Toops

Thanks for clarifying, much appreciated. TBH, I chose some slightly inflammatory words to draw out your opinions on progress and EA, so forgive me. To be fair, I probably under-estimated the team's progress on the new systems, and had some baked-in assumptions that there would be massive dev work needed to finish the feature backlog. The idea that all this dev work would happen in a relative vacuum, without iterative player feedback, and be delivered in a "big bang" integration sounded risky. But the truth is, your team has all my faith, and if you think this is a best way to go, I got your back.

Since they're re-writing the Player Controller and animation systems from scratch, it's literally impossible to keep the melee system we have now functionally the same. Now, it could implement the same design, but at the least I would hope it "feels" better. If they re-design the melee combat system, well, things can always get worse, but I have a lot of faith in the talent of this team, so I assume it will be improved.

I asked this on reddit, but probably better to ask here: It seems like a very big departure from the spirit of early access to release all the remaining feature content in one giant splat called "beta." I wonder if a BI dev or CM could clarify what the plan is on iteratively releasing new content to the community. I'm assuming there will be many more minor versions beyond 0.62 before the official declaration of beta. Below is just a hypothetical, purely used to convey my point, but this seems entirely plausible, feel free to disagree (and tell me why): 0.63: New animation system, player controller, user actions, new sounds 0.64: Vehicle simulation/physics, new vehicles, new items, new weapons, new sounds, map improvements 0.65: Additional user actions, animations, PC/camera updates, helicopters, network sync improvements, new weapons/items 0.66: Base Building, electrical systems, character lifespan, soft skills 0.67: Environmental improvements, mod support, new weapons/items In my opinion, the devs could benefit greatly from stress testing things like helicopter/airplane desync, improved vehicle physics, increased player/infected/animal count, as well as give valuable feedback for new weapons, CLE changes, new areas (can't wait for the infected Tisy area), etc. I'd support the BI team either way, but if we're moving away from iterative changes, and you're planning to release all the remaining features in the backlog in one huge release, I'd like to hear that stated explicitly.

It's because there's absolutely 0 thought put into end game scenarios. It's why I stopped playing. If geared players weren't so bored, yet terrified of getting shot in the back of the head and losing everything they've worked for... If there was anything in-game that was worth risking your high-end gear for, this wouldn't happen every time. But as it stands, with high fear and no incentive to incur risk, it becomes a cycle of gearing up and losing it all while trying to figure out why the hell you geared up in the first place. I've heard the whole "anti-game" argument, and it's just not worth my time. I have many solutions to this end-game problem, but I won't share them here because I'm prototyping them in my own game.

I totally agree with the desire, but performance tuning and optimization, especially graphics, is typically one of the last things done in the development life cycle. That's intentional. Iteration on the back-end can make optimizations irrelevant, so it makes sense to wait until they're closer to feature code complete. More specifically, Brian Hicks said in a recent interview that they've forked the DayZ engine, and the current engine is being phased out. Until the new engine is fully implemented and replaces the current production branch (we're probably talking months), optimizing the old engine and renderer is a waste of precious developer and artist resources.

Look you're clearly passionate about this, and that's rad I'm all for that. But you're not gonna be convincing anyone with a gif and no substantive arguments. The fact that these suggestions come up all the time should tell you something... I think a lot of us are open-minded, and would be compelled by your point of view, so would you mind actually explaining why this would be so horrible? I'm not married to any ideas. I'm very new to this game, and I come with no biases or pre-occupations about what "real" DayZ is. I just know what I like, speak my mind, and enjoy hearing others do the same.

Oh man that's a really good idea. I did some light brainstorming on the effects of sanity loss, but this is better than anything I came up with. Also, good point about being a tactical disadvantage.

What do you think about characters having "sanity", and one of the best ways to replenish your sanity is to come within close proximity of other players? That would create a need for players to interact regularly, and could allow for more social diversity. Or, it could just make people more vulnerable to bandits. Thoughts?

