louist

You always have a chance to fight back. Often that chance happens before you realized you were in combat, but aside from being shot as you are logging in as a fresh spawn, you have a chance. It is up to you, though, to make use of that chance. Stay out of sight, scout around, and be cautious. Get the drop on reckless players, rather than be that player. The player that shoots you "out of nowhere" either laid that groundwork, took advantage of your vulnerable position, or both. That is to say, while you may have felt your death came out of nowhere, your killer saw it coming.

I'd like to start by simply saying I find deterrents and punishments to be a poor way of leveling the play-style field. Especially arbitrary ones as you have suggested. Instead, the game needs more incentives to encourage working together. If base building and research, for instance, are sufficiently difficult and time consuming, they will help with that. But to go the other route and actively punish people who don't play nice seems backwards and reactionary. It also goes against the spirit of the mod, and what we have seen of the SA thus far, where the central action is human interaction, within a complete spectrum which very much includes cold-blooded, opportunistic murder. To address your idea specifically, I dislike it because it is completely one-sided, punishing the instigator of combat, and does so in a very unrealistic way. While I believe it would decrease KoS numbers, it would do so only slightly, as anyone who is fully geared (who are, as anyone can attest, just as likely to engage in that play style) doesn't need their victims' loot in the first place, so your suggestion doesn't impact them. Instead, those it would most hurt are players with little, including those who may need to kill in order to secure basic necessities. In effect, then, you are punishing fresh spawns or poorly-geared players while having no impact on the types of players who gear up and head to the coast to mow down these same fresh spawns. Secondly, such a system would be create a dynamic wherein a player is encouraged to let the other person act first. This would lead to Mexican standoffs (casual racism for the win). You're options would be to fire, and gain nothing; let your opponent fire first and hope he misses, then loot him; continue waiting, for an unspecified amount of time; or walk away. Sure, that could be dramatic. Until most of your encounters go that way. It also deemphasizes the need to, and removes the reward from, taking the time and effort to gain a tactical advantage over another player. Ambushes would be useless (unless your only goal is to kill), sneaking up on someone would be useless (unless your only goal is to kill), and trappings someone in a building would be useless (unless your only goal is to kill). In each of these cases, the only player not affected is the player who kills solely to kill, the type of player, that is, that most people on this board equate with KoSers. I won't even go into the problems caused by exploitation and third-parties, which would be enough, I think, to doom such a mechanic.

I don't know if it will be as simple as switching a server setting, though I could be wrong. The OP may have to wait for someone to mod that aspect of the game, though that will be an even longer wait. As others have said, though, it will require a private hive, one way or another, and without a comprehensive change to zombies, I can see the lack of challenge getting old. Yes, zombies will become more numerous as the development of SA continues, and we'll see more of them. But they can't ever replace the danger of humans.

Traitorous bandit? A real-life friend wouldn't share his stash of ammo with me, so I handcuffed him and took it.

The corpses of my enemies. Well, the tends to be my experience.

If I'm a fresh spawn, I'll gravitate towards low-pop servers, simply to expedite the gearing process. Once I have a gun in my hands and a full belly, I'll switch over to a high-pop server to go hunting. When I'm playing with friends it's high-pop all the way. Even when freshly spawned, there's almost no risk, and thus little fun, for a group in a low-pop server.

Add temperature effects as well. You sweat more in hot weather or when wearing heavy clothing, increasing dehydration, and you shiver more in could weather, somewhat increasing calarie burning, which makes you hungrier...

I predict the same thing happening, as base building and the like are implemented; more stable communities with a greater balance of interaction. What would aid that, in my opinion, is some way to identify other players. Not the type of player, like the flawed hero/bandit system of the mod, but individuals. As it is, I can interact with the same person a dozen times without knowing it's the same person. Or, looking at it from another angle, myself and those I routinely play with avoid wearing the "best" clothing, opting instead for some glaringly easy to spot clothing, as looking exactly like everyone else adds too much chaos and hesitation to interaction. Is that person I'm looking at my comrade, or a random stranger? But finding a system that allows you to become familiar with someone else, without being open to exploitation is difficult, to say the least.

I can't deny that, having read only the barest fraction of survival manuals (though I applaud your voracious reading habit). But my main issue (as you can read in my follow up post) was how people will act, in such situations, not merely how the should act.

I'm in agreement with you on these points. I am all for incentivizing cooperation, but I don't want to see other styles of play punished or arbatraly limited just to push a particular type of play style. And I agree that, as it stands, there isn't really any long term in-game goals to survival, which certainly encourages me to be more reckless and violent than I need to be, and I bet that goes for a number of players. After all, if I play dangerously and die, what have I really lost? Maybe an Hoyt's worth of gearing up? Less, when I'm lucky.

It seems to depend on server population and frequency of server restarts. In a server that constantly restarts, or has few survivors, food hasn't been an issue for me. In busier servers that have been running a while without a restart, I've been reduced to starvation.

