SmokeytheBear

I don't see a problem with a loneliness mechanic in this game, because I like rpg-type games and I generally want to coop in something like this. That doesn't mean it's best for the game though, and I think there are a great deal more options that would be better choices. A psych profile would make a great addition for roleplayers but it would need to be toggle-able per server or something of the like, and I would be very surprised and possibly even disappointed if it became the "normal" way the game was played. Yes people are vastly different in tons of different ways, but not nearly so much as psychologically. Every character being the same height/weight doesn't make any sense, but the majority of adult humans do average out to pretty standard proportions all things considered (I still think being able to customize your skin/model would be superawesome). Sprint speed is the same way. Almost everyone exhibits a fairly typical gait when "running" and everyone except the elite and the sedentary again fit into relatively normal distributions. Temperature is not something that people do differently unless it's a function of weight/composition. Those guys that do polar plunges are risking their systems just as much as I would if I were to jump in, they're just reacting different psychologically. You can't mentally control hypothermia unless you're again one of those people that sits as a distant outlier to the population. Loneliness doesn't really have the same scale. We have meters, kilograms, meters/second, and degrees for all the others but we can't quantify loneliness. That and I just tend to think that apart from roleplaying, psychology is sort of what you're supposed to bring yourself. A game that tracks your character's emotions and decides for you how you should be feeling would probably come across as obnoxiously as making you walk in different directions. "You are scared, you cannot open ominous doors when you're scared." Hyperbole of course, but to illustrate my point... It's a fine line for sure. I love the idea of pounding heartbeats, hyperventilating, and maybe even slightly different vision as a result of panic or alarm from nearby gunshots or very close zombie growls. I guess in the long run my stance would be on the fence. I really don't know, but thankfully, it's alpha right? Who knows, might be the way of the future for games.

The general subject of this 19-page thread has revolved around the way that the current state of the game, namely kill-on-sight mentalities and murder for murder's sake, prevents people from playing in any other way. This is implying that even though they don't say "Hay gaiz play liek all of us!" they're still forcing a playstyle by their actions. By what you have already said it's a difficult decision, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you read at least one other post in the thread beyond the OP's. In doing so you should have seen at least one statement alleging this connection. If you just disagree with all of those things that have been said, please by all means post a counter-argument. I would love to read it. If however, you really did read any of the arguments that have been made about how rampant murder is not conducive to cooperative dynamics and generally overpowering any attempts to play in a different fashion, and furthermore you understand these arguments without any logic to refute them, then you're basically saying: 1) I know what I'm doing is restrictive to other people's freedom (and more importantly, not a retaliation but an instigation) 2) You can't stop me because that would be restrictive to my freedom. ...I thought you said you understood the slavery analogy? While I may still disagree in some respects, I think I understand now what you mean.

This is like defending slavery by saying that to deprive slavers of their chosen profession is as freedom-restricting and debasing as slavery itself. Aggressors don't get the same rights.

As much as I want to bypass this to keep the thread more focused, it's just too interesting and I can't. /sigh How did we devise such "education" if we didn't have that instinct inside us somewhere from the beginning as well? Would we not need to have at least traces of "higher thought" to have conceived of such a thing? The crazy person doesn't think he crazy because everything makes sense to him and he can't fathom a world where it doesn't. Similarly if we were just base monsters than how could we ascend to anything more? And oddly enough in this game, the true monsters and trolls that everyone complains about are the ones that actually do have luxuries and revert back to an animal state from boredom, whereas the scared nubs are trying to group up and seek shelter in numbers. the normal attitude for new players is not to grief, rape, and steal. Instead the "educated" group is doing this. If anything this is practically backwards from what you have proposed. Do people really not read the threads at all? Virtually no conversation has been centered around blaming bugs compared to debates on whether it would "really happen" or not, and gameification. You're embarrassing yourself. No it really isn't the same. People deal with loneliness in wildly different ways and with huge differences in resilience. People all deal with dehydration the same way and it doesn't matter how you're made. You lose too much water and you die. Period. Saying that your vision should blur, you should run slow, hands shake, etc. from loneliness at a certain point being isolated is pushing it I think. However, a psych profile for roleplaying ideas was proposed earlier and I really like that idea because you could have variations in these things. You could be Jeremiah Johnson and live for years without a problem in the wilderness, or the local sorority girl who goes nuts when she can't check her facebook every 3 minutes to hear what her friends are saying. Obvious exaggerations, so sandbox-purists please at least give it a thought. With a good system loneliness, aversion to killing, tendency to panic, or the exact opposites in any of those would not only change some of the problems we have, but also add some depth to the group dynamics and novelty contributions to replay value so people don't get as bored. Done poorly though, I can see why some would be worried.

