bazbake

Too much metagaming. The online manuals are bad enough.

In real life, if you died, you wouldn't respawn on the shore and run back to your tent to get the extra guns you left there. Just sayin'...

In an apocalypse, the nice people die first. Or punish douchebags and repair civilization. One or the other.

Technically, when you log in you are vulnerable for about half a minute and people can walk by and kill you "in your sleep."

You're talking to someone who considers tents and vehicle storage carrying over after death to be cheating. Believe me, you're way below my harsh meter.

Players already sleep. It's called logging off.

Naw. Yeah.

So, some ideas I've seen so far. I'd like to see blood regen over time. A full hunger meter makes it refill faster, less sated means slower health regen. An empty meter means you lose blood. For water, maybe it has no effect except causing you to lose blood if it's empty but it drains faster than food. Only blood packs should restore blood immediately. But to use them you have to trade blood. So using a blood pack on your teammate restores 1000 blood but costs you 800 blood for the privilege. Or something similar. This is from necro's thread, but instead of your typical weapons = damage system, maybe weapons = bleeding effects + status effect based on location. So a wound does less damage than it does now but leaves a bleeding damage level equivalent to the damage it does. Each wound adds to the amount of the tick on the bleeding effect until you find yourself bleeding out in seconds. Also, different locations have a multiplier for the bleeding effect so a shot to the head is a lot of blood loss + a chance of unconsciousness + a tiny chance of instant kill. A shot to the torso is less blood loss + shock + a small chance of infection. And so on. Flatter damage tables, shuffled to reflect soft tissue damage instead of damage to ballistic vests. Encumbrance-based inventory. The ability to lower your pistol just like your rifle. Also, different animations for sprinting with your rifle and pistol raised/lowered so people can tell if you're in a shooting mood. The ability to hold your rifle sideways while crawling so you don't look like you're ready to kill people just because you're prone. Ability to respawn as a zombie (also from another thread). More status effects. For instance, if you catch an infection then there's a chance of getting a fever (a red outline around the thermometer). It gradually raises your temperature until you get hyperthermic, the result of which is rapid thirst. Non-lethal weapons like beanbag rounds for the shotgun or tasers with a high level of paralysis/shock/unconsciousness. Crossbows with sights and stackable ammo. Also, bows and arrows. Animal AI. Feral dogs. Military/police dogs you can befriend. Greater randomization on spawns. Lower the amount of military loot but allow it to spawn everywhere.

You only get beans because you convinced me to click to "boom your dead."

Why can't the player zombie move at full speed? Zombies can charge from 200m away as long as they can see/hear you first, so why put artificial limits on them? The moan ability is really cool, though. I dig that. I could see the player zombie as a sort of suicidal zombie commander with the ability to spot players from far away, attack, and create bottlenecks to screw with survivors. No ability to collect loot, hunger drains faster, and feeding on human and animal corpses to keep hunger up. Maybe no thirst or temperature or humanity meter. Just a big raging ball of hunger looking for survivors to attack.

The silencers are already ridiculous as it is. I just watched a guy spend 15 minutes (edited video) hunting down and killing two players at 5 meters while wearing a ghillie suit without either one of them even knowing a gun had been fired.

Record keeping of your own personal stats on a screen? That could be cool. But we don't all play on the same servers with the same people, so a leaderboard is kind of meh. Someone playing on a low-pop server will just plain survive longer.

Or we could get rid of tents and storage and return permadeath to the game so hoarders and server hoppers don't coast through the endgame on cruise control. Just a thought.

... There's easy mode...and then there's easy mode. And between the two is a very fine line.

Correction: "Taking out a whole pair while dressed in a ghillie suit with a magically silenced sniper rifle from five feet away."

What do you think this is, Dead Rising 2?

