emuthreat

Crash sites will not be spawning any guns at all this patch. Gun spawns on crashsites are disabled due to a bug preventing the CLE from keeping the number of guns spawned under control. You will have to search military bases exclusively for the guns you are looking for, and most other automatic weapons as well.

I get where you are coming from with the player's own learned skill, independent from their in-game character. But this is not discussing that. I eagerly await the day when they add more, and more meaningful activities to DayZ, in the form of advanced crafting and foraging, possibly advanced medical actions. The introduction of the idea of soft skills was to add importance to the survival of each and every character, based on the learned experiences of that toon in the game, by imparting a significant loss onto the death of a character. This forced dichotomy of specialization does not seem capable of achieving that goal, based in part on the oversimplification of what defines a soft skill, learned by the avatar through surviving long enough to become well-practiced.

In my opinion, the entire concept of soft skills meant is to discourage players from so easily throwing away a character's life, by adding tangible value to the experience of that character's life. To really flesh-out a meaningful skill system, everything but weapon sway, reload speed, driving vehicles, and melee, should have some element of progressive and permanent (until death) character growth attached. The benefits of improved character skills should be significant enough for people to want to pursue improvement, useful enough to create real value attached to the character, and take a fair amount of time to accomplish. This proposed polar separation of fine and rough skilled actions appears to only hit one of these points, the time sink. I would hate for it to end up with players committing suicide because they have become too far specialized in fine skills, and want to start with a clean state, because that is somehow better than both of the end results of this "either-or" skill system.

I agree. It seems far-fetched that my earlier examples would be accurate, with such a fast swing of the needle; it may have been a bit hyperbolic. But having just the two polar opposites and a slow rate of change, would make it either ineffectual or force the behavior changes I mentioned in my last post. I just don't understand how it would work, I guess.

That's all good and well, but with the two-sided polar system proposed, it would still mean that half of the players would likely avoid doing half of the actions to maintain their specialty; which seems kinda lame. I'm totally in favor of keeping the quantification of these skills permanently out of view, to discourage abuse. Giving a choice between just two options seems a bit ham-fisted.

The tape will only top-off the damaged state. It will never increase them back to worn, only delay them from degrading to badly damaged and ruined.

Look in general discussion. I didn't want to pollute this thread with my distaste for having the first iteration of soft skills taken away before we even got to see it, and being replaced by a forced dichotomy of rough and fine skills. People generally have both, IRL. Seems artificial and forced. But basically, dividing all actions into two categories, with skill improvement for one set of actions removing specialty from the other, makes the whole thing seem kinda pointless. At best, we'll have people who will refuse to do half of the action types in the game, to avoid losing their desired specialty. At worst, it will be inconsequential, and simply stacked onto the growing pile of failed, half-assed attempts to appease the survivalist community. The other stuff sounds great though. I already drove a V3S in circles until it rolled and killed me. Only to have the next crash return my 10-minute-old freshspawn back to Myshkino with all my gear I died with in the truck. So Experimental has been a blast so far. Thanks for all the hard work, Devs. Happy New Year.

Helmets can no longer be repaired with sewing kits on this patch. Duct tape will repair any item to the top of its current state, and some items can be repaired up to damaged status, from badly damaged. If you have a pristine fish net, you may use it until it becomes badly damaged, and then repair it after each use, back to damaged status, to avoid it becoming ruined. If you repair a motorbike helmet with duct tape, it will only restore the item to the highest percentage of the current condition. So if you notice your pristine helmet is now worn, apply some duct tape to make it of maximum worn quality, and the next time it is hit, it *might* not go down to damaged status. I haven't tried sharpening knives in this patch, as I always just use a stone knife for cutting things. (The combat knife will work as a 100% can opener, even in badly damaged condition) Small stones will only repair axes from badly damaged, to damaged. Putting duct tape on a suppressor should keep it from wearing-out as fast, but again, I haven't tested this extensively.

