TheCoconutChef

I'm certain your intent is not to punish them, but the suggestions are punitive none the less. They are all disincentive as opposed to incentive. There is less ammo, gun fight are more difficult, firing your gun is more dangerous etc. All of those things are designed to curtail or prevent a certain behavior, which is the definition of a disincentive. I know I don't. PvP ain't my style (I got shot at a gaz station with my FN trying to be friendly to two guy even thought I had a perfectly clear shot and they didn't know I was there). The problem isn't that ammos and guns are "plentiful", since this is a necessary condition for PvP but not a sufficient one. In short, no guns means no PvP, but guns don't necessarly mean PvP. It's a risk-reward problem, an incentive problem. As correctly pointed out, one of those is that "all road leads to PvP", which is not so much a problem of Guns as it is a problem of Goals. The second problem is that Cooperation is almost actively disincentivized because of the way the game is set up, which leaves only PvP as default. There's a vicious circle at play, and you can see the first link of my sign (Lemon Market) if you want to know what I think it is. I will say however that I'm in favor of "events". But, more importantly, I'm in favor of Goals. There's lots of space for creativity there.

The problem with a skill system is that it artificially prevent new people from experiencing part of the game, which is to the advantage of the more experienced player. Also, your plan will backfire. If my character is even more precious because of skilled gained, then how does that encourage me to trust other people? Why shouldn't I shoot them all? It's safer if my goal is to protect my skill level. Currently, cooperation is an extra-game mechanic. You have to know the other person outside the game (voicechat, forum) in order to build trust. Your suggestion doesn't change that.

I'm sorry to say that there is a basic flaw in your reasonning: You don't MASSIVELY overhaul something which got MASSIVELY popular. You run the very real risk of of ruinning what made it good in the first place. The problem with what you suggest starts with your categorization of player, which is too particular and tailor-made specifically to suit your needs, namely: to exclude PvP oriented player. Those misconceptions are also why your categorization got to have so many exceptions and subtelties (ie. "they can be mixed, there's overlap" etc). There's two type of player which can be categorized by their in-game function: 1) PvP oriented 2) Non PvP oriented And that's it. Sometime a player is one, sometimes he's the other, and both have a function and a different way of having fun. The only thing right with your post is the recognition of the fact that, right now, the game is unbalanced toward PvP player, which suggests different type of solution, of which you only choose one, which is punish PvPer. But considering that one player can be a PvPer sometimes, and a non PvPer some other times, the only thing you end up doing is punishing everyone and, since your desire is to decrease PvP, you have to compensate for the removal of that massive gameplay feature with a bunch of other stuff which are completely foreign to the game. PvP gets replaced by a skill system and an event system. This is now a completely different game than the one that got so massively successfull. (By the way all of your solution will eventually backfire: a skill system will only increase the difference between experienced player and noob, scarcer ammos and guns means more incentive to shoot the guy with even little gears, events will become mass firing zone and all of this still leads to PvP as the end game.)

So did you actually want to understand why the game is "getting" boring or was it just a rant without reason? I can tell you the game isn't getting boring because of the glitches or the hackers, that would be cause for frustration but not boredome. The game is boring because there is no goal setting involved in the game, as in BF3, in which, even though it's always the same thing, does not get boring because of the fact there is always a Goal -> Challenge -> Victory/Defeat cycle. The problem right now is that, once you get geared up, no such goal is possible except for getting vehicule, and then maybe setting up a camp and keeping it. The point is that goal setting can be quite difficult. Were those present and hackers and glitched still present, people would be pissed but they wouldn't be bored.

The only problem with this is that as of right now the only goal one can have is to get better gears. Aside from that there really is nothing else wich offers any kind of good game setup ie. Goal -> Challenge -> Victory/Defeat

I'm not liking this on bit either but the reality is that we have neither the skill nor the reputation to have earned a place around the discussion table. As far as I know there isn't really any place in any game ever in which your input is guaranteed to get a response unless there is somebody in the staff who is completely dedicated to interacting with the community. You should develop your toughts a little more though. Why would an RPG system be bad? How would it break the game? How would it not adress the problems it's supposed to fix or change the game experience in a way which isn't positive? You're taking it as a given that we should all be pissed off.

