Serrath

The principle is sound, but I can't resolve a few issues with it in my head: Some people listen to music or have other ambient sound while they play. Could cause echo-feedback if two players near each other aren't using headphones A clever player on Skype/Vent could reduce the voice transmit volume in Arma 2 or try to circumvent it by some other means. I'd really like to see a solution to enforce "fair" gameplay regardless of Skype/Vent, though.

THE ISSUE: It's the zombie apocalypse. You've been surviving, and you've acquired a weapon. Now you encounter another player. If you're considering killing this person, it's probably one of these three reasons: 1) Paranoia: This player might kill you. You have a weapon, maybe he wants it? Maybe he needs food? Maybe he doesn't trust you and he's going to play it safe. In any event, your mistrust of him has caused you to consider shooting him. 2) Greed: This player has something you want. Maybe he's got something you NEED. Whether you're dying of thirst and suspect he's hoarding water (see: paranoia) or you're down to your last clip in that M1911, but you've got six clips that would fit nicely in his Lee Enfield... In any event, you've decided your best bet is to kill him to get it. Hell, maybe you're armed to the teeth, AK and everything, but his has a fancy sight on it. 3) Boredom: Yeah, I got some guns, I've got ammo, I've got food, but I've really got nothing to do. I don't feel like putting the time into building a chopper/car, so I'm gonna go shoot people for funsies. (lawl!) Reason 1 is spectacular. It's why PvP is so essential to Day Z. Reason 2 is essential to Reason 1. Paranoia is key, and greed is key to creating paranoia. The frustration here is that players have difficulty telling whether the fellow with the makarov is going to shoot you in the back in the head and take your AK after your amicable exchange and agreement to work together. There needs to be a better mechanism for establishing trust. Reason 3 is something of an issue. It doesn't add to gameplay for the victims, and it somewhat aggravates the issue of trust in the Paranoia & Greed mechanic. Fortunately, it's somewhat self-resolving since sniping noobs is bound to get boring after a while. (Or else the poor sociopath will find small animals to torture and kill in his back yard, if not.) THE SOLUTION: If establishing trust is an issue and it's safer just to kill someone, make it more beneficial to work together. An example of making it more beneficial to work together is the blood transfusion mechanic. It's beautiful. Brilliant. Essential. Removing starting weapons and reducing starting supplies makes players less of an automatic target, and is a perfect example of the kind of Greed motivator you want to remove; it's no longer possible (or particularly helpful) to double your starting gear by locating a nooblet. At the same time, we want PvP to be a tense, emotional experience, so anything that gives you more reasons to work together should also provide additional greed motivators. The idea here is that casual murder for a can of beans or an extra clip is boring; we want desperate murder for that last can of beans or those last seven shots. Anything that increases the benefits of cooperation while simultaneously increasing paranoia should do the trick. We want tension to remain high, but we also want to eliminate casual murder. Every kill/death should be exciting and purposeful. Start survivors at less than full blood? (Increase max to 13000 or decrease starting blood moderately.) Cooperation: You'd need a transfusion off the bat to be as strong as possible. Greed: Food/blood is more valuable. More cooperative goals: Cooperation: Reaching the Northwest Airfield is generally a team job. Razorwire, carrying capacity, and other difficulties predicate teamwork. Similarly, putting together a vehicle, due to carrying constraints, is a team job. Additional team jobs like putting together a generator to reach new loot (maybe some stash is hidden behind an electrical-controlled gate) would inspire more teamwork. If a horde of zombies were attracted by the noise generated, this would reinforce that aspect. Greed: Special loot will attract unwanted attention from opportunistic bandits. Bleed more from gunshot wounds: Cooperation: If a gunshot wound is going to bleed significantly faster than any other injury, maybe you'll think twice before attacking another human with a gun. The need for transfusions will necessitate more teamwork. Greed: Medical supplies (bandages, blood bags) become more valuable. WHAT'S THE UPSHOT OF IT ALL? Any "solution" to PvP issues must increase both paranoia and greed motivators. We want to discourage casual violence, and at the same time heighten the tension between players. And clearly, I haven't figured out how to make text bold. Further suggestions in this thread are encouraged. Remember: The goal here is to decrease the number of casual murders; we want more cooperation and more paranoia at the same time.