How would this clan recruitment concept you are talking about work if you lost all your learned skills every time your character dies? The stone knife is already the best knife in the game, BTW... I think improvement of specific actions, based on actually practicing that action numerous times, would be a reasonable and natural progression of character skill growth. The concept of improving skills through practice doesn't seem too far-fetched, or abusable to me, as long as there were hourly caps on certain actions. Let's say that every time you cut a bush with a knife, you start out getting one stick, and causing the same amount of wear to the knife. After cutting 20 bushes with a knife, you can start getting two sticks, and the same amount of wear to the knife. After cutting 40 bushes, your knife starts taking less wear, and you still get two sticks. After cutting 60 bushes, you get 3 sticks, and the knife still takes less wear. It would destroy at least two or three knives to complete this process, requiring you to expend resources that had to be looted in the game, and the time to do it all. Sure, a freshspawn could spend their first hour of gameplay buffing this stick mechanic, looting around town for a half-dozen damaged steaknives, or searching stones to craft the four improvised knives that it would take to buff just this one skill. So they would have wasted a whole hour, and a few knives, to buff just one of dozens of possible actions, and then starve to death because they neglected to find food while grinding away at cutting bushes for sticks. Repeat this same process for sharpening sticks, starting out with high wear on the knife, and a chance to fail; first losing the chance for failure upon light practice, then reduced knife wear on moderate practice, and finally gaining the speed to sharpen a whole stack of sticks in one action cycle. Repeat the same process for cutting rags from clothing, yielding a reduced amount of damaged rags from pristine clothes, with high wear to knife, light practice yields same quality rags as the clothing they came from, moderate practice reduces kinfe wear, high level of practice yields maximum number of rags allowable per clothing item. Repeat this whole process again, only using an axe or hatchet or machete. Are you starting to get the idea I am going for here? The amount of time and resources involved in grinding these skills would be a deterrent in and of itself. The result would be that players who lived longer and performed various different actions on a regular basis, would eventually get better results, with less expense of materials and effort. Naturally. If a group of people all want to take turns putting the same spark plug into the same sedan, so they can all get the experience, then good for them; that's how automotive technicians are trained in real life!!! All it takes is a reasonable cap to prevent preforming the same distinct action multiple times for credit. If people want to sit in the woods and grind away at bandaging to improve their results of that particular action, they will have to hit each other, spill some blood, and use up rags and bandages, and consume extra food to replace the lost health and blood. If they get attacked while doing this, they will be weakened and risk dying and losing all their skill progress. The simple reality that it takes expenditure of materials and time, as well as the risk of being in-world to perform all of these actions acts as a self-balancing mechanism. If someone wants to run around and kill 50 chickens their first day, to get 100% cuts each time, then they will have to spend the time, and be exposed to danger while doing this. I really don't see the issue with exploitability.

This is true. BI knows that people will play 1pp if that is their only option. Unfortunately, making 1pp the only option would risk alienating people with disabilities or acute discomfort that prevents a few people from being able to play 1pp. That does not, however, prevent them from making it the default version that servers will run on the unallocated public hive servers; the "XX # - ##" formatted server names. I keep suggesting that they simply render the 3pp cameras as a big, orange, beach-ball following the players, but people insist that THAT would break immersion.

BI needs to make the game they set out to make: A harsh, unforgiving, zombie apocalypse survival simulator. People who want easy mode will have access to the epoch/overpoch clones that will surely follow, so there is no point in watering down the vanilla DayZ experience to best suit the lowest common denominator. It is easier to take away difficulty/complexity from the finished product, than to add it. Just for the record, I used to play quite a lot of Black Ops Zombies. Got into the double-digits on the Grief mode leaderboards for Town map. Bio doesn't give me shit about it. But he does cringe and gripe at me for taking potshots at random strangers. LOL

Suicide for spawn conditions should be disincentivised by increasing spawn timers by ten minutes for every death occurring less than ten minutes after spawn, for all accounts with more than 50 hours of playtime. The new player controller will hopefully allow for finer control of character view postures in 1pp. You say the character is too short. When is the last time you have driven a V3s in 1pp? Your head is almost through the roof of the truck. It's a posture/perspective issue, not player size. I didn't vote, the poll is based on a flawed premise.

