Heiduk

Of course, it doesn't effect the loot piles but it absolutely effects how long it takes a player to get to them. You entirely missed by point, nonetheless, I would be willing to bet that the average life span is longer on 1st person servers than it is on 3rd person servers, for all of the reasons Mercules outlines.

Logistics. In order to fight effectively you need to have logistical support, in DayZ that means looting. In 1st person it takes longer to get past the point of subsistence survival to a point where you are fully equipped and looking for something else to do. Even though not everyone will seek out combat once equipped a significant portion will. Therefore, the greater the portion of an average life that is spent equipped the greater the amount of killing. Note that this calculus only really effects sport killing. I don't think it will really effect the rate of murders because the other player has something I want, although I'm not sure that is as much of a problem.

I have to respectfully disagree, I think authenticity is the very core of this issue and part of the reason there is so much disconnect in this discussion. Although there are clearly plenty of shades of gray I think people are basically falling in to two groups: Those (including myself) who would prefer DayZ to be more of a simulation and those who are more interested in a game. Those are both valid viewpoints but successfully achieving either does require different design decisions. The simulation vs. game distinction is also part of the reason I'm a little puzzled by rocket's position on this issue. Although to my knowledge he has never called it a simulation he has made a big deal about designing DayZ in such a way that real-world skills transfer in to the game. Yet 3rd person, in its current form, pretty much nullifies most standard infantry tactics so people who have those skills can't transfer them in to the game. As noted numerous times in this thread there are tactics that can mitigate the impact of 3rd person, however, by in large they are game tactics, not tactics rooted in the real-world. I'm not arguing DayZ should be an infantry simulator, ARMA does that quite nicely, but I do find it a bit strange that in a game with guns where the designer is going to the extent of giving players a blood type (has any other game ever done that?) an entire skill set is just being discarded. This is one of the most thoroughly thought out suggestions in this thread, beans for you. Join us SmashT, your comrades have already forsaken you. 1st person is the one true path, brother. We will forgive your past sins and wicked ways if only you repent and swear undieing loyalty to the 1st view, the only True view.

When assessing the happiness of the community you may want to consider that this thread has more than 1,000 posts and 11,000 views. Meanwhile, after a week, Dslyecxi's video has 30,000 views and 1,300 comments; that comment total puts it in the same neighborhood as some of his videos with 100,000+ views that have been up for years. I haven't checked but I'm sure there is a lengthy Reddit thread as well. Considering those numbers I'm pretty sure "totally happy" is not the adjective I would choose. Deeply divided, polarized, perhaps but not totally happy.

I completely agree, of course I also feel the same about humans seeing me over walls. I don't like the idea of markers either but if we stipulate that DayZ needs third person, for whatever reasons, then we've already taken a big step away from physically plausible simulation towards standard video game. Therefore, it's only a question of what makes a balanced fun game. 3rd person player markers would go a long ways towards evening out the current risk/reward imbalance. Currently, using 3rd person is almost all reward with virtually no risk. The only minor drawback to 3rd person is that it is slightly harder to shoot without going to iron sights. If a player marker was added at the same position as the 3rd person camera then suddenly the player is forced to make a decision: Do I stay in 1st person and keep a low profile or do I switch to 3rd to gather better intel at the risk of making myself easier to spot?

You missed the best one (credit to Terrorviktor): Give zombies 3rd person view. I'm actually semi-serious about this. Amidst all the discussion of unfair camping, etc. etc. people tend to forget how detrimental 3rd person is to the PVE game. Zombies are stupid sods and need all the help they can get, assuming they don't exist solely to be annoying bullet sponges. I thought another decent suggestion was to put a visible player marker at the same position as the camera. Whether or not that marker should be able to take damage on behalf of the player is perhaps another question.

I would be OK with this, assuming that Bohemia is running the servers so that there are decent servers available. That being said it is far from the ideal solution as it splits the community and splits development time. It is also far from clear that separate servers are even on the table. I would also relabel the servers to: Survival - FPV only Deathmatch - A modified TPV Ken et al., make good points that in many cases 3rd person does make combat against a human opponent harder. However, I think it is pretty easy to see that 3rd person makes every other aspect of the game easier. In my view this encourages deathmatch. I would make a distinction between deathmatch and the type of tactical PVP play that has characterized previous ARMA games. 3rd person eliminates the effectiveness of suppressive fire along with all of the tactics that are based on it. Pretty much all that remains is long-range sniping and run and gun twitch shooting. Out of curiosity what do you think would be better than the current Alt mouse look? This is one of my favorite features in ARMA and I'm constantly trying to use it in other games that don't have it. I have no interest in playing Apocalypse Barbie Dressup. In the beginning I played 1st person servers. Then they started disappearing so I played on 3rd person servers. After awhile I tried playing in 3rd person. Even though I wasn't camping rooftops I couldn't help but exploit the view. The game became easy and there was no tension anymore. I went back to playing 1st person on 3rd person servers and tried finding a decent 1st person home but the magic was lost. I haven't played in months. I don't hunt players and I've had the most fun in DayZ when I decided to roleplay by placing artificial limitations on myself to make the game more realistic. Hell, not only have I run across Chernarus multiple times in 1st person, I've walked across it.