Having complied with this fact probably could have reduced the thread to 5 pages. I think stuff is getting lost in semantics. He's for adding things to the game like more items, more activities, more actual, real human examples of why two is better than one in the game, he just doesn't want things like a local bandit detector that sends off a siren on your computer whenever a murderer approaches, turning into a pink dildo when you kill somebody, or having a message come up and say "oh no! You're lonely and going insane!" and knock you unconscious. I'm not particularly opposed to some of the "gamey" mechanics like safe zones, but if people have a problem with it then I see no downside to trying things like adding more activities and intrinsic group motivation first. If they don't solve the problem, then move on to gameification.

I may be taking this way out of context, but there's an old parable about this. A ship goes down and 3 guys survive the initial sinking and manage to get a life raft off the side. The problem is, there's only room for at the very most 2 people. The first kind of person jumps in right away and says he'll kill anybody who says he can't be one of the survivors. The second guy pushes off the side of the raft and says "That's ok, I'll be the one who makes the sacrifice." Before he can say this and drown himself though, the third man sees him grasp onto the side of the raft and thinking he's going to say what the first guy did, he grabs a sharp piece of debris from the wreckage of the ship and pops the raft. "If I can't survive. Then no one will." All 3 men die. Regarding your "zero sum" statement, by your description even an item respawning in .0001 seconds would still be considered temporally finite, so where do you draw the line? Or is literally everything zero sum in a video game? Just curious. In regards to small groups are how primal societies formed and operated, I think you're pretty wrong. Starting from the dawn of time: Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Hebrews, Phoenicians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Japanese, British, French, American... Most of those are more than 10 people I think. No matter what technological age you're in, massive amounts of (able-bodied) people working together will always bring greater benefits to the society (within huge limits at least) because they can do things that aren't possible in this game. Farming, construction, infrastructure, production, invention, whatever. The only thing you can do in this game is forage and defend. The first one is counterproductive with even adding a partner and the second gets cumbersome with like you said, about 10 people. That's why we're asking for things like this. We want to be able to do something, anything really, besides forage and shoot everything that moves. This isn't the same problem as having no interface (friends list, in-game whispers, even a functional direct chat, etc.) to interact with other people, but it does explain why many have turned to being a griefer, and consequently why the people they've killed have turned into paranoid KoSers that ruins any semblance of a group aspect in a survival game. If we're just animals when we don't have excess and luxury, how did we ever get to that point of excess and luxury? I hear that phrase a lot and I've never understood how people can say that man is a senseless beast when we've accomplished so much from the day the first two humans spoke. Did you say it was two fathers that got into a fight? Did they do it because they're amoral beasts? Or were they actually the opposite, doing what they could to selflessly look out for the welfare of their family in an uncertain situation with a violent stranger? ...I bet Rocket jacks off while reading everybody debating the nature of human existence on a forum for a video game.

For anybody who has not seen this thread: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20112-the-only-realistic-way-to-prevent-deathmatching-make-dayz-a-living-hell/ The first post has a compiled and easy to read list of a plethora of suggestions to make cooperation a more appealing choice. They all modify the mechanics and setting of the game so no overhaul to international education of morality is even necessary!

I really am not trying to pick a fight with you, but we keep restating the same points because they're being drowned in piles of qq moars and gtfos from haters, and ultimately go ignored or undiscussed. When a lot of people come in and just skim these things, it's necessary to repeat it often to get points through and maintain the discussion. I'm trying to help. Honestly. I and many others have made points that don't get +1'd or -1'd, yet reinforcement that changes just aren't possible is rampant. "Encouraging cooperation" won't have any effect on trolls of course not. I agree. It will however have a massive effect on people like myself and a good portion of responders in this thread to keep them interested or alleviate concerns. Personally I haven't signed on to the game in days. Waiting for a while for some changes to take place or I simply won't play any more. In fact, I will defend your point even further than you did, and say that virtually nothing will stop the trolls. They're always going to be there regardless how much cooperation encouragement might try to sway them to a different playstyle, and regardless of how much their preferred playstyle is "punished." The fear of driving away trolls, as laughable as that sounds just in principle, is misplaced. I don't necessarily want them to go away at all and it would be great if they continued to enjoy the game as much as they do now. I just don't want them to be able to stomp on any other playstyle, namely mine, because of the way that game mechanics (not human morality/character/and whatever else people have been arguing for) have so heavily facilitated their style.

