bobbyweenus

Tried for an hour to get into servers. No luck. Maybe just rip the bandaid off? Take the fuckers down and patch now, since so many can't even actually play right now anyway. It's not like its a Triple A title on release day (not gonna name any names...) going down for hours, it's an alpha, and I know I'd much rather wait a couple of hours now with a brute force patching than waiting many hours tonight or all day tomorrow.

What you guys don't seem to get is that even rolling out the patch for 3 servers will create a huge strain. Rocket has mentioned that people trying to hammer their way into full servers has a lot to do with the "waiting for server response" issues, imagine what would happen if only a handful of servers had the new patch that everyone wants to check out? They would get wrecked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EikQwfbQQos

275RR, really like your bloody skin idea. It's not perfect, and there are 'in-character' or realism flaws to it but I find it to be subtle enough to work for both sides. I also like the idea of badges for 'good' or helpful players, it gives some people something to work towards. The idea of a patchwork sheriff's faction sounds very cool, and it's really not out of the realm of possibility even on the early days of a zombie apocalypse. Some people would try to organize something to give people hope.

Their name wont be displayed in the kill message' date=' their name wont be displayed on their character model. Our mouths will only pass these words: "Someone was killed." [/quote'] and these are reasons I suggested my witnessing system. It's the only way to really spread the 'word of mouth' of people's bad reputations as murderers without adequate character customization for physical descriptions or names showing up.

So basically you're saying if players want to completely disregard the survival, exploration of the massive game world, and item hunting / vehicle repairing aspects of the game, all to make it a gigantic, coastal death match, that's okay because the game is all about the players making it what they want... right?

:heart::heart::heart:

Yeah, it's important that I note that despite my gigantic wall-o-texts (sorry I like to articulate my ideas), I'm still completely along for the ride here and I'm playing this game regardless of what happens. I respect Rocket's vision and his opportunity to experiment ideas trial by fire, I'm just voicing some points and suggesting some ideas.

It's not about the press conference, it's about the thousands of new players that have joined this community who might be from more immature, or cut and dry DM communities, who might relish in this new world to just go bananas. For what it's worth though, I completely agree, the answers are not all here, but this massive debate on the subject is a productive thing, even with the petty aspect of it, because it's allowing people to articulate a lot of their thoughts and opinions, and even ideas that you may not have seen yourself (such as a person suggesting the dog system on a stream chat). It's really an insult to the experiment of this project and this decision to write off the people who dislike this as complainers or carebears. It's just opinions and viewpoints that you, or others, might not have seen or considered, just as people who are all about the removal of the bandit system and explain why are giving different view points. I think the debate and ideas that this decision has created is interesting and really pretty great.

Interesting question, and thanks for the feedback! I think you bring up a good point that sometimes, things aren't going to be so cut and dry... but if my friend walks into a barn, I hear a gunshot, you walk out and leave, then I walk in and my friend is dead, I think it's a pretty clear example that you killed him. I suppose here we would have to fudge it a little bit. Maybe using the witness button on both the suspect (you) and the victim (the friend) within a certain period of time? I think the system would have to only work if someone had actually done damage to the victim, to avoid trolling, griefing, or false positives. The system could account for not seeing the actual killing blow by thinking about deductive logic. If I hear a revolver go off, my friend dies, and you walk out holding a revolver, you know what I mean? It sorta explains itself so we could add some grace period for witnessing.

