Kageru

You need some mechanism to delineate the agressive PK's. Because there's enough of them to undermine any attempt at co-operative play (unless organized in advance and outside the game). In the real world there'd be humanity, that it is actually not normal to gun down every stranger you meet (or at least they'd gather a reputation), but the game attracts PK game fans who you can't afford to give the upper hand to. So everyone gets brought down to a "shoot first" level. That and there's no other end-game than getting nice gear and guns, which means you end up just wanting to use them.

I agree to an extent. They obviate any zombie threat because you can be so far from the spawn, they allow PK with minimal threat of detection or retaliation. It would be a more interesting zombie game if the weapons were more basic. But they make PK people cream their panties, so don't expect much support.

Some griefer has never been happier than reading your post, that's what he plays for. Give it a try when the mod is more advanced, it's still a work in progress.

It's the actual interesting design challenge. Making co-operative play productive or giving an end-game goal, keeping the PK element under control without totally removing the threat of it and making zombies threatening without making the new player experience punitive. It's still early days though, but an interesting foundation to experiment with answers to the above.

The game currently is flawed because there's no progression. The initial moments are scary but once you find a map with the spawn points of loot, understand zombie mechanics, and have geared up it ceases to become a zombie mod. The only serious threat after that is other player and the only challenge is hunting other players so the whole thing descends into a death-match / campathon. This is a genre problem (what is the end of a zombie story.. escape or die?) It would be better to fix that in the mod environment before the full game happens, where you can try mechanics and the players accept balance being awry. How can you make zombies challenging to a geared player in a secured environment with a silenced weapon? Sniper weapons are a balance nightmare too. What is the co-operative progression? The spawn system means there's actually a small number of high value locations that become campathons and a lot of the map has zero value. Once you get over the ambience, shock of being a new player in a vast map and scavenging (which is excellent) there is not much game left. And the current PvP focus is niche gameplay. Though, ultimately, whatever. I bought ARMA for the fun of watching where it evolves too, so whatever the developer wants to do is fine. Even if it ends up not being my sort of game.

Anarchy is not no laws, it's no rulers. It means you work as part of a group and if you offend the beliefs and expectations of your peers in that tribe they'll boot you out (or shoot you). your state is... I don't know, mental sickness? In an apocolypse, and in primitive times, your chances were a lot better if you were part of a tribe than a mongrel. And there's repercussions to every act of meaning.

I want to be part of an organized / co-operating Posse that trusts each other and takes out PK'ers. Killing should be used productively.

.... no. Besides, Mechwarrior is coming out, you can get your mechs there.

Actually the essence of most zombie movies I've seen is the issues of trust and dealing with the sense of hopeless loss and society collapsing. And that only really comes out in a social setting. Hiding in the hills or sniping people from rooftops has no personal drama, because there is no need for any trust or interaction and they've already given up on civilization (plus they make boring movies). On the other hand many PvP people are focused on harvesting player tears. Zombies don't really interest them other than as a background since they don't get upset when hours of game-time are reset to zero. Betrayal of trust is the very best source of upset players and highly sought. I actually like the idea of PvP, but there should also be a balancing in which the advantages of working together and co-operation are allowed to exist. It doesn't have to be much, some stable representation for reputation like in my suggestion, would go a very long way. Guilds / Clans would be another and would represent how people form teams / groups / tribes in any real world crisis. And this is a game based on a scenario from movies and literature. Did you have a point?

You can either play survivalist, play careful and try to last as long as you can while exploring the map and gathering survival materials or go looking for PvP / loot in the military base / main cities from what I can see.

Some people are playing a zombie mob, some people are playing a FFA PvP game with no controls, they won't react the same. And with no way to tell which is which you have to treat everyone as being a threat and either join in the death-match or head for the hills and try to avoid it. Does the game even have guilds or clans? That would be one way of determining peaceful intent.

They harvest tears, you are feeding them.

