bazbake

Balls deep or you're not in. Yeah, this game needs to lose tents right now.

You know what an Alpha where no one is allowed to complain about performance is? A demo.

Wait. You think three people covering each others' backs puts you in a worse situation than two people covering each others' backs with the same amount of weaponry? Oh, you are definitely going to survive the apocalypse....

Preemptive killing only works if you're an American president, fantafuzz.

If storage is taken away, then the bugs won't matter and everyone would experience permadeath, which is the point of this game. If storage isn't taken away, no one cares about permadeath and the bugs can't be resolved until standalone. So it's either permadeath without bugs or bugs and without permadeath. And I think that's really what this argument is about...how many gamebreaking bugs are some players willing to accept as long as they can have their own personal exploits preserved.

I was in a thread yesterday when someone made the comment, "Rocket said he wanted this game to be unfair and unforgiving." And then I realized I had heard those exact words repeated over and over again on the forums with no actual attribution to Rocket. Now, whether or not that statement happens to have been true at one point, I have to say that I find it to be an interesting game design choice. I also find that when it comes to "unfair and unforgiving," it is only one group that seems to have this problem: new players and spawns. I have to say that the game has a difficulty curve that is incredibly steep at the beginning and then not only tapers off at the end but dramatically plummets past a certain point in the game. And it is not because of scripting or dupes but a problem with the actual game design. At one point, players started off with pistols that did 2300 damage per round. It was enough to drop a zombie in one or two shots or fuck up another player in four or five. These were removed because it was an excuse to hunt players on spawn. But this scenario brings up several details of the time. Spawns started off with firepower. Spawns started off completely exposed. Spawns started off completely surrounded by zombies. Everyone knew where spawns would appear. The firepower was removed because it was believed it would disincentivize spawnkilling (not really). Players still spawned completely exposed, surrounded by zombies, where older players knew they would be. In other words, they technically made the game harder for newspawns and easier for playerkillers. I haven't seen zombies in spawn areas recently, so I now believe the current conditions for spawns are such: Unarmed. Completely exposed. Where everyone knows they will be. Either way, spawns are basically the pegs in a whack-a-mole game unless they spawn in the Wilderness. There are three threats to players in this game... Environment Zombies Other players And as I go through, I'll explain how the difficulty curve is different for new players who aren't using metagame online resources, veteran spawns and metagamers/easymoders, mid-level players who don't use metagame resources and mid-level easymoders, and high-geared players and high-geared easymoders. Environment Everybody has to keep fed and warm and there's no guarantee that food, heatpacks, or water are going to appear anywhere. With regard to equipment and player experience, this is probably the smoothest, most forgiving mechanic in the game. It's not your primary concern and it doesn't take much to keep yourself fed or hydrated. All players need to eat and drink and you can only eat or drink so much before those resources become useless. And even trees and house awnings provide some shelter from the elements. At some point you acquire matches and a hatchet and can find reliable food sources outside of town. Difficulty curve: Starts off pretty decent, smooths out for the mid-equipped player, never completely goes away. Zombies This is actually the most interesting to me because I've seen claims that zombies are too easy and claims that zombies are too hard. I would have to say that they are both at the same time depending on where you are in the game. Stealthing past zombies is pretty easy but zombies will randomly aggro you. And for early game this is kind of worthy of panic. It takes a while to figure out their pathfinding and stealth radius as well and they never seem to lose you even when you disappear from sight. So, if you're a gamer just recognizing the game system and using the tools you have at hand, it may seem that zombies have a sixth sense for hunting you down and nothing they do makes sense and fuck this game. But if you're a metagamer who has looked this up online or one of the brilliant few who has experimented with zombie line of sight, you know exactly how to lose zombies so that initial shock and panic is gone and you usually have a plan. However, as I mentioned before, you can spawn in Kamenka and not find a hatchet or crowbar until you reach Zelenogorsk. If you're a metagamer who has a map of all of the distant loot locations, then naturally zombies are less of a concern because you haven't had to struggle to find that information. Someone gave it to you. Likewise, if you're a veteran player who has scoured the map and knows exactly where to go first, you're in the same situation except you actually earned it (congratulations on playing the game!). As your firepower goes up, you have to concern yourself with aggro radius. Even then, post-nerf, many weapons require entire clips to kill zombies short of headshots. Particularly those weapons early players have access to. Difficulty curve: Early game, spawns are mostly helpless against zombies for quite some time unless they're metagamers relying on outside information and maps or unless they are fairly experienced. Even then, those who go directly to places they previously acquired weapons will have to worry about environment. Mid-game, or when a long-range weapon is acquired, zombies become easier