Fair enough. And it definitely doesn't help to go personal in any case so I apologize. While in theory and principle I agree with you about not wanting to punish another play style, I see it inevitable to draw the line at a certain point. The nature of the game cannot accommodate superpowered, and highly incentivized random killing if it also wants to accommodate people that want coop to be an option. I will stand by and defend banditry as strongly as I defend cooperation, but I don't think that random murder is banditry at all. Deathmatch, shoot everybody, and leave-the higher-thinking-at-home games are everywhere, and none offer anywhere near the options that this game could. Part of it is just the setting but another large part is that the mechanics are simply set up to facilitate a style of play that's conflicting with the other styles that DayZ presents. It's already been driven into the ground for 15 pages so I won't list 'em all, but frequency of high-grade weapons and ammo, low penalties for death for established players yadda yadda are the things I'm talking about that simply provide too strong an advantage (given the near absence of any comparative, cooperative mechanics) for people that just want to run around and blast everybody. I agree people that wander around carelessly, get killed, and rage shouldn't be the only people who dictate the game's development, but I also disagree with a "legitimate right" for what I called herp a derps to continue playing. It's not really about rights at all, it's about what best for the game and the community, and these kind of people, the methods they employ, and the people they're turning away, all don't speak well for what this game was marketed as and what Rocket has declared is his 'vision.' That said, if it's really irreconcilable and no nerfs can be made without compromising the game, then let's just put in some buffs for the survivor crowd and see how it goes no? I'm not demanding one way or the other, just would really really prefer something to be done or I'm afraid I will lose interest and leave dissatisfied.

Haha that's pretty g... wait, are you actually serious? Unless you're being sarcastic or something I don't understand how that statement even applies at all. You said in regards to making some sort of added penalty for death that you have yet to hear one concrete suggestion beyond this that doesn't effectively ruin a particular facet of the game. If you're attacking me for not reading your post about advocating group mechanics (advocating one concrete suggestion beyond this that doesn't effectively ruin a particular facet of the game), and then of course attacking me for remembering that it was you that said it in 15 pages of content, maybe you should remember that you said it yourself and not make stupid comments saying there's no suggestions other than harsher death penalties. Wtf man? Regardless, I made a few points and suggestions and you ignored them completely didn't even bother to read all of it. Yeah I know they've already been mentioned. That was exactly the point. Plenty of things have already mentioned that have not received a single response. If you actually think these would break the game, why not explain why so you can actually contribute something to the thread other than you're indignant jackassery. I think it's full to the brim with that as it is. Just for full effect, I'd like to add two things you said in a single post: "I stopped reading your entire post after the first line[...] Before you interject into a conversation, please, do the rest of us a courtesy and at least read the thread." Way to go dumbass.

How does in-game support for groups/parties and channels "ruin" a particular facet of the game? Sure it might not be as realistic as we'd all like but it already happens anyway and has been sanctioned by the developer as ok. Putting it in-game would just make it easier to actually meet people within the game and more easily designate that they aren't hostile without the need to actually know the player before seeing his character. What about a friends list? If both people confirm the other as friendly, they could easily add them to afforementioned groups, or see what server they're playing on. Maybe even go so far as to say where their character actually is. I don't see how a menu or lobby chat on a server would disrupt much either. In fact, it would actually allow you to do all the moral character analysis stuff people keep saying is so great from outside of their crosshairs. It would be like global chat, except you would need to be not in the game to use it. You would make friends or partners there that you would have to trust enough to meet in game, with only their assurance. Furthermore, assuming you were both starting new characters at that point, the tension would increase as soon as you found the first weapon. Isn't this the whole distrust thing people are raving is so great about this game? It would be way more present in something like this than it is now where you can be assured virtually EVERYONE is bad and you won't even get a chance to talk before you're dead if you're dumb enough to actually try. Maybe this feature would lighten it too much... IDK, but lucky for us, and to quote the favorite phrase on these boards: it's alpha. Let's try it eh? If you don't like nerfing anything bandit-wise, I disagree, but I can see your point and that's okay because I think plenty has been suggested simply to make cooperating more advantageous without necessarily ruining bandits' fun. Please note by bandits I mean actual bandits too, not herpaderps that just want to shoot people to ruin their day.

