Rzach

No they did not go crazy. My grandfather served in the Pacific Theater during WWII. He was not crazy. He had nightmares decades later about the men he killed. His hands shook from the stress he experienced during the war. He got shot through the lung and survived and yet he was scarred for life. He would cry for the men he killed and for their families loss. He felt guilt that wouldn't go away. He turned to drinking to ease the pain and smoking cigarettes to help with his hands shaking. He lived a very full life and was loved by everyone around him. He was a good man and he helped raise me. Of all the people I have know he is the one I respect the most. It is because of the respect that I don't try and pretend like killing people has no consequence on a persons mentality. Those soldiers who fought in WWII paid a price few people can understand. Killing may not drive you mad or make you crazy but it does affect you. To say it doesn't is to disrespect all the veterans who have been through combat. Law is not the only reason people don't kill. Most adults come to realize that another persons life is just as valuable as their own. Most adults have empathy for others.

Never said they were all sociopaths. Just said that sociopaths don't suffer the same mental consequences for killing. Many non sociopathic individuals have killed. They suffer all kinds of mental trauma for doing so. Stress and regret are two of the most common.

Watched it. Read it. They still don't shoot on sight. While violence may ensue after meeting others they always start by giving warnings and talking things out. If the Walking Dead was KOS then Rick would have been shot when he first found the group. Michonne would have been killed at the fence. Hershel would have killed the group when they approached his farm. And so on. The show at least tries for realism. You get to see the types of trauma the group suffers both mentally and physically from the violence they are continuously surrounded by. I don't think many of the nay sayers have really read my idea. My idea is not to stop KOS but to fix it. Currently there are a type of player that engages in griefing. They don't eat or drink they just kill everyone with whatever weapon they can find. They will starve to death or die of dehydration because they don't use supplies. Have any of you all ran into the axe wielding maniacs who just leave piles of bodies in their wake? The only thing I like about them is when they move on you can get some decent gear easily since they just leave the bodies alone. There are people who camp the hills above Kamyshovo killing the new guys just as they spawn in. KOS is a video game mentality. It is a form of metagaming. In real life people don't respawn so in an apocalypse humans are a limited resource. That is not the case in a game where when you die you get to respawn as a new survivor along the coast. In real life if a person was killing everyone they met they would either get killed themselves thus ending the problem permanently or they would run out of people to kill. Anyways my idea is simply to make combat a bit more immersive and put a cost on doing it. It fixes the KOS problem by simply making things have consequences. Specifically it was meant to address the crazy KOS guys who don't even try to survive. If you are a bandit or just want to stay safe then the system will have minimal impact on you. Notice I suggest a 10 minute delay between getting stress and when the symptoms kick in. This means that the first kill only causes five minutes of hand shaking. If you want to kill others without consequence you can just get some meds to take to stop the symptoms. It also gives a reason to go back into cities once hunting and the like are put in the game. It could even be done as a server option that could be disabled if needed. As a note to all of the people who seem to think this is based on some kind of morality or such: Sorry it is not. The idea is based upon the science of how our brain operates. The frontal lobes are the actual reason people aren't just murder machines in real life. People are simply wired to not kill each other normally. While a person can be pushed to the point that they do kill it results in mental trauma and stress. There are tons of studies in neuroscience about the effects of violence on the human brain. I still want the game to be violent and dangerous. I don't want it to be mindless and boring though. The violence in the game should be methodical and scary. It shouldn't be a bunch of respawning clowns running around the starting areas murdering everything like a game of unreal tournament.

You all should probably read my post in depth. My idea is not to punish players with a system that permanently messes them up. In fact if you read it I even point out there should be a time delay between killing a person and gaining stress and the effects setting in. If you aren't a player that just goes on rampages throughout the game this system will not really hinder you. It even has mechanics that would allow those who want to KOS to do so. You would simply need the meds to stop the effects of stress. The only players who would really have a problem are the campers who set up shop in a city and kill everyone who is there until they run out of ammo or get taken out. Anyone who wants to kill another person for their gear could still do so. You would just have a small time frame to not have consequences. Once the effects set in you either use drugs to control them or find a safe spot and let them fade over time. The system is not meant to stop KOS but instead make you deal with the consequences of your actions. It is not intended to be completely realistic. It is intended to make a person think about what they are doing and plan for it. Basically lets say you get into a fire fight with two bandits. You kill them and then you either take meds when the slight hand shaking begins or you get away from other players and let the shakes subside. Lets say you have a rifle and you want to survive by killing others. You kill the players and take their gear. You hunt down meds that will stop the side effects of stress. You rinse and repeat. You are still able to KOS but now you need to adjust your play style to deal with the consequences.

