frostWaffles

The OP is on the right track, but this fix probably won't do anything. All it means is that people will troll each other with lower tier gear instead of higher tier gear. Instead of KoSing with AS50s, they'll KoS with Makarovs.

I tried reasoning with the dickheads on this board a while ago. They all seem to have lost touch with reality, in that they seem willfully ignorant to the fact that they're playing a video game. You need a punishment/class based system to achieve the highest level of realism from people's behavior. This is so because it's a video game, and incentives will never work in-game the way they work in real life. You need mechanics that compensate for the fact that people are going to behave so differently in-game. People in DayZ KoS for the giggles, and very rarely out of necessity. This does not reflect a real-world scenario at all. Until Rocket gets over his delusions, DayZ will suffer from these problems, and the number of active players will steadily fall, as it has been for the last six months. I'm just disturbed by the fact that the truth is so troublesome to the bellends on this forum. But hey, that's what happens when your community consists mostly of trigger-happy CoD fags that don't give a flying fuck about immersive gameplay and role-playing. Have fun, DayZ. I'll have a nice view from my soapbox when an accomplished game developer adopts your concepts, but does them right.

Back in the old Battlefield 1942, there was a mechanic that snapped your camera to 3rd person when you died, and panned it so that your killer was in the center of the screen. I would enjoy a similar mechanic in this game.

Again, the suggestion puts penalties on both bandits and survivors. Try to read the post before adding your thoughts.

lolwut? This is a game, dude. It's an RPG. There are already a plethora of arbitrary rules in place, all I'm suggesting is adding a couple more to help maintain the game's health. If the mechanics remain the way they are now, the game will probably just fade into obscurity.

If you simply make the environment more challenging, people will simply complain that soloing is imbalanced.

My intention isn't necessarily to punish one class over the other. In fact, under the changes I suggested, survivors get punished as well. My intention is to keep the metagame from shifting to something that could be extremely boring and stale. If there are no pros or cons to choosing either class, the game will continue on where it is currently headed; kill or be killed. Which isn't really a good thing considering the nature of this particular RPG.

I've been playing DayZ for a couple weeks and I'm slowly realizing that there is a pretty big oversight to this game as an RPG. The social aspect to the game is what makes it truly interesting, but I fear that the social aspect has somewhat fallen apart since the game's release. I'm noticing that for every one survivor you meet who means no harm, there are significantly more bandits, and I think the reason for this one-sided gameplay has a lot to do with incentives. As far as I understand, there are two intended classes; bandits and survivors, and both these classes must endure the environment in order to survive. This is fine, but so far, there are no disincentives associated with choosing to be a bandit over being a survivor, and there are no actual incentives associated with choosing to be a survivor over being a bandit. In other words, nothing bad happens if you choose to kill someone, and nothing good happens if you choose not to. This has lead to the current metagame, which is to simply kill-on-sight, or be killed. A lot of players have defaulted to just heading in the opposite direction of the shoreline when they spawn in; just heading north to completely avoid other players. I think this severely damages the social dynamic of this game. I understand that keeping the game's mechanics the same for both classes is an attempt to maintain the game's realism, however it doesn't work. It's a video game, and there's nothing at stake other than time. So, we need to design arbitrary rules to create a stake for both classes in order to maintain diverse and entertaining gameplay, as well as adequate game balance. My suggested balance change is to simply remove naturally spawned loot for people who choose to be bandits. So, basically if you choose to be a bandit, you lose the privilege of being able to farm the environment for loot, and if you choose to remain a survivor, you cannot kill and loot other players without penalty. This means that a survivor's relation to the environment is the density of naturally spawned loot in any given area, and the bandit's relation to the environment is population density relative to any given area. The hope is that there would be a more reasonable number of bandits on the map, and the bandits that are on the map would be more readily identifiable based on their location. In short, if you choose to murder another player, you've basically made the admission that you're capable of surviving off of loot only dropped from other players. Whereas if you choose not the kill other players, you're basically making the admission that you don't need the loot from murdering people. I feel that the game's mechanics should reflect these values and decisions. As it stands, if you walk into any moderately populated area, you're almost guaranteed to get shot regardless of how sneaky you think you're being, and I really think that my idea is a way to remedy this. The two classes need different mechanics and different incentives. Without some sort of penalty or stipulation associated with mass murder, I fear the gameplay will grow increasingly more stale as time goes on. I hope my suggestion is taken under advisement, and I hope others evaluate my suggestion and suggest changes of their own to help develop this idea. -Nick