Kageru

I love that image... doubly so if you watch the making of videos and realize most of the orc's were Maori rugby players in real life.

I'm sure you are. Players will naturally argue in favor of the game-play they want. There's an interview in which he says it is not a PvP game, but there are mostly mechanics that favor PvP (partly because that's what Arma-II was designed around, though it also assumed balanced teams and gear I assume). Either he was being misleading, changed his mind or simply hasn't finished the mechanics. We'll both get to find out as the game evolves. But excessive PK activity has been strangling the life out of persistent online games since Ultima online and I don't think he intended the game to be "Day-Z, Cherno deathmatch". And yes, mechanics not rules, the mechanics should naturally lead to "In this sort of world, I react this way". Removal of the bandit skin removed a (fairly weak) consequence of going on a murderous rampage and the player base adapted.

I suspect it's a Arma-II limitation. I doubt it was intentionally coded so that you have to reload your axe.

Basically having weapons that can bring the zombie threat to effectively zero (silenced, long range) makes them boring and trivial. And they're meant to be the center-piece of the game.

The game will change over time, alpha means the mechanics are not fixed. How it evolves will depend on what the designers want, and it would surprise me if it becoming a PK playground is what they had in mind. I guess we'll find out as the game evolves.

Yes, the zed's need to be more of a threat and thus encourage co-operation. They're not really very scary once you work out their patterns.

No, the game mechanics define that. And at the moment they say, "Killing is good, go for it".

I doubt it, PK players love people who hold their fire and get upset when they get killed / back-stabbed. You probably just made a lot of them really happy.

Nah, a zombie apocalypse game should be focused on survival, not sitting on a roof-top reducing the number of survivors. But the mechanics do nothing to discourage it and there's lots of people very motivated to kill players for fun so that's what happens.

The designer doesn't get to decide if the game is PvP or not by fiat, The mechanics he puts in the game will shape the gameplay that results. At the moment the no consequences (people who come here to PK do *not* feel remorse on killing a survivor, quite the opposite), full-loot, exploitable and ambush friendly game means it will become a PvP game. Aided by the fact that there are limited non-PvP goals once you are geared up. The suggestion that "self-defence" was an issue is more likely a red herring. Someone averaging 20 survivor kills an hour is not killing in self defence, and even if they are you'd want to steer clear well clear of this person which is represented by them being delineated as a bandit..

Rampant PK activity will choke off the supply of new players, it always does. That's why most games control it.

You got to blow up their bus, kill them and disrupt their evening of gaming and are crying you didn't get your kill count incremented?

Very, very well said. PK's will come to dominate the game because they tend to be poison / locked out of games after the developer realises the damage they do. So they'll flock to this one because it's a full-loot, unbalanced, exploitable, no-consequences PvP game with lots of innocent newbies thinking it had something to do with zombies. Ball is ultimately in Rockets court, but it may well be he's happy with a niche / hard-core game and won't care. And really that's fine too, as long as it's clear what the intent is so people can decide how much they buy in to the game. Of course it also occured to me that zombies might be part of the solution.

Indeed, it would probably be more fun if it was a mod about zombies than a PK playground though.

The PK's would think christmas had come early and after a couple of murders the whole thing would fall apart.

Bandit skin should be optional, a outfit to wear because you make it clear that you reject civilized behaviour and want people to fear you. But the idea behind it, of the reputation you gain when you mass murder innocents for fun, should be retained. My idea being that once you talk with other survivors or reach a survivor camp you are considered "informed" of the dangers. At that point you'll recognize any infamous bandit in some way, the normal being their name shows up in red once you are in ID range.

I have my suggestion in more detail here so you can correct me there :) Though I didn't realise it would also help with server-hop teleporting at the time... it didn't occur to me people would do that.

Nah, PvP is when the aim is a contest of skill, PK is when you try to make sure there's no real risk of the target fighting back. That's why PK's love MMO's because they have lots of imbalances they can take advantage of. I'll give them credit though, a PK will put an immense amount of time into a game for a chance to make a noob cry in general chat. It strokes their ego something fierce.

It's sort of forced by the fact that the servers are privately owned and can't be expected to carry too much load. A fully persistent MMO would neead a lot more back end. I think you can still do a lot with the approach. But base building will have to be a lot more abstract, such as reinforcing a set location and that location growing into a base on all servers when enough resources are donated. Either way the current approach does nothing useful and aids exploits.

I hadn't realised player built bases would be negated by going to another server, walking forward X steps, coming back to the origin server and thus having effectively teleported through any barricade. It basically means that any "survivor base" has to exist in the same location on all servers. Though you could still use found objects to re-inforce it, a value that could be shared between servers. And yeah, as above, the base could easily be explained as being a camp setup by the military survivors. Having hostile encampments could be good fun too, like if you want to go an loot a military base you might find the military survivors there aren't interested in sharing.

Just remove it. It has no use other than exploits and griefing. If there's going to be a survivor base it clearly needs to exist on all servers to avoid the "server hop teleport" which means it can't be constructed directly by players.

The game will become what Rocket wants it to be. But at the moment it is far more about fans of free for all, full loot, PvP finding a game that supports their play style than it is about zombies. A realistic outcome of a zombie outbreak is not getting a sniper rifle, heading for a rooftop, and doing everything in your power to bring the survivors down to 1 unless the person was a psychopath to begin with. I'd like to see some elements to control this without removing it entirely, because it does add tension, (my suggestion is here), but if you let the PK fans run rampant sooner or later that's all that will be left. And then they get bored due to lack of targets.

Not everyone is playing a zombie game. The PK player has their own interests, the zombies are just a distraction in the gearing up process.

No other end-game, no consequences, lots of guns... yeah, it's not surprising. That said it doesn't take too many PK players to drag the game to their preferred style of play. Those guys are dedicated and will invest surprising amounts of time as long as they can make some noob cry / quit.