Reducing damage is the opposite of what I'm trying to do here. I want PVP to be more tense, more suspenseful. Hell, to that end it'd be better if players were damaged as easily as zombies; if an M1911 round is all it takes to put you down, you're gonna be pretty paranoid. I'm not trying to make PvP fair, I'm not trying to make PvP less worth your while, I just want it to be more emotionally intense. Life's unfair, it's not this game's job to fix that. That said, dealing with armed strangers in a post-apocalyptic survival scenario gets your heart racing, and it is the game's job to replicate that.

Sometimes players disconnect when under fire from PvP. I've outlined a potential fix for this. Player "John" wants to disconnect. John: John hits disconnect. He enters a 15-second wait (this can replace the 15 second wait that currently happens after the player leaves the server). Everyone but John: During John's 15-second wait, a vote is passed to all other players on the server. "John is disconnecting. Press to stall for 2 minutes. A 15 second penalty is applied." Result: If nobody presses the key to stall John's disconnect, he disconnects successfully. If someone within a 2km radius of John presses the key to stall John's disconnect, John remains on the server for 2 more minutes. Anyone who presses the key to stall John's disconnect, even if they are not within a 2km radius of John, has 15 seconds added to their disconnect period (i.e. if you vote once it goes to 30, twice it goes to 45, etc.) This prevents players from abusing this system. If multiple disconnects are occurring in the same period, all votes to stall apply to all players (the 2km radius restriction is still in effect to actually prevent any individual player from disconnecting). The penalty, however, is only applied once per keypress, regardless. Bandits, read this: The only drawback to this system is that if players keep trying to disconnect to avoid being murdered by bandits, the bandit will incur a severe penalty when trying to disconnect. (Every 4 players is an extra 1 minute wait.) The upside is, if the system is effective in preventing players from disconnecting to avoid death from PvP, this won't be an issue. The reason the message goes out to the entire server is to prevent abuse of the system.

It already tells you every time someone disconnects; this is essentially the same thing, murhis.

This works just as well, all the complicated bits are behind the scenes. As long as it's not abused, you'll hardly notice it. Abuse it, and you'll feel its wrath. (Plus, if you're not in a position you can hunt them down and you elect to stall them, they can always Alt-F4.)

@Bo0G: I'd really rather it didn't take me 1-2 minutes to quit a server every time. @FishIsTwonk: Spamming that button will bite you in the ass, is the idea. Any system is going to inconvenience people trying to disconnect somewhat. This system should punish people trying to abuse it more than it inconveniences the average player. Reducing the radius is probably important; I don't have access to data that will tell me what range is the upper limit (within two standard deviations from the mean) for murders by bandits. Obviously the devs could tweak this very effectively.

First let's clear up the misunderstanding: If multiple survivors are quitting, you only press the key once to vote for all of them. The penalty is only applied once. So that penalty doesn't instantly become 30s or 45s. I'll concede the range should probably be nerfed; if we reduce it to 1km or 0.5km radius it's less likely to be abused. It's also possible to tweak this to prevent abuse (i.e. after 10 failed votes in an hour you can't keep stalling) or excessive punishment to bandits. (i.e. Your d/c timer runs down over time, so for every hour you're on the server it strips 15s or so) I'll also concede that you don't know whose disconnect you want to prevent, but I'd like to ask: 1) How many times in an hour you kill someone? What % of your playtime does the time between the first shot and their death add up to? 2) How often do players disconnect from your server on average? With a 30 minute average life, if everyone plays exactly one life, that's every 6 minutes on a 50 player server. This would be a 15 second process. 3) Do the math. These coincidences WILL HAPPEN, but it won't be obnoxiously frequent, and certainly shouldn't cause you much trouble. I'd expect you mistakenly try to stall someone no more than three times in a long play session. Adding a system to slowly drain your disconnect clock would fix this readily.

