Element47

finally people get to see what alpha really means.

screenshot from experimental branch:

you do realize that alpha is expected to have bugs, and even be unplayable for an extended period of time. this is not the finished product you preordered, this is the bonus of early access.

T-SHIRT TENTS. FOR THE COOL CATS OF CHERNARUS

i am having fun testing new features, finding issues, and taking part in this journey. i do not expect finished gameplay at least until beta - and neither should you. check with yourself for what reasons you are here.

white leather jacket, white cowboy hat. then i will be complete. great update.

i will repeat my argument from the other thread: three are strangers, one is your friend. tell me which one is your friend

its not different than "looking for a special house with object XY", or "Search for 3x object X, 8x object Y and 12x object Z to repair Vehicle A". Long-term goals are planned in anyway. Such gameplay mechanics are by no means exclusive to fantasy MMORPGs.

i absolutely agree that gearing up is too fast, too easy at current stage. but it has to be, as people need to be outfitted to mass-test the various mechanics and identify issues in a timeframe as short as possible. by this, obviously, the gameplay gets skewed, so i think its not entirely correct to judge it based upon current situation. i am convinced, that current loot spawn rate, its distribution, rarity of specific items and their impact on the overall gameplay are in no way indicative of the finished gameplay. that said, I think gated content is a valid approach, and a good suggestion, that should definitely be considered - and your suggestion of safes and lockpicks/keys is great in my opinion. but there is still so much to come. dean stated once, that he wants guns to be rare. if a player finds his first gun finally, it needs to feel like an achievement. i really hope he mmanages to achieve that. also, there will be key elements beyond personal equipment added to the game at a later stage. Dean stated in the last reddit AMA, that maintaining an advanced vehicle like a heli or maintaining a power station will be a complex and daunting task. add to that, that food aquisition will shift from collecting tins to hunting and harvesting, thus changing the map dynamic in favor of uninhabitated areas, and the planned exposure system inspired by the Frostfall mod, which might give another dimension to actually surviving in the open so to sum it up, i think we havent seen much of what is going to constitue end-game yet - or more broadly phrased, what would be the pursuable goals in the game. but locked containers with high-quality loot should not be difficult to implement while at the same time adding true value to the gameplay, so you have my vote for that :) oh, and one final, personal note: i go to the piano buildings for books alone, so there is always a point to searching it. ;)

it isnt a problem because we dont have finished gameplay yet. at current stage, we have only disconnected parts, some are working, some are not working, some are not yet implemented and may have placeholders or just be missing. thats nothing unusual. and as its not a problem, it doesnt need a fix. actually - again: at current stage - and this is pure speculation - it could as well be done on purpose as part of the test, evaluating average time-to-starvation after the hunger/thirst tweaks. of course you cant really gather data on that if everyone is stuffed. if we're at the end of the beta, approaching the release candidate stage, and you still feel that the loot is unbalanced, you will have all my attention. at this stage its pointless

the game is supposed to be harsh, brutal. if you think its hard now, think again. it will become much more unforgiving once its finished. as long as murder is death cause #1 and not starvation or infection, the game is not hard enough. then i suggest you research how agile software development works, because i bet my remaining bottles of Havana Club that the dev team uses scrum strategy...

- Baby Green Mountain - we should adopt it.

someone was playing with the maptools... another case of "cat-on-the-keyboard" maybe?

he only made wine out of water. i make cuba libres out of hopper tears. i have redefined the term "geared". and i can confirmed, i am getting geared up pretty fast. i still can type though....

gating content is an established mechanism to slow progression. but i fear that the design of dayz is too simple for that. there are many approaches possible: you could have keys being craftable, and the ingredients rare, for example collecting access codes from rare military zombies and crafting a makeshift generator to then be able to unlock military caches you could add dynamic events that produce keys or ingredients necessary to crafting keys, with such events only to occur every few weeks, rolled out with the weekly maintenance patch and removed with the next. the basic question is, does gated content fit into the overall design of dayz?