Super Mario Brothers is also ridiculously hard by modern standards and gave you a very limited view of the world around you. Kind of like..., oh never mind.

Can we please keep the leet sniper slap fighting to a minimum. That is an entirely different 50 page thread. Hmm, I haven't seen a good one of those in awhile. This is the bottom line right here. Design decisions should be driven by what makes the game better. Period.

Status effects should be applied the same in both 1st and 3rd person. Do broken windshields count as a status effect? As for helmets, I basically imagine the same effect as NVGs minus the color shift. The FOV is the same in 1st and 3rd person so reductions should be handled equally. Also obligatory quote from this weeks Breaking Bad: "I see a kid with a bicycle helmet on, I wanna smack the shit out of him. Like, for his own good."

People seem to forget this part of the equation, hence my last suggestion: Launch with 1st person only, get that right, then if necessary spend developer cycles on fixing 3rd person before adding it back in. What I'm afraid we are heading towards right now is the same old ARMA story of mediocre 3rd person built on top of mediocre 1st person. It may not ruin the game but lack of focus will definitely make it less than it could be. Arguably multiplayer ARMA has been most successful within the private milsim communities such as Shacktac. I think that is for two reasons. It gave them the flexibility necessary to build the games they wanted to play. However, just as importantly, because they were closed communities they were able to set and enforce rules that they determined constituted fairplay, e.g. no 3rd person in the case of Shacktac. When you take away the ability to enforce rules you end up with the chaos that is ARMA Domination, Wasteland, and DayZ on public servers. Airdropping cows and god mode may be fun for awhile but they don't make for a game with much staying power. Like it or not, by deciding to build a MMO Rocket and Bohemia have taken on the responsibility for setting and enforcing rules. They can't rely on public opinion to make those decisions for them if they hope to make a compelling game.

Agreed, you just need to ignore the trolls on both sides of the issue.

Personally I disagree with rocket's logic for keeping 3rd person, however, based on his recent comments (see Fraggle's quotes) it seems pretty clear that it will continue to be part of the game. Rocket does indicate he wants to make changes to 3rd person so that it's abuses will be less egregious. Finding a 3rd person compromise that fixes the biggest issues in a way players find natural and acceptable will likely take a fair amount of balancing and tweaking. Therefore I wonder how it would work if the initial release of DayZ was first person only with the promise that 3rd person servers would be added after a few months of reworking, much like vehicles were removed until they could be done properly. I can see several advantages to doing this sort of staged release: Initial developer time required is almost 0.Assures that all mechanics work well in 1st person.Supports soft-launch (presumably some 3rd person players won't want to play 1st person only).Provides time to design a good 3rd person system, rather than just slapping together changes that are easy to code.Delays 3rd person design decisions until more game components are in place, reducing potential rework.Delays player rage about 3rd person changes until they can be seen in the context of a more complete game.Instrumented servers provide baseline data on how players interact in 1st person and how their styles change after 3rd person is made available.Gives players who might otherwise go straight to 3rd person a chance to see what 1st person is all about.

This is the best 3rd person fix I've read so far. With limited ammo it would make operating in towns almost impossible. That is exactly why some of us are arguing that DayZ should be based around a physically plausible player perspective. Rocket could certainly decide to make gravity or vehicle damage optional components of the game too, and that would be an equally bad idea. If you want to make a game that feels plausibly realistic get the fundamentals right first and the rest will naturally fall in to place without the need for convoluted work arounds like a context sensitive camera (that probably won't work right) or LOS ray casting. This is what worries me. In one of the Gamescon videos he mentioned keeping the goofy blood fountains so that you can tell if you're injured and which direction fire is coming from. I think this is a horrible design, or more accurately failure to make a design. DayZ has the potential to be a great game but I don't think they can achieve that if they decide to punt on some of these core issues. The ARMA editor is a great sandbox, DayZ mod with its infinite variety of hacks is a great sandbox. For DayZ standalone to be a great sandbox game it needs to have rules, even if those rules are just Physics 101 and Anatomy 101.

