emuthreat

This is the only thing about the last couple years of DayZ development that makes me uncomfortable. I want BI to go the extra mile post 1.0 to really flesh-out the game; maybe hard-coding more functionality into the engine in the future. The prospect that they will leave it to modders to "finish the game" is frankly unacceptable. That being said, after so long, nobody really can have a fair idea of what DayZ is or should be, to the point of what exact features, capabilities and content need to be in the game for it to be "feature complete" and all the EA buyers can finally say they got what they paid for in the end. Are we supposed to use the 2015 roadmap as a reference point? Do we take the most commonly occurring and popular features of various mods to ARMA II/III? Do we rely on suggestions from here, steam, reddit and twitter that get lots of likes and multiple redundant submissions to gauge what exactly is "feature completeness?" Is there one person, or a small group who have already decided what the final goal for DayZ 1.0 content and capabilities will be? As I've said before, less and less jokingly each time, my reference point is that I want to be able to make a sandwich from scratch. Farmed or foraged wild grains, milled to flour with a small stone and large stone, wild yeast cultured in jars with rags over the top; relatively simple. Cheese might be a bit more complicated, but still possible if specific parts of cow innards are produced from a slaughter. Sliced meats? I don't see why not. Mayonnaise? Chicken coops are in the game. Stuffing a chicken in a burlap sack and closing it in a coop should be possible. Mustard seeds, ground and mixed with vegetable oil; vegetable oil from pulverized crops tossed in a pail of water and strained off the top after some time. Leaf of lettuce, slice of tomato? Piece of cake This is just my joke of a reference point for what I think a well-fleshed-out crafting system might be capable of in a "finished" game. I'm not gonna cry foul or demand a refund if it's not in the vanilla version of the game. But if all the planned content for 1.0 is just parity with the previous iterations, it's pretty lame; considering the "been there, done that" factor. How far should we reasonably expect the post 1.0 support/development to go? In light of how the development has gone over the last couple years, I think a policy of "wait and see" will not sit too well with a lot of people. Sure it could be all hacked into the game with no animations or awkward use of other existing animations. Letting modders finish the game is a copout. Throwing in all the content tested in pre.63 iterations, along with stuff like hazmat and basebuilding and the new weapons showcased in status reports and on trello will just feel like finally delivering the old stuff that we deserved from the start; and none of the New stuff that we have waited for. Hopefully someone has a plan. Because if a customer who played the mod for a few months back in 2012 tries out 1.0 on XBOX and sees it as better controls and less buggy, but nothing significantly more than they already experienced, it's gonna seem an awful lot like like they spent six years reinventing the wheel. Edit: If we are to look at the origin of DayZ, and BI's involvement in the process, it's almost like the DayZ dev team has seen what people thought was cool in a game and clumsily cobbled together, and have taken a serious approach at doing it right and making the tools to make it feasible while looking and feeling right. So maybe DayZ can grow like this for a few years after 1.0, drawing off the mod community for inspiration and ideas of what people want to do in a game, and BI can simply keep working at making the solid framework to facilitate these new things that people want to be able to do in video games. Why not squeeze some more juice out of this Mod port turned extensive R&D project? (After a solid vanilla 1.0 experience has been delivered, of course.)

I don't think any of us expected the need for a new engine. But I honestly believe that it was both unforeseen (unforseeable?) and unavoidable. No use crying over spilled milk. As I've said before, I bought in in early 2015, expecting the game to be about halfway finished. Figured I could get a head start and hit the ground running by the time it hit the market in earnest. Never expected to be nearly burnt out on it before it even hit Beta. Open world games are hard to make, apparently...

^^^This I ran around with a torch the other night and it was constantly inside my FOV unless I was sprinting or walking slow with hands raised. Omni-directional light sources need to be held out of players' FOV to avoid washing out the darkness adaptation. Easy way to check this is to go into a dark room and use a Bic lighter as a light source. While holding it directly in front, it severely compromises one's ability to see anything beyond arm's reach. Even putting a hand between your eyes and the flame will greatly increase the ability to see what is in the room without the direct light burning out your rods. This is why traditional flame-based light sources such as candle box lanterns and portable oil lamps often had a baffle/reflector on the side facing the person holding it. The new flashlight animations are cool; not sure how this would look on a weapon mounted flashlight though. But directional lightsources aren't the issue. For a torch, flare, or glowstick, the player should hold these items overhead to avoid blinding oneself. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to have adjustable animations for such things; where the player could use the scroll wheel to adjust the height of the equipped hand position; but it would definitely be a welcome QOL and functionality improvement. Not to mention the machinima and RP implications of an angry mob being able to hoist torches up into the air as part of a rallying cry. But I'm sure at this point in development, makework suggestions like these are likely to fall by the wayside.