I think if it is a crash, then the player just disappears instantly on the spot. Was seeing lots of this happen last night on Experimental.

Admittedly, I may have come out of the gates a little bit hot with the OP. Maybe I'm missing something from Peter's bit of the SR, but it seems an awful lot like people will have to avoid doing literally half of the actions available in the game, to avoid losing the benefits to the other half of the available actions. At best, the effects will be inconsequential, and thus kinda pointless. At worst, we'll have players stuck choosing between 'woman's work' and 'manly tasks,' which would result in half of players sitting on their hands for half the time, to avoid losing their specialization. Thanks for sharing your opinions.

I like how OP ended the post with "greets." It's so cute. Like pinchy-the-cheeky cute. Anybody wanna help round up $30 for 'em, anyways, just for being so unbelievably, squeezably, cute?

It looks like 3pp is here to stay, but it would be nice to see some #Official1ppLoveTM from the developers, in the form of making the *official (reads un-rented, @pilgrim*) servers default to 1pp. It would be nice if the wave of new players that come with the console releases and the full 1.0 version, got the opportunity to play the game as it was meant to be played for their first experience. I know I'm thankful that it took a few weeks before I accidentally hit enter.

Wolves are basically free food, if you have enough bullets. They don't run away like all the other walking meatbags, so they make it like a one stop shopping trip for all your delicious protein.

Is it just me, or did this thread take a downward spiral of the missing-one-of-its-fixed-wings variety? Go back and read the OP. It honestly seems like B8; Gr8 B8, by the looks of your guys' posts filling these last two pages. Reddit is proud of you. Maybe if you stopped beating each other with your second oar, this discussion can move forward, rather than in the circular fashion in which it appears to be circling the drain. Or maybe there is no forward, as the aforementioned bait suspicion might suggest. Is it safe to come out now?

Nice wolf video. Why didn't you kill them and eat them? It looks like you had the ammo to do it.

I was pretty excited earlier to learn about the different skill classes, such as mechanic, medic, bushcraft, farming, etc. I see no reason why the earlier proposed system would not work out great, simply by capping the amount of improvement per category per day, and keeping the entire soft skill experience system behind the board. If players cannot see their progress, they cannot selectively grind for any one skill, without the uncertainty that they are wasting their time. We will simply have to do different thing often to improve them, and the only feedback we get, is in the results of our actions. It seemed like a solid concept. It's too bad to hear that they scrapped it before even giving it a try.

I thought this was the topic discussing whether or not DayZ was too easy. Unfortunately, we won't even begin to understand what that means until all game elements are included and working. Then comes the balance. For now, it's still much too easy. Needs more wolves, ATM.

The public hive is an interdimensional warfare simulator, and I'm not sure if it should change, even if it could. I'm not too hip to people ghosting into a base, but that's why I prefer to hide mine well, to begin with.

I'm getting tired of all this bland wolf meat. They need to add spices to the game. Wild garlic, perhaps?

Instant gratification is the type of gameplay motivator that creates situations like this: Last time they put out a crash-ridden patch on Exp. (the one that they rolled back over the weekend as a pacifier to all the whiny kids who don't understand the purpose of Exp. branch), I met two guys in Nizhnoye, and we all started picking apples together and talking about the progress of the recent patches. Then some guy comes up and starts punching at one of my new friends. I managed to knock him out, and the server crashed before I could bandage. What on god's green earth could that fella have been after, other than the instant gratification of punching out some other bambi who was picking apples on a server with less than ten minutes between crashes? Oh yeah, that's right, INSTANT GRATIFICATION. I don't know where you come from, conflating the use of the term "instant gratification" with feminism, but if you are going to use feminist as an insult, then maybe you don't belong here. I'm sure most of us core players would like to keep DayZ at arms length from any Gamergate nonsense. All are welcome here, aside from those who have nothing better to contribute than ignorant, toxic, douchebaggery.