Dr. Toros

Except killing someone who saved you isn't about survival, he just wanted stuff and was an ungrateful little shit. Problem is, that teamwork, particularly with people you bump into, is as difficult as possible in day Z.

There's a reason that persistent games do not operate off of privately owned and operated servers. The right way to do it would be to use the 15 million day z has made, and put up 100 official servers.

No, the tools are not provided. Combat d/c is still a thing. Assuming I can kill the bandit, despite him likely having superior weapons, he's free to d/c and remove his body, and the loot. That is of course assuming he hasn't already server hopped and started up again on a different server. More importantly, why do you think that getting gear, killing people, and getting more gear are the only meaningful activities in a zombie apocalypse? They aren't. They're just the only ones supported by this game. You seem to thing there's all this freedom, you clearly never played UO.

Frankly, I'd like a tranq gun. See another survivor in town? Tranq him and loot him, then move on before he wakes up. Or, using the game mechanics incorrectly, tranq him and offer him help, not epi-penning him awake until you're satisfied he's trustworthy.

People who say the game gives you the tools are out of their mind. No, this game doesn't give you a whole lot of things. It doesn't artificially restrict you, is the best it has to offer. Imagine there was no forum and no teamspeak/ventrillo/etc. Day Z would be unplayable in groups. Clans couldn't form. Don't credit day Z with things that it hasn't done.

Player location and loot should be saved to the server. Stop combat logging and everything is so much better. Suddenly, no more teleporting to a better location. No more server hopping, so loot is harder to get. The same people will play on the same server, so you'll start to recognize names of other players who play at your time. Also, lol at people wanting to spread tents on multiple servers so they have an easier time getting their pixels back. It doesn't take long to begin with.

I've been reading both sides of the arguement, and the crux of the issue is thus: -Aspects that reward and encourage aggression are fairly implimented with some semblence to reality, by and large. -Aspects that reward and encourage cooperation are not, by and large, supported in any way that reflects reality. While this is a griefer paradise, there are plenty of unrealistic things preventing people from working together, which exist in real life. Some can be represented in game, and others cannot. Fundamentally, part of the issue is the game mechanics. -Being able to hop from server to server, transferring your location and items, being able to combat disconnect, all means that everyone you meet will always be a stranger, so you never see familiar faces. -Character customization is pathetic, making recognizing allies very difficult. Without using player tags (which cause their own problems) or using 3rd party voice chat, it is very difficult to tell allies from enemies from far away. -There is no specialization in the game. Everyone can do exactly the same thing as everyone else, with the same effectiveness. Everyone can give a blood transfusion and rebuild a helicopter, so other than extra guns, why would you need anyone else? Even at a tribal level people have different skills, which is a big reason why people don't murder each other in small groups. You lose whatever abilities they had. -The debug counter showing murders and bandit kills is not encouraging anything but pulling the trigger, for the weakest of reasons possible, and invisible +1 to some stat that doesn't mean anything. Because of these "features" and the fact that this game is based off of a milsim, aggressive pvp is done fairly well. Huge chunks of what makes cooperation happen are missing due to what the base game lacks, and the mod hasn't supplied. Bandit skins were not a bad idea in the abstract sense. They were trying to sacrifice realism to improve gameplay without removing freedom of choice. Sacrificing realism for better gameplay is the fundamental tradeoff that anyone playing a game makes. Sacrifice enough realism though, and gameplay suffers, which it does in many games. The problem with bandit skins is that rocket implimented them like shit. The game which nailed the pvp vs pve problem was UO. UO eventually fucked it up, but they had the best system thus far. People got murder counts, which went away over time, but if you had say 5 murder counts, or more than 2 murders in 24 realtime hours, your name turned red, and it told everyone you were a murderer. Yes, this sacrificed realism, but it did 2 things. 1) it cut down on meaningless pvp heavily, as pretty much everyone killed someone with a red name on sight, which made only dedicated pkers go red 2) You could trust people who didn't have a red name... to a point. Someone with a blue name might be a selective killer, but they aren't going to murder you just for fun. I'm not inherently against unrealistic pvp penalties (such as bandit skins) simply because things that make people work togather aren't supported. Neither is realistic, but it's balanced. I'm for whatever is going to improve the quality of the game experience, which needs improving if it's not supposed to be a sandbox deathmatch game. I came into day Z expecting a full-loot zombie survival simulator. -zombies are buggy and not a threat -survival is incredibly easy and incredibly boring. Gather supplies, hide out in the woods by a pond, eat and drink until you die from falling asleep at the keyboard. -combat disconnecting means that in meaningful pvp, the other party can simply opt-out, denying you of loot even if they died. What day Z is, is not much more than a sandbox deathmatch currently, and doesn't really do either job very well. If I want a sandbox, I'll play UO or minecraft. If I want a deathmath, I'll play tf2 or counterstrike. If I want zombie survivial with guns, I'll just play killing floor. For day Z to work, it has to be more than the sum of it's parts, because none of it's parts are done very well.

