chhopsky

I'm sick of people whining that the game is a deathmatch and that everyone just wants to kill everyone else. We should all take a moment to appreciate the very public statistics on the front page of the site. We can determine a lot from them: Claim: "this game is deathmatch" Statistics: On August 11th: Survival attempts: 23.8 million Murders: 4 million On July 30th: Survival attempts: 20 million Murders: 3 million On July 13th: Survival attempts: 12.8 million Murders: 1.8 million Reality: Only 15% of all deaths have been PvP. -- Claim: "everyone is a bandit" Statistics: August 11th: Bandits killed: 530k Bandits alive: 139k = Total bandit lives: 669k Total survival attempts: 23.8 million Ratio: 2.8%. July 30th: Bandits killed: 429k Bandits alive: 124k = Total bandit lives: 555k Total survival attempts: 20 million Ratio: 2.7% So a total of around 555k lives has been used in which a person has become a bandit. 555,000 of 20,000,000. Reality: Less than 3% of characters have been used to take another human life. -- Claim: "everyone shoots on sight" Statistics: August 11: Total characters alive: 830k Total bandits alive: 139k == 16.7% of alive players are bandits July 30: Total characters alive: 723k Total bandits alive: 124k == 17% of alive players are bandits. Reality: Only 17% of current players are bandits. -- This is nowhere near the 100% of players that people are whining about. People really need to think about whether or not it is THEIR behaviour that is causing them to be murdered, and be open to the possibility that their experience of Day-Z is not what the vast majority of others are experiencing. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution. If you don't want people to shoot you, don't give them a reason to! Two guns are better than one, you're ALL better off against the bandits if you work together. You want Chernarus to not be the murder-hole you think it is? - Don't shoot on sight - Help strangers - Announce your presence on direct Three simple rules for improving the world we survive in.

Re-read the OP again. Replying again for utter agreement. Bring on living hell!

Of course not, but it does create new survival attempts for everyone that died, artificially inflating the total instances figure.

I made this point in that last post, but it's important to think about so I'll give it a separate post. When we are new at the game, we die from zombies. A lot. The chance that a new player will be killed by zeds as they don't know the mechanics and aren't careful enough is incredibly high. As time goes on and we get better at it, our chance of being killed in any of those encounters goes down. So thinking about things differently for a minute. Let's say that a noob's skill level is proportional to time spent playing, both of which are inversely proportional to the chance they'll die in any one zombie encounter. Say you have a 100% chance of death in your first zombie encounter. So the probability you'll survive one encounter is 0. As we get better, we might successfully sneak past one, two, three sets of zombies before making a fatal mistake. P(S1-N) gets less with the number of encounters increasing, and as skill level increasing, the probability of surviving ANY zombie encounter becomes 1 as you get better at handling them. I don't remember the last time I died from zombie encounters. So if we look at probability of death as relative to number of encounters then as players play longer the chance of dying at all from Zs is quite high vs chance of dying from player kills being quite low, due to probably not surviving long enough to have too many encounters. It would be very interesting to chart the number of player encounters vs number of zombie encounters. I daresay people have a much higher death rate per encounter when dealing with players as skill level increases, simply because the comparison stat drops away underneath it. We encounter zombies every time we go anywhere near anything good, whereas players are encountered less frequently. As time goes on my death rate due to players will approach 1 (assuming that hacks ever stop). So, to a certain extent these stats, if anything, may actually overstate the amount of PvP violence due to skill level increase. I own two copies of ArmA2 and thusly have two DZ characters. One of them has been alive for months, and only has one murder which was in defence of our group. The other has died a whole ass-tonne of times and has never murdered anyone. I met a guy in Elektro with an axe getting mobbed by Zeds. I baited them off and drew them away, letting him attack them while they chased me. I found another guy trapped in a tower with Zeds coming up the stairs and managed to lure them away for him to escape. I met a guy at Rog and for a few very intense seconds thought I was about to get shot, but I didn't - I looked at him, made sure he knew I'd seen him, then looked away and scanned the forest on the other side, walking over to him with my back facing him, scanning for threats to us both. I was camped outside Stary and heard a voice "do you see me" and panicked. "no, i'm just watching the town". I stood up, lowered my weapon and turned around, never facing him directly. We watched the town together for a few minutes then he took off. I met a man at the coast who had a blood pack and an AKM. He gave me the AKM in return for giving him a transfusion. I camped the hills of Kamyshovo and picked off Zeds with an Enfield while an unarmed player fled the town, obvious unable to lose them. He climbed the hill and I finished the last of them while he fled into the forest. He stopped to catch his breath then moved on while I cleared the town around him. I've been saved from an insane horde by four people I've never seen before. I've been rescued by people in bandit skins. I've been chased by someone with an axe when I was unarmed and bleeding out, wanting to trade not killing me for my loot. I've been shot by people I never saw. I've been teased by the promise of chopper crashes and shot while running for them. I've been killed looting Stary because I missed the shot after he went to loot the body of my friend he just killed. I've been shot in the head while screwing around in my backpack arranging things trying to get gear at military sites. I've been shot by people pretending to be friendly to get my friend's gear. I've had to drop my stuff and go while switching backpacks at a supermarket and been chased through Zelenogorsk for 20 minutes. I've escaped, stalked those people, and shot them & broke their legs then run away. I generally prefer to leave people with their lives, so long as they can't chase me. This game is dynamic. It is what you make it. If you're all so unhappy with what others are making it then insist that gives you no option but to do the same, then you are the problem. Be the solution. Saving and co-operating with strangers has given me some of the most rewarding game experiences of my life, and I really hope you don't miss out on that by being jaded.