i am actually starting to server hop now, so i can enjoy this epic invention in all its glory, and make the best use of the timers on top of that. i also made a guide for everyone who wants to follow my example:

as an actual |33† ɱ0₣0 who roamed BBSes when telnet was the shite, and who instagibbed n00bz in q3a when CoD kids werent even born yet, i take real offense at that misrepresentation

I killed my partner once. In the mod. We tracked a group of bandits who have attacked a medic team earlier from Novy Sobor to the fields between Vybor and the airfield. After half an hour of stalking and circling each other, we finally engaged. My friend was able to shoot one of them, but died to the other. I dropped into the high grass, and managed to take out the other one with small bursts from my trusty Mk.48. A third bandit was able to retreat, and we were not sure whether they were able to call in reinforcements. I found me a spot in a bush, from which i could guard my friends body, while he started to run north from his spawn point in kamenka. The situation was pretty tense, the third bandit was still circling me like a vulture. We traded a few potshots from the distance, but none of us wanted to leave our entrenched positions. After what seemed an eternity, i heard our air support circling above. Knowing that the only Huey on the server was in our service gave me reassurance, but i was still shaking with adrenaline after the shootout. This bandit was my first kill after all. Suddenly, i noticed a shadow behind me - hastily turning around, i just saw someone rising his hands as in an attempt to aim at me. Out of a reflex, i pulled the trigger and fed some 20 rounds from my Mk.48 to his face. It was my partner, shining at me with his torch. Our chopper dropped him behind me after picking him up so he wouldnt have to run so long for his body. They somehow forgot to tell me though. This was the day i killed my first bandit - and murdered my partner to top it off.

there is one thing about that reddit quote that really bugs me - if such a simple mechanic already has a serious impact on the server performance, then the concurrent event handling seems.. rather suboptimal.. and this is not good news for the future

im outta here, would need a portal gun to follow your assumptions and conclusions. lets agree to disagree, and finally bury this topic. you have made your point in favor of skill progression. future will tell.

Permadeath does not invalidate RNG looters. Permadeath just makes it more valuable. there are millions of hardcore characters in D3, and yet statistics show, that over half of the pearmadead characters in D3 made it to the level cap of level 60 in their quest for moar epix. (source). Losing a lvl60 epicly geared character in D3 bears definitely more gravity than losing a geared up toon in DayZ, be it mod or SA.

RNG (means luck) based loot is a much stronger motivator than skill progression. this concept is why diablo and wow have sustained millions of players over many years, games in which skill progression is merely a temporary mean to access more advanced RNG loot mechanics. that is the reason why people gamble. this is the reason why las vegas casinos are more attractive than savings banks. players will always choose RNG above pure skill. they will bitch when they loose against the odds, but they will keep playing, because the thrill of finally winning is a strong drive, and the feeling of accomplishment when finally winning the dice roll is so incredibly rewarding.

there is more than just "little" cooperation we have medic groups who travel across the map just to give a saline transfusion to a patient we have trading groups who will set up a guarded perimeter only to make that one trade possible without interruption we have bookclubs who seek every single house for those gems of literature, only to meet on the cliffs of Guba to have a read while watching the sun set over the ocean we have so many people trying to help newspawns on the coast that people actually complain about it in threads on this forum oh, and the killers? for me, those are part of the environment, like zombies, just with working AI. Avoiding or neutralizng them is just part of the PvE game for me. as a carebear medic, who only shoots back when shot at, i say that persistent PvP and KoSing bandits add tension and thus value to the game. Without it, it would be boring. and from what i gathered from my friends who are new to the game, there is a surprisingly high amount of friendy or at least neutral players. I would assume a TMW member would be aware of that ;)

during alpha, patches will break game functionality. thats common occurance. it is to be expected. linking a certain feature to a certain bug without indepth knowledge of the codebase however is talking out of your ass. please take your nerdrage elsewhere.