From what I've seen, they are sticking to their guns with making the new engine as functional as possible while trying to get full parity to the older versions of the game in addition to adding some new mechanics. Alongside this they have put out Ylands to tap into a new market, Vigor to give the people a shoot and loot title without zombies, and have continued iteration of the ARMA franchise. So yeah, I understand they are doing more things at once than thy have in the past, and some folks are upset about this, given the protracted DayZ development. I don't really think this harms DayZ production in any significant way. I figure all the heavy lifting has been pretty well completed in terms of making the new tech; now they are just focused on making it work. TBH, I can't really be bothered to care if we see Beta before 2019. It'll be done when it's done. And I'm fairly confident BI will keep making new and interesting stuff; stuff that companies with the prevailing business model won't attempt due to risk or not fitting perfectly into their profit generation rubric.

@pilgrim* Dayz II: Alpha Strikes Back DayZ III: Return of the Disclaimer DayZ Prequel: The Phantom Engine DayZ Prequel II: Attack of the Bugs DayZ Prequel III: Revenge of the Mods DayZ IV: The CLE Awakens DayZ V: The Last Cherno Revamp DayZ Standalone Games The Bicycle Wars Loot Won: A DayZ Story Wobo: A DayZ Story. Well that sure was fun. When should I expect to get a meat slicer, a mill, an oven, and a cheese press so i can open my damned sandwich shop? And while they are at it, why not add a campaign mode with achievements? I'd love to see an outbreak scenario with scripted events and tons of NPCs to rescue. Maybe submarines too, why not?? This thread makes me laugh. After hundreds of miles of "are we there yet" people start flogging the bus driver after the sign indicating last exit is near. I've been enjoying grinding No Man's Sky while waiting for tents and barrels to come back.

This is a great idea and very much common sense, at least to hold the torch off to the side out of direct FOV. But realistically, it would require an entirely new class of item animations, in which hold RMB makes the player lift their arm up like the Statue of Liberty or hold their hand to the side parallel with shoulder line with elbow bent at ~135 deg. The latter being an uncomfortable posture to maintain for extended lengths of time While I'm on the subject, I understand the reason for the devs' choice of making us hold RMB to keep weapons raised, as they seem to have found disdain at groups of players running around in constant ready weapon position. But functionally, it is fatiguing, and probably adds unnecessary wear and tear on the mouse button. And it's not just the weapon readiness. I mean, I'm perfectly fine with only being able to ready a weapon while holding RMB; but perhaps objects that have a primary use that is not a weapon should have a toggle; maybe hold RMB and then scroll mouse wheel up to lock the position. It seems like a no-brainer to exclude guns from this and keep the HOLD RMB as the only way to keep a gun raised. But what is the harm in being able to do so with a torch or flashlight or even a stick with a rag tied to it? (flags, anyone?) This scroll-wheel lock on RMB position would also be helpful for long duration LMB functions such as cooking or filling pots. I know what they are going for with having to actively press a button to perform tasks, but anything more than eating a can of food gets seriously tedious to do, especially in repetition. IRL, when filling a container, I position the container and start the water, then brace myself against the container and water spout and just kinda lean there and wait until its full. The current implementation makes it feel like you are a muppet with a sub-70 IQ, just holding your arms at full extension for a minute. How many people cook a sausage over a fire by holding their arms out like it is a fishing rod? Lastly, I'd like to comment on the gamma fix. Normal seemed way too dark, which I guess is good for realism; but I'm not sure how much having the light attachment turned on spoiled the player's simulated natural darkness adaptation (Rhodopsin depletion in brightness, vs. regeneration in prolonged darkness). In any case, the normal example pic seemed to be too dark even in the cone of light, while the gamma abuse clearly had the floor of the tent too bright for contrast, and the adjusted version looked grainy and lacked any light spillage through the tent windows. Honestly, the gamma comparison had one glaring thing that I noticed, and that was the ground seeming to give off light of its own, or reflect way too much ambient light without regard for obstructions. The background was sufficiently dark, but the ground and tent floor were much brighter than the surroundings; the tent wall in uncorrected gamma abuse example even seemed to be reflecting way too much ambient light.