I can be, actually. The vast majority of people aren't bandits, and the stats prove that, so if everyone is still murdering then they are doing it because they are afraid. If you want people to shoot on sight less then you yourself need to not shoot on sight. I've spent the last few days distributing bandages and helping people being attacked by zombies in Elektro and you know what? Didn't get shot once. Your personal experience is, in the face of 24 million survival attempts, completely irrelevant. It's all pretty well-defined. If you attack someone and they die, it's a murder. If you attack someone and they bleed out from their injuries, it's a murder. If you attack someone and immobilise them and they're eaten by zombies, it's a murder. There are undoubtedly people who will attack on sight, but I make an effort to make voice contact with people, announce my presence before entering buildings etc. I've been killed by some players recently - once in Berezhino military camp, once in a forest somewhere, never saw him. I'm not saying the player kills aren't happening, but the funny thing is that as time goes on and we all get better at the game and avoiding the zombies, the stats do become more and more stacked towards artificially amplifying the murder rate. If I stay alive for a month because I'm good at handling AI zombies, but eventually die in a firefight, I've still lost my life to a murder. Interesting. Really? Who dies before meeting another player or getting a weapon after their first week? How bad at this game ARE you? Or, you're worse at the game and have not figured out how to introduce yourself to players without getting killed? There is a huge human interaction element to this. Explain how they're inaccurate? New and inactive players still doesn't have an impact on the statistical relevance of most of the stats. 3% is the number of survival attempts that have become bandits. We get that by adding alive bandits to dead bandits and dividing that by the number of total survival attempts. 16% the ratio of lives that ended at the hand of another player. When taken in context that about 16% of currently alive players are bandits, and only 3% of total survival attempts have been used for banditry, what we can deduce from this is that a small number of bandits is killing a large number of players. Where are you getting this from? That's totally made up. We can rely on the 40 minute average survival time but not anything else. I admit you have lost me here. What do you mean "prove they are?" The banditry rate is 3%, that's provable. Or at least, it was a month ago when I posted this thread. It has gone down to 2.8% since then. The thing that really poisons these statistics is hacks. I've personally had two deaths contributing to the survival instances that have been hacks. That messes things up a bit. What's that got to do with anything? This is part of the game, do you engage or not engage because you're afraid you might get shot, etc. Some would say this is a core tenet of the game. NOW you're getting into some real analysis. Heaps of this is speculation but we need more data to get any of it. I covered the bandits staying alive longer and playing longer side of things earlier. They do tell you things, they just don't tell you _all_ of the things. What you're proposing is basically impossible to determine with gatherable data as so much of it is social. How do you determine when a player is around someone that they know IRL? All it seems you've done, is determine that you don't want to believe it so you'll try to find a way to argue with stats by setting an impossible bar for their accuracy. Your suggestion goes against the very core of this game. So much of it is social and about managing player expectations. Since basically everyone here is complaining about murder, and saying it is a deathmatch and they don't like that, the only way to stop it is for ALL OF YOU to start trusting other people a little more and start behaving a little less threateningly around other players.

Great to hear Sinoby. As I mentioned in another thread, the only stranger that ever ran in to save me when I was really in trouble was wearing a bandit skin.

