Localhost (DayZ)

:exclamation:I'm preemptively apologizing for the wall of text, but I'll add a tl;dr at the bottom. Enjoy and be sure to give feedback! Hey guys, I've been reading a lot of the humanity posts lately, and many of them seem to revolve around a visual change to alert other players. I think this is wrong, as it essentially just makes the game a team based shooter with friendly fire (Oh, he has skin A? he's ok. Skin B? shoot on sight). I've been thinking of a new approach to the humanity system. Player Sanity. First of all, I believe one of the biggest changes that can be made to reduce killing "for the fun" is to remove the Murder/Bandit Killed counters from the debug screen. This will prevent people from seeing it as a score, and trying to maximize it. Now, on to the Sanity system. Player Sanity would increase slowly over time, as well as when doing acts that currently raise humanity (bandaging/healing others, giving transfusions, etc). Sanity lowers as you do hostile actions, such as killing other players (high penalty), and shooting at other players (very low penalty). Other causes could be added, such as stealing, but I'm unable to think of a way to check stealing vs taking items out of a consenting player's bag, so I tabled that idea, for now. As far as how quickly you can hit low Sanity would require testing and tweaking, but I would ballpark that netting 4 kills within an hour would bring you to slightly low Sanity (so you begin to feel effects) from neutral. As an added effect, there should be no sanity meter in the UI, the player would have to determine the effects on their own. -High Sanity: Does not have an effect on gameplay, other than having a larger buffer before you fall into Low Sanity. -Low Sanity: Has a few drawbacks. None of these should be immediately noticeable to a third party. Low Sanity should only have effects noticable to the afflicted player. The lower a player's Sanity, the more common these effects would become. Effects of low sanity are as follows: -Visual Hallucinations: My first idea was for the player to have visual hallucinations of survivors in the distance and zombies close by. This would introduce paranoia, possibly forcing the affected player to shoot at/react to things which did not exist, subtly hinting to other players that grouping with this character may not be safe. However, this may not be possible in the current engine. -Auditory hallucinations: Keeping with that theme, I believe a much easier solution would be auditory hallucinations. Footsteps/zombie groans/gunshots at random intervals could have the same effect (though maybe less effective) without the technical limitations -"Phantom" Inventory: shifting inventory, "phantom" items that look normal, but appear in the inventory randomly and when used, do nothing but vanish. (Possible drawback: would have to prevent these items from being transferred to other players) -Inaccurate UI readings: slightly off compass/watch, UI displaying that you are more hungry/thirsty than you currently are, etc. I haven't thought too much about this one, it just dawned on me while writing this post, so it may be a bad idea or may not be feasible in the current engine. I'm not suggesting that all of these be implemented, they are just ideas, (in order of what I would most like to see to least). Feel free to add more. Now, I do not believe that killing people should have an unavoidable punishment. That just seems unfair. That is why I suggest a new item, the anti-psychotic. Anti-psychotics: This item would spawn rarely in the country (Read: almost never), regularly in cities and military outposts, and would be found in large quantities in hospitals. Consuming these would restore Sanity (Amount would have to be tested, maybe restores the amount lost by killing 5 survivors). There would be a cap however. The maximum sanity you can regain through anti-psychotics would be the "neutral" sanity level at a player spawns with. This is to avoid raiding a hospital, pumping yourself full of anti-psychotics to gain high Sanity, then going on a killing spree. OK, done with my wall of text. Any feedback or suggestions? TL;DR: Sanity system hidden from UI, lowered by killing/shooting others, raised slowly by default, by healing/transfusing others, or by taking a new item, anti-psychotics(can only restore to neutral level). Low Sanity induces auditory/visual hallucinations, and can add phantom items to inventory. Frequency of effects depends on Sanity level. At no point should sanity level be immediately apparent to anyone, including the affected player. Third parties will only be able to infer the sanity of another player by observing their actions.

No. Would just feed the coast PKers (they aren't killing for makarovs and makarov ammo, I'll tell you that). However, possibly lower starting items to makarov/1 clip ammo, 1 bandage, 1 can beans, 1 canteen.

I don't believe that it punishes the play-style of player killing any more than having ammunition implemented punishes the play-style of firing your weapon(edit: and certainly less than the common threads suggesting forced appearance changes). If you choose to player kill regularly' date=' there is another item that you must seek out. Since the anti-psychotics would be fairly common occurrence in military outposts (where most PKers go to get more ammo), it would not be too much of an extra hassle, disregarding the inventory space taken. It will however (hopefully) fix players who sit on a hill and disconnect/reconnect to restore their ammo, by forcing them to move to look for anti-psychotics. Killing other human beings does put a massive strain on a person's sanity. DayZ still has a society, though a fractured one. Killing people for spot fits the dictionary definition of insane, even in the world of DayZ.