thegreattriscuit

lol, that makes sense now. And yes, I certainly am getting desensitized to zombie noises :P Loot was a false alarm... I found a shirt shortly after that post... and then a dead guy who had found a ton of useless crap, and, I had assumed, some adversary. There's water where I found him, so I didn't figure he had died of thirst... and he had food on him, but as I discovered later, when my own stomach started rumbling, he hadn't had anything to open the cans with. And then, dying of starvation, I happened across a fellow survivor who graciously offered to open my cans for me. Without thinking I threw them onto the ground thinking "well, if he takes them I'll just die the same way I was going to anyway". The cans promptly vanished into thin air, dooming me to starvation. This is DayZ. Side note: I can't imagine anyone ever starving to death in the vicinity of canned food. Especially since I had a shove and a wrench and some other BS. Someone who is ACTUALLY desperate for food would get that can open one way or another, and when it splatters all over the ground, they'll just eat it. Seriously. Maybe that's what should happen... once you get past "starving to death" it shouldn't go to "dead", it should go to "mad with hunger" and you just start eating clothes, or medicine, or your friends, or whatever uncontrollably until you've eaten enough to bring you back up to "really hungry" or whatever.

So I can't find anything. And by "thing" I mean something that's not a tree or a wall. I can find dirt, also. So I get the whole "loot scarcity" thing... maybe the spots I'm at are picked clean, or whatever... but I've also not seen a single zombie. I keep hearing them... I'll even hear them seem to "alert" when I sprint... but they never show up? Am I either stuck in some limbo-like parallel dimension, or maybe gifted with ultra-human hearing and picking up the sounds of Z movement miles away? I am endeavoring to move inland, but it really feels like something is wrong. I also seem to be getting a lot of red chain action, but it always seems to recover after a few seconds. Thoughts?

sure. If you have a knife, hatchet, and matches. I did not.

So, most people here seem to agree about one concept: Right now, death is too cheap. All you loose is loot, and even then, with persistant vehicles, tents, etc... it's not that big of a deal. I, myself, when low on blood and faced with a long and difficult recovery, but plenty of loot, have been known to treck down to the coast and kill myself, so that when I respawn I can just run back and pickup my loot. Likewise, when encountering others, there isn't enough real incentive not to just kill them. These are all serious problems facing the mod, and I think I've discovered the perfect solution. 'nuff said. personally, I think this is absolutely inline with Rocket's stated goals for this project. I can't wait :D

lol. I'm in favor of bandit labels, as I've pointed out several times... and usually when I chime in on suggestions I do so with 8 paragraph essays or whatever... but for this, 'terribad' is good enough. lol. I like the idea, implementation can use some work however :)

Lol... does it need encouragement? I've never found one, but I can promise you that if I ever do, my first order of business, after my massive erection subsides, will be to find a place to use it...

First: This is the SUGGESTION forum. Not the bug report forum. Obviously the bugs (and there's many) need to be fixed. That's not a suggestion. That's self evident. That's like "suggesting" that airline pilots do their best to not crash and kill everyone on the plane... Not that it never happens, but they either are, or aren't going to try, and they either are, or aren't going to be successful, and that suggestion has nothing to do with it. Second: What are you talking about? right now, as it stands, 90% of character interactions are KOS. There's no reason to be careful about meeting people when you just shoot them. I ran across two guys yesterday... and if I'd of seen them first, having zero reason to trust them, and very good reasons to not trust them (really nice kit they had on), I would have opened fire. They saw me first, turned out to be lucky noobs who'd found someones tent, and were friendly, and it was cool... but MY instinct was to kill them because I had zero room for trust. If you want to enable any kind of scenario where people can start building that trust, you have to give them the tools to do so.

So I apologize for not having time to read all of this. Not being sarcastic either, since it looks like there's a good deal of good discussion going on here. So I'm going to throw in my $.02, and if someone else has already raised these points, simply count them as an upvote for that guys ideas, kay? kay. So this is an excellent idea, at the core. I also disagree about permanence. I think that, aside from the break of immersion, there's a great deal of potential here to incentivise certain kinds of behavior (a persistent reputation that could get you killed and/or make life easier for you can sway people decision whether or not to go dark side). But I also like the idea of adding a greater degree of value to someone's life than just loot... so it's a tough one... I think one possibility is a journal type thing (probably talking standalone here, vs. mod...) you make these notes in your "journal" and it's a real thing that can be lifted from your corpse. That doesn't do much to increase the value of your one life, but it at least keeps your "new survivor on the beach" from knowing everyone in chernarus. I'm also concerned about implementation... how often are you going to have opportunities to do the kind of clicking you describe when you're within range of a guy you want to click about (usually someone who's doing something you don't like... like killing you). I'll say one possible alternative is to have your 'journal' auto fill a bit... i.e. "I saw so and so commit a murder". "So and So saved my butt". etc. Or it just compiles a list of people you've been close enough to identify recently, and you can, later, go back and make notes, or assign colors/whatever... Maybe it only records certain "important" info automatically... "Saw so and so kill someone" or "HES KILLING ME!!!". So you kill a bunch of people, there'll start being more and more records of your bad deeds... maybe you have the ability to go, grab their journals and either simply steal/destroy them, or rip out your page or whatever... It should be POSSIBLE to be a rampant murder without the rest of the world knowing about it... it just shouldn't be EASY. y'know?