Well, no, not maths fail. That would certainly make the above statistics more relevant but it doesn't necessarily make the above less relevant. You've actually hit the nail on the head with the word 'accurate' there, because there is a difference between accurate and statistically relevant. There are things in here that are impossible to quantify, but we can work around them. BTW, I pulled the numbers on this stuff and did a similar back-of-napkin eval 2 weeks ago and everything seems to be scaling up in a linear fashion. So with at least two data points (we were at 12.8 million attempts, 1.8 million murders, at the time) we're pretty much dead on (lol).

Hi, Suggestion for commercialisation model: You buy lives. Rather than paying $x to purchase the game and play it online forever, you could buy, say, 50 lives for $30. Or whatever amount, up to the ongoing full retail cost of the game. Some people will be saying 'whoa slow down crazy pants, i die all the time because i'm terrible and this would get expensive' but hear me out. Everyone in the games industry is looking for a new way to commercialise their games. Tribes is free but you have to pay for items and classes in-game. That sucks; as a player trying it out and not ready to commit there's nothing to ever stop me playing it, as long as I'm okay with a gimped, sucky experience. The concept of lives originated in video arcades where you needed an arbitrary meter to stop people from playing the game indefinitely. This transitioned over when home consoles became a thing but for the most part, died out when saved games started being a thing and we could store our progress. It was no longer about how long you played it for so we wanted people to get through no matter how many times they died. I don't like buying full-priced games. In Australia a retail box game can be over $100, which is ridiculous considering that most of the time our dollar is better than the US dollar. I've had a lot of people baulk at buying ArmA2 for DayZ, so the idea of a demo trial being that you get 1 or 2 free lives actually sounds awesome to me. You can get people playing, get them hooked, then they die enough, they feed in some more quarters. I can't tell you how many times I've died but it wouldn't be that many. Permanent death in and of itself already gives serious repercussions for death but what if you knew that next time you died you were forking out another $5 for 20 lives? (or however much it might be, I don't know). How much do you care about your character's life now that there's a dollar value on it? Anyway, just a thought. I'm going to buy it regardless of what the model is, even though I've already bought ArmA2 and no doubt will buy ArmA3. It's an interesting reversal of the subscription model because it rewards good play. Not many commercialisation models do! Please apply thoughts/comments/abuse here. God knows I tell so many people their ideas are terrible and they are shit at the game, probably only fair to let them hurl their slings and arrows.

Well, no. There's basically nothing that's legally correct that you've said in there. But it's good that you're thinking about it. Also remembering too we're talking about a point where it's a retail product, not plagued by hacks that kill everyone on a server by teleporting them into the sky or something equally terrible. It's difficult to compare the current alpha state with the RC state it would need to be in to work. That customer service desk WOULD be interesting though. That's kind of the point - you get a barrier of entry that's almost zero cost to the new player to try it out, which then reduces its load over time. So you've got the option of paying full retail price for a game, or you've got the option of paying $5 to get 10 lives to test it out to see if you like it. If anything, I'd say that more people would get hooked and buy the game because you've lowered the barrier of entry.

Dunno. I've got my two keys working just fine, steam OA.

Is there a way to take away beans from an idea?

If you'd like to prove that with some valid stats I'd be happy to discuss the numbers with you.

Timed 'free for the weekend' trials don't work as well as 'hey you mean i can play this now?' It's got to co-incide with the player demand. I would also support getting a number of free lives, then having to pay full retail. Because I've had a lot of people refuse to play this because they don't want to spend the money to try it out. Plus, that's just how I roll. I play all games on perma-death mode, because death has to mean something for life to be important.

You're half-right. People form groups very quickly and easily. Once they have the group, they will then become incredibly suspicious and distrustful of other groups. It's called Asymmetric Insight, and there's a lot of good writing out there on it. A great article on You Are Not So Smart explains: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/ This is pretty true. There part that's missing is the reward for teamwork though; you don't need to make food more scarce, you need to make it harder to get to on your own. You need to need other players. The nature of Asymmetric Insight kind of implies that it will become team deathmatch no matter what. It's easy to read this and go 'laws? thats dumb' but like all things they need to be player-enforced. The server-hopping nature of the game does make it very easy to get away with no consequences. I would like to see a world where your appearance becomes more customised, or we develop some other way to identify people (perhaps tags on?). At the moment with everyone basically dressed the same there's almost no way to identify anyone, which is profoundly unrealistic. I think people being held to account for their actions more would help. But that also kind of takes away from the transitory nature of each life. So who knows. I don't like this at all. It goes against the very core of the game IMO. I do like the idea behind it, but I don't think it will work. The notion of scarcity is what drives competition. If you want a permanent fortification or defended position, fortify it and defend it. Collect tank traps, bear traps, razor wire kits. Lock it down. Log in as a group. I disagree. I think the best way to encourage teamwork is to bump the zombie numbers and toughness. Fear is what keeps us from working together, it must be a greater fear that encourages the opposite. The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

