Solopopo

So it's been six years since I oringally posted this. There was a lot of speculation in this thread that the soft skill system was an early, unfinished, implementation but it doesn't really seem like that was the case. After six long years there are many players that still don't even know the soft skill sytem exists, let alone what it actually does. The general consensus among players that do know how it works is that leveling up your soft skills is not worth it. It seems that after all this time the soft skill system is ineffectual, which really begs the question why it exists at all. Why did they bother implementing a system that does practically nothing? The original intention of the system was to encourage players to stick it out on their characters when things got rough. Players were supposed to care about their soft skills. It would seem that the soft skill system fails to achieve it's original goal. The original intention of the soft skill system, as stated by the developers, was to encourage players to have more of an attachment to their characters. It was to encourage players to not just respawn right away when captured, knocked unconcious, sick, etc. And it clearly fails at doing that. I understand that these are supposed to be "soft" skills. The developers didn't want the game to be an RPG. But players were supposed to care about soft skills. That was the whole point. So lets consider for a moment that they wanted the soft skill system to have minor but appreciable benefits to your character, and at the same time it wasn't meant to be something overly distracting to the player experience. For this system to function and achieve it's original stated purpose, fine and rough skills would need to be leveled independently without anything taking away that progress, aside from death of course. The way the soft skill system is currently implemented, you need to be very preoccupied with your soft skills to make any progress with them. You need to know how the soft skill system works if you are going to level up consistently in either direction. Unless you are conciously leveling your skills by putting enormous effort and time into it, you will never gain any benefit from it. If you are not drastically changing your play style to level up your soft skills, it is not going to happen. You say it isn't supposed to be that way. Well, that is the consequence of how it is designed. Players were supposed to not be overly concerned with soft skills, but you can't progress in your soft skills unless you are. So the system is at odds with itself. It undermines it's own goal. So to recap, what we have is a soft skill system that takes great effort, planning, and time to eke out minimal benefit. What were we supposed to have? A soft skill system that wasn't distracting that provided some small benefits to players that have survived a long time. Is that what we have? No. Players who are not going out of their way will never benefit from this ineffective soft skill system. From a conceptual game design perspective, the current soft skill system we have is a failure. It fails to achieve it's original purpose and it oddly fails to influence anything in any way at all.

Man, what a coincidence. I came here to make this suggestion. I'm happy to see another player on the same page. This is really how the devs wanted the game to be. They wanted to remove zoom when the Beta was released, but people complained they would quit if they did. It's hard to blame them though. The thought of an essential function being bound to an item was initially not receieved well because players at the time were used to the majority of itmes being non functional, and historically items have been hard to find consistently. If they improved the functionality of binoculars and tweaked the central loot economy so players could find them more often, I think this could be a great idea. The current zoom level should be the default zoom for basic binoculars. Better binoculars could zoom in further with the scroll wheel. However, the devs have a track record of making their changes hard to swallow because they are implemented in incomplete and broken ways. They would really need to cut that shit out for this to work. Modded servers are still modding out night time because light sources were completely broken in the beginning of Beta so no one gave it a chance. Still to this day you can't simply turn the headtorch off without taking it off your head. When they first released sprint it was balanced poorly. Of course everyone modded it out immediately. In order for this to be recieved well they would need to nail it the first time with no bullshit. I'm tired of the modding community just overriding everything they do. Rather, I'm tired of the devs doing what they do so poorly that the modding community has to. DayZ started out as a mod. This was supposed to be a standalone game. What was even the point if no one plays the game the way the devs intended it. Edit: After spending some time with the most recent build of the game I've noticed that you now can turn the headtorch off by pressing L. I have also managed to find a few modded servers that don't alter the core vanilla experience.

This makes sense and seems like something that should be easy enough to implement. Has swimming really not been addressed yet?

Your only options are to reconcile with your friend or find a new server.

Here is another thought, an even more wild and crazy thought. Players want cars and helicopters that both work as they should, because that's been on the agenda for 5 straight years now. What exactly is your point? Are you trying to justify why helicopters aren't in the game? No one questions why they aren't there. They know they would be a disaster with the game in its current state, but players want them not to be. It's pretty straight forward and it's not even that outrageous of an expectation, at least it shouldn't be. From what I'm gathering, your argument is pretty much "shut up and be grateful cars even exist." That's pretty sad if that's what DayZ has come to.

Pretty unremarkable... you wont catch me on this experimental branch.

Thanks for what? Insisting in a smug way that the problem I was reporting about was bs when other people have been experiencing it too? Implying the devs are somehow not responsible for this stupid stuff that happens and that it is somehow my fault? I think not. If this place didn't immediately annoy me I would have checked back to read your post earlier. I fixed the problem myself. I should be the one getting thanked for bringing awareness to this issue. How about next time you tone down the condescension so people actually stick around long enough to hear what you have to say. It's true that melee combat was botched for a significant number of people. The only thing invalid in this thread is the alpha disclaimer in your signature. You should "understand" that.

It isn't always like that though. It does light up a bit if you are in an open field with an open starry sky. But the forests on a cloudy night are basically pitch black, as they would be in real life. I'm looking into the forest just behind my house now and it literally is pitch black. I'd walk face first in to trees without a flashlight.

The only problem with night is that players are not willing to step a little outside their comfort zone to experience it. The light sources in the game do a fine job of illuminating the area around you. Yes, day time is faster, but so is night time, which makes it actually possible to survive through it. DayZ without a day/night cycle is bland.

I know right? All the time around here. Just delete the contents of your dayz folder where your config files are stored. The default location is documents > dayz. There are probably thousands of players playing 1.0 for the first time with broken melee right now and they don't even know it. One of the previous updates screwed around with the config files and the update that was intended to fix it didn't actually fix it. It just stopped the game from causing the problem. You still need to generate a new config file that isn't messed up.

double post

Managed to fix it.

It's not fixed. Heavy swings are still the default attack on both stable and experimental branches. Do you even understand what I'm talking about?

I thought the beta had a great combat system. The default swing was the light swing. You used the heavy swing by holding shift, which is loud and requires stamina. The current system, which was originally acknowledged by the devs as a "known issue," has heavy and light swings reversed. It feels so clumsy. It doesn't make any sense. Why is it like this in 1.0? You guys had the perfect melee system and you tossed it. I got good at the original system. It was fun. The current melee system in 1.0 is crap and not fun. The other night I got into a close quarters melee fight. It was disgusting, a complete sloppy mess. I was able to become proficient with the last system. The fights were clean. This new combat system is a joke in comparison, clumsy by design.

Don't even bother bringing this to stable branch until you fix melee. Actually, if you could revert back to the previous build where melee actually worked until you can sort things out that would be awesome, because the game is borderline unplayable now. It's nearly impossible to fight even a single zombie without getting hit, and heavy swings are so loud that if you are ever caught out in a military area with zombies around you are going to announce your presence to everyone in the area. It's crap. Fix it. Don't release stable builds that break the game. Honestly, it shouldn't even need to be said. Melee is in an unacceptable state, which is a tragedy because the new melee combat adds a lot to the game, way more than the little features you have been adjusting with your recent experimental builds. I am not saying I don't like the new additions, I do, but some things are more important guys. Broken melee is unacceptable. I'm sitting the beta out until it's fixed.