I get your point, but I try never to think in terms of real world and always in terms of kinds of gaming experiences. You don't respawn in the real world either. Short term I agree. But longer term? Think that, right now, in the game, that person would NEVER roll up to you to ask to be friend. He'd kill you right away or avoid you. Current game mechanic makes this almost unavoidable and people have to go around it in order to make cooperation happen (they have to use this forum and third party communication software). I get that they are part of DayZ but what I'm trying to say is that other things could be part of it on top of it but right now they are almost actively prohibited. I'm not talking about preventing banditry, I'm talking about giving people who want to cooperate some way of getting information. I'm not saying that trying to get this information should not get you killed some times or that betrayal could not happen. See below. --- I have an extremly (albeit more precise) similar proposition which, like yours, entail that you get close to the person in order to get reliable info (maybe 20-30 meters? closer?). That way, those who want to kill at sight just do (in my system, those kills aren't even recorded) and those who want to cooperate have a chance to ask themselves "should I get closer to see what this guy is about"? There's several way of doing this.

So you've been playing on a server for a little while now as a lone wolf and you've got some good gears. As you're running on the outskirt of some village, you see two survivor scavanging some buildings. You think it'd be nice to team up with them and so you hide and announce yourself on the chat. You know it's risky but you feel it's worth a shot. You talk a little with them and they seem friendly enough, so you decide to start approaching and, of course, as you do, they shoot you in the face. You then remember that you should "trust no one" and you tell yourself that, next time you see someone, you're gonna shoot him right away or hide until he's gone and, even if somebody claim to be friendly, .These situations happens all the time and there's something common to all of them. The seller has more information than the buyer. If it isn't obvious to you why this particular element is what is breaking the "cooperation market", let me explain. I'm assuming there's two person: somebody who wants to cooperate (a "buyer" of cooperation) and somebody whose cooperation is wanted (a "seller" of cooperation). Let's assume furthermore that there are two types of player: cooperator and bandit, the first one wanting to cooperate and second one wanting to kill everyone, and that bandit form 20% of the players. Now what happens in the context of no information? As a buyer, regardless of wether or not the guy you want to cooperate with is a bandit or a cooperator, both of them have all the incentive to answer positively to your demand for cooperation, and I would argue the bandit even more so than the genuine cooperator and you can't distinguish between them. Screwing you over is just too tempting and, even with only 20% assumed bandit, it's enough to tell you not to take the risk or, put another way, it's enough to keep you out of the market. As a buyer, you never know who you're buying from, you only know there's a good chance of getting killed, and this is enough for you never to initiate contact with anyone. The skin system does nothing to adress this, as a survivor skin is not precise enough to tell you anything about the person you're "buying" from. There's no rellevent information attached to it. How did this person react to other cooperation request? Did he betray or got betrayed? Did he politely refuse to past request and let the other person go? Because of this, we find ourselves in a situation in which betrayors (bandit) are strongly incentivized to put themselves on the market (to betray) and those who want to cooperate will tend to withdraw (because there's too much risk) so that the only person left on the market are bandits, and cooperator stay hidden. Bad business drives out the good. Thus : "Trust no one". (This moto, by the way, is not for bandit. It's for people who are likely to offer their trust or, said another way, it's an advice telling cooperator to stay out of the market) This situation is exactly identical to the one described in this article, and the solution to it is, therefore, exactly the same. We need a better information system. I didn't really know where else to put this and I believe it's accurate enough to have it in writing. So discussion is welcomed I guess.

It could but then the question is: as a player that has been getting all this gear for the better part of a weak, why should I risk coming into contact with people that may kill or betray me to do something which somebody else could do? If I let somebody else do it, then I'll gain just as much advantage as if I did it myself without any of the risks. Realizing that this would be true for every player (this is the Free Rider Problem, by the way) then you must realize that you'll have a problem in the way the mechanic has been set up.

The problem is that the skin provides very indiscriminate information. There is no context as to when or how who got killed got killed. Some bandit may be approachable (good cooperation or refusal stat) even though he snipped lots of people. The first objection doesn't seem to hold to me since the point is to give the cooperative minded people some tools and not necessarly to deter those that want an fps experience. Furthermore, the moto "trust no one" seems to point in the other direction. Artificailly bolstering the human hunter / camper that already exists may be an issue however. Though the goal of the proposals were not to protect those who just spawned. As I said, you have to die within a certain range of group members in order for this to work. If you still thinks it's unfaire (even though it's randomly selected item, a few) then I can't think of anything better for now.

I'm not sure you realize how much my proposals are about letting everyone play as they wish. If you want to bandit as a lone wolf, there's nothing in what I've said that would prevent or hinder that. Furthermore, clean shooting without any sort of cooperation attempt will give you most of the loot. I see no way of avoiding it during an invite procedure, but there could be a way of doing it with regards to group, which is that your items would only be given back to you upon making contact with all or one of the members, but they would not be with you upon respawn. The problem with that is that then it's not much different than your group looting your body to give you back your stuff. It's only advantageous if the whole of them gets killed or if they can't stay around to get the stuff manually.