I think part of your premise is flawed. The first part is dead-on: cooperation should be much more valuable than just having a second gunner to watch your 6. The other part I disagree with: interacting with other players should be safer and more rewarding. I made a thread about a "parlay protocol", where once players get within a certain range of each other, they can hit a button and "opt-in" to a parlay/trade screen, eliminating the awkward, dangerous "Friendly/Drop your weapon" crap. But after a lot of replies disagreeing with my premise (meeting people in-game should be easier), I kind of changed my mind. Encountering other humans in a world where resources are scarce and survival is hard should be extremely dangerous. You just don't know what people are going to do. There is no ambiguity about how humans act when they are starving and desperate: They lie, steal, murder, even eat each other. The real problem imo lies in the interface. It should be easier to read people's intentions. In real life, we get so much more information through non-verbal communication, body language, and "vibes." The interface needs to somehow give us more insights into what this other player is about. I do like the idea of your in-game behavior somehow being reflected visibly in your character. Having some database where you have to alt-tab to read about players and give reviews, that's just not going to work, it either won't be used at all, or won't be accurate enough to be informative.

Um... HELL YES.

That's true too. I don't expect the devs to have this done anytime soon. The reason I make posts like this is because I want to influence Bohemia's design decisions. That's why I opted-in to early access.. so I can help in my small way to make this a better game. In that way, I appreciate it when people disagree with me, because although I really want light skill systems, I don't want to lobby for a game the majority of the community would not like. But it seems to me (from this admittedly tiny sample size) that people are pretty divided on the topic of skill systems. When people are divided on an idea, I find the best course of action is to mock it up, try it out, and get feedback. Best-case, Bohemia will try out different mechanics and features, release them to us, and really listen to our feedback. If our feedback is positive, they keep that feature. If it's not, they iterate on it, replace it, or just scrap it.

Now that's totally fair, I also want brutal survival. That's how this idea came up, is I was riffing on how easy it is to hit people from 300 yards right now, or 100 yards with iron sights. It's leading to gameplay that resembles neither brutality nor survival. Even if they don't introduce a soft-skill system for weapons use, I really hope they make it harder to hit your target in general.

Also something to remember, writing good code takes time. Hacking fixes together is fast, but ultimately doesn't fix anything. Just trades one set of problems for a new set. I once had to make all the public forms on a web app free from XSS and SQL injection, which is pretty easy... in theory. But this company's implementation of Spring Security was written by a company they had acquired, and it was so shit-house, it took a major re-write and tons of testing, but they didn't have any test automation so I had to write that, then more re-writes, more testing, etc. Sometimes when problems arise in software, you are presented with a choice: "quick and dirty", or "the right way". I don't blame you for suggesting this, it's an honest and good suggestion. But it seems to me like Bohemia is choosing "the right way", given how much time they are allocating to security framework and battle-eye re-writes.

It's not a silly idea. Your immature reduction of my complex idea into a silly idea sounds silly, I'll give you that. I get it, you want 24-hour ezmode, but if that's what Bohemia delivers, I'm disappoint.

Dude I hate grinding too, that's the last thing I want. But I do want to feel like there's an incentive to survive. I think a lot of poorly designed/executed/balanced games half-assedly pull in rpg-style features just to get people cheaply addicted to the game. That sucks, and I agree. The perils of cheaply designed stats and skill trees that require min/maxing are real. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath-water here. If Bohemia implements a skill system, your "maximum" gains just absolutely must not be that much better than base-level. IMO it should always be hard to hit a living target at more than 50 yards. Otherwise the game is out of balance by design, and now everyone is required to powerlevel their character else be a gimp. That's garbage, nobody wants that. One solution: Make your skill improvements purely time-based. So the longer you stay alive the higher your accuracy and poise under pressure. Doesn't matter how much you use the skill. That way, it's 100% impossible to powerlevel. And again, just to reiterate, even if you're alive for a year, your accuracy should not be that much better than a fresh spawn. But it should be noticeably better. The alternative is skill-use-based progression, which I fully support. In any case, over time, you should just get a sense that you're hitting targets slightly more often, or that your gun is not moving around or jamming quite as much as it used to. After two weeks of playing a char, you might realize quite out of the blue, hey! I aim down my mosin faster than I used to! As another balancing element, you could make every skill have an equally bad trade-off. Here are some examples: -the better you are at shooting animals, the worse you are at shooting people -the higher your killing aptitude, the worse you are at growing food and cooking -the more calm you are under fire (better adrenalineComposure), the faster your sanity depletes when you're not in combat (assuming they implement a sanity system, which is a HUGE assumption) Anyway, you get the idea. I have some other examples of skill trade-offs in the fitness thread. Like the more you jog, the better you get at jogging.. BUT the lower your body fat and higher your metabolism, so you starve faster and get cold faster. Ultimately what I want is replayability, and for me that comes through progression. But the only kind of progression that captivates me is a balanced system of trade-offs, where every choice you make both gives you something, and takes something away.