This is a decent idea. Especially with the caveats you mentioned. It's a good idea for all kinds of reasons... as you mentioned: the dude you're stalking has ceased to exist... good to know. The dude you're stalking has magically changed position... good to know... Even some random guy who just got home from work... if HE magically appears within a few hundred meters of you, it's good to know. Likewise, if you come home from work and pop into the woods somewhere... it'd be nice to know if you're alone... I like that it's not directional... the goal isn't to get TOO carebarey... just to make it harder to sneak up on people by gaming the system. And since you're giving the EXISTING players extra knowledge, it's only fair to share that same knowledge to the guy that just logged in. Keep everyone on the same playing field. That way if you pop into existance and you get a notification, either "3 players are near you" or simply "YOU ARE NOT ALONE"... you know that they just got that info aswell and you need to GTFO... or lock and load... per your play style.

Agree with ODoyle. 50% is too high, but the idea of loot damage is good... and intelligent is better than a flat %. hell... if you REALLY want to go there, you could subject items in a backpack be subject to loss/damage from people shooting your backpack. But yeah, in general, if you want to steal someone's NVGs, you shouldn't shoot them in the face... if you want anything they've got on them, you shouldn't shoot them with an AS550 (there's a reason .50 cal is considered 'anti material' rather than 'anti personnel')

So this idea kind of evolved while I was typing the last post... I didn't flesh it out there, because it was the end of the day and I was trying to pound it out before I left work (DON'T JUDGE ME!). But in any case... while I firmly belive that people should have to EDIT: SHOULD NOT HAVE TO (lol) resort to cruising the edge of the map looking for vehicles to have any chance of finding one, I've decided that it's exactly what I want to do. I hearby commission the Vehicle Redistribution Force Chernarus Economic Management Authority to go out and destroy vehicles and tents found on the outskirts of the map. Don't just steal it and move it somewhere else... destroy it so it respawns. Maybe steal ONE, and use it to find others... But it sounds fun for a number of reasons: 1) sticking it to the people that are breaking the game (to an extent, not comparing hoarders to hackers by any means, just think it needs to be limited) 2) reduce item-inflation by stoping the item-duping cycle 3) bring the joy of finding a sweet vehicle to more players 4) last, but certainly not least, the rush of raiding a bunch of camps... eventually you're going to run into the hoarders themselves doing this, and it should make for some fun PVP. If someone catches me destroying their crap, no matter how they acquired it, I would certainly expect them to defend it, and that's fun times right there. There are few parts of this game that are as fun as the rush of a close encounter/combat, so anything that gives me more of that is a good thing.

So, you're incorrect. Here's why. I'll take your first statements at face value, as I BELIEVE (though I'm not certain) that that's how it works... brand new server will spawn them there. People find and move them, and they persist. If/when the vehicle is destroyed it will eventually respawn. So with that system you should, on average, have about 19 to 20 vehicles per server (to account for the ones that are still awaiting respawn). Either way, close enough. The problem is where you say "50 people". You're right, that's a standard server size, or close enough to it. Hell, you've even got plenty of low pop servers with 10 or less, right? So I should be able to log onto a server with 15 people and the game turns into Grand Theft Auto: Chernarus, right? Well it's obviously not. Why is that? It's because your population of '50' is absurd. If you just take the last 24 hours you've got (number of players in DayZ) / (number of servers) players that have been on that server, on average. so what is that right now... 173,000 / (approx. 2500 servers*) = 69 players. And that's only in 24 hours. In reality, when you factor players vs. vehicles, since the vehicles persist across server resets, you count the number of players since the server came online, since that's the amount of people that could have found that vehicle and driven it out off the edge of the map, or at least the corners somewhere. In any case, the math is irrelevant. You can easily observe that vehicles are rare as balls. Far more rare that your statement up there would suggest. hoarding has created a scenario where the LAST place you look for a vehicle is a city or town. You look deep in the woods. The only chance of finding a vehicle anywhere near the kind of places that you would ACTUALLY find vehicles, is when someone gets themselves killed while taking their tractor out or whatever. That's about it. All the other vehicles are stashed away in random hideaways. I honestly think they should spawn more often (a couple hours after a vehicle has been taken from the spawn point, another would spawn, for instance), but be subject to decay (if neglected for more than a few hours, parts start to go bad... actually becoming broken after a day, exploding after two days of being left alone, for instance). That way they're not LITERALLY everywhere, especially on a high pop server, but you still stand a reasonable chance of finding one by doing normal survivor crap. Seriously, while typing this, I've decided that when I play tonight, I'm just going to go make a circuit around the edges of the map and destroy vehicles. And play with them. But also destroy them. *number of servers comes from http://arma2.swec.se/server/list?mquery=DayZ&nquery=DayZ&page=1&state_playing=1)