^ exactly my point. There's a huge difference between 'everyone i meet tries to kill me' and 'everyone i meet tries to kill me while i am raiding a high value target with limited supplies'. I've died from players 30% of the time, 70% zombies. As I get better at the game though, zombies tend to kill me less and less, so that ratio will surely increase. This again will interfere with the statistics as in that case, even though most deaths will be murders, it's not necessarily indicative of the murder rate, and you need to look at the number of bandits. You can't necessarily make every assumption and say things are 100%, but you can make a number of reasonable inferences. For example, there's no arguing with survival attempts. That is 100% the number of lives that have been instantiated. There's no arguing with the bandits alive + bandits killed either - that is just plain also the number of those instances that have been used for banditry. Where do you get a 50% chance of dying from? Most battles are lost before the first shot is fired due to effective tactical behaviour. The few times I've been killed by bandits, I've had almost no chance. It stands to reason that people who make a sport of killing other players are better at killing other players because they do it more. I think the chances are much higher that a small number of bandits are killing a large number of people. This would also be something we could pull out of the logged data. It's also important to make a distinction between a bandit (a person who makes a sport of killing other players) and a murder, which may or may not be in self defence, or accidental. I've witnessed a number of accidental shootings, some blue on blue, others strangers surprising each other. So while we may not be able to hard and fast trust the murder figure, we can trust at least a couple of the others. Even if you throw all the numbers away and say 'theyre all shit because they can't be trusted' they still imply quite a lot even if we know they aren't accurate. The murder rate is not going to go up from 15% to 100% any time soon because we know people die from zombies, bugs, respawns, glitches etc. I wouldn't want to suggest a margin of error but even if it were massive, +/-15%, we would still only end up with a 30% rate. Not really relevant - point is, not murder. This is interesting because there really aren't many 'great' starting positions. They're all on the coast so they basically all suck. I'd like to see some statistics on how prevalent this is. If we could pull lifespan data then we could definitely do it. The average lifespan is pretty low so I think we guess this may be a statistically relevant number. This will be impossible to quantify. Why would anyone altF4 if they were dying? Either way, you're right that this muddies things, but I don't see any way this data could be pulled out from what we assume is being logged. You're right that there are a lot of variables, but all things considered, even if you add in variances for all of those things, it's not going to change 15% into 100%. It's not going to change 3% into 100%. It just isn't. No matter what kind of variance you add in to compensate for player behaviour, it's just not likely that they could be statistically relevant to the tune of 85 or 97%. I'm going to guess that you have never studied any kind of statistics since you suggested 'polls' since polling is incredibly ineffective for trying to deal with this kind of personal experience data. We would get a very good idea of how people feel about it but proving that everyone 'feels' there are bandits everywhere is different from proving that everyone is a bandit, if that makes sense. The only way to get this data is log trawling and analysis. I'm actually in the process of performing some psych research at the moment regarding video games and immersion and tomorrow when it's posted I'll give you an example on how to capture statistically valid data. I also actually appreciate your attempts to pick holes in it; all things should be open for questioning and as normal I thoroughly encourage that they be questioned. If you think those things would pollute the front page statistics so badly that they are completely unusable then I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Everyone is complaining about other people killing anyone they meet; if you want that to change, you need to change YOUR behaviour. Approach from behind/cover and announce your presence. The best way to earn trust is to give it. You need to show people you've had an opportunity to kill them and you didn't. Don't trust anyone while you're raiding a high-value target, that's just competition for weapons. Don't point your gun at people. Don't hang around the coast like an idiot. Etc etc. There are lots of good simple rules we can follow to show people that we trust them. If most people aren't bandits then everyone else is killing in fear of bandits. This is hilarious because the number of players murdering each other is SO much higher than that of bandits. If those 3% of lives are polluting the servers that much then band together and hunt them. And if it's not then it's just paranoid people with shaky hands. Be the solution!

Got any numbers to verify that? Anecdotal and statistically irrelevant; but I feel your pain. I was in a house with a friend, we cleared it and closed the door to go through the loot. Someone spawned in, I thought it was my friend, he shot me and I ran away bleeding. I bandaged up and put five rounds in his chest with an M4A3 CCO, my friend hit him with 4x Makarov, and he ran away, but I died. Of the last 10 people that I've met, 2 shot at me. Maybe I just have a friendly demeanour :) What we could take from this, especially the large number of murders vs the small number of lives used for banditry is that perhaps a small number of bandits are killing a large number of people?

