SwiftSpear

I really agree with you. The only thing, as a game designer, these problems are not at all the fault of players, it's entirely the game design that's responsible for the current situation. In nearly every way it encourages murderous behavior and punishes peaceful behavior. It's just not very psychologically functional in it's current state.

Sounds like you were shot.

The server reset and it took time for new murders to offset the few long lifers who carry the upper end of the average. It's now down to 39. No starting weapon has decreased the time it takes to be murdered by someone, but not decreased the ratio of people who murder on sight if they're able to.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but personally I understand the frustration of being murdered by someone after you've just saved his friends life, and are coming to save him.

I just wanted to draw attention to the split between DayZ and a hypothetical real world apocolypse scenario, and why DayZ encourages sociopathic murder. Stashes: - Real world: If you kill someone, you probably will never find their stash. People in the real world would be unlikely to carry everything they own on them, as it makes them a target, and it's heavy. "Tents" would be the universal standard, NOT rare. Everyone would have a home base somewhere, most would probably be houses and buildings, hidden cellars, crawl spaces. - Dayz world: If you kill someone, you now get everything they own, unless the rare chance they had a tent occurs. Don't worry, the tent disappears if they die anyways, so might as well not be concerned with it. The survivor has really good stuff anyways. Take your chance or someone else will. Loot: - Real world: The biggest jackpots are entirely likely to be in the world, as opposed to on the bodies of other suriviors. Loot stashes hidden by others. Locked premises with shops, grocers, warehouses. These places may be guarded by others, but at any given time, most property will not be on the person of another individual. - Dayz world: Every world jackpot is moderate or disappointing. Your survive by dropping by many locations collecting bits and bobs here and there. Consequently, any survivor who has taken 3 or more stops, probably has a better loot loadout than almost ANY world spawn. The best loot is ALMOST ALWAYS on the person of another survivor. It makes them the ideal target. Why waste your time doing work someone else will do for you? Revenge: - Real world: You can track someone through the woods, you can meet with your community and negotiate mutual protection, if someone is identified, everyone knows it and no one will willingly become victim to the same individual. There is substantial evidence of any given crime being committed, the murderer can be tracked down after the fact in many instances. If someone is caught they will probably be punished by death, and are no longer alive to commit the crime again. - Dayz world: Server populations are small and constantly cycling, the individual who was the worst offender at one place, might disappear an hour later to the point where they might as well have never existed. Because a victim respawns, they can easily identify their killer, but even if they killer is caught and killed, he will simply respawn, and has no reason to not kill next time. You're more likely to be killed for selfish reasons anyways, why fear revenge? Server populations are too variable and small to make community justice realistic in any but the most contrived scenarios. Fun: - Real world: Don't get me wrong, I like fun, but in the real world I'm not going to take stupid life risking moves on a regular basis. Especially not in the name of fun, and not when messing up might mean a gruesome death in pain over a two day long period rotting in some hole with a broken leg and slowly wilting out. Survival would ALWAYS be #1 priority, I'd sneak around on my belly for 3 hours in a town if it meant I stayed a little safer. Unnecessary risks would be, for most people, kept to a minimum, except in cases of extreme desperation. - Dayz world: At the end of the Day, DayZ is a game, it needs to be fun. The biggest risk is always loss of all your loot, weather that's from death or swimming. There's no such thing as a real slow and painful death, let alone a real game over. Watch almost any DayZ livestreamer. You VERY rarely see hours of crawling around for pennies. Most of them stick to the high player conflict areas where risk and reward is high... simply put, that's really the only way right now to speed the game up, to show off the interesting parts of the game, to have a good chance of something legitimately fun happening on a regular basis. The best longterm survival strategies in DayZ are not very fun, where as gunfights and huge loot drops from other players you caught with their pants down, that is much more adrenaline fueling. More often than not the interactions with the entities of the game world in DayZ are slow, frustrating, and boring. You're either crawling by zombies like a slug, or you're running from them for the next 10 minutes after spooking a hoard. There aren't too many really interesting environmental locations. There are no waterfalls to slide down, no trees to climb, no abandoned buildings to parkour through, no islands or caves worth exploring. Murder is the most fun thing in DayZ for many people, and so, for many, it becomes the standard in most scenarios. ------ At the end of the day, it's a tough issue, but I think the problem we perceive right now, comes from the design of the game. It's not something to blame on players. If it's something that needs to be fixed, it needs to be fixed by large scale design modifications. Not little tweaks here and there like spawning without guns or adding overpowered blood packs. What do you think?