Because you have yet to counter that argument. I'm not saying murders need to be decreased, I'm just saying survivors who don't want to kill people in cold blood need to be able to respond to those who do. Right now, with the ability to change your character's name and face at will, it is impossible to keep track of bandits and punish them in-game. But...that's really what this is about, isn't it. Your fear of retribution for banditry and this desperate need to remain anonymous to the point of breaking the game. Right, because the person getting credit for those murders is.... Yeah, see, you only get a murder if you commit an actual murder and kill someone. A huge list of suddenly dead people caused by changing the status in the script code to nuke all the players won't count as a murder. Murders committed by people are increasing faster than the bandit population. You're very confused by the math. Percentage of living bandits goes up 2%. Percentage of people who are now listed as bandits goes up 36%. Percentage of players overall goes up 31.8%. This just means that people are becoming bandits before they are learning to survive as non-bandits. And the number of bandits is increasing faster than the population of players. What does that mean? It means people are joining the game and almost immediately turning to banditry. And it also means those people who are already bandits are committing an increasing number of murders because there is no way in the game to punish them. They can change their face in the options menu. They can change their name in the options menu. So even if I SEE SOMEONE COMMIT A MURDER, they can disconnect, change their name, change their face, and suddenly they have a BRAND NEW IDENTITY. The numbers are obvious. This game is drifting into a murder simulator because players have total control over their anonymity. Anyway, the bottom line is that bandit tags/IDs/skins will give people who don't want to commit murder the option to PvP with all of the cold-blooded killers. The only way it'll discourage PvP is if the bandits suddenly become afraid of getting into fights. Are bandits afraid of fights? Do they really rack up all of their murders by saying "Friendly" and then shooting people in the face when they walk up? If so, then I find this whole panic to be pretty amusing.

In real life, Bandits would either have to wear masks (self-imposed bandit skins) or people would recognize their faces and tell other people about them. Maybe post up wanted posters. The game gives players COMPLETE anonymity which allows bandits to do whatever they want without other players being able to respond, keep track of it, or even recognize them. Remember, bandits can change their default faces and names in the options menu. There is absolutely no in-game way to keep track of the activities of the players in any way, shape, or form no matter how much you try.

I'd go so far as to say that anyone should be able to spawn as a zombie upon character creation. A zombie's life expectancy is incredibly limited already, of course. Maybe their hunger drains a lot faster and they have to feed on corpses or die (allow them to catch and eat wild animals too). It's not like they'd have superpowers. They'd actually be at a disadvantage except that other zombies don't attack them. But they can't use guns, so what's the big deal? This is a cool idea.

I get that folks enjoy building basecamps and it gives a sense of community (look at all our loot!), but death is a joke. Put down tent. Hoard equipment. Load up tent. Do whatever. Die. Return to tent for another gun and some ammo. Repeat. Occasionally someone finds a tent and then brags about it on the DayZ forums. But hiding a tent is easy. There's no risk. Permadeath only matters if you actually lose progress. Technically, the more you have the more you should be risking in this game. But tents and vehicle storage make it so that you only lose whatever you feel like carrying in your pockets before you did whatever got you killed. As one player on these boards put it to another, "I don't know why it takes you an hour to gear up after dying. It takes me 15 minutes to run back to my camp and get everything I need." Hey, he said it, not me. A significant portion of the playerbase is not experiencing anything close to risk. They've learned to completely mitigate it by punching against the boundaries of metagaming. Want to get the tension and the danger back in the game? Remove the tents and vehicle storage completely. Tie what a character owns to the size of the backpack they wear. Alternative options: None. What kind of a post do you think this is?

Tents are a combination training wheels and parachute.

My opinion? Turns this game from a zombie apocalypse survival sim into an RPG. I get that the first instinct is to replace skill with stats and give yourself constant progress to make sure that you're not wasting your time by playing when you could just lose it all with stray gunshot, but this idea of inevitable progress is what, in my opinion, will hamper the dynamic of the game and the freedom for new players to step right in. Tents have already provided a combination training wheels and parachute. Basically, I'm anti character progress in any way except for a humanity meter and maybe a beard to reflect the days it's taken you to survive this long.

And officially the concept of permadeath goes out the window in favor of metagaming.

Tents are really easy to hide....

In real life, killers size you up before taking you out. But eyes don't animate. In real life, killers don't see you as a human being and this translates into the way they interact with you. But there's no such thing as body language in this game. In real life, being able to bluff and lie in order to cover up your actual thoughts is a tactic that requires years of training and practice. But your face is painted on. In real life, you'd be able to identify someone by their face through a scope from a kilometer away and remember what they look like and tell everyone you come across what they look alike and make posters describing them and be able to post them wherever you go and then hunt them down and kill them when you see them. But there are only about 40 faces in this game to choose from. In real life, it would take three or four rounds from a sniper rifle to make sure someone is dead. But it only takes one. In real life, bandits would disguise themselves so they don't get caught, practice how to be convincing, and get in close to kill someone to make sure they're actually dead. But in this game they don't have to. So we need something to compensate for their ability to exploit the weaknesses in the system.