Yep. This is why I'll be leaving now. My first thought when I ran into the problems of this game's community, an element so vastly important for its success, was that it was just a very vocal minority and I was getting unlucky. Having seen this is hardly the case and an overwhelming majority of the people associated with this game are just dicks, with the exceptions being too infrequent to do anything or having left long ago, I'm going to do myself a favor and join the latter group.

As it unfortunately seems is the case with every one of these types of topics, people assume that any proposition of imbalance is a suggestion of completely removing any banditry. This I will wager IS in fact a minority mode of thinking. The players taking an opposition to the current state of the game merely want more ways to cooperate, or a greater incentive to do so. Reducing the obviously large incentives of shooting people on sight is one way to relatively boost the prospects of acting sensibly and diplomatically. It doesn't have to be complete removal, and I wouldn't want it to be. It doesn't even need to be only as advantageous as cooperation. A point made in this thread is that the strong always have that edge and it should stay this way to a degree. All I, and many others, are suggesting is that it not be as far superior to working together as it is in the game right now. That said, +1 beans for OP.

Hey guys you actually need to read all of the conversation before adding to it if you actually want to contribute something. Yeah I know it takes 15 minutes, but that shouldn't be that hard for your patience if you actually play this game. If you still can't force yourself to read it, I can summarize: The OP, playZ, and a few others are frustrated by the lack of a system to encourage, or even allow, cooperation in addition to the existing system that very strongly encourages not cooperating. Apart from the obvious trolls and assholes saying 1: It's an alpha. 2: If you think it sucks, don't play it. Try My Little Pony and Bob the Builder. 3: QQ MOAR 4: Dood it's supposed to be like real life. Everyone would ttly shoot each other! It would happen! A few people opposing their ideas have countered various arguments, but left a large number of suggestions untouched. /endsummary First, the fact that it's an alpha implies that comments, criticism, and yes even complaints, and not just allowed, but what you are SUPPOSED to say. Virtually nobody in this thread is raging at bugs, they're suggesting modifications to very a extensive and critical portion of this game that may make it stand out as something other than another pseudo-rpg deathmatch, and more closely resemble what Rocket has been quoted several times within the thread to actually want. As skyter has said, there's 0 emotion that follows KOS gameplay other than the traditional sneaking around and avoiding bads that you find in any fps/rpg/platformer, The trailer on the main screen for the website has a video of dudes screaming on mics with guns pointed at each other in a room. As super-awesome as that would be, that would never actually happen in this. Somebody would just shoot the other guys in a few seconds and walk away, assuming they even got that close before firing anyway. It's generic, it's petty, and most of all, it just sucks. To point 2: I think it sucks how it is, but I see tons of potential. Exactly why I'm criticizing, to help turn into something better. Problem? 3: Fuck off. 4: I'm assuming you think this way because that's what you would do. It actually takes a decent amount of work to survive in the world believe it or not when you're not at a cozy computer chair with McDonald's drive-thrus down the road a mile in your sedan. What are you planning to do for food when the canned beans run out? When your tent inevitably wears down from the weather? When it's winter? When you run out of ammo? Or best yet, when you're sick or injured in some way and can't make it back to your medical supplies? The It's lyke RL argument fails hugely because of the mass inconsistencies that have already been mentioned ad nauseum so I won't go into them. But even in fantasy, not being able/willing to group up with people is retarded. Ever seen any post-apocalyptic movie? Yeah there's one or two psychopaths but even in Mad Max and Water World, the bads had some semblance of a society. There's no life to this game beyond your number of bullets and accuracy as long as any coop is moot or impossible. It's essentially a 1 hr respawn and gear acquisition wait to play an FPS with a shitty engine and a few near-inconsequential zombies thrown in. So in conclusion, tons of good ideas have yet to be answered, just to name a few: 1: Groups/Parties. If meta is part of the game, why not just have them actually in the game? 2: A safe zone, like a town or a city normally would be in an MMO. Hell even the lobby could work, just some way to actually communicate with people other than being right next to them. 3: Any sort of karma system, like the 'you go slow when you murder people' idea. I'm waiting for something, and I'm sure others are too. Just because only a few people have spoken up on the forums doesn't mean we're the only ones a little dissatisfied. Most people probably just immediately go play My Little Pony and Bob the Builder and never think twice about this game again.