Disconnecting and reconnecting with the purpose of losing zombies or avoiding a firefight almost definitely. Nightcrawler is one of the X-Men who's power is teleportation. Nightcrawlering is therefore most likely using connecting and disconnecting from two or more servers to effectively produce that effect. Likely the guy you killed was playing with the admin or something, he went to avenge his buddy and you had magically disappeared.

Don't tents despawn when the player who owns them dies? I think this HEAVILY grinds against the idea of permadeath in the game, although I suppose I understand that some would prefer to be playing in a more forgiving environment. If this or something like this is ever done, it MUST MUST MUST be kept optional to the discretion of server owners. Permadeath players should NOT have to deal with playing with players who aren't following the same conditions.

1500 meters is too far. The login/out behavior you described is normal when you log into a server in night cycle if you don't have NVG.

Include my vote for this! No need to take western weapons out of the game completely, but they should be rarefied and restricted to crash sites what not. Eastern weaponary is fun to play with anyways :)

Karma should be based on in game actions. Murder reduces Karma. Trade with other players (once it's implemented in a meaningful way), saving shots (similar to the left 4 dead saving shot), healing other players, and killing bandits improve Karma by a smaller amount than survival murders decrease karma. Karma also very slowly drifts up through pure gameplay hours. The Karmic penalty or benefit to murdering another player is based on that players Karma. A player you murder who has 900 karma may cost you instantly 40 karma points. Where as a bandit killed that had 10 Karma will give you a bonus of +24 Karma. Consequently this also means murdering a career bandit who just happened to spawn as a survivor does not entail a very heavy penalty, and likewise murdering a saint who had a very unlikely short term conversion to banditry doesn't entail a very valuable bonus. (loosely, karma vs murder = (victim karma/20) for survivor murders, and ((1000 - victim Karma) / 40) for bandit kills) Karma is tied to account, it does not reset at death. Your starting loadout is tied to your Karmic level. At the extreme low end (tons of unredeemed murders) you start with no equipment aside from basic healing items. At the high end you start with more individually beneficial items such as survival kit (hunting knife, matches, hatchet), water bottle, or better weapons (intermediate tier sidearms or basic tier rifles). Karma also effects bandit skins, however, not as absolutely as loadouts (if you have good karma, you will always spawn with a good loadout). Imagine for a karma system between 0-1000 points, and a default starting Karma of 300. Your chance of spawning with a bandit skin is 50/(karma+1). Karma also effects how easily you convert to or convert from banditry. Committing a murder entails a 25/(karma+1) chance of immediately adopting a bandit skin, and likewise, committing friendly actions with a bandit skin entails a karma/25 chance of flipping back to a survivor skin. When spawning under this system, your client always perceives you as a survivor skin, even if you actually have a bandit skin (this prevents re rolling spawns to avoid the disciplinary factor of karma negative actions). This personal identity crisis lasts either 1 hour, or until your first murder/bandit conversion event takes place, whichever occurs first. (I realize this could still be gamed with groups of people meeting up after they spawn, but it would still be a huge hassle to go to that effort only to immediately be swapped after your first murder because your low Karma makes your chance of skin conversion very high) No matter how low your Karma gets you are always given the chance to spawn without a bandit skin, and even just surviving in the bush for long periods will creep your karma up and allow you to recompense for your sins. This is so there is no room for the "all my kills were self defense" argument. Why this is a good idea: It disconnects incentive to kill other players from receiving quick loot, because in the long run, you get less loot after dying. It encourages you to default your game play to humane non-sociopathic styles without actually making career banditry impossible. Most importantly, it allows game play balance of other things to be modified without much fear that ratios of bandits to survivors get drastically out of whack, as if you have too many bandits you can always increase the spawn punishments of being a bandit, or increase the spawn benefits of being a saint, and ratios will again naturally drift towards the desired amount. If something like a more potent single player healing item makes sense to the balance of the game, you know longer have the plague of the temptation of forcing players to work together simply so they don't immediately murder each other, since you don't need to worry about immediate murder to nearly the same degree, as players will fear the moral ramification of that action.