Synchronicity

I've been away from the forums for a while so I don't know if anyone has touched on this recently, but I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on how the current system of bodily needs could be improved in future updates. The system works fine as it is, but I think it would be nice if it was eventually made to mimic real life a bit more realistically. Here are my ideas: 1. Hunger and thirst should decrease more slowly. Naturally, the game moves more quickly than real life, and allowing someone to go a full 72 hours without water would be excessive (particularly since most people don't even live that long), but I think the current rate is a bit high. 2. That said, food and water should restore a certain fraction of your total need, rather than all of it. A person dying of thirst needs more than a can of soda to be properly hydrated, but someone who is only mildly thirsty can get by just fine. 3. These two points alone would be fine, but here's where it gets interesting: there should be detrimental effects for having high thirst/hunger, such as: -Impaired movement speed -Increased stamina consumption/reduced stamina recovery -Stuttering aim -Fainting -Increased likelihood of bleeding/increased rate of bleeding So even though players would be able to survive longer without food or water than they could before, it would become increasingly debilitating if they don't keep their supplies up. Furthermore, a single can of food won't be enough to keep your strength up if you're very hungry. 4. Optionally, keeping yourself well fed and watered should allow your blood to regenerate (albeit slowly), as you would expect it to in real life. This would also negate the need for one-time blood bonuses from eating and prevent people from abusing this feature to rapidly recover from their injuries. Convalescence takes time, after all. Meat would therefore not give you extra blood, but would fill your belly better than a can of beans. What I like most about this idea, apart from making the game a bit more realistic, is that it would create a greater sense of urgency when you find yourself running out of supplies. Imagine yourself trying to find water as your vision blurs and you find yourself struggling to keep a steady pace due to your worsening condition.

Twinkies are VERY important! EDIT: Also, for those of you saying Twinkies are not a worldwide product, why don't you explain why there are M1911's and M9's, among other weapons not used in East Europe, lying around all over the place?

Good idea. It would probably also make you harder to see. Would make for a good tradeoff to the heat you lose from being out in the rain. (Not that there needs to be a tradeoff, but if it makes sense...)

I don't think removing visual aids is a good idea. My rationale is that, for a normal human, your level of hunger or thirst is pretty easy to gauge, but you can't convey that feeling in a video game. Things like growling stomachs and impaired aim are certainly good enough to indicate that you are hungry, but they are too subtle to indicate how hungry you are, which is also critical. It doesn't necessarily need to be an exact number shown on the screen, but something that gives a clear, unambiguous indicator of how close you are to death is a must to avoid alienating people (myself among them).

Wouldn't it make it easier? Think about it. Right now you can only go something like 2 hours without food or water. My proposal is to make it more like 8 hours (just an estimate; testing would be required to determine what is optimal)' date=' but with gradually worsening symptoms after the first few. That would actually give new players - and everyone else - [i']more time to find supplies once they run out. The only difference is they would need to find more food and water to make up for time lost if it takes them too long to find it. But considering that they would be already be dead under the current rules, they would still be better off.

Broken bones has never been one of my favorite features. Not so much because I don't think it's fair, but because healing it doesn't make a lot of sense. Morphine is a stop-gap painkiller and doesn't actually repair any damage. Once it wears off, your leg would be in just as much pain as it was before. More, actually, since walking on a broken leg is obviously very bad for it. Of course, a "natural" way to heal a broken leg is also out of the question since bones take WAY too long to knit to be sensible in a game like DayZ. Having bones heal in a matter of minutes or hours would just have to be a concession to gameplay, but I think it might be a good idea. I think the addition of splints is ideal, simply because it's a very practical and realistic solution to a broken bone in the real world. All you really need to make a makeshift splint is some stiff wood and a bandage to hold them together, both of which already exist in the game. That way, you don't have to crawl all the way to the nearest hospital for some drugs that wouldn't actually help you anyway. The question is, would splints basically be the same as morphine (wrap up your leg and pretend it's good as new) or would you be required to crawl/walk for a time before your bone heals? The latter might be a good idea, but if the time is too long then I think it would be too far into the territory of fun-killing realism. Right now I think the best way to go would be to keep morphine in the game as a temporary fix (to keep you going in a combat situation where you have no time for first aid), but require you to splint your leg to permanently fix the problem. Splinting would either take you some time to perform (like bandages, only somewhat longer) or would necessitate a slower movement speed until the bone is healed enough for you to put normal weight on it.