I can offer some perspective for the people saying that hacking isn't that big of a problem... I hadn't really seen much of hacking for the first several weeks I played, other than item inflation (shouldn't be coming across this many L85s, etc...). Then a few nights ago, BAM, everyone teleported into the sky and fell to the ground. I chuckled... not that big of a deal I said... only broke my legs so I logged into a different server, bandaged up, and crawled around. Eventually I met up with a friend who gave me morphine and it was cool. The next night my character randomly started dancing for a minute or so. I was a little annoyed, but no big deal. Just log out and go somewhere else. The next night everyone teleported into a field and was attacked by mortar fire or something... the whole field was exploding. I didn't log out in time, and lost all my gear. That sucked... but I really wouldn't be that upset, except it's literally been three hacks in three nights... and these are obvious ones, designed for the express purpose of griefing and ruining other peoples enjoyment of the game. It's stupid and pointless. Dancing, that's for lulz... air dropping a battalion of cows? lulz. They're annoying, but whatever, it's the internet. Killing everyone on a server? That's called being a hateful little prick. So yeah... it's certainly possible to avoid hacks, but only out of luck, or by sticking to lower pop servers, but it's not fool proof and as the situation escalates BI, Rocket, and crew run the risk of loosing some of the momentum they're trying to build with this mod. It's really going to suck if that's what happens.

EDIT: I hadn't seen the latest post, so most of this is in response to Badjr... I disagree with Grodenn on a few points, but agree with the general premise. hah... okay, I'll buy that... But I think my arguement still holds. Thing is... it's a multiplayer game. So you're playing a game... with multiple players. Follow so far? Good. So you're playing a game with other people. If you just wanted to play a game by yourself... they have these things called single player games. Go play one. Better yet, sit in your room and write crappy Walking Dead fanfics or something. Since you've decided that you want to play a game with other people, that requires some degree of socialization. It also requires some degree of suspension of disbelief, as well as a degree of abstraction. Since you can never fully and completely replicate the stressesors of a real zombie apocalypse, you're not going to get a true representation of the decision making process people would use in a zombie apocalypse without introducing some artifical tweaks. So take this issue... in a "real" zombie apocalypse or other SHTF scenario, peoples decision on whether or not to commit murder would be influenced, strongly, by their appreciation (or lack thereof) for the value of human life. Most people that are perfectly happy shooting a bunch of pixels in the face for a digital can of beans would be much less willing to do so to a real person, for a variety of reasons. Let's do fake math! if X is someone's propensity to commit murder, P is all the good things that could come to that person through murder (beans, guns, make the dogs stop barking in their mind), and C are all the bad things that could come from murder (dangers of combat, expended ammunition, slow decent into madness), then you could say the following: X= P - C so if P outweighs C, then murder. The problem is that, for most people, the biggest component of C is their conscience. All the years they spent believing they were better than that. The cold sweats and sleepless nights spent contemplating the value of the human life they extinguished... the thought of a child cowering cold and alone underneath a car, slowly starving to death because daddy said "wait right here until I come back, son". Except daddy's not coming back. Because you shot him for some delicious beans.... none of that matters, because it's just a game. So you have to compensate. You have to provide some other, artificial control there to influence the player behavior. Some other negative consequence to the act of murder. You'll still have plenty of people that will decide to go down that road, but at least now alternatives to murder are more viable.

I'm usually not big on shooting complaints down with "It's Alpha dude!!! get over it!", however... It's alpha. There IS, in fact, a persistent database. It does exist, I promise. Myself, and somewhere close to a million other players have verified that fact by logging into more than one server and having items/character state persist. As for it being buggy, that's part of the deal. If you suspect that the issues you've experience HAVEN'T been reported 10000 times already, file a bug report. then move on. Also, you didn't pay anything for DayZ, so you have no "damages" you can claim. You say you spent 30 on ArmaII.... but that doesn't have anything to do with DayZ... Bohemia sold you ARMA II so you could play ARMA II. If you want to take their product and use some unofficial third party mod on it, that's really none of their business. Of course, if they move it into a standalone product, or pick it up in any other official sense, then that's a BIT different. But for now, they don't owe you crap.