c4tch22

No, more like if you don't have the 'medicine perk' (or whatever) you simply don't get the context menu option / mousewheel option to use it - at all. Several people seem to understand my reasoning as something along the lines of making death penalty harsher. That's not the point. It's (for me) not about respawn being even more of a pain in the ass, but having reasons not to want to die while you're still alive. The only reason right now is gear.

Well, tbh I think that would just add another layer to the item late game. What's the difference between a perk and an AKM rifle when they're both just items I have to take out of my tent after respawning? Learning them through items defeats the whole purpose of why there should be a perk/skill system in the first place.

Take the day off, go have a beer or two and read it tommorow B)

I too said that XP are bad....read it please ;)

Well, gamechanger as in 'becoming invincible/invulnerable' yes, definately not that! But whatever they do, it'll have to be awesome enough to be worth the trouble. I share your general stance on achievements, but here they would have an actual meaning instead of just being an epeen-o-meter. Go ahead and don't call them achievements, don't give them silly names and achievement points. I just brought the comparison up, so people know along what lines I imagine the tasks required for unlocking. In essence, just a list with elaborate objectives to clear for a skill reward. I agree with you, I prefer passives too (for DayZ) and wouldn't like to see active skills. One approach could be to take away what we now have (that everyone is able to use every item ingame) and make us learn to use some of them properly via perks. For instance, make perks required for using saline bags / Defibrillators or what not.

Hi everyone, this is really going to be a pretty long post, and if you decide to read it, please read the whole thing before commenting. Thanks! What this thread is about I’ve thought of a concept to create gear independent character value. I’d like to elaborate on this concept and on the reasons behind why I think it would fit the environment of dayZ. What this thread is NOT about Specifics of possible skills, numbers, details. If I somewhere write that something could i.e. be unlocked after being alive 3 ingame hours, don’t bash me because I wrote “3”. I don’t care about the numbers, I care about the idea and every detail like that is made up off the top of my head for the sake of a complete example. So..here we go: What is gear independent character value and why do I think it is important? DayZ is a survival game right? In its core the goal of the game is - or should be - to survive, at all costs. The decisions that we make to reach this goal are what make this game so exciting. But right now there is only one thing important to us that we fear losing - gear. If you rob me in between Stary Sobor and the NWAF and leave me with nothing but my life - right now - I’d be far better of if you kill me in the process than leaving me there, probably wounded, hungry, thirsty and unarmed. As a consequence every person being robbed will always take the most laughable, most tiny chance to make an escape or kill you (the robber) instead of accepting their fate since there is (except gear) literally nothing to lose. If we were to value the life of our character itself and fear to lose that, there would be so much more room for awesome situations in this game than we already have right now. Now, I know I’m not the first person coming up with this. Many people have stated that there needs to be something like this, including Dean himself on reddit, though he’s been pretty vage. I’m aware that we’re simply not yet at the point in development where such features are added, but since I’ve never read about anyone from the dev team mentioning something along these lines in any devblog or roadmap post, or giving any details as to in which direction they want to head with this I thought I’d just give it a go. The obvious solution. You don’t have to be a genius to come to the conclusion that there is really only one thing you can do to make a character valuable if not through equipment: The implementation of some sort of skills and/or attributes that can be learned and/or improved over time. But - imho - that splits into two main problems: 1) What are skills that would fit into dayZ, how would they look, what would they let you do, etc. 2) How do we aquire these skills, how do we improve, what do we lose upon death. As mentioned above this thread is about explaining a concept so I’ll be focussing on problem 2. I don’t really care how exactly skills or perks or however you want to call them will look. We could all probably come up with a ton of awesome ideas, that’s not the point of this thread though. A look at well-established character progression models in games So, while thinking about what would fit dayZ I thought about a lot of existing systems and how they would work in dayZ. Let me share my thoughts about some of them: The classic RPG model How it works: Choose some kind of class -> do stuff to gain XP -> gain XP to gain levels -> gain levels to unlock new skills. In DayZ: The main problem I see here is: Do what to gain XP? Kill? Kill zombies? Use items? Heal players? Whatever will give you most XP, people will figure it out and abuse it. This would heavily impact how people play the game and change it into a necessary grind to gain xp instead of adding to the depth. I don’t like it. The ‘learn through consumables/findables’ model How it works: You find something (like a gun magazine in Fallout) and it improves or teaches you a perk. In DayZ: It might work quite okay, though it would be heavily luck based what you find. You might find that one perk 5 times, and never another one. And again it would be abused. We all know that people find out ways to flip loot, find best spawns etc. People would probably camp spots where the “first aid manual” spawns and just be back to their old power in a relatively short time after their death, or have tents/stashes full of those manuals so they can reskill back up instantly after a death. The FPS loadout model How it works: In games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, out of a big reportoire of options you define the specific skillset you want to play with for this round and spawn in with it, unable to change it until you die. In DayZ: I kind of like the variability of this, but a loadout is nothing more than a configuration of weapons most of the time and we want gear independence. So what’s left is that one to three perk slots those games normally give us. I like that, but it wouldn’t be char progression if we would just spawn with them. Conclusion Considering the above our character progression model should: Not force the player to play in a specific way Avoid exploitability or incentivizing looking for exploits Grant customizability as well as progression Require time to rebuild up, avoiding ways to play the system My proposition So finally, after all the jibber-jabber here’s finally my proposition for the progression system: Every character gets a set number of ‘perk slots’ on spawn, for the sake of the example let’s stick through this with three. All three of these slots will initially be locked. They will unlock over ingame time alive, one after another. Not all perks will be equal in quality, they would be tiered, starting with giving you your ‘Tier 1 Perk Slot’ after a rather short period of time, following with Tier 2 after maybe something several hours of alive time and ending with Tier 3 with a really really long time. Something people would rarely achieve. The perk quality should reflect the rarity of the slots. So Tier 1 perks would pe rather baseline, Tier 2 would be really cool, and Tier 3 “like totally imba, dude!!! Sooo OP!!!111” The pool of perks you could choose from wouldn’t be unlocked and the same for everyone, but rather accountbound. There would be a list, some kind of achievement archive, where you could look up what you would have to do to learn, i.e. “Basic First Aid”. You would then do that ingame and unlock “Basic First Aid” as a perk that you can choose ingame once you unlock your Tier 1 Perk slot. What are the advantages of this system? Everyone can continue to play how they like it most, it doesn’t dictate playstyle. It creates some kind of meta progression, giving you character independent long term goals (unlocking the perks through achievements) without giving you an unfair advantage over “newbies”. It also gives you goals in situations where you don’t really know what there’s left to do ingame, and we know these situations exist. The character grows stronger purely through the time he has survived. That’s not abusable and it emphasizes the core goal of the game. It allows you to specialize for a specific role in your group of people you play with, you can be good at stuff, and suck at other stuff. Decisions, trade offs, good stuff! It’s compatible with whatever kind of skills or perks the dev team comes up with. Passives, actives, buffs, whatever, everything could be added to the pool of perks. The way to aquire a perk wouldn’t be always the same, the requirements to fulfill such an achievement could be whatever they think of. “Have you already unlocked that really really hardcore imba Tier 3 perk where you have to kill a player with every gun ingame in one life? How are you supposed to pull THAT off ???” ...that kinda stuff. Variety is the key! So thats that, I hope you like it, add to the discussion, tell me what you think. I apologize for any form of typos or bullshit english, I’m not a native speaker so please be kind. Take it as what it is - the thoughts of a fan that needed to be written down ;) tl;dr: don’t even bother :D