Your brain would still feel empathy. People are simply wired for it. Stress is realistic. Any response that states that because society isn't there anymore that you would no longer feel any stress from killing is simply false. Your brain is wired for it unless you have a mental disorder. Any argument that states that you would be different because you survived the apocalypse is false. Your brain chemistry and wiring will not change due to you surviving. You would still feel stress and suffer for it. This doesn't even touch upon the fact that people who go extended periods without contact with other people develop a variety of mental disorders. If I wanted realism I would want a depression meter in the game. As your life got more bleak you would become more likely to just kill yourself. I don't want realism. I want consequences for my actions. Otherwise this game is simply another COD game where I spawn, find a gun, kill, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

Actually there is a problem. If real soldiers can't just fire blindly without consequence how can a game claim to be an authentic experience without having repercussions. BTW, I KOS. The way the game currently stands there is no reason for me to help you because a single m4 round to the head will kill you. And then I get all of your gear. I see it as a valid survival strategy for a shooter game. But this game is supposed to be an authentic experience. That means there should be consequences.

The military has proven time and again that even trained soldiers will find themselves unable to fire at another living being if given enough time to think about. It takes a split second to feel empathy for another living being. Your brain, unless you have an antisocial spectrum disorder, is wired for empathy as an adult. If you have empathy you will suffer consequences for killing. This isn't some kind of weird morality but simple brain chemistry. Killing another person causes mental trauma that can take decades to overcome and may not be able to be dealt with at all. I am not saying to stop the killing. I am saying let people suffer something for having done it.

Alright so I am really getting annoyed with KOS. For a game that tries to make an "authentic" zombie survival simulator this game really fails to effectively deal with KOS. First is real life people actually have a hard time killing other people unless they are acting under strong emotional duress or they are naturally wired to not be empathic (psychopathic or aspd individuals). People who are not mentally equipped to be killers suffer from a variety of problems when they take another persons life. The military and the police both spend millions of dollars to provide ongoing training to their members so they can instill a shoot first, think about consequences later reaction. They also spend millions on counselling to try and deal with the after math of their members having to shoot at other people. Unless DAYZ is trying to be a game about people with antisocial personality disorder surviving the zombie apocalypse there needs to be some mechanic that deals with KOS. I propose that the developers introduce a stress mechanic. If you kill another person you gain stress. Stress depletes with time and can be stopped temporarily by having antidepressants or stimulants. As your stress level goes up it would take longer periods of time to go decrease and it would have a couple of debilitating effects on the character. First stress shouldn't immediately bother your character. It should go up rapidly but the effects should take a few minutes or more to begin to set in. At low levels it should cause your hands to shake so your aiming is messed up and you still lose food and water from containers when you use them. This would be the stress level of someone who has killed one or two people recently. At moderate levels it should make you more prone to getting infections and diseases. This is accurate to real life as stress has been proven to make your immune system decrease it's effectiveness. The hand shaking should become more pronounced. Your character should need food and water more frequently as their appetite increases due to stress. This is the stress level of someone who has killed 3 to 5 people recently. At high levels it should make you bleed out faster as the stress increases your blood pressure. Infections should be even easier to acquire and harder to get rid of. And the hand shaking should become very severe. If you want more realism you should have characters at this level of stress sometimes fail to shoot their weapon when the mouse button is clicked.This is the stress level of someone who has killed more than 5 people recently. Antidepressants should temporarily make the hand shaking go away but have no actual effect on the stress level. You could even include other drugs which would alleviate the hand shaking even better like muscle relaxants, opiates (another use for morphine), or other narcotics. Antidepressants and other drugs should be very rare. If more realism is wanted a character should have a 1 in 25 chance of being immune to stress to simulate the natural occurrence of antisocial disorders among people. A character shouldn't know they are antisocial until they kill someone and don't have any reaction to it. This system won't stop KOS but should discourage it. Players who wish to go on murderous rampages or kill every other player they meet would be able to hunt for drugs that would suppress the symptoms they experience. Or they could just go out into the woods away from other players for a while and let the symptoms fade over time as the stress level goes down. The symptoms should have an onset time of about 10 minutes. This would allow players who are being shot at to respond without having to worry to much. Then if they retreat or hide for a bit the symptoms should fade. It should take about 15 minutes for a single kills worth of stress to fade. For more realism you could simply add in the ability to have a stroke or heart attack from stress. The stroke or heart attack would have a small chance to kill you but normally would just cause you to lose a large chunk of blood. Or you could add in auditory hallucinations like weapons being loaded and footsteps nearby to simulate the paranoia a person would begin to feel under such combat related stress. Anyways thats my idea for dealing with the KOS mentality. As the game currently stands I feel that it becomes a bit to much of a game and less of an experience because the fact is that killing others has no effect on you unlike real life. If the game is about normal survivors then they should not be able to just become murder machines without suffering some kind of debilitating mental damage. Most of the KOS I have witnessed has been the kind of behavior that would flag a person as being mentally unstable in real life. Thanks for your time, rzach