Bosco

I'm going to write a little essay on it, if you decide to read it then good for you. So I come from the /v/ video game board on 4chan where I first heard about DayZ. Typically /v/ hates video games of all shapes and sizes, but there are some games that /v/ is passionate about in the other extreme where they get really worked up over something. Right now the flavour of the month is DayZ (to the point where people are buying ARMA 2 CO just to play), perhaps some of you may have noticed a steeper increase in players since the start-middle of the week. I jumped on board as well to give it a try, here's what I think. At the start of this whole mass-migration people would post a lot of stories from in-game, all of these had the general theme of PvE survival. "Oh, I was in this town and low on ammo when I encountered this group of players and they were total bros", basically people were playing the mod like STALKER and all was good. Soon though the trend moved towards "I saw a player moving in the distance and I shot on sight because fuck being bros". This outlines the big problem (or maybe it's not a problem but a deliberate design decision, I don't know) of the mod. It's not the PvP which is unbalanced or unfair, it's that the PvE isn't engaging enough to give people a reason to focus on it and cooperate. As it stands once you figure out a way around zombies and sneaking and using throwables the entire allure of PvE scavenging is the thrill of knowing that someone is going to try to engage in surprise PvP with you and so building your strategy around killing other players on sight. I see what you're trying to do with the mod, create a persistent world where players will have to police themselves. I'm sure this will work out great on closed-off RP servers owned by clans, if they're the only niche you're trying to appeal to with this mod then you can stop reading here. If however you want the mod to have mass appeal (or the sort of "mass appeal" that vanilla ARMA has) I think you'll need to make some changes. The game needs structure I'm afraid, there's no way around it. For the same reason ARMA has missions and objectives and isn't "let's put 1000 troops here and 1000 here and program them to hate each other and see what happens" you'll need to do something similar with the mod. If you drop a few dozen players into a big area with guns lying around and don't give them a defined end-goal it will turn into a free-for-all, either immediately or after the "I'll gather guns first and THEN kill people" delay. It's a glorified deathmatch at the moment when it can be something more. Look at games such as The Ship and Epic Mafia, they've managed to convey the feeling of paranoia and distrust while keeping some sort of structure in place by means of player roles and game rules, different players pursue different objectives and get awarded for those objectives while punished for others. Without these in place the only structure the game will have is the structure that comes from players metagaming (ie clanmates playing on a clan server and not shooting on sight because they're friends outside of the game). A lot of games rely on metagaming and teaming up with real-life friends to have fun, that's not a design flaw. What is a design flaw though is making it so difficult to team up with friends. I tried playing it with a guy I know, we started off in totally different places, no matter how many times I tried respawning I wouldn't get anywhere even remotely close to the guy's position. I think something should be done about this. The PvE component needs to be looked into as well, looting or killing zombies or building escape vehicles should give people a reason to cooperate. I can't imagine how this can be done unless actual objectives and missions are built into the game, but I'm sure there's a way to increase player interaction beyond shooting each other.