The major problem with this is persistence. Back in the early days of SA basebuilding, it was a constant annoyance when official servers would get decommissioned and assigned to community rented servers. Population fluctuations are random. It would be unfortunate if you and your friends spent the better part of a week setting up a base, only for other servers to be high pop at the moment and have your base server shut down to force players into the more populated server at the moment. i truly hope that once tents and barrels are back in, that BI will have a few servers on the official hive designated as permanent.

Battle Royale is a dead format; already too played-out. The next big thing is persistent world KOTH. Battle for strategic control points; resource, transport, and thoroughfare monopolization. Own the land, own the loot, control the coastline, own the server.

Holy shit!!! You did it. A positive post. Pinch me; am I dreaming?

How would you propose the control scheme to allow this would look? Q E for direction of swing, and shift for slow strong swings?

Rock paper scissors? Respectively; sledgehammer, shovel, axe?

See troubleshooting

Not really. Server files are already released, long before anything close to resembling a stable branch candidate has been seen.

The weight is about twice as high as a standard plate carrier without any accessories should be. The basic vest with two plates should be about 8 kg. The US Interceptor system maxes out at about 15kg with the full works installed; enhanced plates, groin, neck, shoulder and side protectors. So yeah. The plate carrier, as it is currently in-game, weighs about twice as much as it should.

First. I know your pain. I used to make a thing of trying to kill wolves with melee only, but not in this patch. Now they will actually run away when I come at them with an axe, only coming close enough to bite me when I get frustrated and try to run away to a structure for more security. So use this to your advantage, and try to make sure you know where nearby structures are. There is a bit of a no man's land immediately around Tisy. Plan you approach carefully, and pay attention to those caravans; they are my favorite way of safely killing wolves. Database locks resolve themselves on PC after the next server reset. Good luck. And keep your eyes up and your head on a swivel. Last couple wolf packs I met made no noise before biting me.

As far as I've experienced, this is pretty close to how things are, after you get over the initial hump of spawning hungry. My old habits of keeping most food items in my belly has caused me to overeat pretty frequently. It's definitely not a good idea to eat more than two or three cans of food in a sitting, if you want to keep it all down.

Just good practice. I'm not too sure about the reasons, it's just a good way to keep things from sticking at an inopportune time.

Every two hours maximum is about what I try for. It really depends on what you are doing. If you notice ANY rubberbanding or inventory lag, take that as a sign to relog. Unless you're in a popular server with a queue, it takes less than 30 seconds.

To your first sentence; great, everybody should enjoy all of those things; even if that's not what they came here for. For the rest, it's not so much server related. The game just needs more. More of all ^^^^that stuffe^^^^. The ways of players are always the same per moment. The means is what needs adding-to.

That's kinda the point of my attempts at contributing here. My intent has always been to push back against the unfortunate title of this thread with reasons people might believe this to be so, and provide ideas that might mitigate such impressions of the game. People have different ideas of what DayZ is, or should be. But the underlying theme is that the core concept is now pretty-well played out by now. More risks, more rewards; more challenges and more opportunities; more reasons to cooperate, or more reasons to backstab. Maybe people don't think this is what DayZ needs, but it sure couldn't hurt.

@pilgrim* You seem to be trying VERY HARD to misconstrue and misunderstand my intentions. Yes, participating in a private server that encourages interactions provides a better experience for both the people who want to create order and enforce it in areas, as well as those who seek to destroy that. The fact that it took such a large effort and such degree of organization speaks to the faults of the game itself. We were grasping at straws to keep things interesting and playable. Nowhere in my "diatribe on living in a private cooperative server" Did I even mention that. There are plenty of KOS players and we generally track them down and kill them. People who make an effort to make things interesting and rob others, put people in dresses and radio ransom to their groups, etc. are valued and respected members of the community. Sadly, within the game mechanics, there just isn't that much to do. And there is a dearth of incentive for people to have and contribute to interesting interactions. That's what my whole argument is about. Giving players more options, and implementing a system that rewards exploring them. What you have said here adds nothing to the discussion at hand, and much of it diverts the discussion by misrepresenting and polarizing the ideas I put forth. I propose more options for in-game activities (no, not fingerpainting, you insufferable twat) and incremental improvement in player skill over a lifetime; you reframe this as hyperrealism, stat-based skill leveling, and propose absurdly extreme examples of overly complex and frivolous features. Frankly, I find it pretty fucking offensive that people are trying to discuss a topic that I'm loathe to try clarifying for you once more, as you seem to be making a concerted effort to put words in my mouth and misrepresent intentions, and you offer nothing but cryptic intellectualism juxtaposed with hyperbole. Good job on the slippery slope fallacy from socks and vehicle repair manuals, to farming dasies and naming cows . I'm done here. Blocking you. You're obviously trolling. Peace out