This isn't a new debate, this is just Utima online continued, and every FFA PvP game since then. And it will probably go the same way: 1. Developer thinks full-loot / open-PvP is really cool and fits the theme, which it probably does. 2. People who adore that game-style take full advantage of it and start to dominate the game, because noob tears stroke their ego and they will put immense effort into it (plus shutting down any suggestion of change). 3. People not into that game-type start complaining on the forums / leaving / playing less, PvP guys start complaining the map is empty / boring since there's fewer targets and those ones are better armed and skilled. 4. Developer realises it's a problem and does something like Trammel (free and limited PvP worlds) or just rolls with it and accepts the game is more niche than it otherwise might have been. Of course in this case it's Rocket's baby, and there is little profit incentive to decide for him, so I imagine he'll do what he wants to do.

It's because there's no real structure for co-operation (I have a suggestion for it here) and any such groupings are intrinsically non persistent and offer little benefit (plus it takes ages to meet up) plus there's no concept of reputation when the population is so fluid. On the the other hand the open-world FFA full-loot PvP people are incredibly happy to find a game that lets them play the way they like (killing poorly equipped noobs) and pretty much don't care what the justification is as long as it supports the gameplay style they want.

There'll probably be wipes when there's major changes to the database, since there's no reason for them to put too much effort into migrating versions, no real reason to do one without that reason.

Agree... and canteen's are reasonably rare.

Combat rarely happens at that range though. To be useful you'd need to be able to detect a PK threat at longer range. Survivors showing each other a photo of "this is the guy who gunned down my group" would do that. Use as a metric something like 1 survivor kill / 3 hours (per account, and hide the numbers) to allow for the occasional oops, shooting someone who really needed it and the fact the information wouldn't be perfect especially for marginal cases. My suggestion also includes you have to visit a survivor camp to get this information, you don't wash up on shore knowing it (so better assume everyone is a danger).

I assumed something similar having found barbed wire, tank traps and other construction stuff which is currently pretty useless (well, maybe a sniper guarding their rear?). But the interesting idea was how to imitate the idea of a permanent camp when players themselves aren't persistent. NPC guards just represent the fact that players don't really vanish from the world and as such would look after their own security during down times. Easy to code too since I think ARMA probably has the idea of forward military bases and NPC guards already. It would be good to have some primitive system in though so new players know the game is evolving to support several game styles. Cherno deathmatch, Hill Hermit and Banding together. It also means the game wouldn't need any whining about or complex anti-PK mechanics. Players could reasonably be expected to posse up and hunt down active PK's.

The enemy to homicidal maniacs would be communication, even in a zombie apocalypse. If you've met other survivors you'd chat about the "crazy guy with a sniper rifle in Cherno whose killed scores of survivors" (ie lots of survivor kills / time on the account) and be able to recognize a prominent PK in future. That would allow players who are not PK prone to have some level of trust and form anti-PK groups to clear and hold areas. I have a thread in the suggestion forum on this, but I expect there's also a lot of vocal PK fans who are salivating at having a full-loot open PvP game and quite like things as they are.

It doesn't work so well because players, players per server and player reputation (mostly in terms of PK status) aren't persistent. There needs to be some focal point to make up for that. And a place that won't have a sniper rifle trained on it when you log back in. At the moment using global chat to "find each other" is pretty much like throwing chum into shark infested waters. I cringe when I see noobies giving their locations in global and generally don't have to wait long for the death messages. Incidentally bandits already have a focal point in game since spawns are known and static. It's as much a balance for that.

A good idea. Would also make the new player experience much better. As it is they don't know the spawn map but will recognize a building as a place which will have the stuff they need. This way buildings will more reliably generate stuff so that reflex will work and it doesn't matter so much they start with nothing. Indeed if you do it this way the first house you loot could give you the basic newbie kit since there are some things you can expect to find in a house and would take when you are desperate and have nothing. And since it's once off it doesn't make each house farmable for that loot. It certainly makes more sense than some houses having a bunch of bullets and bandages sitting in the toilet or by the door.