The Sanity System: A more balanced approach to Humanity/PvP

[Localhost (DayZ) 0]

:exclamation:I'm preemptively apologizing for the wall of text, but I'll add a tl;dr at the bottom. Enjoy and be sure to give feedback!

Hey guys, I've been reading a lot of the humanity posts lately, and many of them seem to revolve around a visual change to alert other players. I think this is wrong, as it essentially just makes the game a team based shooter with friendly fire (Oh, he has skin A? he's ok. Skin B? shoot on sight). I've been thinking of a new approach to the humanity system. Player Sanity.

First of all, I believe one of the biggest changes that can be made to reduce killing "for the fun" is to remove the Murder/Bandit Killed counters from the debug screen. This will prevent people from seeing it as a score, and trying to maximize it.

Now, on to the Sanity system. Player Sanity would increase slowly over time, as well as when doing acts that currently raise humanity (bandaging/healing others, giving transfusions, etc). Sanity lowers as you do hostile actions, such as killing other players (high penalty), and shooting at other players (very low penalty). Other causes could be added, such as stealing, but I'm unable to think of a way to check stealing vs taking items out of a consenting player's bag, so I tabled that idea, for now. As far as how quickly you can hit low Sanity would require testing and tweaking, but I would ballpark that netting 4 kills within an hour would bring you to slightly low Sanity (so you begin to feel effects) from neutral. As an added effect, there should be no sanity meter in the UI, the player would have to determine the effects on their own.

-High Sanity: Does not have an effect on gameplay, other than having a larger buffer before you fall into Low Sanity.

-Low Sanity: Has a few drawbacks. None of these should be immediately noticeable to a third party. Low Sanity should only have effects noticable to the afflicted player. The lower a player's Sanity, the more common these effects would become.

Effects of low sanity are as follows:

-Visual Hallucinations: My first idea was for the player to have visual hallucinations of survivors in the distance and zombies close by. This would introduce paranoia, possibly forcing the affected player to shoot at/react to things which did not exist, subtly hinting to other players that grouping with this character may not be safe. However, this may not be possible in the current engine.

-Auditory hallucinations: Keeping with that theme, I believe a much easier solution would be auditory hallucinations. Footsteps/zombie groans/gunshots at random intervals could have the same effect (though maybe less effective) without the technical limitations

-"Phantom" Inventory: shifting inventory, "phantom" items that look normal, but appear in the inventory randomly and when used, do nothing but vanish. (Possible drawback: would have to prevent these items from being transferred to other players)

-Inaccurate UI readings: slightly off compass/watch, UI displaying that you are more hungry/thirsty than you currently are, etc. I haven't thought too much about this one, it just dawned on me while writing this post, so it may be a bad idea or may not be feasible in the current engine.

I'm not suggesting that all of these be implemented, they are just ideas, (in order of what I would most like to see to least). Feel free to add more.

Now, I do not believe that killing people should have an unavoidable punishment. That just seems unfair. That is why I suggest a new item, the anti-psychotic.

Anti-psychotics: This item would spawn rarely in the country (Read: almost never), regularly in cities and military outposts, and would be found in large quantities in hospitals. Consuming these would restore Sanity (Amount would have to be tested, maybe restores the amount lost by killing 5 survivors). There would be a cap however. The maximum sanity you can regain through anti-psychotics would be the "neutral" sanity level at a player spawns with. This is to avoid raiding a hospital, pumping yourself full of anti-psychotics to gain high Sanity, then going on a killing spree.

OK, done with my wall of text. Any feedback or suggestions?

TL;DR: Sanity system hidden from UI, lowered by killing/shooting others, raised slowly by default, by healing/transfusing others, or by taking a new item, anti-psychotics(can only restore to neutral level). Low Sanity induces auditory/visual hallucinations, and can add phantom items to inventory. Frequency of effects depends on Sanity level. At no point should sanity level be immediately apparent to anyone, including the affected player. Third parties will only be able to infer the sanity of another player by observing their actions.

[i wub pugs 16]

This has been discussed at length. It is yet another mechanic that punishes one style of play while awarding another.

It will not be implemented.

If I butcher my wife and three children when I get home today will I suddenly start to have any of these effects? Who is to say I am insane?

Sanity is a perception and perceptions only hold weight in society. Day Z is the absence of society.

The real trick would be to build a new society within the game and to do so with all the temptations of bullet and bean hording.