Is the increase in zombie server wide or local? That is, say that a bunch of people get killed by zombies in a certain zone, then does that particular zone get more zombies, or is it the whole server who does? I personnally would favor the first option, as it would give each server and each game with its own history (althought I suspect the same thing would happen to the same area from time to timem there would be this tendency). I support the general idea, however. Making server grow dynamically and respond to the players action is a good thing most of the time. I do not, on the other hand, support this idea of a gaz cure. There is also another problem, which is that cooporation is not encouraged on a level which is individual enough. As a player, I may realize that there are more zombies in a certain place because general cooperation has been low, but then there is nothing to say that I should be the one taking responsability for it, that I should take the risk for it. If somebody else does it, I'm gonna have all of the advantages and none of the risks.

They are two things a player is after in this game, which are fun and inventory, which is to say that these are the two things each player tries to maximize. This means that the behavior one is most likely to see in the game are those which maximize those outcome or, said another way, minimize their opposite and it thus follow that the way player act will be in line with the way they are rewarded by the game in those areas. The basic problem of this game when it comes to player interaction is that: Incentive to kill > Incentive to cooperate Both of which relates to fun and inventory. The incentive to kill are higher in terms of fun because the risk of trying to cooperate is too great, which is to say you're all too likely to get killed and so maximizing pleasure is equivalent, in those instances, to killing the other guy, since it will minimize your unpleasure. They are also higher in terms of inventory for a couple of reasons. First, cooperating means the possibility of loosing all of your inventory. Second, cooperating means renouncing the other dudes's inventory, which is often better than what you can get in any other places. Third, teaming up with people means splitting found inventory, so that the overall build up is much slower. In order to fix these problems, we need a situation in which: Icentive to kill ~ Incentive to cooperate Which can be done in three ways: 1) Reduce risks associated with cooperation 2) Reduce the reward of killing other player (which I'm against) 3) Increase reward of cooperation The second option is not to be considered, since punishing certain behavior only breaks the game for some without fixing it for all the others, while a blanket punishment on murder would be too imprecise to satisfy anyone. Furthermore, the goal is not to prohibit but to encourage. We still need maniacs to make the game interesting, after all. And I even believe that my system would encourage the cooperation of several maniacs, which is better than having several lone ones. As such, I believe certain new game mechanics could accomplish these goals. 1) The creation of a group entity. This is only important to the extend that it is prerequisite to suggestion 2 and 3. 2) The creation of an "invite" or "cooperation" command, associated with certain statistics. It would work as follow: a player could come closer to certain player and send a "cooperation" command to them, which would be a way for him to include them in his group or to demand to join their. As soon as this invitation is sent, being killed will not be as badly punished as it normally is (for the inviter) and the position of the inviter will be revealed, as well as his stats*. Upon your (the inviter) possible death, some of your item would respawn with you and those that did would disappear from your body. Furthermore, at a certain range, one would be able to see the response stats I'm talking about, which would be: i) Positive response ii) Refusal iii) Violent refusal iv) Betrayal A refusal is a "no" without killing. A violent refusal is a "no" with killing shortly after. A betrayal is an acceptation and then killing. The game would not punish nor reward anyone based on those, but, at a certain range, this information would be avalaible to other players. The effects are twofold: i) It reduces the risk of cooperation by making death less costly ii) It reduces the risk of cooperation by making relevant information avalaible (as of right now, lack of information skew the balance toward undiscriminated killing) As implied, a timer would be set from the moment a cooperation invite is refused so as to allow the other players to go away safely. You can still kill him, but some of his gears will go away with him (randomly), more if he was in a group (see below) and this information will be known to other players who comes within a certain range of your character. (Why within a certain range? To keep the tension of people asking themselves: "should I approach"?) It is worth noting that straight kill without any sort of cooperation status (say, an ambush or snipping) is not recorded in that system. 3) The third proposition is inventory safe keeping. If you are in a group, then the amount of gear you keep with you as you respawn is proportionnal to the size of your group and how close you were to them when you died. When I said than my proposal would encourage the formation of groups of maniacs, I was referring to this. The gear that respawned with you would be randomly selected and would disappear from your dead body (so as to make exploit non feasable). The gear would be randomly selected so as to not deter PvP which, as stated earlier, is encourage by the fact the looting possibilities are very good. Now there would be a potential for them to be, an almost certainty, but the item you wanted most may not be there. 4) The fourth proposal is too general but still deserves mention: make zombies more lethal. This post is already too long and is more than enough to start a discussion if there is an interest, so I'll leave it at that. *If an invite is sent and the inviter shoots you in any way, his protection falls of. He will not respawn with his items.