armed you have a good chance of getting shot. This change definitely reduces the number of bandits camping the usual cities, but I don't think it's affected teamwork. Not from what I've seen.

What I'm saying is that aggressive, inflammatory posts make people more likely to simply ignore you, focus on the tone of your posts instead of their content, or disagree because they're put off by it. It doesn't matter how big of a dick you are in real life, it's about conveying your message without all the little games that make people want to ignore your message, or respond negatively just because they don't like your tone. I think there's a misunderstanding here. I haven't seen any people use their own behavior as proof that the game is a deathmatch, that would be silly. What many people, myself included, are saying is that the game mechanics strongly favor deathmatch-like behavior, and as a consequence we're going to alter our playstyle to better fit the game, to the detriment of the social and survival aspect of DayZ. Yes, it's a conscious decision to shoot other players on sight, but if the game is designed to make that the most viable way to play then it's only logical to do so. More importantly, it's not hypocritical to play according to what the game favors, while simultaneously criticizing the fact that the game favors that playstyle. What would be hypocritical would be playing this way, while criticizing that other people utilize that playstyle. I think there's a subtle but important difference. It's like, suppose a game has a well-known extremely overpowered item, and I openly use it. If I'm saying 'This item should be heavily toned down in the next patch, but it's in the game so I'm going to use it and expect others to do so until it gets changed', I don't think that's hypocritical. If I'm using the item while saying 'You people shouldn't be using this item, you're terrible people and you're ruining the game' then I'm an enormous asshole and deserve to be tarred and feathered immediately.