Humanity

[Redd (DayZ) 0]

The humanity system is weak. Is the ever omniscient babby Jeebu looking over the field of play, deciding who's been a good person and who hasn't, and sprinkling this ultimate truth into the minds of all who roam? No? Well, with the current system it sure seems like it. And let's not even touch on having it regenerate automatically.

If the devs removed global chats completely (without your character having access to a radio system) and removed names from showing on-screen (chat etc.) unless you know, in-character know, the speaker then instead of this magic morality system we currently have, we could have a player controlled system where you:

- Choose to identify yourself to other players or not as the only way to gain or lose trust and reputation. If you're unknown or your actions, good or bad, are unwitnessed then why should your characters reputation be affected? This identification should be a one way process. Once another character knows your character that's it. No toggle.

- Vote on those, and only those, who are identified to you who injure you or injure/kill others if you're party/witness to the act. This can be location based, team based, or however the game already knows who's involved when working out the 'logging off in combat' punishments. Thus you can forgive friends who accidentally injure you in a firefight, give negative rep to people who try to kill you and, if you include a short, rolling log of inventory access too, give known players rep based on hold-ups etc. and which would also have the knock-on effect of helping foster a working trade system.

Example: You notice some supplies missing after hanging out with known survivor Sticky Fingaz. If you noticed within the brief lifespan of the access log you get to rep them down accordingly.

- Separate personal rep from group/faction rep. Allow some manual sharing of rep between characters/groups, so people can build a web of trust.

- Have a particular entity's rep reset on death (obviously, permadeaths for everyone \o/). If you tie this in with rules that mean a character's face/name gets chosen on creation and remains set until death then this feeds into the ability to genuinely role-play a character. The proposed RPG skill system will help deter people from killing themselves for a quick rep reset.

Tl;dr

Characters should be anonymous to others unless they choose not to be, on a character by character basis. On top of that, a character's reputation should not change in the absence of measurable action. i.e. no humanity ticking up for simply existing. And, of course, a lone, unwitnessed murder victim shouldn't be able to negatively flag their attacker to the world, known or not, from beyond the grave. Forensic evidence is there for a reason (or absent if done right :P).

[shiromikan 217]

I like these ideas very much. However, I think the entire system would be very much time consuming on the coding-end.

[jorava 0]

The current system works as a quite elegant solution of keeping track of reputations. I'd suggest that the main problem with it is that it's called humanity which carries a moral implication, suggesting that perhaps the "murderous bandit" way would be less proper form of survival. A quick fix for this would be to change the word from humanity to reputation, as in a real world it would be probable that if you're linked to enough murders (whether they be self defense or PKing) eventually there would be witnesses and you would garner a dubious reputation.

Game mechanically the fact that you don't automatically get to a bandit skin from a single kill is good representation that not everything you do would be witnessed, but do it often enough and it will be (Perhaps adding a simple randomization effect to the mechanic of how much negative reputation it adds could even more accurately depict this, and/or decreasing the amount when no players are in a certain distance from the event).

Also the beauty of this mechanic is that it's simple, it's already in the game, and most of all because people who kill in self-defense are liable to occasionally having a bandit skin, it would still be possible to use social interaction to gain trust (whether you're a PKr or not). Also doing practical favors for others should always have a reputation increasing effect like bandaging, giving blood transfusions etc. though perhaps more limited ones when aiding bandits.

[laserost 0]

If the devs removed global chats completely (without your character having access to a radio system) and removed names from showing on-screen (chat etc.) unless you know' date=' in-character know, the speaker then instead of this magic morality system we currently have, we could have a player controlled system where you:[/i']

I really like this part. Because then people could play around with different identities and call themselves Strider and whatnot.

[Quixotic 26]

Game mechanically the fact that you don't automatically get to a bandit skin from a single kill is good representation that not everything you do would be witnessed' date=' but do it often enough and it will be (Perhaps adding a simple randomization effect to the mechanic of how much morality it adds could even more accurately depict this, and/or decreasing the amount when no players are in a certain distance from the event).

[/quote']

I'm afraid that I turned into a bandit after a single kill out of self defense. One kill. That was a week ago. When I try to help people, I get shot at on sight. There is no way for me to simultaneously survive and regain humanity without camping (especially on hardcore servers). If it worked how you said maybe it would be better, but it doesn't and that's frustrating. IIRC you need 2000 humanity to get back the survivor skin.