to handle one at a time. At this point players have acquired hatchets. Zombies have spastic close-in animations that make it difficult to pull off headshots when they get in close, hindering gunplay. Experienced players will easily outmaneuver their pathfinding, though. Also, veteran players have tents which makes dying merely a nuisance. Late game, no one cares about zombies. Seriously. Other Players This is, at this point, the greatest threat. And it makes sense. Players are the smartest enemies with the best pathfinding and the widest aggro radius as well as possessing up to three times the health of zombies. They even have the best weapons. But they also carry the best loot, making the reward for killing them the best. However, here we see the most drastic difficulty curve. When a player spawns, they spawn in an easily-predictable location with no cover and no form of self-defense. They are helpless and exposed. Veterans know to serpentine or go prone immediately, but new players are at the mercy of their circumstances. Even when a player acquires a hatchet, they are only moderately capable of defending themselves. Any player they come across will take three blows from the hatchet instead of one and they will still have to get into melee range. When a player acquires a pistol, they are not in a particularly better situation. Although they now have range to combat their enemies, it takes 11 to 16 rounds to kill a player with early firearms. Metagamers and veterans have an advantage, though. They know where to quickly acquire mid-game weapons. At mid-game, once a primary firearm is required, the amount of shots to kill an enemy drops to 2 if you have a sniper or bolt-action rifle, 3 if you have a shotgun, and 6 if you have an assault rifle. At this point, you can engage and defend against the majority of mid-game opponents. And you can also start building camps. Dying while in possession of a camp allows you to recover quickly and stop loss of progress. So an early-game player loses everything but a mid-game player loses only what they were carrying on themselves when they died and perhaps 15 minutes of time they spend running from one place to the next. Veteran mid-game players consider death to be little more than a mild delay. At late game, you have established multiple camps and acquired a sniper rifle or machine gun, and things change drastically. Nightvision goggles allow you to kill other players unmolested once the sun goes down. Machine guns allow you to fire twice as many rounds per second and hold more than 3 times as much ammo per inventory slot. Sniper rifles kill instantly from up to a mile and a half away. Ghillie suits conceal your bandit status and make you nearly invisible against the terrain. At this point you may be in possession of multiple tents such that whatever you lose when dying is now a much smaller fraction of your acquired loot -- death itself becomes a mere nuisance. Veteran late-game players don't even really care that much. Early game, you are helpless and you will die and even if you see your attacker you will still die. Mid-game, you can defend yourself against other mid-game players. You are untouchable by early game players. Dying is kind of scary but you're prepared for it and can negate most of the negative effects. Veterans don't think about it much. Late-game, no one in mid or early game is a threat. Period. And if you're a veteran late-game player? You're an invisible ubermensch creeping around in the dark one-shotting players or two-shotting them with silenced weapons. And when you die, you hit one of your ten tents. And if you're a metagamer, that would actually be fifty tents across ten servers. Either way, death doesn't matter. You have officially broken the game. Transcended it. Basically? So when we talk about improving the damage that zombies do, the threat level, their pathfinding, their aggression, when we talk about how boring the game is getting or how easy it is to survive, it is important to understand that you are not the only person playing this game. It is important to understand that there are in-game maps because it is assumed the players wouldn't go onto other websites to look up where all of the loot is. When we talk about increasing the difficulty and maintaining engagement, understand that the new players are already getting their shit stomped in. They are freeclimbing Everest without a sherpa's help while others are building elevators in case they want to visit again. If we start talking about what is necessary to increase the difficulty level, the real question is, how hard and how often do we kick late-game players and veterans in the balls, not how to make newspawns bleed and cry harder than we ever had to in the first place. The game is already ridiculous difficult for them. The question is how to make it easier to kill veterans and late-game players, how to slow them down, how to take away their advantages and make them shit themselves when they encounter a stranger in the dark. Just a thought. tl;dr Game balance has been hurting newbs too much. It should be hurting veterans and late-gamers.

Of course, a desert eagle's a handgun so it would only do about 1500 damage a round... I just want to see reasonable damage tables for once. Seriously. Also, get rid of tents and storage because right now there's no such thing as permadeath.

So...instead of a server with 50 tents full of loot for newbs to trawl, we'd have a server with 300 backpacks full of loot for newbs to trawl. Can we just go ahead and get rid of permadeath and spare the server load?

Wait...people are afraid of losing their stuff when they die? Obviously we can't let that happen.

"So, uh, I've noticed that these guys who barely heal anything at all can still heal themselves. Can we please nerf them, they aren't dying easily enough. And while we're at it can we randomly have them fall dead for no reason just because I'd like that?" Tell you what. Only one blood transfusion every half hour.