I'm going to make a thread in the suggestion forum soon about this but I wanted to put it on this thread because this is the center of the debate here. The most realistic way to add a moral / decision making devise that stops people from wide scale slaughtering everyone they see is socially. Realistically that is how the world works, not a number value humanity system. Relying on something to be socially driven is dangerous, as it could be easily trolled and such. Here's my idea anyway, let me know what you think: The relatively failed semi-MMOFPS game APB has a witnessing system. When a cop character see's a criminal character stealing a car or killing someone or running a robbery, he holds down a button (lets use tab for the sake of DayZ) and it witnesses the criminal, registering it as a crime if it is one, and sending out an APB. We can take a note from that. If a bandit/murderer character's reputation were to be sullied, someone would have to survive or witness his wrong doing. So lets say there are 3 players in a forest. Bandit, Survivor 1 and Survivor 2. Bandit sees Survivor 1, he shoots him and likely kills him, but he never saw Survivor 2, as S2 was further away and hiding. S2 would hold down tab, to witness the murder. This registers this player as a murderer in S2's eyes. Since player models, even with some more skins, cannot be described to each other, we have to let the game/engine do the work and fill in the blanks. IRL, I would describe someone as tall, short, skinny, fat, and their facial features, since we can't do that in-game, the witnessing system would effectively do that for the player, using the game to commit the players 'appearance' to memory, or data. This brings up the social aspect. Now lets say you meet another survivor and briefly talk without murdering each other. You could then pass along or trade the 'witnessing data', the in-game equivalent of telling the other survivor what happened and describing the murderer, and telling them to steer clear. Players could accumulate witnessing data, trade it and pass it along to each other, effectively creating a social reputation system that isn't an arbitrary number or something that magically works. This creates a demand for social interaction, allowing us to have those perhaps tense moments of uncertainty around a player instead of just killing each other. This creates a demand for players to perhaps create trading posts naturally in-game and gives players a reason to maybe be diplomatic rather than violent or psychotic. The thing this would do, assuming we're playing on servers without gamertags showing up (hopefully), is maybe add some kind of noticeable marking on a player if you've heard that he is a murderer. Maybe even just a slight red tint to their gun, or add something slightly to their face, or even just an asterix near them when you look. This is something we, or Rocket, would have to figure out, what would be the best without breaking immersion. Murderers could wear facemask, the one used on the bandit skin, to make themselves un-witnessable. The negative effect of that is that other players, true to life, would see someone wearing a facemask as threatening. Think about this. You're walking through a parking lot. Someone walks by you wearing a bandana over their face. Wouldn't you wonder why that guy had his face obscured? It makes you think, and it gives a trade off. You are untrackable, but you are threatening looking. This fits in with players, "Dressing to their playstyle" as Rocket stated he wanted to implement. If a player dies, his witnessing data is wiped, and witnessing data about him is wiped, as it is permadeath, a new death means a new character. This is about as realistic as I can think of. The only way a murderer is traceable is if he leaves a witness, and even then, that witness has to spread the word. Input / comments?

Bandits with ghillie suits... If we're adding ghillie suits in, could you add a button that turns my gun on myself too? Might as well cut out the middle man!

Let's not forget that this is still a game' date=' allthough it has some kind of realistic approach. But pulling a trigger in reallife is pretty damn hard. Even sickos like MR DELICIOUS wouldn't run through a countryside in Breivik-style killing everybody on sight (At least i hope he wouldn't). So of course there has to be some kind of penality to senseless murders. [/quote'] This guy gets it. As much as I like realism, this is still a video game so we cannot assume that decision carries the same weight. It, as a fact, does not. I've been gaming, both casually and competitively, for over a decade, and I've yet to meet a gamer who didn't think he could beat me, regardless of how likely or unlikely that was.

Valid point, but without some social level to the game, how would the word be spread? Without some sort of trading post with a tavern to spread word of other's wrong doings, there is no real reputation system, and since we can safely assume that people will be a lot less likely to invite someone they know to sit down for a can of beans and a coke at a camp fire, there is nothing that says, "doing this might outcast me or label me as a horrible person, I should perhaps think better of it." This kills what little social interaction there was with strangers. Instead of having a system that says, "maybe I can trust this guy, he's not an outright bandit", it lets you know that you absolutely cannot trust anyone unless you personally know them.

Servers de-evolving into a total DM match is not unprecedented. Rocket himself explains that the bandit system was created BECAUSE servers had become gigantic DM matches. From Rocket HIMSELF on the Rock Paper Shotgun interview: The system is clearly flawed, but it needs to be improved, not removed. The server rapidly fell into chaos because of a language barrier, and this was early on with limited servers. This game has attracted the attention of Kotaku readers, RPS, PC Gamer, Reddit... it's not just a friendly or mature ARMA2 mod community who would be interested in playing this game as a social experiment, it's safe to assume the growth has introduced a number of people, if not a large segment of the population, that would much rather DM then scavenge and survive.