The numbers show that less than 3% of total lives have been used for banditry, and only 15% of all player deaths have been murders. Only 17% of alive players are bandits. Full stats ongoing in this thread.

Do you have a way to calculate that? Is that really a thing people do? :F Clearly what I'm using is the numbers presented. If you have a way of making a meaningful estimate of that I'd be happy to add it in. But you're right - I can't say for sure the rest were zombies. I'll update the OP.

I thought it was two? Can someone who knows for sure let us know? It's been so long since bandit skins and the humanity-meter I've forgotten. Either way, that figure only affects the bandit count stat. I'm not interested in proving myself right, I'm interested in what is actually correct - post some different analysis of the figures or find some historical snapshots of the stats and we can discuss them. Happy to put my foot in my mouth if your number suggest I'm wrong or you've got a better interpretation of them.

That's only partially true - in order to compare apples with apples we'd need to be able to make that split, which is why I've tried to compare the correct numbers. The number of active players has grown hugely every time I've made this comparison, and while I've tried to argue it out with people 1:1, it's been growing at such a rate that even though it's impossible with those statistics to prove how much of it happened in the last two weeks, I did this comparison a month ago when there'd only been 12 million survival attempts and 1.8 million murders, which is also exactly 15%. The number of players is growing at a huge rate, and from what we can tell, it seems as if the murder rate is increasing in line with it. But you also make a very good point - in order to really get a feel for this we need to track these numbers over time. I'll be updating the original post with current stats every now and then because as I said, last time I added this up, I got very similar numbers. Of course I do this. Doesn't everyone? :S I thought that was just sensible. Something for up close, something for far away, and a pistol.

Obviously not now, since we're still deep in alpha territory and the game changes every two weeks. You may not like the subscription model but a lot of people do - it's working quite well for WoW, EVE, et al. I don't remember the last time I bought a boxed game. What if it were a staged increase? So, past a certain amount of lives, when your total spend is the full retail price of the game, you get unlimited lives? What I'm ultimately looking at for this is a way to provide a low-cost way to get people through the door and playing. And to make them value their lives a bit more so they don't do retarded things like throw flares in Cherno at night >:) I'm not entirely un-fond of that! But on that note, see my other thread that makes an attempt at proving that the game isn't the deathmatch the whiners say it is.

We should all take a moment to appreciate the very public statistics on the front page of the site. We can determine a lot from them: Claim: "this game is deathmatch" Statistics: Survival attempts: 20 million Murders: 3 million Reality: Only 15% of all deaths have been PvP. The vast majority die to zombies. -- Claim: "everyone is a bandit" Statistics: Bandits killed: 429k Bandits alive: 124k So a total of around 555k lives has been used in which a person has murdered another player. 555,000 of 20,000,000. Reality: Less than 3% of characters have been used to take another human life. -- Claim: "everyone shoots on sight" Statistics: Total characters alive: 723k Total bandits alive: 124k If we take this instant in time as being an average snapshot, as indicative of any other, then we can surmise from this that approximately 17% of current player characters are player killers. Reality: Only 17% of current players have killed someone. -- This is nowhere near the 100% of players that people are whining about. People really need to think about whether or not it is THEIR behaviour that is causing them to be murdered, and be open to the possibility that their experience of Day-Z is not what the vast majority of others are experiencing. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution. I'm going to save this post and possibly cross-post this info somewhere else because people whining about 'everyone kills u' are just .. wrong.

This is a terrible idea and you are terrible at the game if you want this.

By the way, how many of you here were actually around for the Bandit skins? Remember we got rid of it because it wasn't working? For what it's worth, while that was still a thing, the only stranger who ever stuck their neck out for me when I was down on my luck/ammo/health was a bandit. The only person who deceived and killed me was a survivor.

I have to say it - what are all you people who get shot on sight doing wrong? This doesn't happen to me very often at all. I'd say maybe 1 in 4 people are instantly hostile. Part of it IS a trust game - if you want to be part of the problem, kill everyone you meet and go 'oh well thats what everyone does'. Most people only do it because they're afraid to be shot. Perhaps approach people from out of FOV, or not with your weapon drawn, or etc? People by and large are going to shoot you if they are afraid you will kill them. I'm really starting to suspect people are just plain doing it wrong and blaming 'the community'.