I think while tents are being used as storage this would be ridiculously OP and game-breaking, but if tents are removed as a method of storage (along with all other forms of external storage), then they could still be useful as a form of dense foliage camouflage replacing their current garish olive drab camo. In this form, players would be able to pitch a pup tent and crawl within concealing themselves from other players and possibly as ambush points. There would have to be a slight change to the mechanics. While a pitched tent could still be saved to server, breaking down a tent could return the tent to your inventory similar to how picking up an unlit campfire returns the pile of wood to your inventory. In addition, tents could be used as a shelter from the elements in place of a campfire (with smaller positive effects).

So...tents make the game boring because dying is meaningless now? Got it.

Don't encourage him...

I really dig this. There is a lot of stuff in this game running on autopilot and it can be frustrating to newer players to find themselves prey to so many people who lack any actual skill. Rocket said he wanted real-world abilities to apply to the game. The more realism the better, in every mechanic. Right now it's a kleptomaniac/OCD simulator with guns.

My observations are about how the game performs when it's working correctly, not bugs. And my suggestions for changes to game mechanics are over in the suggestions thread. In the house of DayZ, vets and late-gamers are upstairs asking for fluffier mattresses and premium cable. So the devs decided to put padlocks on the doors and beartraps on the stairs. Just my general observation about the Alpha build so far.

One big issue with tents and vehicle storage being indefinite is the inevitable inflation that will occur and I think it's about time we get down to the nitty gritty. When you find an item, that item stays in the world until it is removed. If someone takes that item from you, they haven't removed that item from the world. It remains. However, if they have a tent, they can now store that item even if they have absolutely no use for it. But you now have to find a new item. You could track down his tent, maintaining the same number of items in the world. Or you could go back out and find something new. In the case of the latter, the act of taking your loot has actually created another piece of loot to fill the void. Every time you enter a loot spawn, you create new items in the world. I believe that these items will eventually disappear if left unattended, but in the meantime the only way to stop this is for you to get the loot you want. This is different than "procuring" an item. Loot that never existed magically appears when you go looking and slowly disappears or is wiped on a server restart. Of course, you don't want to have to start over from the beginning, so if you find a tent you pitch it and fill it with things you will eventually need. Not now. Not next time. But maybe the next five times you die. But here's the catch. The guy with the tent who stole your loot is doing the same thing. And unlike the loot in loot spawns and on server restarts, they never go away. You're both creating mountains of loot out of thin air. So now you're running around spawning new loot and storing it in your tent. Over and over again. And the other player is stealing other peoples' loot and storing it in a tent. Over and over again. Maybe he's even stealing from your tent, forcing you to go out and search for more loot. Meanwhile, he's just storing this loot in one of many tents around the server. You will never run out of loot. Because the loot you have is just ones and zeros. And there is no such thing as scarcity because the loot you have was created by an algorithm. And if you do hit scarcity, what do you do? Server hop, naturally. So not only are you filling your original server with loot, you're filling new servers with loot and moving valuable loot to a server that otherwise wouldn't spawn it. And since you're tired of that guy stealing your loot on the original server, you make new caches around the map jumping from server to server shoving in newly created loot as you go by like a crazed ground squirrel. Eventually, tents full of loot become very common. And I'm not talking tents full of common loot, I'm talking tents full of useful loot since that is the loot most likely to be saved. You see, in an MMO like WoW, they can dial down loot spawn percentages. They can prevent server hopping. They can restrict your number of bank slots. They can prevent you leaping to another server. They can control the conditions under which loot spawns with bosses. They can make loot "untradeable" so that once you're done with it no one else can use it. They can limit what level you get access to loot. They can even sell you loot that makes previous loot obsolete once you reach a certain level. They have an incredible number of economic checks and balances in place to prevent something like this happening and even then they often fail. Right now what we're experiencing is loot inflation. And as much as people want to blame it on dupers and scripters, I'm kind of glad they're doing this. Because this is what was going to happen eventually no matter what. They are fast-forwarding us into a situation it would have taken a population of 2,000,000 players and an extra four or five months of game time to accomplish. But here we are. This is the system of loot and economics we are destined for. This is what happens when you can farm loot on multiple servers, store as much loot as you want in as many tents as you want, and have no limit to the amount of equipment you can own at any one time. Now, I hear some possible solutions already and I haven't even finished typing. "Just take away the ability to use other peoples' tents." Well, if you do that then what you end up with is slower inflation in exchange for power-gaming. Players will just farm loot anyway and then never lose it. You'll still be able to take loot off of players' corpses and store it in your own tent. The inflation is still going to occur as players are motivated to loot harder and faster and resort to server-hopping to do so. And then their deaths will be inconsequential, as they currently are, and the loot they lose will still be on the servers and never go away. "Wait, what if we just make it impossible to loot other players?" Then...all murder just becomes killing for fun and PvP disappears. This would partly check inflation if combined with the removal of the ability to loot other peoples' tents, but then again you now have a system where survival is just living long enough to put stuff in your tent and then we have the exact same situation as the proposal above with a little less loot. "What if tents disappear on death?" This is one proposal I kind of agree with, but I'm not going to lie and say it's not easily exploitable or that it won't fail in the first couple of weeks. Put tent on a server other than the one where you risk dying. Have one player store everyone's loot and then log off/create a player just to store peoples' loot. "What if you can give certain people permission to use the tent?" See the first solution. This one should be obvious. ----------------------------------- I'm going to come out and say it. Hoarding breaks the game, not just because it gives players the ability to survive multiple deaths without slowing down but because it encourages an economy of loot inflation in which everyone has quick and easy access to everything they need within 15 minutes. And don't pretend that this isn't true. People come on the boards for advice in how to do this and get dozens of responses. When people complain about the rarity of loot, you get a half dozen people telling you that the only intelligent way to get loot in this game is to spend fifteen minutes on a high-population server hunting down loot. And they do this without any sense of irony at the revelation. Seriously, hoarders and power-gamers (I don't use this as a synonym for hardcore gamers, I use this as a synonym for munchkins who break game systems by researching code, compiling data tables on loot, and then using metagaming exploits in order to maximize their performance in the absence of perseverance and trial-and-error) are breaking your game, Rocket. The only caveat is that hackers are breaking the game even worse and as someone who plays without a parachute/training wheels (oh, I'll most definitely steal from your cache, I just won't horde the crap I steal from it and have only taken what I needed), I know exactly how shitty it is to work hard and then have a hacker ruin everything for you. I've been there. Repeatedly. But I also know exactly how this ends and it's with shitty loot calculations and an endless September of PvPers exploiting the hell out of the game. There are a lot of solutions to this dilemma, of course, but the two biggest ways this game is going to break is 1) hackers and 2) persistent storage. I can't tell you which one to address first since the latter seems to be a partial solution to the former for people who just can't handle the stress of being outright abused. But I can tell you that both need to be ditched for this game to stay on track.

