Kageru

I hope there's one in Australia, need to go looking.

Self-defence banditry is easy. More than 1 kill per X hours and you get a bandit skin, so it only marks career PK's which is what you care about. Bandit skins don't stop PvP, they mean that it becomes survivors versus bandits which creates more stories than a everyone kills everyone setup. Indeed extend it so you can have various bandit gangs so there's clan wars, those with lots of bandit kills become hunters and you'll start to see loyalty, politics, betrayal, competition, vengeance and all those other sources of interesting stories. It was removed because Rocket has some mystical belief that removing game mechanics increases the depth and variety of game-play that results, something pretty clearly erroneous in practice.

If it was survival of the fittest the world would be ruled by tigers or bears. It's dominated by humans because they are a social animal that naturally works in groups and is made much stronger thereby. This would be especially true when there is a powerful external threat. I'm really hoping the ones who believe it is only the cops stopping citizens slaughtering each other live far away, because that's a sick society.

Because it's not about the character, it's about your chosen play-style. It allows more co-operative players to have some level of trust that the stranger they meet isn't a PK gearing up. Removing the mechanic rather than fixing it is probably one of the dumbest design decisions I've ever seen.

The game had an end-game solution. Habitual PK (bandit skin) versus survivor PvP. Just like Eve has survived so long because its PvP is shaped by the struggle of in-game factions. Maybe it had some minor issues but it was a great mechanic because it made PvP part of the story and allowed new player friendly ad-hoc co-operative player behaviour without limiting PvP. And most of the good press, when they're not just playing with Rocket on a locked server, came from this time. And then Rocket removed it so it became unstructured (barring out of game groups) and meaningless PK. And he removed it because it was much more important to implement bear-traps... :/

Yes, Rocket has not the slightest clue why his mod became popular or how to appeal to a non-niche audience. It wasn't for the PvP. It was because gaming magazines talked about the psychology and ambience of role-playing survival against zombies. And he needs to pack it in with the "this is art!" bullshit. That is the saddest excuse for not actually thinking about the player behaviour your rule changes will have on how the game is played. He should just admit it's Arma-II, and you should bring your own organised team if you want to compete, with a bait and switch wrapper suggesting it's about zombies.

Good post OP. Wasted though, the non-PvP players don't post on the forums long-term. They work out the truth of what the game is, how long it will take to mature, and silently move on. This game has had a massive media hype, largely undeserved for the stage of development it is at, that has driven up people giving it a try. But longer term the number of players logging in each night will fade to the hard-core player base the mod is designed for (Rocket's bias is pretty evident). Still, it's confirmed the obvious (If you have zombies in it, it will sell) and I'd expect to see other iterations of the idea.

No one really knows. Rocket's post is ambiguous and vague. Probably because increasing the PvP activity conceals the lack of content. But your guess is as good as anyones.

It means less targets for him to potentially shoot. Private hives sound fun, and much more realistic / interesting in that you'd develop factions and politics.. Which is what kept Eve interesting.

It's not suggestions or possibilities they are short of, it's the fact that implementing any content that didn't come as part of Arma-II takes time. The latest patch seems to be pretty good proof of that.

Accept the game for what it is. A endless, persistent, objective-less, team-less Arma-II map with a complicated and time-consuming gearing up process. However once you are geared up it allows you a huge advantage over lesser geared players and the chance to send them back to start all over again making it a player-killer's wet dream (so they're not going to go to CoD). Maybe it will be something more in a year or two.

PvP is cheap content using mechanics it gets for free via using Arma-II as a foundation. It will be months to years before there is anything much else to do. Though seeing Rocket describe how a team of newbies playing together, and getting axe murdered in turn by a silent veteran, is "cool emergent content" makes me realise he gets off on it. Also that he doesn't really understand the term.

It would be a more interesting game if it was PK vs Anti-PK vs survivor. At the moment's it's just a free for all and fairly meaningless because it is almost always the right call to kill or avoid any other player (barring pre-set groups). There's no "story" or "psychology" in that.

PK's do it because they know there's a real life person on the other side not enjoying their gaming. The idea of people raging, quitting or crying on the forum because of their actions is the game they play and the motivation to invest hours of time. Zombies are boring to them because they are both no challenge and don't care when they get wtfpwn'd. Roleplaying a "zombie survivor" is equally alien. They adore Day-z because there's lots of noobs, the game is full of exploits, they can gear up to give themselves a massive advantage so they rarely die (sniper rifles being the preferred weapon, even better if you don't even see them), dying sets their target back and there's no repercussions from playing this way. If you wanted to design a game to make the PK community wet themselves it would probably look something like day-z.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was good death-match, but really when you look at it like that the only strengths it has is a perfect environment for sniper / long range rifles and a slow re-gearing process.

:) It really sort of does..