A 2km radius is just over 12 km2 of a 225km2 map. I picked this distance specifically to be fair to bandit snipers. The 15s penalty for stalling a quit is to prevent the system from being abused. It does punish bandits more than other survivors, but the benefits of this system should outweigh the costs as far as the bandits are concerned. It is noteworthy that the current system arguably favors survivors heavily. The penalty is relatively low (15 seconds) because you don't know the person you're shooting at is the person disconnecting. However, I think it's relatively safe to assume that in a 50 person server, the amount of times that someone starts disconnecting while you're shooting a player will be low enough that this isn't an issue. The server very specifically DOES NOT inform you that the player is within X km from you. That goes against the grain of what we're trying to accomplish. The server displays the same message to all players. If you're currently trying to kill someone, hit the stall key, just to be safe. It's just a 15 s penalty.

The 15 second penalty for voting yes is to prevent people from spamming the stall button. You suffer the 15 second penalty for every time you vote to stall; anyone spamming the stall button would suffer a pretty steep d/c time. Plus, you get to disconnect at the end of the 2 minutes, regardless; if no one is actively hunting you, you can easily find a quiet place to sit that out.

Save it as an indexed *.gif file and you'll be able to get what you want in there. PNG files and high-quality JPEGs are a no-no. Any image that size can be stored as an indexed GIF. Try converting your existing image to an indexed GIF using The GIMP as Dallas suggested. http://www.gimp.org/

The 15 sec penalty applies even if you're in 2km, even if you kill them after. Anyone spamming stalls will suffer quite the penalty for griefing.

I like this idea. Got my support.

Removing regular infection/disease goes against the survival aspect of the game that ROCKET's trying to push. Regular infection/disease MUST stay. If you want the zombie virus to be contagious, it would have to be an additional type of infection that may occur. Personally, I'd like to see every zombie attack infect the victim and they've got maybe 2-8 ingame hours to get medicine before they succumb.

The fix is already finished and will be added when the game reaches Beta.

Absolutely! Once he implements power plants this is going to be fantastic. He also mentioned in a previous interview having dismemberment with zombies, I feel like once they stop zig-zagging that'd be a great feature to add some horror. Blood trails, bloody handprints/footprints... More grotesque/decaying zombies, corpses in houses. (I think the zombie part here is actually already in the plan, sort of a lifecycle thing.) Ambient animal noises that disappear near zombies. Zombies rattling chain-link fences, rustling leaves, making wooden steps creak, etc. when they touch these objects. These already exist' date=' mostly in big piles in military areas. They also have lots of body bags all lined up, which is a great touch. A little better lighting would go a long way to make these scenes more striking. Actually not a fan of this one; screams would be interesting, but I'd rather it was kept real, no random ambient cries for help. Maybe when a player takes a particularly rough hit from a zombie he/she screams, alerting nearby players and zombies. (Suddenly your hatchet isn't 100% stealth anymore. Crossbow's looking pretty useful again, isn't it?)

1. More co-op goals / gameplay mechanics to make player interactions more tense / increase paranoia 2. Show how much blood someone's lost by bloodying up their character 3. Extra hard difficulty setting where you need antibiotics within a few hours of being attacked by a zombie or you turn into a zombie (player respawns, creates zombie where they were)

Even starlight/moonlight reflecting off zombie eyes would be a really cool sort of aesthetic effect.

It'd be nice if whiskey bottles shattered when they landed and made a lot more noise than tin cans and such. Maybe even have negative consequences for stepping on the broken glass?

Ordinary difficulty level: You're not immune to the infection. (You're ordinary) Any damage from a zombie gets you infected. Antibiotics within X hours to cure or your body turns into a zombie & you respawn. (Only count time logged in.) Make this server-selectable, I certainly wouldn't want this to be the only way to play; this would be a nice challenge for highly skilled, organized players like clannies.

I'd love to see a map that does cross sections of survival time/bandit %/average murders/etc by country or region. Especially after that interview, hearing about the difference between NZ and RU, this'd be pretty neat to watch.

It's possible, and I'd say even probable; ROCKET's mentioned wanting to start the inventory system over from scratch.

Wow. Maybe when the team fixes the contact section you could apply to help them out with models, these are some pretty solid props; they're pretty! http://dayzmod.com/news.php <-- They'll tell you when the contact form's back up. http://dayzmod.com/contact.php <-- The contact form. I love the idea of a bat & pitchfork. Water purification tablets would be nice, but I'd like to have the freedom to boil the water held in canteens over a fire if you can get one lit; purification tablets are more of a military thing, and military loot's pretty well guarded.