First off, I want to thank Rocket for quite an incredible mod that he must've put many, many hours into. I sincerely appreciate the work you've done and the enjoyment I've received from it. The DayZ community appears to be very interested in the PvP/Bandit issue. It is going to be obvious that not all players are going to want to work cooperatively and not all players are going to want to fight other people. That said, I believe Rocket is fairly firm in his stance of not wanting to put down rules that will restrict gameplay options or choice. I am in his camp and believe that open-ended gameplay is a wonderful choice for this mod. Therefore, any changes to the mod need to make sense and/or have some element of real life to work. The best open-ended games make use of our knowledge of the real world to provide us clues as to how to play. That way there is no railroading or hand holding of the player. Currently the Humanity system is a little wonky. It seems to be a very all or nothing proposition. Most people are reporting only a small number of kills (even in self-defense) turns them into a bandit. I'm interested in creating more of a continuum out of the Humanity system. Here's my idea: 1) All players start at Humanity = 0. This will give you a default "normal" person skin. 2) For each wounding of another player you receive negative Humanity equal to 10% of the blood loss x 10% of that player's humanity. Thus killing virtuous people would be more damning than killing a "bad guy". 3) For each healing of a player, you receive positive humanity equal to 50% of their blood loss OR a fixed amount for painkillers/morphine/bandagign. 4) As your humanity increases or decreases your character will slowly shift. For each -1000 humanity, you will look more and more "bandit-like". For each +1000 humanity, you will look more and more like a military soldier (or some other obviously virtuous person). 5) For #4, these models would need to be graduated so that the changes are subtle at a distance, but noticeable up close. As one gets further away from 0 Humanity, their appearance would become obviously different, so that after 5+ player kills the person would be obviously a bandit, or after 10+ healings of others you would be obviously virtuous. This system would be unobtrusive, would be intuitive (we all know to stay away from shady looking people), and would allow people to defend themselves without ending up as a bandit forever. Additionally, it would be cool to see a "rank" system where characters who've survived longer would be noticeably different. This would be aesthetic only. No inherent benefits, more of a badge of honor. It could be awarded for every 24 hours survived (perhaps with 5-10 ranks). I thought it would be interesting to have it be an aging thing, but I don't think that's feasible, so likely it would have to be a model implementation. This rank system could also be tied to the Humanity system so that if you are primarily a bandit your "rank" badge would look very different than if you had played primarily as a virtuous person. This badge could stay with you even if your current Humanity was positive so that people know you used to be a bad guy. I think this would have a lot of net positives, including: 1) Making bandit identification easy, since only obvious PvPers would have full bandit models. Thus removing any ambiguity about who is actually friendly. 2) Reducing the penalty for defending yourself (particularly against a bandit). 3) Making Humanity more interesting. 4) Making virtuosity have a reward. 5) Make players value their life because they want to reach higher ranks.