[Blaise 1]

I'm against punishing banditism and player killing. The things you mention create small annoyances to bandits. It does not fix the reason why people are killing people.

I wrote a post that raises the question why people are likely to choose to play as a bandit: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=12106&pid=112788#pid112788 If we can pinpoint the root problem, we can find real solutions.

[Strategos (DayZ) 190]

Well said PUGS.

[SEF 0]

bandits=crazy junkies

Yes, its not easy to work humanity out

[Localhost (DayZ) 0]

This has been discussed at length. It is yet another mechanic that punishes one style of play while awarding another.

I'm against punishing banditism and player killing. The things you mention create small annoyances to bandits. It does not fix the reason why people are killing people.

I don't believe that it punishes the play-style of player killing any more than having ammunition implemented punishes the play-style of firing your weapon(edit: and certainly less than the common threads suggesting forced appearance changes). If you choose to player kill regularly' date=' there is another item that you must seek out. Since the anti-psychotics would be fairly common occurrence in military outposts (where most PKers go to get more ammo), it would not be too much of an extra hassle, disregarding the inventory space taken. It will however (hopefully) fix players who sit on a hill and disconnect/reconnect to restore their ammo, by forcing them to move to look for anti-psychotics.

If I butcher my wife and three children when I get home today will I suddenly start to have any of these effects? Who is to say I am insane?

Sanity is a perception and perceptions only hold weight in society. Day Z is the absence of society.

Killing other human beings does put a massive strain on a person's sanity. DayZ still has a society, though a fractured one. Killing people for spot fits the dictionary definition of insane, even in the world of DayZ.

[clever 12]

Firstly, I've seen this suggested multiple times, use the search bar next time before you suggest something that has been discussed to death. Secondly, this still won't discourage playing a bandit people will still play it and kill people if they want to. We don't even have to discourage banditry, it's apart of the game.

If you're suggesting that only insane people would not have any ill effect from killing innocent people, then you could argue the only people who would survive an apocalypse like this would be people who are extremely lucky, and sociopaths because they'll be able to do tough things to survive without any emotional effect.

[Shroom 12]

This is not realistic in the least. I vote no.

[Blaise 1]

Killing other human beings does put a massive strain on a person's sanity. DayZ still has a society' date=' though a fractured one. Killing people for spot fits the dictionary definition of insane, even in the world of DayZ.

[/quote']

I agree that it should be considered insane and that it puts a strain on your brain, insane in the membrane, but I don't find hallucinations realistic. Being attacked constantly by both zombies and bandits would also have a tremendous effect on the brain.

IRL, you need human company, humans are social animals. In DayZ, people do team up, but there are also too many loners, sniping away from their ivory towers. Removal of the side channel was a good start. It makes you feel more alone. " has died" could be removed from the side channel. Increases the loneliness even more. Just remove the side channel entirely. I don't care about joins, quits and battleye messages.

Teams are not the solution to everything, but at least in a team, you have to account for your actions. And it's also more natural to have teams roaming around, naturally suspicious towards other groups, but also curious to find new players in this desolate world.

[i wub pugs 16]

There is a fallacy in this. If I have chosen to take steps to become insane and I have done so purposely, why would I need to seek out anti-psychotics? Oh yes, because you are seeking to implement a mechanic that punishes me for making a decision to play a specific way.

Murdering people en masse does not necessarily make you insane in a cartoonish/cliche sense.

If the Nazis that marched millions of Jews into gas chambers weren't sane then they wouldn't have been as diligent or proficient at their work. Someone who belongs in a straight jacket or requires a lobotomy would not be able to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion.

It's amazing what training/indoctrination/inclination can do to a person.

The KKK have no need for training or indoctrination as they have members that are willing to commit murderous acts simply because they have a negative inclination against "inferiors".

Another example? Ted Bundy was a cool, calm and collected man who put up quite an amazing self-defense in his trials and he was a mass murderer.

[haviv[3rdid] 57]

We'd all go insane if we had to watch zombies munching on our friends.

[i wub pugs 16]

Or become desensitized.

Nah, I'm leaning on desensitized. A zombie eating your friend is no worse than watching your friend be burned alive in a HMMWV. Or watching your child be blown to bits by a mine.

The human mind is much harder to break when you actually start putting stress on it.

[tenbucc2 0]

while i agree with Pug i also think that due to the game's nature... if one were to max out their morality meter to its negative limitation, a bout of auditory hallucinations might be a good end result. give you bandits something to achieve