No, things won't change until the game theory rewards something other than simply shooting. With magic magazines that refill on disconnect, ammo isn't an issue, and with the crazy number of weapon spawns, it's easier, more rewarding, and even safer to just shoot people. Honestly, any way you look at it, it's better just to kill people instead of non-lethal robberies, in every way. You expect a group of people to act against their self-interest? When has this ever happened?

Being a bandit is too easy and rewarding. The game either needs to be designed well so that natural deterrents reduce banditry, or create artificial punishments. rocket has been unable to successfully do the first, and failed hard at the second (bandit skins, as opposed to popular opinion, were done shittily, not a shitty idea. UO, a 20 year old game with full-loot pvp, managed it just fine)

They actually do foster cooperation. The problem is that there's so much else that doesn't. Random respawns mean noobs don't get spawn killed, but it also means they spend their early deaths with no idea where they are. The removal of side chat, and the inability to send tells means that unless you add someone on steam, you'll never see them in-game instead, and if you do, you'll both probably shoot each other because you can't recognize anyone due to no customizion of the player skins. It's not just that shooting is so rewarding, it's that the game supports teamplay as little as possible besides bloodbags. Groups always use teamspeak or some similar program because the in-game tools are pathetic.

This is so wrong I'm forced to comment on it. No, no it would not. This game is not going to be broken if all characters stop being exactly the same. In fact, being different would actually encourage cooperation. To address your other post about progression already being in, no, it's not. You can become more familiar with a gun with use, but handling a gun is not the only thing in this game. Being a first responder and cpr instructor, I can tell you that the ability for everyone to effectively use everything but bandages and painkillers without training is unrealistic. The broken leg/morphine relationship is also stupid. Splints should be made out of wood and 2 bandages, and if used on yourself would give the ability to walk but not run for 5 minutes in game. Someone else reduces the time, with someone with high medical skill splinting so you can run on it immediately. Morphine should let you run on it for 5 minutes, but then wears off and your leg is still broken. This change would A) make broken legs less worth respawning over and B) eliminating magic morphine.

It is a risk to be sure. Educated laymen can be problematic. They might catch on to what's going on, and then where would we be?

They were removed because rocket implimented them incredibly poorly. They were incredibly easy to get, and were permanant until the character died. After dying, the character was back to a normal skin. The correct way to impliment them would be 5 murders to flag someone as bandit, your murder count is reduced by 1 every realtime 48 hours, and attach it to the account, not the life. Once you have a group or a stash, you aren't starting fresh every life, and pretending that bandits weren't going to murder after dying was foolish. Tl;dr we had and then lost bandit skins because rocket didn't do his research or think them through well enough. The system I just described was used by Ultima Online, an old game that had unlimited pvp and full loot everywhere outside of cities.

Randomness is bad to introduce to a game, especially a binary 90% success, 10% failure. Perks are better for a zombie survival game than just pure learning, because people *would* come into an apocalypse with prior training and knowledge, and those people would be far more likely to survive. A combination system would be best, I think. You start with some prior knowledge and can build in other areas. %effectiveness is a better way to go than succeed/fail percentages, because it is more satisfying to get 50%, then 52%, then 54%, instead of 100%, 0%, 0%, 100%

To me, having more starting and/or findable skins is priority. Identifying other people is artificially difficult, and it hurts teamplay. Let us start with civillian doctor/mechanic/suit and tie/running clothes/etc, and let us find skins that are more advanced from there. Regular camo/desert camo/medic camo/camo and no shirt (rambo) Hell, even add things like wet suits and neoprene backpacks that prevent loss of items in water. The current system where client and server don't match is a load of horseshit.