Solopopo

In stress test 12 they introduced soft skills. This is our first look at how soft skills could be in beta. The little meter on the lower left is the soft skill meter. It starts in the middle. You can progress either left or right. If you mend and stitch, it goes to the left. If you craft and build, it goes to the right. You can undo crafting progress by mending, and visa versa. But if you max out the stat in either direction, it stays locked in place (which took forever to prove). The consequences of this are interesting, although I don't know If I am entirely on board with it yet. With the given system, players that spawn are posed with a question. Do they want to be a crafter this life, or a medic? It makes sense to make a decision one way or the other, because otherwise your meter will just balance out in the middle. This is interesting because it provides players the option to choose a sort of soft class, without actually requiring any decisions to be made about your character in the selection screen. It also allows players to reverse decisions if they want to, up till a certain point. Again, I don't know if I'm on board with it yet though. I liked the idea of being able to max out all of your stats, not just specialize in one. This does however provide interesting coop opportunities, at least in theory. It would make sense for one team mate to focus on the opposite task, one healing, one crafting. But there is a problem. I managed to max out crafting/building as shown above. I have to say I am a little underwhelmed by the benefit of having maxed crafting. When the meter is in the middle, it takes 5.5 seconds to craft a stick fireplace. At max crafting it takes 4.5 seconds. That is a lot of work to do for one second. Neither mending nor crafting is actually very useful from what I can tell. Being able to craft something one second less isn't really that big of a deal. I suppose you could say the time was lowered by about 20 percent, but still, this isn't really all that much to get excited about, and certainly not enough to motivate someone to deliberately max anything out. For those of you who are curious, it took me about seven hours to max it out in Elektro with no threats or distractions around, taking breaks every once in a while. I was relieved to discover what I set out to, that the bar indeed locks if you max out, but I regretted the time spent to gain the benefit I got. 7 hours of work for a 1 second difference? That's a little crazy if you ask me. If I am remembering right, the purpose of soft skills was to encourage players to stick it out on their experienced survivors, even if things got really rough. This isn't enough to motivate anyone one way or the other. edit: One more interesting consequence of this system I forgot to mention is that all those useless items lying around all over the place aren't so useless anymore if you care about your soft skills. edit 2 (7/31/22): I was looking up some info on soft skills after a long break and was surprised to find my own thread turned up as a top result on google all these years later. Damn, I can't believe the beta was 4 years ago. It's truly scary how time flies. For anyone still being directed here it's now known there are a few extra benefits to soft skills. Leveling up left increases the chances you will mend clothing to prestine, earns 10 percent more blood from blood collection, and results in more food from skinning. Leveling right increases the chances of getting a higher yield of farmed crafting materials like logs, sticks, etc. Perhaps there are more benefits waiting to be discovered/implemented. I wish the devs would clarify things like this. In early Beta when soft skills launched we weren't given much information. The game has been fully released for a while now and they haven't officially addressed it. I'm glad the thread is still helping people, but it's strange this is one of the few resources on soft skills all this time later. But since it is, I may as well elaborate as to how soft skills currently affect the game, given what we now know. Soft skills at first glance may seem kind of random. How are base building and clothing mending opposites of each other? The more apt question is how they are alike. Both clothing and bases are used to store items and keep them safe. The mending specialty encourages a nomadic playstyle, while the building specialty encourages hunkering down and making a home. This is the essential idea behind the soft skill system. If you are always on the move, you are always carrying your items in your clothing, always at risk of being injured, and more relient on hunted food, which you are likely to cook in a random house you are temporarily calling home with no need to craft a fireplace of your own (which would undo your mending skill). If you like to hunker down and build a home of your own you are more likely to build improvised shelters, fire places, fences, etc. These objects have high persistence and are intended to help for you to stay in one place. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but I think it's likely that digging garden plots also increases your building skill, because it makes use of the base building placement system and the shovel is already a required item to build fences. Digging plots also encourages you to remain in one place because it means you don't need to hunt. Lastly, allowing your cloths to become ruined will not have as detrimental an effect on you with a building specialty because you have somewhere else to stash your stuff and to retrieve spare clothing. Having ruined clothing means you can't take your cloths off to dry them faster by a fire or ring them out. But at your base you are protected from rain. With this in mind it begins to makes sense why we aren't allowed to put pieces of ruined clothing back on and also why taking them off dries them faster to begin with. There is really an interesting picture starting to form here, which makes it all the more frustrating the devs haven't confirmed their design intentions with the soft skill system. Not explaining things is kind their MO at this point, but I think the time has come for a little more transparency about this stuff. We aren't in alpha anymore. The game is significantly more fun for players when they understand it. Several people in this thread have expressed the idea that soft skills have trivial benefits on purpose because the devs don't want soft skills affecting PvP. While it is true they have said they don't want soft skills having a direct impact on PvP, any system that is trivial may as well not exist. It isn't meant to be a "meaningless grind", and the assertion that soft skills aren't meant to motivate player's behavior is just silly. If soft skills don't motivate player's actions, they fail as a game mechanic. It is now clear that there is a lot more to this system than was initially apparent, although we still hardly know anything about it with absolute certainty.

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.