YES I honestly don't think this will make the game much more challenging than it is now and will add to the depth and realism. Makarovs are shitty guns anyway. I do think it's a good idea to still give a small chance of spawning with a weapon, and expanding the types of guns you can receive (mostly pistols, maybe a few of the civvy rifles like the Remington or CZ). Other useful items could be included in lieu of guns, such as extra medical supplies, ammunition, or survival tools (e.g. matches, compass, both fairly ordinary items). When you think about it, mortality is going to be highest for newcomers to a zombie apocalypse no matter how you look at it. They're inexperienced, underprepared, and at the mercy of those stronger than them. Besides, since there is no delay for respawning, dying early in your life isn't seen as a big deal, which is why so many people start off their adventure with a high-risk trip to Cherno or Elektro. It's once you get past those first difficult steps that you really start to settle in for the long haul.

Woohoo! I'm going to rejoin ASAP and see if there's a difference. (Will report back here with results.) EDIT: Reporting live from Virginia 22, I can say that the new hotfix has definitely resolved my performance issues. Hopefully more reports with the same will come in soon.

"We don't coddle people who can't handle this game. That's not what it's about." This is advice I hear people give all the time to newcomers expecting a game more to their liking. Now replace "game" with "forum" and you'll have the advice I give to anyone who can't handle the complaints here. Take your own advice and either like it or leave it. No one is forcing you to read these threads, and this forum is necessary to bring new thoughts and ideas (and bug reports) to the devs.

Now that bandits are gone, there's not much point to humanity, but Rocket decided to keep it in the game for a reason. I don't know what that reason is - I don't know that HE even knows - but there's a good chance it will come into play again in the future. Obviously, whatever effect humanity will ultimately have on gameplay will influence how the system works, so all of this is preliminary and I don't propose any changes until we know what the effect will be, but I do want to hear peoples' opinions on my idea. This proposal is meant as a solution to the problem of being penalized for defending yourself. If someone attacks you and misses, returning fire and killing them will result in a loss to your humanity when it should be they who are punished for firing the first shot. Problem is, there's no easy or reliable way to program the game to recognize who is the aggressor in a conflict. Sometimes it's hard even for us humans. My idea is to make the loss of humanity for killing dependent on your victim's current humanity. My reasoning behind this is that a person's humanity is essentially a measure of how likely they are to help or hurt someone. High humanity indicates that someone actively tries to help others, as well as actively tries to avoid bloodshed. The chance that you would need to kill someone like that in self-defense is small, so your humanity loss for killing them should be high. Conversely, heinous survivors (formerly bandits) who kill everyone they meet just for sport will provoke people into returning fire on a regular basis. Hardly an act for which they should be punished. I do not think humanity should ever be gained for killing someone, regardless of their status. At most, the penalty should be zero. Taking a life is sometimes necessary, even justified, but that does not mean it is ever right.

I like it! Not enough to make them a legitimate threat, but enough to mess with your sense of security in the woods. Bonus points for adding an extra layer of unease by forcing players to (potentially) blow their cover by firing at the Z.

Coast is for the younguns who like to live fast and die young. It sounds like a fun and exciting adventure, but I've been playing for a week and still haven't died once. I'm sure as hell not going to tarnish my record by throwing myself into a city filled with Zs and untrustworthy humans. One day, I'm sure I'll visit Cherno. Until then, I'll stick to the countryside and live in peace.

They should add string and let you connect tin cans to either end to make an impromptu communication device that would allow you to talk to your friends from up to 10 meters away! :D

This would be great if it were possible. I doubt it would actually be very useful, but I can think of tons of fun opportunities. It would be even better if we could write on walls like the stuff in the safehouses on L4D. Each server could have its own banter on the walls of Cherno. But that would obviously be way too complicated to ever do. I can still dream :)

I've heard people talk a lot about wanting to spawn near friends or in certain places. The answer to all of these is, of course, no. We're not going to let people magically transport to wherever they want to be regardless of whether or not their friends are there. This idea is actually not that bad, however. I don't think I would support it, personally, but your rationale that two people might be together at the start of an apocalypse is valid. It wouldn't unbalance the game at all, really, since both players would start on the same footing as everyone else.

