Hardplace

Hey guys! I'm rather new to the DayZ scene, have been playing alpha for the past month or two, and haven't tried out the mod, so please excuse my lack of experience. I've been having a lot of fun in DayZ due to the emotional consequences to the RP aspect of the game. Dying specifically adds gravity to the rest of your actions while you're alive. There is a certain finality to a black screen with "You are dead" written across it, be it from eating bad food, getting shot by a bandit, or in a heated exchange of firefight with another survivor. My suggestion is to add a map, that shows up after the "You are dead." screen but before you respawn. This map would only be viewable while your character is dead - and would show a line moving from where your character started his life span (With an X marker (possibly black) where you started) all along the path you took throughout Chernarus until you died, which would be marked with another X marker possibly in red), as well as a life timer (IE//.. You survived for 6 hours 3 minutes! Or... You survived 2 weeks 3 days 2 hours and 4 minutes!) I personally feel this would have the dual benefit of adding a certain gravity to your actions by allowing you to view where you have gone, and make decisions based on your previous deaths allowing people to learn (but not where you are at the moment so as to not ruin immersion), and also increase immersion in that it'll give people a goal to increase their time survived. I personally feel that this would have an added benefit of encouraging players to explore the map more, and make players aware if they are only camping in a certain area, without limiting their ability to chose to do so. In the end I feel this will encourage a play style that lets player access more of the map - however it will not give them any more tools to access more of the map as they do it, so as to not make the game any easier. Any thoughts or responses would be appreciated!

Agreed, it's not a high priority. It's a Nice to have not a NEED to have. But it would be a great selling feature for the game. Which is why I wanted to make sure it was in the suggestion forums. There is CERTAINLY a lot more pressing things that should be addressed first. But - as stated in multiple other threads, conveniently the dev's are pretty good at prioritizing AND multitasking. I'll leave the business decisions of 'when' to the developers. Just wanted to gather some support for the idea in the mean time and see if we can work towards it.

That's what I'm saying. I'm about 150 hours into the game, and about 50 hours into this character. I've been all over the map, done all sorts of crazy things. Been in conflict about a dozen times and made it out alive either through running, killing, bartering, or talking my way out. I've helped lots of people on the coast, I've shot people because I was starving and I needed food... and surviving was more important than morality. I've been shot and knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, and I've knocked people out and looted them. A play by play like at the end of civ would be rad - but I'm setting my sights much... much lower than that, as it seems many in the community feel this isn't realistic. Admittedly, civ was the inspiring factor in this. ;) Thanks for the support PJSleaze! The more support we can get for an idea like this, the more likely we are to get recognized. :) Also, in regards to previous comments, if you read the article it is indicating that the heat shown is death locations I believe. It's a very very neat idea though, and even if there was just a heat map like that for a server it could be pretty awesome, but I admittedly think that may be a little out of our reach currently, the mod had years to work this stuff out from what I gather.

That's basically exactly my goal. It doesn't need to be public. It doesn't need to ruin immersion by trying to encourage people to boost those stats with some kind of competition in mind, because survival is really the only goal. But it would be a neat way to reflect upon your own journey, and it would likely increase immersion for me by helping me to recap my existance in that life, and reminding me of my past experiences that life. In short - I don't need to be compared to other people to feel successful. However, having the ability to compare to myself would be a nice feature to the game that would help to drive me to succeed, and keep my interest high.

Add this to the list - Any time I try to speak to someone, and they choose to not respond. I understand you may not have a mic, but at that point, it's type or die. By not responding to me you've limited all possibilities of positive interactions with you to... looting you. And I'm a generally HYPER friendly player.

I understand what you're saying, it seems everyone is saying it would be too difficult to implement a tracking map, and I can certainly understand why! Keeping track of a 6 digit number of co-ords for each player, even if it's as innacurate as once every 15 minutes, is still going to end up with a list of 800 Co-ords to track in the situation that a character survives for 200 hours. Simply placing a start - and death marker should be easy to track if they wanted to bypass this, meaning each character would only need to record 2 co-ords, and shouldn't be too much work for the servers to keep track of, but it would still take a lot of work to build into the existing interface. I like the idea suggested earlier of other relevant stats, or even just in it's most basic form - A clock, showing your survival time, which should be again, should be pretty easy to implement in the grande scheme of things. Any other outside of the box suggestions on this? Clearly people do not see it as viable to track a character's progress everywhere they go on the map, I don't have any experience in computer game design so I'm clearly not capable of making that judgement.

I really like this idea. For a short time almost 10 years ago one summer I trained with my cities riot squad helping to teach them how to use Riot Batons and Riot Shields (as I belonged to the only group in town that was trained in sword and board fighting, so we would often have skirmishes vs the Riot squad to practice both of our teams out). While we did this, one of the things that they had to bring to the table and taught us was how to remove a wounded teammate from the front. It's something that is trained by police, medics, EMT, Military, and other rescue/survival groups (Hell, even lifeguards have a water version of this!). It would be highly situationally useful, however if it was implimented it should use your 'hands slot' and you should only be able to drag them backwards (although you can change the angling to rotate) to remain somewhat realistic. I can already think of a situation where one of my friends broke their legs and this would have been a useful tactic.

I'd rather personally see Wheel Chairs, than shopping carts. It'd be easy to place them in medical facilities, and gives an alternate form of 'healing' a broken leg without actually healing it. Maybe limit it's incline speed more than running, but give it a similar speed to jogging on flat ground to simulate how quickly people can actually go in wheel chairs on flat ground (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7G4b73hyvs).

Thanks Karma. :) It may be very difficult, I could see that. it is certainly a LOT of information to keep track of when you account for 40 players each living up to 200 hours or something crazy like that. But... better to set our sights high and try to achieve it. Either way though, I believe in the community and our ability to think outside of the box. I'd be glad even if it just showed 2 points 'spawn' and 'death' even if it didn't connect the dots, infact that may actually be better and leave a little mystery to the path you took to get there. Also that'd be a million times easier for the servers, and it could still include the timer. Any other suggestions on how we could make this successful?