Reductive and misleading. You seem to conveniently ignore that character death will remove all progress, and infer that leveling will need to have some sort of stats management interface. I don't even know where your interjection of keeping score came from. The mod touted its brutal environment by having a ticker of the average player lifespan. The game was hard, and survival in itself was the reward. In SA, survival is too easy, players get bored, and the only engaging thing to do is go shoot people or troll them by despawning bases. Nothing about that is gritty or authentic. Nowhere in a lawless apocalyptic landscape would the prevailing behavior be to kill other people and torch their resources. Face it, DayZ has stagnated into little more than a platform for trolling people. Only on private servers or with dedicated communities, does anything really interesting emerge from this platform, and those people have to try very hard to make anything worthwhile happen. DayZ already has so many other things that other games do not, that seemingly go to waste. All of the books in the game. More or less just a pointless novelty, good only for curiosity of tinder. Why not add technical, medical, and survival manuals, and make them actually DO SOMETHING? Would it be so terribly frustrating to have to find a truck manual to change the sparkplugs for the first time without downgrading the condition of the plugs; or simply avoid the manual and know that you'll have to do it 4 times to not damage them. Maybe after changing them ten times in a life, the player can now do this as quickly as possible without damaging any parts. This would reward survival, which was the main goal of this game, or at least that's what it was initially sold to me as. It is telling, that rather than directly respond to my points, you again throw out the red herring of making DayZ the same as other games by adding all kinds of things which i never even mention. I'm starting to doubt if you are capable of responding directly and honestly to the issues I raised. Darn those amyloid proteins, sooner or later they'll get us all.

Show me one thing I've said that would make it harder to shoot everyone a player encounters. Just one thing, please. Tell me how adding benefits to lifespan experience favors only one group, and please identify that group as anything besides players who CHOOSE to do so. Tell me how being able to cut up peppers and zucchini and chicken, and boiling it together with rice for faster consumption and digestion would hurt any section of the player base in any real way, aside from their feelings that others maybe should not be able to do it if they choose. Tell me how needing to wear socks to slow down the wear of ones shoes enforces any moral leanings whatsoever? Tell me how any of those things would hurt others, and help me, based on my perceived virtues of their actions in game? I really have a hard time trying to understand why so many players object to allowing players to have things that cannot be taken for future use by another player by killing them? It's not like nobody has ever seen a movie or television show where a doctor is kidnapped and forced to perform a procedure at gunpoint? Does it really hurt the snipers of Sverograd if some guy they are shooting at has survived for two weeks, and can repair a truck tire in 30 seconds instead of a minute and a half, because he has done it many times before and it is now easier? Should anybody care if it hurts the players who are only taking potshots at other for lolz. I believe response to it might appropriately be "git guud." Is there really any logical chain of reasoning by which ADDING MORE to the game, WILL TAKE ANYTHING AWAY FROM ANYONE??? Please, if there is tell me. Explain to me how a player surviving long enough to perform a dozen or more blood transfusions getting better results than a fresh spawn trying for the first time, takes anything away from anyone? From my perspective, it would only add value to certain players, both as a resource to coerce into service for oneself, and as a higher LULZ factor target for trolls. It would be super cool if anyone who responds could actually respond to the content of my posts, rather than regress into some diatribe about forcing people to behave nicely and wanting to directly control what people can or can not do. I've read back over my posts, and so far, all I can get is the impression that I think it would be beneficial for everyone if there was more depth of play, facilitated by many of the player choices already in the game having more than just a superficial and immediate effect.