TKJ said it simply. If we punish players for anything (which we certainly do), make it for something logical. There's no logic in making Z's more attracted to bandits because of blood on their clothes for the following reasons: 1. There are many reasons why someone might get bloody, such as: administering aid to someone wounded, close contact with a Z, or being wounded themselves. 2. Most kills are at range, where blood would never reach. 3. Survivors can kill bandits just as easily, and blood is blood no matter who you are. 4. Bathing or changing your clothes would remove the scent of blood: neither are implemented, but it's unfair not to give the option if it's going to adversely affect them in the game. I imagine you already know this and are only using this blood reasoning as a justification for singling out the bandits, and therein lies the problem with your idea.

No one in history has ever turned into a zombie for committing murder. So no.

After reading some of the replies I've rethought some of my opinions on this issue. I've always felt that blood should regenerate (definitely on the slow side), but I agree that increasing regeneration while idle wouldn't be a good idea. I do like the idea of taking a break now and then to take a knee and chat with my survivor buddies, but if we incentivize it with this blood thing, people will idle too much and it will slow the pace of the game. My thinking is that blood regeneration should be a slow, constant process, which increases when you are in good health (high hunger or thirst should slow or stop regen), but that food should not provide any instant blood bonuses. It would instead keep your hunger low and also provide a regeneration bonus based on the quality of the food. Cooked meat would therefore still give X blood over a period of Y minutes on top of the base rate. Tweaking would be required to figure out the best values for X and Y to keep it from being too fast. Regardless of consumption, I think it should take a minimum of 5-6 hours of play to completely recover from <1000 blood. The advantages I see to this system are that it would prevent abuse from scarfing down huge amounts of food (I've never done this and it seems rather inefficient, but the potential is there I suppose) to regain blood, and it would more accurately mimic the kind of slow convalescence that real people must go through after being wounded. We're not action heroes: we don't eat a steak and then jump right back into battle. The only concern I can think of is that people who are badly wounded might take an unreasonably long time to recover past the "blacking out" threshold.

Losing all your stuff is punishment enough, I think. Making them wait is draconian and arbitrary.

I may still be a summer child, but I wouldn't shoot. What's there to gain if you're not desperate for supplies? Who knows who else might be in the area? I could bring down the guy's friends, or a total stranger, with the sound of my rifle. Killing someone where there is no threat only opens the door to bigger problems. If I was hidden, I would observe him until the coast is clear. If not, I would vacate the area.

I'm more thinking of the data that would accumulate over the course of hours, days, or even weeks. Multiply that by tens of thousands of players (and who knows how many more) and what you have is a non-trivial amount of data. As a disclaimer, I am not a dev and truly have no idea how practical such a feature would be, but I am trying to show how it's not a good idea at this time where simply getting a connection to a server is a challenge. Mostly it's icing: not required to make the fun and playable, so I don't see this becoming a real option until much farther down the road. Once the important stuff is taken care of and server infrastructure has caught up with our needs, I'll email Rocket myself with this idea! The hardest part, but probably the most important, would be a way to save the map for posterity. After all that work, getting to see it once after you die and then have it gone forever would be a real downer.

This is one change that I think overlaps too much with fun-killing realism. Being able to run constantly is not realistic, but constantly having to walk everywhere, distances being what they are, would be ungodly boring. I've noticed there is very little difference in speed between jogging and sprinting (I'm not sure there is any, honestly). Perhaps jogging could be made a little slower to make sprinting more useful, and then make sprinting a limited ability that will eventually slow you to a walk until you recover. That way, you can still make decent time by jogging, while being able to sprint away from danger when necessary.

This is a great idea. Unfortunately, I imagine this would be very computationally intensive, so it would likely be some time before it would become feasible given how unstable the servers are to begin with. Once the mod can accomodate the new influx of players and it's moved on to beta, this would be a great feature to pursue.

I'm not sure an alternative is warranted. There's no real way to tell just by looking at someone what kind of person they are, so why should we be able to in Day Z?