Redd (DayZ)

Sweet. Reminds me a little bit of what happened in HellMOO. I would probably not have it kill everyone though, but rather have it/them as a tactical nukes (assuming they can be assembled correctly from parts on mil bases) or dirty bombs (easier to make, I.E.D style, from a subset of the full tactical nukes components) with the upshot that certain areas of the map become irradiated and people need to start being aware of radiation sickness etc. Think geiger counters, iodine pills, sourcing clean water/animals etc.

The devs claim they want to take the game in the direction where the players have characters that are a unique, one-shot deals, i.e with the permadeath element characters exist only for as long as you can keep them alive. So why have stuff carry over from one life to another such as gender, reputation, name etc? Obviously name and rep have been around for a while so it's the move to make gender a 'once per cd-key' thing that's been the catalyst for this post. To be blunt, the way the devs have made this change belies either a lack of direction/foresight, or of commitment to the stated goal. I expect people will be tempted to counter that "adding female characters does increase the uniqueness of characters", but then they'd be making the same mistake the devs have in conflating uniqueness of characters within the overall set of players with uniqueness of characters within the set of the player's characters. See the difference? Most of the fun of role-playing is taking a break from the norm. If your norm is playing a bandit, you might want to play as a survivor next life. With skills implemented, you might choose to put your efforts into being a mechanic instead of a medic. This freedom of play, still within the one game, is what extends its value to the player. With a change in play style, you might decide a change of name/face/gender is a better fit for the character you had in mind. It seems foolish and counterproductive for the devs to go to the trouble of implementing gender for characters and then lock the choice down to the players account. I was hoping the devs would unbind (the already god-awful) humanity scores from accounts and set them to individual characters at some point, demonstrating commitment to the goal of allowing players to role-play unique characters in a sandbox, and was willing to sit quietly by until that happened organically over the early life of the project. But when they make a move in the opposite direction, by tying more things down, I felt I should speak up and draw some attention to the disparity between words and action. Tl;dr The devs are working to implement freedom of play for each of your characters with one hand, as choosing skins has now been implemented, and skills and such are coming down the road, and yet they're taking this freedom away with the other; choose your gender, one time only, for all characters. This, along with other things mentioned in the body of the post, seems to suggest they're approaching development from the mainstream mindset of permanence of character whilst simultaneously trumpeting the ephemerality of your character in a permadeath world. There's such a big disconnect here one can only hope it's an oversight.

Idling shouldn't be allowed on servers, full-stop. Also, considering the game is headed towards penalising deaths even more, if anti-idle methods weren't introduced or were combated by macros simulating activity then the people who go AFK are going to have a bad time regardless. I wouldn't trust the life of a character with a bunch of gear, skills and reputation to an anti-kick idle macro for anything, and certainly not just to regen some health.

The humanity system is weak. Is the ever omniscient babby Jeebu looking over the field of play, deciding who's been a good person and who hasn't, and sprinkling this ultimate truth into the minds of all who roam? No? Well, with the current system it sure seems like it. And let's not even touch on having it regenerate automatically. If the devs removed global chats completely (without your character having access to a radio system) and removed names from showing on-screen (chat etc.) unless you know, in-character know, the speaker then instead of this magic morality system we currently have, we could have a player controlled system where you: - Choose to identify yourself to other players or not as the only way to gain or lose trust and reputation. If you're unknown or your actions, good or bad, are unwitnessed then why should your characters reputation be affected? This identification should be a one way process. Once another character knows your character that's it. No toggle. - Vote on those, and only those, who are identified to you who injure you or injure/kill others if you're party/witness to the act. This can be location based, team based, or however the game already knows who's involved when working out the 'logging off in combat' punishments. Thus you can forgive friends who accidentally injure you in a firefight, give negative rep to people who try to kill you and, if you include a short, rolling log of inventory access too, give known players rep based on hold-ups etc. and which would also have the knock-on effect of helping foster a working trade system. Example: You notice some supplies missing after hanging out with known survivor Sticky Fingaz. If you noticed within the brief lifespan of the access log you get to rep them down accordingly. - Separate personal rep from group/faction rep. Allow some manual sharing of rep between characters/groups, so people can build a web of trust. - Have a particular entity's rep reset on death (obviously, permadeaths for everyone \o/). If you tie this in with rules that mean a character's face/name gets chosen on creation and remains set until death then this feeds into the ability to genuinely role-play a character. The proposed RPG skill system will help deter people from killing themselves for a quick rep reset. Tl;dr Characters should be anonymous to others unless they choose not to be, on a character by character basis. On top of that, a character's reputation should not change in the absence of measurable action. i.e. no humanity ticking up for simply existing. And, of course, a lone, unwitnessed murder victim shouldn't be able to negatively flag their attacker to the world, known or not, from beyond the grave. Forensic evidence is there for a reason (or absent if done right :P).

No idea what they were doing then. They were still there in the same position when we swung by later, and didn't react to having members dropped and looted, so idk.

Have blood regen (REALLY LOW not fucking modern FPS style) from food & rest, but tie it into a food & hunger system. You can't eat the 20 tins of beans you looted from nubshore all in one go to keep it regenning, because you will become full after a few tins, although while you're regenning blood (SLOWLY), your hunger should drop at a faster rate than if you're fully fit. Blood transfusions can obviously still be an instant remedy to spilling your claret though, as that doesn't break authenticity. I'd also like to see injuries like broken limbs and such take time to heal rather than being instant, and painkillers should certainly take a while to kick in. I'm not suggesting that once your leg is broken you can't walk on it for weeks, but it should at least slow you down for a good while, even if it's splinted.

I would assume this is unintended consequences from the placeholder (I hope) automated humanity mechanic, but people standing around in the woods AFK to regain humanity needs sorting out. It's cheap and it's taking up slots for people who actually want to play. I've observed whole groups doing it, so it's clearly a problem. Regardless of the underlying cause, people shouldn't be allowed to idle.

One time purchase of the game it's based on. If it moves to a new engine down the road, I have the choice to stick with what I've got, or move onto the new one. Community developed. Community hosted servers with stable, developer run back-end server(s) funded by donations. Allow people to donate via whatever means possible. Incentivise donations from those who would normally not bother via 'prestige' rewards. All in all, look to Valves mod-to-standalone game track record. Think Counterstrike or Team Fortress. Start as mod, and IF it blows up, and now is not the time despite what the little voices may or may not be whispering, then it's time to go studio (still in the Valve vein i.e. I'm sure Bohemia would green-light a fully fledged version of a mod of it's previous games if it was shown to generate sales). The big mods only got as big as they did because they were left in the hands of the community before becoming entangled in the shitfest of business. You should probably wait until a few people have died IRL of game-caused dehydration/starvation/lack of sleep/revenge killings to gauge when to make the move. This seems to be the industry standard. ;)