Starbridge

You think the game is balanced already? If that is your idea of balance, that is truly sad.

As much as everyone hates the idea of "classes" then you live in a very sheltered world. You cannot hand a scalpel to just anyone and have them preform a successful heart transplant. Weird, those people are surgeons, they went to school for that... and that would be their class. You cant hand me a keys to a tractor and a bag of seeds and expect me to grow a field of corn. You cant just give a gun to anyone and expect them to know how to use it. We, as gamers are very accustomed to game combat and therefor we either know it or can clunk around til we get it figured out. I am going to go out on a limb and guess there is around 15%-25% of people playing this game that have never fired a real gun, let alone held one. Maybe even more.

Incorrect. If you make soldiers more vulnerable to being sick or diseased then you would have to have people that were doctors to fix that. First thing that I would want to play is a Medical character. "Oh, you have a gun pointed at my head... no, I wont help cure the disease thats going to kill you in a couple of hours, because your just going to kill me as soon as its done." Everyone that rejects this idea are the kind of people that realistic game experience, but dont realize that everyone in the world has skills that make them useful. And for everyone that thinks starting with an M4 is powerful... it called an idea, something that is subject to change. Just for you people that dont understand the whole spawn with an M4 IDEA, let me break it down for you... M4 Condition: Badly Damage (Subject to jamming) Maybe takes longer to reload it because of its bad condition. Spawning with a gun, powerful yeah but with power also comes the draw backs. THATS ALL YOU HAVE! You can play this game solo no problem... find a no pop server, get the weapon you want to use, find lots of bullets and food then go to where you want to camp and kill people. Log out. Wait a few minutes, then log into a high pop server and go to town. Personally, I am a friendly player and help people when I see them and can tell they are fresh spawns or just need some food. Give them some good, maybe a bat if I have one and then be on my way. I pack a Mosin rifle so that when I play with friends I let them loot the town while I watch for other players and provide long range sniper fire when needed. Whenever I die, it take me all of 20 minutes to find a Mosin, a scope and a few boxes of ammo. So really, spawning with a busted up M4 thats prone to jamming and not working right only saves you a little time if you want to be a D bag and kill people. This brings me back to the drive to play. I am geared up... and now what? There is no story to investigate, no game mechanic that makes me want to log in and play. Dont get me wrong the game is fun to play with friends and from time to time help people out but if I could build/add on to buildings I would be spending my time making safe places for new players to spawn, maybe leave some gear there for them and some food. Everyone that I know that plays DayZ (Mod and Standalone) gives me the same replay. "I like it because of how real if feels." My replay... "How real is it? You mean that you are the same as everyone on the server, and a death just makes you start over and have to find all that stuff again?" Fun, but lacking, and I will be very disappointed if Standalone is the same as DayZ Mod, just most polished.

I said not a class system. Did you even read the context of my post. Obviously not.

Well, good thing my ideas are not for you.

I think everyone is really moving my idea way out of the realm I was thinking. Think of it like a tug of war. If you go all into Soldier than that is what you do, but lets say you can have up to 5 skill points to make it easy. Starting your skills in Soldier grays out the top tier perk/talents from other professions. A Soldier is not going to be doing any brain transplants is what I mean. That way people that pick Medical have a reason to be in a group with people and Engineers (Electricians, Mechanics) have their place in clans and groups too. Yes its a somewhat class base system but because you start as a Medical doesnt mean you cant take a skill or two in something else. You might not be able to do a heart transplant or rebuild a car engine with a single roll of duck tape but at least you can bandage someone better than most and keep a car going a few more miles before it completely dies. Now when you start as a Soldier--lets say Melee build--and you have the combat knife and you do more damage with it, because you take a skill to help you fix a car doesnt give you the special perk that the Engineer (Mechanic) gets. You get the perk based on the profession and and starting package you picked when you made your character.

You guys are thinking of a skill system like Oblivion or Skyrim where the more you do it the better you get... good in a way, but also bad because then everyone can do everything, you just have to work at it and then everyone is the same again and then being able to do something doesnt give other players reason to keep you around. So that doesnt work. As far as the experience goes it wouldnt be something that you grind out like an RPG because you can only learn so much from killing a zombie. Hit it enough times and it dies. I was leaning more in the direction of the longer you stay alive the more experience you get. I mean you should get some kind of experience from killing zombies and fixing things but it would revolve more around staying alive.

