SwiftSpear

In the current generation. DayZ is a really bad game as a new player. I've read a bunch of different posts on the forums, and a lot of people here have half the picture, but most of you have forgotten what it's like to be a newbie. I've logged around 10 hours trying to get into this game, and I'm responding to what I'm seeing on the youtubes, and what other new players I'm seeing are referring to. I've been watching destiny's stream, I've been watching many many dayz videos, I appreciate the endgame goal for this project, but, as a game designer, I want to address what I personally see as the issues in this project. I could make this post a lot longer, but I'll keep the points concise. 1. Player killing is HIGHLY incentivized: This game is loot driven, it is boring to try to stay alive a long time, it's only really fun finding new stuff, and BY FAR the best source of new stuff is that other player who has been scavenging for the last 3 hours. The greed level is just overwhelming. Losing your 2 hour old character might be tragic, but it's hardly as fear inspiring as real life death. Zombies themselves can be scary, but being sniped in the head is not really scary, it's just frustrating. The emotions involved with fighting other players are not very decentivizing. You win 50% of the time and receive a HUGE payoff, when you lose, you feel crappy, but not really terrified. This game HIGHLY encourages PvP behavior, and making people start off with shitty items, and making deadly items rarer has done NOTHING to decrease that. 2. The barrier of entry is prohibitive: DayZ is literally an impossible game for new players. I picked up this game with significant premature knowledge, I had watched HOURS of gameplay in stream and youtube video. I KNEW this game would be tough, I'm a dwarf fortress addict, I have experience with games with very high barriers of entry. I'm previously an Amateur competitive FPS player for a CAL team. I read the wiki, I read the forums. It STILL took me a good 5 hours to learn through trial and error simply how to find a few items without zombies chasing me down. Zombies effectively spawn everywhere items are in this game, there are no safe item stores. Sneaking by zombies takes a huge amount of time, it's difficult, there's a delicate dance to doing it effectively, and your chances of finding useful items is HIGHLY dependant on knowledge of where to go given any specific spawn location in order to have the best chance of actually finding something useful. You CAN NOT just jump into dayZ, wander in a random direction, and have fun. This is a MAJOR MAJOR HORRIFIC design flaw. I'm not going anywhere, I'll be continuing to play this game, I am not rage quitting or whining, I just want to CLEARLY communicate my experience of learning this game. This game is simply bad when it comes to how it treats new players. It's not "difficult", it's bad. Survival depends on knowledge that is not intuitive, it not trained to players in any rational way, is not reasonably achievable. Even with extensive reading on the wiki and watching "how to survive" tutorials, for the most part you can't just spawn in any location, you have to quit and rejoin until you get the spawn locations close to where weapons actually spawn in order to give yourself a reasonable chance at an early game. That's bad, simply put. I don't expect every game to do this, but ideally you should be able to actually learn the majority of the gameplay through trial and error. DayZ has reached the point where this is impossible. 3. Teamwork is WAY WAY WAY overincentivized: You cannot generally fight a zombie hoard with a single weapon the way ammo is doled out in this game, at least not without taking a few hits. And then, as a solo player, you cannot heal those hits in any reasonable way. It's bad enough that you basically need buddies to actually face down a zombie encounter. Fair enough, the game wants to encourage players to play cooperatively, but seriously, bloodpacks are bullshit. There is literally a 10/1 return on the multiplayer healing items as opposed to the soloist healing items. Not only that, but there's no global chat in this game. If you don't have a microphone, well, dayz is just a shitty game. If you don't have a couple of buddies to play with from the getgo, or you don't have preemptive knowledge on how to actually find each other when the game starts, dayz basically says "well, fuck you" Solutions: 1. Karma. Punish players who rely heavily on murder for personal rewards in the long run. Decrease the profitability of their start locations, start loadouts, give them bandit models that persist beyond death. Improve the spawning conditions of players who make the play experience more pleasant for others through donation of items, salvation of others from zombie attacks, and cooperation with healing. It's not realistic, but it's fun in the same way that all the other unrealistic things about this game are. 2. More intuitive start conditions. This isn't that hard. Spawning with the makarov alone was better than the current state. Healing items specifically would be nice. This could be tied to Karma. Starting players could have an innate karma bonus that would make the learning curve more fun for them before they've learned to become murderous assholes. Removing those hotspot locations that everyone tends to gravitate to in the random item generator system would be a good step forward as well. The more you decrease the advantage of memorizing the map, the more you improve the starting condition for new players. 3. You don't need to punish solo players soully for playing solo. It's bad enough that you can't really kill a zombie hoard while playing alone. You don't need restrictions against using base healing in the form of blood packs. 1 zombie offsets the healing of the second best healing item in the game in 2 hits. Where as a blood pack can single handedly offset the damage of being hit 20 times. It's literally absurd how abused solo players are. This is not appropriate incentive to not immediately kill eachother, it just promotes gang mentality, and rewards the few at the expense of the many. You don't even need to remove items like blood packs completely as a multiplayer item, you just need to make them less absurd in the degree at which they are advantageous vs the options available to a single player alone. At the end of the day I'll keep on plugging, I just wanted to put in my 2 cents, and express how frustrated I've been with this game recently. Thanks.

