ezdaroth

Rocket said fixing direct and removing global is a high priority. It's obviously something that needs to be done for way better immersion. I think splitting direct to two channels, would be great. Speaking, which has very limited radius, but generates very little noise the zombies can hear. Shouting, which generates a lot of noise but can be heard from far away. Ideally there would also be some range-based echo filter on the sound, so you could tell if someone is yelling from far away or speaking right next to you. Lootable radio equipment would also be a great addition. While it would add depth and realism, the sad side effect is that it would only encourage people to use Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Mumble to get an advantage. I hope the community starts viewing third party voice communication software as cheating after global is gone. If global becomes a server-side setting, I at least hope the servers which remove it also quit advertising VOIP software channels.

I think the whole bandit system is absolutely terrible, like the global chat, it takes away a lot of the authenticity. You shouldn't be able to tell if a player has good or bad intentions just by looking at him. The game is all about decisions, risk and reward. If you see a bandit, it's very simple. You either kill him, or avoid him. The game tells you "this guy has killed other players, best to not trust him". You haven't seen him kill anyone, anyone hasn't told you he killed someone. Playing a friendly survivor in a group already increases your chance of survival a lot. The bandit skin only artificially reduces the changes of survival for a different play style. It isn't based on reality and is against the "anti-game" philosophy. The game should have psychological side to it, the player should be able to lie and trick the other players for his own advantage. Even if you find a player looting a corpse, he should be able to tell you how the other guy attacked him and it was only self defense. It should be up to you to decide if you trust him, not a game mechanic which tells you what happened. (Cross-posted from another thread, seemed more fitting here)

I think the whole bandit system is absolutely terrible, like the global chat, it takes away a lot of the authenticity. You shouldn't be able to tell if a player has good or bad intentions just by looking at him. The game is all about decisions, risk and reward. If you see a bandit, it's very simple. You either kill him, or avoid him. The game tells you "this guy has killed other players, best to not trust him". You haven't seen him kill anyone, anyone hasn't told you he killed someone. Playing a friendly survivor in a group already increases your chance of survival a lot. The bandit skin only artificially reduces the changes of survival for a different play style. It isn't based on reality and is against the "anti-game" philosophy. The game should have psychological side to it, the player should be able to lie and trick the other players for his own advantage. Even if you find a player looting a corpse, he should be able to tell you how the other guy attacked him and it was only self defense. It should be up to you to decide if you trust him, not a game mechanic which tells you what happened. The fact even death doesn't reset your skin only makes it only worse.

Make players spawn to closest spawn point from their friend. This means buddies can spawn on the beach and start playing together, but if one of them dies there's no way to instantly spawn back to the other player. In this case the surviving player needs to either head for the beach to find his friend, or kill himself and spawn there as well. It doesn't open too much room for abuse, but makes at least starting with your friends much less frustrating and makes finding friends even a little bit easier after death, since they won't spawn on the opposite side of the map.

I think this is a great suggestion, it's pretty obvious solution used in many MMO games. If player disconnects from the game, the server should leave the character stationary for 1 minute, able to be killed. The player is able to initiate a ~15 second logout process, during which he can't do anything and any damage received will cancel it. If this is completed, the server won't keep the character for the minute. Any animation for this is secondary and should be low priority. I don't think it would need to account of accidental disconnects. 90% of the time you aren't in a situation where you would die in 1 minute while remaining stationary. Trying to prevent deaths caused by losing connection would allow exploitation and you can't prevent deaths by other real-life disturbances either. I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement, because the servers would need to know if the player's character is active somewhere else and not let the player join in during the character's one minute disconnect delay. If there's some sort of master server that keeps track of the characters, it shouldn't be too hard.

Just tweak it so the weather is clear most of the time, but heavy fog and rain happen occasionally. Rocket said he wants weather to play a bigger role in the game, so I'm sure he will look into the weather script when more critical issues are fixed.

While Day Z is probably the most immersive zombie game I've ever played, there's one thing which takes away from the experience. The chat. It's hard to feel lost and alone when you can instantly communicate with everyone. It also often results in random discussion, whining about deaths and so on. I'm not saying the chat should be removed, but I think it should be a server-side setting, so some servers could go for more authentic experience. What I'm suggesting is two different location-based VOIP types. Talking and shouting. Both have limited range, but shouting travels far, zombies can hear it and it would include some range-based echo filter when you hear it, so you can tell the guy isn't right next to you. Another great feature would be to introduce some sort of radio and/or walkie-talkies as loot, which would allow long range communication. This would add a lot of depth to the game and make communication more realistic. Shouting would always be risky, but sometimes you have to call for help, shout if the guy in the barn is friendly etc. Now using Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Mumble would give an advantage in setting like this, but most of the people, including me, don't use them and I personally wouldn't mind it. I also believe many members of the community would see VOIP software as cheating on such servers and wouldn't use them. I don't know if the engine is capable of this, but I just wanted to throw the thought out here. Do you think relying on location-based VOIP would make Day Z a more authentic experience, or would it be just annoying?

Does anyone have a clue if ARMA already supports limited VOIP range, or if it can even be implemented in a mod?

This. Nothing breaks immersion like clearing a house and seeing more zombies spawn in it when you walk out of the door. Players have to keep moving and want to explore anyway, so the will encounter the zombies even if the zombies can't spawn in a large radius around them. I don't want towns to become total safe heavens when they are cleared, but zombies should wander into town rather than spawn in there when it's populated by players. It would require the players to keep lookout, but not constantly worry about someone spawning behind their back.