darkgritty

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/six-upcoming-developments-that-will-change-dayz-for-the-better/1100-6420740/ GLOBAL LOOT RARITYOnce the loot spawning system has been fixed, Hall plans to revolutionise the loot economy itself by making loot persistent across every single server in the entire world. This allows the team to control the rarity of individual items not just per server, but for every single player no matter where they live. "We'll say there can only be, for example, a hundred night-vision goggles in the whole world across all servers," Hall explains. "Then, once your character dies, or that item gets destroyed, it makes a new one available to spawn on a server." The rarity of an item will be defined by its function. Specialist military gear, such as night-vision goggles, logically wouldn't be found as often as a can of baked beans. Hall wants players to hear rumours that a particular player on a particular server has found some of this specialist gear, which could lead to a kind of lore and reputation building up around such servers. And if you are the person who has found such an item, you'll start playing differently to hold onto it for as long as possible. "What we'd see is, particularly when we get into vehicles, or components for helicopters that are very rare and are controlled centrally so there can only be a certain amount of helicopters in every server in the whole world, that would mean that if you hear there's a working helicopter on a particular server, you'll want to go to that server," he adds. Hall predicts that the team will need to add a new server cluster dedicated to controlling this persistent loot economy. But the introduction of extreme rarity and the reputation surrounding players with such items is an important step toward adding more opportunities for emergent storytelling to take place. The team also discussed methods of bringing the notion of changing servers into the gameworld itself, such as walking to the edge of the map loading you into a new server on the other side. "But obviously we need to make a lot of maps for that, and it takes many years because they're huge, hand-made maps," says Hall. "We talked about procedural generation, but it was going to be so much effort that, before we looked at that, we needed to do all our architectural work first." Ok, maybe someone can explain how exactly this reputation from another server helps "emergent storrytelling"? What storytelling is he talking about? Because the only thing I see is even more motivation for server hopping - which is already a big problem that is NOT being solved in its roots. Why should there be economy between servers? In Rust or 7 Days to Die you cannot bring your loot to another server. You change server, you start with nothing, no server hopping for loot, everyone is happy. Is it not a viable solution for DayZ? Why? What if someone gets a hold on night vision goggles and goes offline? What if he dies in the woods under a bush? Will that pair of goggles remain with him forever and not spawn on this or any other server again until he goes online and gets killed? What is the logic behind this? If we have abundant respawning food and ammo, appearing just out of nowhere (which already means no realistic economy), why should night goggles get limited this way? Or maybe Rocket wants players to server hop even more in search of rare items? Is it a game about server hopping for rare items?

No its not. It means that players who want to achieve something will HAVE to change servers all the time to get it. If only one of 100 servers spawn parts for helicopters, everyone will go for that server to farm these parts. If it starts spawning on another server - they will have to change server again. And again. And again. It also means that you will HAVE to go to a server with bad ping, if you play from another part of the world. It also means larger crowds trying to enter a server with specific spawn, and other servers will have lower population. It all sounds like a pile of overcomplicated crap that will result in more exploits and hack. If you design a system with possible exploit hole in it, be sure that players will find it and start abusing it. And no matter what patches you try to implement after that to 'punish' this kind of gameplay, you will only make things worse for normal players who try to play an immersive survival game, not some powergaming rare loot farming. If you tailor the system towards pvp competion - get ready for constant hacks and exploits, because A LOT of people want to be the best by any means possible. In this sense, DayZ has a unique exploit foundation compared to other 'survival' games. It has all the hacks you have to deal with, for example, in Rust, plus server hopping pvp. Got a fortified base you can't assault because its heavily protected and barricaded by other players - just disconnect from this server, wait for 5-whatever minutes, log in to another server, change you position, and log in later right in the middle of their base - voila, barricades are pointless. You can change the reconnect timer to 30 minutes, or 3 hours - it won't change anything if powergaming and competition is involved. If Rust, where base building is already implemented had the same crap with server hopping, no one would play it, because barricading and base building and defence are the main aspects of Rust. Gary seems to understand that. Dean - I'm not so sure. If saving you loot between servers is the issue here, and starting a new character from beginning is too extreme (I thought we play a hardcore survival game here, eh?), then all people who enter the server with any loot in their inventory SHOULD spawn on a random spawn point, as if they were a new character, and not on the place they disconnected on previous server.

Yeah, I watched it too, there's not a word there about "cross-server" battles between clans. The whole presentation is mostly about survival/immersion aspects of the game, in case you didn't watch it and just posted a random video.

lolwhat? I've never heard about DayZ as 'cross-server clan battles' game. Can you please link some official statement about this? The only thing I heard of is clan bases, but it has nothing to do with cross-server battles. I always thought that DyZ is about survival social experiment, not some Battlefield with rare milweapons farming and assaulting clan bases on other servers.

I'm not against rarity control, I'm against loot being transfered between servers. It sucks. It is unrealistic. It is not about survival. It is bad already and it can become worse with the new global rarity system, which will promote server hopping. And that 'emerging storytelling' idea sounds like bad excuse and mindless bullshit. DayZ storytelling was never about changing servers for rare loot.

AgentNe0, I couldn't agree more

Jet Li - The One :)