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?

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.

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.

It's not just patience though. It requires a crapload of knowledge and understanding of complex game systems to have a realistic go of it. It's hard as FUCK to lose zombies, and you really need to know where the likely weapon spawns are, meaning you have to memorize destinations for at least a few spawn points where you can semi-reliably find the survival necessary drops. A bandage is not a reasonable longterm survival starter. This brings us back to the thread title. The knowledge I speak of is not intuitive, it's not easily available in game, infact, I'd argue there are VERY few players on these forums that naturally came to the realizations they have regarding these things. I know I had to read up a SHITTON of stuff on the wiki pages before I made a half decent run in the game. I REALLY would have liked at LEAST not having to spoil the maps for myself, as a map is an ingame item. I didn't half to do half the research I had to do for DayZ when I was learning to play Dwarf Fortress, and that game is legendary for it's learning curve. It's hard enough learning to reliably sneak around zombies in DayZ. It's bothersome that the early game areas are so absurdly unforgiving if you don't know EXACTLY how to navigate them. EXACTLY where to go and not to go. It's no longer reasonable to expect players to figure that out via trial and error, because they don't have the forgiveness factor of a sidearm to save their ass in a pinch.

You've sacrificed the learning curve for new players on a wild goose chase. It's made banditry worse by making loot more valuable.

Agreed. Your character should persist on server past the point of disconnect, and if you die, your corpse should remain as well. I think 30 seconds is pretty fair. I'm not sure the 60 second thing is fair, as I don't think there's a technical way to distinguish between a CPU crash or unintentional disconnect as opposed to alt-f4. From the game engine's perspective they are effectively the same thing. So I don't think you can really punish alt-f4, you can just make it risky by game conditions that apply to every other disconnect method as well. I don't think the chance of death caused by a 30 second timer on a legitimate accidental disconnect is significant. Unless you just happen to disconnect after spooking a hoard, and that seems pretty unlikely to me, as conflicts happen pretty fast in DayZ.

It may be sociopathy, but it's justified sociopathy. The game heavily incetivises murdering other players. Player loot drops are, on average, WAY better than anything you can find anywhere. Other players on the server only really make the game more difficult for you, so if you can make them ragequit it's of little concern to you. And, aside from blood packs, which you only need a friend to log in and help you with once in a blue moon, there's really very little good reason to cooperate with strangers in DayZ. ESPECIALLY being that your dead body is SO INCREDIBLY valuable to them. Even leaving all that alone, it's just not as interesting fighting zombies as it is fighting players. Actual gunfights make the game more fun. The problem isn't the players, the problem is the game. Some serious design changes are needed to tweak the ratios of PvP to PvE players.

I don't want bandits to not exist in the game, I just want them to be 15% of the population, rather than 95% of the population :)

The issue, as I understand it, it total body count. So if you're killing 100 zombies a minute server wide, and all bodies last an hour, pretty soon you have 6,000 corpses persisting on the servers with full inventory data and all the other things related to corpses. The obvious solution is that zombie corpses are meaningless where as survivor corpses are EXTREMELY valuable. Hence, z corpses should continue to degrade in a few minutes, where as survivor corpses should be made extremely long lasting. It seems like the implementation is just overly simplistic right now. I can't imagine the current system will be left in place all too long.

Fucking first world problems. Honestly, I'd really love more meaningful lategame content in DayZ as well, but you kind of have to excuse an alpha game for not having a well established late game. I hope it's not neglected forever, but, currently, I think there are MUCH more pressing issues.

There's two primary issues. A: The worst punishment the game ever meters out to players is character death, the biggest gain the game rewards a player is another players corpse. Loot drops in structures and what not in DayZ are anemic at best, the Loot that playerY, who has been scouring the map and has visited 10-20 drop spots already is WAY WAY more worth it than anything you will find at one spot. The only thing you risk by pursuing the highest avenue of benefit to yourself, is the chance of dying. Especially in the early game this is negligible. The only players that are really seeing a huge downside here is the players who choose to not go after the big payoff of someone else's murder. There's no longterm punishment for murder. B: Murder is glorified by the public faces of the community. This is HIGHLY intensified by the loot drop problem. Streamers and video makers don't want to spend 4 hours timidly scouring farms for moderately useful survival items. It makes for boring gameplay, and even more boring video. Consequently, if I'm a new player jumping into this game 90% chance that my biggest motivation for joining, the person who effectively taught me how to play, was basically stating to the world "look how cool it is to murder other players! It's so fun!". They aren't punished for it, so why on earth wouldn't they do it that way? Basically. By the fundamental design and slowpaced nature of this game, it's become a murder simulator, as opposed to a real survival game. Disappointing.