So I have been doing some reading about personal servers and how many of the DayZ fans dont like them because the hosts start server, loot a city and then restart the server. Yeah, I can see that as cheating and its not cool, but its really no different that looting the military base and then server hopping to a no/low pop server to do it again. Yeah, chances are you will run into someone but really... what are the chances of that because the map is so big? Not high at all, but sure they are there, whatever. Anyway, this brings me to the easy fix for that problem. When a server starts or restarts it must go through a day night cycle before loot spawns. Wow! Problem fixed! Or you can just say that your character file is held by the server you are playing on and that would prevent server hopping all together. The biggest reason I want to run my own server is because my internet is not very good, and in the past I have had to go a days without internet but still want to play games and when games are like DayZ where you cant host your own server I miss out on being able to do what I like to do, play games.

Well if DayZ Standalone is made just like DayZ mod then what was the point in buying it? The game needs to bring something else to the table or else its just a waste of $30. Lets go with what just happened to me about 10 minutes ago. Here I am raiding an air field with a friend of mine. Were not out to kill people but some dude out there was trying to kill us. If he had a broken bone or something, shooting at random people wouldnt get you any help. So it would be in your best interest to be cautious but friendly to people.

Then you could have a skill web. Maybe something as large as Path of Exile. (That skill/talent web is HUGE) Letting players move in whatever direction they want but only giving them limited points. I would guess about 5-10 points based on how big the skill web is. So as a Soldier you could start working with your hands more and lean how to fix cars. This just made you useful in two way. You can fight, and now you can fix a car for the team. Same thing goes from any other kind of combination you can think of. Possibilities for this really add a new depth to the game and a whole new level of realism. If a player is unhappy with they skill/talents/perk they have taken they can reset them in their options and then when they die and spawn again they will start with the new setting and perks. Somewhere I saw someone posting some kind of difficulty options, and this would work into that perfectly. Easy/Casual: Keep skills/perks/talents even after death. Keep clothing and backpacks on death drop all other items. Normal: Keep skills/perks/talents even after death. Keep your current backpack, respawn with profession items. Hard: Reset last half of skills/perks/talents spent before death. Respawn only with profession items. Survival Experience: Reset all skills/perks/talents. Respawn with only profession items.

You dont want classes but you just said you thought it would be neat to spawn with perks. Said perks would put you into a classafication of what you do best so thats what you do. AKA classes. Just as a rough example. Lets use two classes that would be opposite of each other. Soldier and Medical. One causes wounds the other heals them. Work with me here and focus. First off you pick a profession when you make your character. So lets say Soldier. When you make your pick of the profession you want that takes away the top 2 tiers of everything else, but still lets you branch into other professions if you feel the need to round out your skill set. So when you make your soldier you have--lets say 3 options--these would be: Melee combat, Secondary Firearms, Primary Firearms. Make your pick and then that is your base starting gear, even when you die this is the same package you will spawn with until you want to rest your profession and skills. So with your profession as soldier and your focus as Melee you would start with a combat knife, and maybe some better pants. Now with this set up you would have a special perk where you did an extra % damage with your combat knife, and bonus % for being behind your target or whatever. So if we change it up and you take Soldier and Primary Firearms. You start with your better pants, an M4 with a 10 round clip and 10 extra bullets. With a perk of a little better accuracy with that weapon. Secondary would start with 1911 and 2 clips of 10 rounds each. Perk of reloading a little faster. So now we move on to the Medical. 3 starting packages. Doctor, Surgeon, and Nurse. Doctors start with start with a few items they can combine to treat sicknesses. A whole new element (Sicknesses such as lime disease, pneumonia, infections and more) could be brought into the game. Staying in soaking cloths you could get pneumonia and doctors could make something to treat it. Surgeons start with items to make casts. A better way to fix a broken limb than adrenalin or splints. With perk that with the right tools they could revive fallen players within a window from the time of death. Maybe... 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how badly they were hurt? Nurses start with First Aid Kits and only 10% is used from bandages instead of 25% so you get more uses from them. Putting a system like this into the game opens up so many door to encourage players to play together and form gangs/bands/clans where people could have jobs to help the team. So if you are playing the soldier and your sick, being nice to another player could be very helpful if he was a doctor to treat you. Then you would have able to help each other survive. Because if something like a zombie out break would to happen, the lone wolf wont make it very far without help.