Killing zombies doesn't regenerate humanity. Standing around doing nothing does...up until 2500 humanity. So...stop kiling things.

Oh, I'm sorry. My mistake, Vanguard.

Rocket said he wanted real-world skills the players have to reward you in the game. Awareness of gun performance should be at the top of that list. Which...means they really need a working damage table based off of real-world trauma studies and run as fast as they can from Arma II's nonsense as soon as they can separate the damage tables from the Arma code. http://ammo.ar15.com/project/Fackler_Articles/effects_of_small_arms.pdf http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/wrong.pdf http://www.firearmstactical.com/pdf/fbi-hwfe.pdf http://www.rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/myths.html#wli

This is how this thing usually goes. And...scene. This is why we can't have nice people, places, or things.

Hey, in America most of our listed terrorists and terrorist groups are white Americans who go after minorities according to the FBI watchlist. We usually just label brown people "terrorists" because it's easier to get funding for military ventures. EDIT: Max Planck, you're good people. Keep your head up.

Why should killing bandits increase humanity? I mean, I understand how it could work, but killing bandits already doesn't cost humanity. Why encourage murder among heroes? Heroes got that way by helping people.

My thoughts: All non-lethals cause pain and shock. Chance of KO that goes up with the rarity of non-lethals and inverse to the range. (A stun-gun has a high-level KO, a taser a moderate KO). Some can blind opponents too (teargas canisters). Rubber bullets cause fractures as well. All non-lethal weapons KO on headshots.

BUHT MAH PRESHUS LEWT1!!1!!1!!!!!! Look, even if the tent bug gets fixed we'll still end up with more high-level items floating around the server than we know what to do with them as people start storing them in tents that never go away. This is obvious if you have even the slightest foresight. And all of the solutions I've heard that haven't been the removal of tents have been attempts to keep high-level loot out of the hands of new players and to keep letting older players keep their stuff forever and ever because they "deserve" it or something. The tents and vehicle storage have to go once and for all. If you really want to stash something, dump it in a pile, hope no one sees it, pray there's not a server restart before you can pick it back up.

Play however you want. No one will stop you. We just now know the type of player you are and can respond accordingly. Your right to do what you want is not free from other players' rights to choose not to interact with you.