Some people on these forums have expressed that they think both the food and stamina systems in .63 are too punishing at the moment. I could not agree less with this. From the beginning, DayZ has always been a survival game. It was always meant to be hard to survive, which I think some of you have forgotten, with the prevalence of infinite apples spoiling you. Survival is a part of the game again. It was always supposed to be part of the game. If you are never burdened by your thirst or your hunger, there is no point. If you don't need to plan out what supplies to bring on a long journey, there is no point. If nothing bad ever happens to you for failing to manage your character's status, there is no point. Sprinting rapidly reduces thirst and food now. It is not something you can always afford to do anymore, and this makes sense. It is not realistic to sprint at your maximum capacity all the time. No one travels long distances like that. We need to get accustomed to walking. I made it all the way to the airfield on a single can of beans because I wasn't sprinting. Managing your character's health is essential, and beating the crap out of him/her all the time will put you in an early grave. This is exactly the way it should be in my opinion. Some of you may think that journeys are painfully long without sprinting. This was not my experience. It was actually fun. The world is vibrant now. The ambient noise and weather changes are fantastic. The day night cycle also transitions faster. There is much more to look out for on the trip. Obviously you need to manage your status as well, which is a distraction from the duration of journeys too. Things actually happen now on your way to get where you are going. The world isn't static, and neither is your character. I'm content if I'm healthy no matter what I'm doing. edit: I am referring to basic movement with the w key, not walking by holding w and control.

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.

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?

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.

I just wanted to say in the wake of the disaster that was Fallout 76 that I have never appreciated the development team behind DayZ more than I do today. Despite being faced with basically every hardship a game could be faced with in development, they just refuse to quit, and I am proud they have made it this far. It is an all too common occurrence that game developers cave to the complaints of players, and the players of DayZ are about as savage with complaints as it gets. They could have easily dumped DayZ at any point, but they haven't done that, and they still aren't doing that. It is undeniable at this point that major work has been put into overhauling the base experience of the game. The differences between the early alpha and today's beta are honestly staggering. Keep up the good work guys. The vision is true.

I got sick from drinking dirty water on my journey north, but later I did not get sick drinking dirty water. I now regularly consume dirty water and don't get sick. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe the disease feature just broke? Maybe still water is easier to get sick from?

You need to be more thorough with your testing. We can't play for 5 minutes without losing our gun audio. It is seriously detracting from the beta experience and it is affecting everyone equally. It isn't an isolated issue. Anyone who has played the game for even a few minutes after arming themselves will discover this bug. It is strange that this bug was only encountered a "couple" times in testing. It brings the testing methods into question. I think it would really benefit you guys if you were to employ a person whose job it is to actually play the game the way we do and report on that experience. Players, including myself, have been getting the impression that the developers are detached from the actual experience of DayZ. I had a long conversation with a friend about this very issue as we roamed Chenarus last night; that is before he died to silent gun shots. Perhaps the community managers could actually play the game on official and community servers? It would have the added benefit of making them seem more grounded about what's actually going on in the game when they seldom do communicate with us. I did not get the impression from their most recent DayZ stream that they are incredibly busy. I'm sure they have the time, and it doesn't take much technical know how to simply report on broken features. But of course you guys have your own way of doing things that have gotten us this far. I'm only making suggestions. Overall the beta is really coming along and I am really happy with the progress, keep up the good work! I criticize only because I care a lot about what you guys are doing. If the gun noise and persistence issues could be hammered out the beta would be a super fun experience. PS: I don't think shotguns are the source of the problem, or at least not the only one. I experience this issue constantly when I use silenced pistols. My impression was that the source of the problem is actually the silencers themselves.

What exactly are you face palming? You wrote several paragraphs trying to justify why it's okay that base building is broken. Apparently your argument is that base building sucks anyway so we just shouldn't care? Is that seriously your argument? We should just be okay with broken features which they delayed the development of the game to include? Because honestly I facepalm at that. Your premise is ridiculous man, but what's even more ridiculous are the extreme lengths you go to in your post to emphasize your ridiculous premise, as if it is some ground braking revelation, when it is really just a looney defense of base building being broken right now.

What are you on about? Base building doesn't sound cool, it is cool. That's why the developers spent five years trying to get it in the game... I'd imagine players expect to be able to build a base which locks that is at least a little difficult to break into so they can store vehicles and items on the server. They probably expect only well geared players to stand a chance getting in, and only after a good bit of work. Base building like this exists in several other games and mods similar to DayZ, and even in the original mod, and it definitely serves a purpose in those games. In those games bases act as hubs which house convenient items you can use all in one place, and yes, people do hunker down in their bases and try to defend them from people who surround the base. Typically explosives are used to break walls, which are hard to craft and take a long time to plant. The explosive itself is valuable, meaning there is less incentive to break into smaller bases. It's also loud and lets everyone within a wide radius know what you are up to.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about night, but I think they really nailed night with the beta build. Gamma exploiting to see in the dark is stupid. I am happy they actually addressed this issue, and they aren't getting enough credit for it in my opinion. The player spawns with a road flare, which is perfectly adequate to gear up if you actually commit to using it. If they could fix the head torch I think night would be perfect. They increased the vanilla day/night cycle speed significantly, which I think was a smart move. It's actually possible to play through the night. Try surviving the night if you haven't! It's actually fun and it can even be terrifying at times. This reminds me of another important but subtle change they made last year. Foliage doesn't disappear on low object settings anymore, and many smaller graphical advantages of low settings were eliminated too, meaning everyone is subjected to the same visibility. Little things like this are important for DayZ. I'm impressed by both these changes to the game. They are things I was hoping for from the early onset of alpha. I really never thought they would actually address graphical exploitation to this extent.

It isn't always dark. The night is equally long as the day. If you commit to your light sources it's possible to play through the night. It isn't nearly as long anymore.

Wait for his stamina to run out and he will be a sitting duck. Unless you are playing on unlimited stamina community servers, which breaks the melee combat and makes it crazy OP.