@pilgrim*We are talking about the game. While all of the survivalist theories might be interesting, and perhaps useful to someone writing a thesis on DayZ player behavior motives and modes, it is largely irrelevant to the discussion of how to balance motivations and player behavior within the game mechanics. It is food for thought when getting acquainted with a private server, and all the regular groups operational trends, but purely academic and beyond the scope of how game mechanics influence player behavior trends. Some people will always shoot on sight, regardless of the benefits of cooperation; these players can be excluded from consideration in the sense of this discussion. Everyone is aware of the possibility/prevalence of being shot on sight. Many players will choose to shoot on sight out of fear of being shot themselves. There is little to no incentive to cooperate with strangers, both in the short term and long term. Things that may provide incentive for players to make contact and asses the benefits of cooperation; even if only in the short term to achieve a goal and then dispose of the cooperant: Gradually developed, lifespan-bound, task specific, competencies. Things such as medical, agricultural, mechanical, structural, handicraft, bushcraft, and culinary skills could be applied over lifespan experience to generate greater value to individual playthrough lives, both to the benefit of the player and anyone that they may meet. In this manner, a player who has survived a long while farming and hunting will generate more food for any group into which he/she may integrate. All of this should be "behind the board" and only perceptible by observation of results. Said player-lives would carry greater value to the group, in terms of product produced per growing cycle or animal harvested. Other players would see an incentive to protect that player, and have incentive to delegate experience based tasks to players with a higher experiential competency in that category. Farmers would likely be kept safe behind walls and oversee plot preparation and planting to help give experience to others, while attending and harvesting for greater yields. Experienced hunters may oversee hunts and provide security, perhaps taking a few butchering themselves for a greater yield; it would be dangerous for an experienced hunter to risk skinning the first deer out in the open (or perhaps the last). As I discussed with a friend over beers earlier, the potential for abuse and trolling will always be there. As long-lived and masterful player-lives come to be known in a specific server ecosystem/economy, there will invariably be people who want to take out those more valuable and skilled player-lives who contribute to the skill-based economy. Such is already the case, if anyone has played on a server with developed groups and factions/clans. People target the players who build and defend bases; the players who secure and maintain vehicles and do supply runs; people camp out farming plots near tents full of food, to kill the farmer after they get tired of seeing the tent full of vegetables keep coming back after numerous despawnings. All this would add is more incentive to cooperate for some, and more specific interference-based hunt and kill goals for others. Whichever way one plays it, it can only lead to more diverse and layered player motivations and interactions. And that is what I think DayZ so desperately needs right now, to rise above the years-long quagmire of incremental not-quite-progress...

This pretty much hits the nail on the head. There simply aren't enough factors affecting the player's decision making process and hierarchy of needs to address the regressive trends in player interactions. Over the years I've suggested many things to diversify the range of motivations among the playerbase. For those who wish to do nothing but find and kill other players, because that is the reason the are here. Not much can be done to change their goals and motivations outside of adding more "realistic" and diverse basic needs that need to be met. A sort of extra layer of confounding issues they will need to address to become effective at sustaining their purposes. It's too easy to sustain a long term mission with the given mechanics. Stamina has slowed down the process considerably, but there aren't any more considerations that need to be met and managed. In previous patches, I used to like playing as sort of a park ranger. I could carry with me everything I needed to to indefinitely sustain a mission lasting a dozen hours over most of a week, to roam the map and catalogue evidence of player activity; tents, crashed vehicles, discarded backpacks. I would often be able to discern who was playing at what times by taking screenshots of tent contents and referencing the time elapsed between changes. With this I could make contact with regular players on even a public official server after a few days of gathering information. I feel that perhaps even that was too easy to do. In most cases KOS wasn't even an issue, because I could easily choose to avoid engaging players who took longshots, even if they got a good hit; I could just use the terrain to my advantage, mitigate bleeding or bone damage and eat all my food that wasn't ruined and take a big loop to catch up on my rounds after a half hour or so. I could pretty much do anything I wanted to do after a couple hours of prep looting, without any immediate concerns or challenges. In this light, the game could surely use a few more factors in influencing the needs of players to drive behavior in a less linear and repetitive manner. Things like normal wear and tear on clothing and shoes would provide diversions to make players need to make stops or go looking for things that they otherwise would ignore. Maybe add socks to the game, and have boots contribute to blisters soreness and fatigue with longer periods of sustained foot travel compared to sneakers. People will have to divert their attention to finding new or more appropriate shoes, replace worn socks, or stop and rest their feet to avoid loss of health. Another thing I had suggested was a nutrition/comfort/morale system to encourage players to eat freshly cooked hot meals of diverse ingredients. These things would be affected by diet, conditions of clothing and shelter from the elements, and the intervals between injury or conflict; and would contribute to behind the board metrics that affected things like healing rates, stamina usage and recovery, and perhaps even a dulling of hearing if these values are dismally ignored. I tend to lean towards bonuses for taking more care, rather than penalties for ignoring factors. That way it takes nothing form those who wish to ignore it, but will give a slight advantage to those who take the time and care.