I was thinking more along the lines of the "end of the world" apocalypse, but I was being more specific than i should have been. I agree, history is full of examples. In fact, history is full of examples going both ways. Look at the Meduse, for example. Those who acted against the group, those who refused to cooperate, those who thought only of themselves, survived. But I'm not going to use that example to claim that in every case, acting selfishly is the best course of action, or that people will act in that manner every time, which is essentially what you were arguing. There are simply too many factors which we can't quantify, too many personalities, power dynamics, too many facts unique to each and every situation, to make any such claims. That was why I called you out. Not simply to attack for an attack's sake. This isn't in-game.

My point stands; all you have presented are assumptions and suppositions. Claiming to know how people will respond to, and act in, an apocalypse is, at best, utter guesswork. And it's a pure flight of fancy otherwise.

I don't see what your caring has to do with it.

Source?

It wouldn't hurt to have the player list also display the server name.

I don't like the "all items become ruined" idea. If I'm starving with nothing but an axe (which seems to be the case in full servers) and manage to take someone out, I'd like to get my hands on his beans. And the fully upgraded M4 that everyone I kill tends to have.

I'd like to see more... Regionalized(?) weather, such as snow in green mountain when it's raining. It's not entirely realistic, but it would be fun. I'm not sure what sort of weather effects the engine is capable off, but other things, like fog in the valleys, or coastal storms that obscure visibility would be awesome.

I'll concede the point about blood types. But not the rest of your evidence, for one simple reason: if you died, but your group survived, they just guard your gear until you return. If you truly were a completely new person, they'd shoot you as some random scavenger. Waking up on the beach or no, you are functionally immortal. You know where you died, how you died, and can run right back to your corpse and/or group to recover what you lost. Rogue-likes, and RPGs with iron man modes, make real use of a perma-death mechanic by deleting your save and/or presenting you with a new randomized world. In those games, you truly are a new character.. I am not suggesting that DayZ become that kind of game; obviously introducing those mechanics are impossible. I'm just pointing out why perma-death works for some games but won't for DayZ, and we really should find a more appropriate term for what occurs here. As for tents: we're going to have persistent underground bases, which will presumably NOT be deleted when you die. Tents, in my eyes, would just be a more exposed, easily robbed, poor-man's equivalent.

It really depends on how long the person would be locked out of a server. Aside from dissuading server hoping and ghosting, I don't think locking a person out is ever the right way to go. If death meant you couldn't return to your server for, say, 30 minutes, that essentially means that whenever one of our group dies, everyone has to relocate. After all, playing together is the entire point. I don't mind playing solo, but that's something I do on my own time, on the first person hive. When I'm playing with friends, I want to be doing just that: playing with friends.

I can see where you are coming from, but that system would be tantamount to punishing people who play in groups. Either the person who died has to do something else, or the entire group has to log off and and switch servers. For those of us who can only play together a few hours (if that) a week, that would suck. My other concern is that it would break up server communities, once we have the mechanics in place to encourage people to stick to a specific server (bases, vehicles). It would send a mixed message. I am also of the opinion that as people begin to settle down onto specific servers, we'll see a healthier mix of interaction, as people begin to developer relationships.

Thanks. Very informative.

My point isn't that perma death isn't realistic, or that it is meaningless within the realm of gaming. My issue is that perma-death, within the specific context of DayZ is a misnomer, and people who use it as a reason against the inclusion of persistent storage are ignoring this. Perma death, in games that use it well (I'm thinking about Rogue-likes and similar games) are games where you can invest a lot of time into the game, and a lot of energy or even emotion into your character, only to lose dozens of hours worth of that investment. Those games also allow you access to very different characters and a huge array of items, abilities, and so on that result in a unique character every time. Compare that to DayZ, where every character is a clone, and each playthrough is essentially the same. Where, if you luck out with a fresh server and don't encounter hostile players, you can be essentially fully-geared within an hour, perma death loses it's impact. With gear as the only defining characteristic of a character within the game's mechanics, Perma-death is essentially the same as restarting a level in any other game. Sure you lose an hour or so of time you had spent gearing up, but that's it. And if you play with a group, even if you did die, they can guard your loot while you run back and are suddenly back to where you were. Tents/storage, in this view, are no different than that. This post rambled a bit, and I apologize for that. The short version is that, in my opinion, without some cosmetic (beards) or mechanical (skills) way to give a character's life meaning, there is no perma-death. As it is, all your characters are essentially immortal. Sure, getting shot results with you waking up on the beach sans equipment, but you haven't really lost anything.

I've been through those apartments immediately after restart, and I can confirm they spawn loot. But I can also confirm they spawn almost nothing. I found, after checking the two across the street from the northern supermarket, a rotten orange, a fresh banana, and a no of .357. Add them to the list of bugged buildings you don't bother checking, I would suggest. Others have suggested that the items spawn, but fall through the floors.

What perma-death feeling?