Totally!!! Here's my list of things that I think players should have to manually manage because the game doing it for us is just laziness: BreathingNot shitting and pissing ourselvesBlinking to keep our eyes from drying outSomeone mentioned QWOP movement. Excelent idea!Opening containers like canteens with a counterclockwise rotational moue movement. Closing containers like canteens with a clockwise rotational mouse movementSwallowing when eating and drinking. Just putting stuff in your mouth is damn lazy! ...now everyone please bash me since im super serious about this! :rolleyes:

Yeah...it would change the night time play to the point where noone plays on nighttime servers :rolleyes: Seriously though, Rocket already mentioned that the reason this game is so dark is actually that ArmA 2 was never designed to be played without NVGs at night. So...another "please make this game more softcore" request that I just can't agree with.

Stuff like this is just too exploitable. I see right now, how every squad would just hoard their stuff in their bases to do "unarmed nwaf runs".

I heard about a new kind of "soldier suit" on reddit. Is it an item of its own or is it just a variant of the camo clothing? Does anyone know? Edit: Nevermind it's a unique item, just found the answer in the reddit comments. For those interested: http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/xdgbs/found_a_soldier_suit/

This exactly. We don't need to alter anything ingame right now to fight pvp, we just need more endgame / meta content. People kill eachother because there's nothing else to do. Give us endgame content, or content that can't be soloed for that matter, and things will even out pretty quickly.

lol, get a grip ;) But seriously, if vehicles were always respawned they would be a lot less attractive. Who would even farm those spots for more than a minute when all they're worth for you is to bring you from one place to another once ?? Really, I think that's a terrible idea, I hope they never do that. But they could potentially do something like limit every player to saving only one car, you know? I really think these kind of changes would be long term stuff though. That would really need a lot of work and I don't see Rocket (& team) wasting time on these little details right now.

I think the problem that many people have with this, is that everyone who is actively farming for a vehicle is running along the known spawn points. And everyone knows them, because of all the maps about dayZ spawn locations out there. So essentially those hoarding players are changing the "vehicle farming experience" for others from farming known, relatively safe locations to farming unknown, relatively dangerous areas. As to wether that's good or bad, I don't know. There are obviously pros and cons. Maybe it's initially harder to get around to finding a vehicle. But once you do, chances are actually pretty good that there's some really good gear in the trunk.

Wow this thread is moving fast....there were like 10 answers while I wrote mine :D ....so @OP: Some source on those extreme emotions?

Well if they're no true emotions, then the satisfaction of success in this game isn't real either right? Like, surviving zombie and player attacks, gathering better equipment, essentially just beating the game. It's all just happening in the game, so it's not real and we should just all stop playing right away... Just because the source of these emotions is emulated doesn't mean that they can't be real in their effect. People go to the theatre or cinema and they cry over dramatic moments...those are real feelings.