What stopped an Arma-II match being dueling sniper rifles at extreme range out of interest? Given their power and the large open areas / cover that suit them so well. I could see it if the map was all CQB, where sniper rifles have weaknesses, but on a map like Chernarus...

In that video he basically says that playing the game purely for PK is "just part of it", so it's not really much support for him being interested in controlling it. He seems to think if there are more long term goals (which take a lot of development effort to implement) there'll be less people focusing on PK or people won't be bothered by it? Then again he seems to be quite an optimist. He was shocked that the hackers would see something with potential and screw it up just for fun.

To a PvP person a PvE / PvP split means a lot less targets PvP, and those remaining are more agressive and skilled. Not a good thing. It's not a great solution anyway. The idea is that both extremes get most of what they want. Most players will have some interest in PvP some of the time. But you need some mechanic for that (there's lots of possibilities) or the more dedicated PvP players tend to chase off people who can't compete (soloists, casuals, pure-PvE players, zombie fans). At this point the game is way too immature to be splitting it up into sub-communities, on the other hand if he wants to keep the "zombies are cool!" casual gamers then the current environment will probably chase most of them off. I guess that's why alpha development is normally not done while being public and catching a lot of attention too early can hurt a project.

Probably the best thing for the game would be Rocket not burning himself out. Software takes time, he's not going to fix every bug and implement every suggestion in a weekend, and he needs those weekends as recharge time for all the pressure he must be under. It would also be good if he had other developers to share the load (I hope he does). A fully evolved Day-Z is months to years worth of work, a marathon not a sprint, and that means conserving your energy and being realistic with the screaming fans as to how fast change will come.

PvE games have trained you to do nothing but click on a rock 1 million times to achieve some accomplishment. STOP BEING WORTHLESS. PvP players are just as bad' date=' with things like the above making it clear that anyone taking issue with their gameplay choice is simply bad, weak, doing it wrong and deserves to be hunted down unless they learn to play it as a PvP game. They do it in Eve too, although they realised after a while the empire (PvE players) generate most of the money that kept the game going. The degree to which PvP influences the game is entirely a design decision. You make it punitive for people who are only casual or not that interested in PvP and over time those people will stop playing. You reduce PvP to nothing the PvP players will leave. And most players are somewhere within the PvE / PvP extreme, wanting a bit of both. Whatever though, the game is currently highly pro-PvP and rocket will do what he does. I was watching the walking dead trailers on steam though (Walking Dead and wonder how many people see the zombie apocalypse as being like that. Grinding psychological pressure of knowing the worlds gone to shit, people are losing it and trying just to survive is a challenge.

Something Awful. I hope Rocket recovers, though he has to be under immense pressure, expectations and people wanting him to constantly pull development miracles out of the hat in a couple of days / hours.

They're not really the same though. Someone who is here primarily for another PK notch on his rifle will see the game completely differently from someone who dreams of sneaking around zombies to steal their beans. They have different goals, probably don't even understand what the other gets out of it, and their play-style can be enhanced or degraded as the game rules change. Since the game is young, and the rules will change (but no one really knows how) the lobbying is intense.

The difference's are just based on the play-style. PvE gameplay very rarely negatively impacts PvP gameplay much, indeed it gives more targets so PvP people really don't want a non-PvP option or separation. The inverse is often not true, so there will always be friction. This is why virtually all games have some degree of limits on PvP because they want to retain the maximum number of players. That may not be an issue here, since it's effectively non-commercial. PvP players are competitive and realise a strong group makes winning a conflict *much* more likely and thus have an extremely strong incentive to group. That's why Goonswarm's coalition in Eve is something like 8,000 people strong. PvE players are fighting AI opponents that have a known challenge, generally aimed at the solo player, and thus a much weaker incentive to pre-form groups. Both sides will try to influence Rocket to favor their game-style with forum posts. The PvP players pretty much defending the status-quo at the moment since it favors them. What actually happens is pretty much 100% up to the developers, and won't happen quickly in any case. Building game content that didn't come in the Arma-II box is going to take months. And if we're going to argue realism a blood transfusion and a couple of bandages doesn't cure multiple gunshot wounds, anyone up for several weeks of your character being incapacitated after a shoot-out? Of course not, because realism has to take a back seat to gameplay.

There's lots of reasons to bum-rush chernarus and lots of PK's looking to capitalize on that. 1. If you don't have a loot-spawn map or previous knowledge, and realize most of the small groups of houses are unenterable, you'll head for the nearest city for supplies. 2. You have nothing much to lose. 3. You need morphine thanks to Rocket's enthusiasm for leg breaks and its rarity so it's better to try and get some while you don't have expensive gear to lose. Any post that say's, "Just head for the deer stands and crashed helicopters" doesn't really understand the new player experience.