Skill points, ability points, survival points, I dont care what you want to call it. Personally, right now I think the game is crap. Granted its in alpha right now but as it stands right now I have some of the best gear that I am going to find and now I just run around not knowing what to do, because there is nothing in the game that drives me to do anything else. You want to say survival is the drive, how about this. I can guarantee that that I wont die now, and its easy to just not log in, knowing that I will not starve, dehydrate or be attacked. Surviving. If you think that everyone is the same then you dont know what the real world is like. The game wants you to feel like this is really happening to you, then you would have to give players the freedom to craft, work on skills and such. I mean hell, a couple of the other zombie survival games allow players to build buildings. If the zombie apocalypse were to happen the last thing I would be doing is living in some run down city knowing that people would be roaming around looting and killing. I would be off in the hills with my family. I'm fine with not being able to build things, but there needs to be some kind of progression element to the game. Yes, DayZ started out as a mod for Arma, but thats just it... it was a mod for game, but now that the game is getting its own game title and release you need something that is going to give it that extra edge over the other games out there. I would rather play DayZ, I have more friends playing it than the others. (Infestation, 7 Days to Die and Rust) However, I will gravitate to a game that gives me more options, and so far the options are lacking. Yes, alpha I know.

So I have been trying out all the new zombie survival games lately and each one has elements that I like and dont like. What I find lacking in DayZ is the the lack of personal customization for your character. Let me start of with Professions. Everyone has one. Some people are better at things that other. For example, running. The running that my character does in the game would physically kill me due to a heart problem that I have, but on the bright sight I do electronics for a living. I could make flashlights, radios, broadcasting equipment and I also worked in a hardware store for a long time so when it comes to thinking out side the box I can use a bunch of broken crap and fabricate some really neat stuff. Guns, I know safety but could I really speed load a gun if I had to... I am going to go with no. A friend of mine that was in Afghanistan as a troop would on the other hand be able to handle his weapons with ease and have the running endurance for long runs. To make the game a truly life like experience you would have to add in some kind of skill/perk system, profession and stat system. If you would to put me and my friend side by side with the same gear (lets go with a full combat set) I wouldnt be jogging anywhere, I would be dragging my gun down the road while he would be jogging and I am going to guess without even breaking a sweat. However, you put me in a hardware store I could make you some weapons that would be awesome. A little bit of ABS pipe, some fittings, an air compessor and some paper towels and nails and screws. Meg-shift shotgun, ta da! Not sure what he would make but man I could just go to town in a hardware store. Throws us both in the wilderness and I think we would be on part with each other. He would have the upper hand on hunting and being mobile, but I was a boy scout when I was younger and I could navigate myself to a town or to water if I needed to. My suggestion for this being worked into the game isnt kill X amount of zombies to get a level. It would kill zombies or players (if thats your thing) and get exp, as you build up exp you can spend it on new skills. Such as being able to go longer without eating, or faster weapon swapping or being able to fall from higher places. The idea behind this is to let players progress to something other than just running about and finding better gear that what they have. Right now I have the most storage space I can get I think, and a good set up of food and weapons, so what is there for me to do really... nothing. I just log in and run around with friends to hang out. I have nothing to progress in and there for, no real drive to play the game. For fairness, each player should only have so many skills/perks so you cant be the super crafty soldier or were just back at the same place of everyone being the same and then the game is boring again. When you make your character you should be able to pick a professions and a single skill to go with it. The gear you start with should match up to said profession and skill. This would be the only thing that sticks with you when you die. Not that you keep everything that you had, but you will start again with the same profession and skill that you picked before. If you want a new set of skills then you have to start over, so that means no respecing. If you make a soldier and ear 6 skills and then find out you want to do a survivalist, then you would have to start over FROM ZERO. I dont want a level system, that just wouldnt make any sense at all but grouping up with someone that can fight, and someone that can track and hunt while someone is good with their hands would make for a good team, and maybe players wouldnt just kill on sight they would want to see what you have to offer. In real life, the best groups would be all kinds of people with all kinds of skill sets. If everyone in a group was a good soldier, who is going to help them track food, or locate clean water or fix something like a car engine? Yeah yeah, some people are going to flame me for this but hey, you are not the best at what you do and there are things that you cannot do.