This argument always gets brought up in these threads but I don't think it's nearly that simple. Although I won't hesitate to try and put you in the ground if attacked I've never fired on another player in DayZ without provocation. Nonetheless, I will argue strongly for the removal of 3rd person. If anything my experiences on 1st versus 3rd person servers have been the opposite of what you suggest. I not sure that the players were any friendlier but populated 1st person servers were certainly safer, and definitely didn't feel like as much of a deathmatch. Although I agree with all the posts arguing that 3rd person provides an unfair and completely unrealistic tactical advantage, particularly to campers, that is not the primary reason I think it should be removed. It should be removed because it eliminates a whole host of difficult and interesting decisions that the player would otherwise need to make. As Dslyecxi argues in the video how will you chose to balance the reward of information versus the risk of getting your head shot off? Rocket has made it pretty clear that much of the gameplay will revolve around exploring the environment and scavenging. Regardless of how many widgets they add for us to collect and craft together, or how many beds we need to look under to find them, ultimately these are pretty mundane tasks. The only thing that makes them compelling is that we need to risk losing everything in order to acquire those widgets that we either need and/or want. By providing more information at less risk 3rd person just makes the PVE game even more shallow and allows us to get to the "There's nothing left to do, let's shoot each other in the face." stage quicker. Although I'm sure there are many who see that as a good thing, personally I don't have much interest in yet another deathmatch game with zombies, even if it is on a bigger map than most. I'm much more interested in a game where human conflict occurs for authentic reasons, not simply because there is nothing else left to do.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Maybe context sensitive 3rd person will fix its problems but it seems like an awful lot of effort to try and fix a mechanic that is fundamentally broken. I would much rather have the developers spend their limited time working on the list of problems in _Anubis_'s list. This is a game design choice. If Rocket et al., are trying to produce an authentic immersive game step 1 should be making as many of the game mechanics as physically plausible as possible. We now have shoes that wear out and avatars with blood types, is it to much to ask that those avatars experience the world from a plausible perspective? Saints Row is hugely entertaining but it isn't authentic or immersive.

This 1000x. In addition to working out the technical issues I'm really hoping the team is taking some time to think about some of these design choices. Seemingly minor UI changes like enforcing a physically plausible perspective, disabling the HUD, or changing how vegetation is displayed through optics have a huge impact on how people play the game. Those choices should be made by the game's designers so that they can optimize all aspects of the game around those choices. As an aside, I'm amazed how little support third person has received in this thread. Maybe it's time for me to log back on and try to find a decent server again.

As usual Dslyecxi sums up the issue perfectly. Its all about risk versus reward. I really hope rocket is listening to the likes of him and CHKilroy more than he is to ones likes Frankie and Sacriel. All that needs to be said to 3rd person players has already been said by the late great George Carlin.

I'm guessing you don't work in the film industry. :P

This would be fantastic and I think it's right in line with the idea of character progression via gear. Our characters would be identified by the things they carry and place the most value in. Beyond the ability to simply choose different clothing, form would start to follow function based on the way each player chooses to play. There would always be room for deception but inevitably, Rambo would start to look different than Dr. Wasteland, who would look different than Jermiah Johnson, who would look different than Hatchet Man.

Exactly, although that is a little harder for those of us without access to the alpha to evaluate when all we can do is look at screen shots. Now spend another hour next week when they add another column to the backpack array. Then a another hour the week after that when all of the boxes get resized by 5 pixels. Then another hour... I don't mean to be critical of you specifically, in fact I quite like your version, but as you note this kind of polish is better suited for post-alpha development. There isn't much point in spending time on a beauty pass when the foundation is still likely to change.

Exactly what the Steam Box ends up being seems to be mostly speculation but I'm not sure Valve is terribly interested in making money selling hardware. They've said they would be providing reference versions but that there would also be a set of specs so that other vendors could build their own versions. It seems more like a defensive move. With the Windows 8 app store Microsoft is going after Valves core business, but that store is unlikely to ever be available for any other OSes. By providing a well defined hardware/software target Valve is making it easier, and hopefully more desirable, for studios to develop cross-platform games (Windows/Steam Box/Mac/Linux). Although its market share has been slowly declining Windows still dominates the desktop market and that's unlikely to change for a while. However, the vast majority of those installs are XP and 7, the number of people running Windows 8 is pretty similar to the numbers on Mac or Linux, so now seems like as good a time as any to start encouraging some competition. Besides, Kerbal Space Program is on Linux Steam, what else to you need?

Personally, I think the inventory looks fine. Sure it could use a little polish but it was clearly designed for function first and foremost and that is absolutely the right move. What I really want to know though: How does night look? Oh, and for the record, 140 characters may not qualify as a dev blog, but I think 4 sentences and 2 screen shots absolutely does.

Heritic! I've been setting my watch to the dev blogs every Friday since... oh wait never mind. Rocket hates us all :(