The Moral Compass

[Brittanica 26]

My suggestion has to do with a revised - character development system - which acts like a moral compass and guides the player through the empty field of Chernarusk. The longer you survive, the more immune a player gets to certain intens experiences. Right now, the only thing lost at death is your gear. The succes behind this mod is the giving fact that 'you are never safe'. I think the assumption that 'the longer you live, the more you have to loose' is a neccesary addition which hasn't been presented yet.

So how does this 'moral compass' work and how does it change playerbehaviour? I've added some pictures to show you guys the mechanics behind it, dont mind the appearence for now.

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The Lifeline.

Your lifeline is a new icon which consists out of 3 elements; Bloodlevel indicator, Mood indicator and Experience. By combining these elements into a single icon, you can get a quick and detailed view of your current life and it's history so far (I know they're trying to clean up the interface, maybe this is a good substitute for the current icons).

• Bloodlevel indicator - Shows your current bloodlevel/health.
  
• Mood indicator - Shows your current moodstatus (read on).
  
• Experience level - Shows how experienced you are as a survivor (read on).
  

If the moodindicator drops to a lower point then your current experience level, psychological effects are gonna start taking place.

What is Experience Level?

Experience level is a simple indication of all that you've been through so far. Someone who manages to survive for a week has more knowledge about survival then a 'newly spawned'. All the experience points gained together make up a certain a experience level which influences your psyche. The factors which influence your experience level can be divided into two categories;

Constant.

1. Timebased - Every hour of survival you gain a certain amount of experience, no matter what you do.
   

Variable.

1. Zombiekills - Zombiekills make up for a certain amount of experience.
   
2. Encounters - Encounters with 'strangers' make up for a certain amount of experience (depending on type of interaction). For example; Providing medical care, killing a player/bandit, studieing a dead body, giving someone a lift.
   
3. Player actions - Certain player actions make up for a certain amount of experience. For example; Hunting animals, repairing a vehicle, finding a crashsite.
   

All your experience added up together makes up your experience level.

What is the Moodindicator?

The moodindicator represents your moral, and is influenced by both your basic and emotional needs.

Basic needs have a strong temporary influence on your morale, while emotional suffering can take it's toll for a much longer period of time.

Basic Needs

• Hunger - Food.
  
• Thirst - Drinks.
  
• Comfort - Weather conditions, time of day, enviroment and playerpose influence this factor. For example; Running or proning for to long without taking a rest, driving a car (+), swimming during the rain and climbing steep hills.
  
• Illness - Injuries, temperature and amount of rest. For example; Injuries gained take time to heal back to normal status.
  

Emotional Needs

• Fear - The amount of fear generated per encounter is determined by a couple of factors. Amount of players/zeds, distance to subject and gunshots heared. For example; If its your first encounter with a player you run scared, if shots can be heared you become afraid and the more zeds are chasing you, the more likely you are to shit your pants while running for cover.
  
• Guilt - The amount of guilt generated is determined by a couple of factors. Killing a player, a bandit (+) or friend (-). Not burrieing a friend, picking loot of a dead body and stealing from a tent. Though this all might sound like consequences, these are actually the actions which give you a high amount of experience as well. So the more experienced one becomes, the less chance of psychological effects taking place. The first time you shoot someone, it's gonna give you a huge amount of guilt, but once you continue along this path it wont effect you as much anymore as it did the first time.
  
• Loneliness - The amount of loneliness generated is determined by the amount of playerinteractions. The type of playerinteraction taking place can have a positive (medical aid, giving supplies) or negative (shooting at a player, looting a corpse) influence. This need becomes absolete once a 'friend' is in your presence. However, if one of you dies a player can become lonely for a long time.
  
• Happyness - The amount of happyness generated is determined by the type of gear you possess. The better your gear, the happier you become. Think of running into a crashsite and managing to get a high-end gun without taking casualties, doesn't that make you happy?

Psychological Effects Triggered

I'm in a bad mood, so what?

You have just shot an innocent man in the middle of supermarket while he was looking for food, it's your first murder and this doesn't affect you? You have all the makings of a monster. Though your starting to feel guilty, you are becoming less afraid of doing it again.

You lost all the gear you had stored in your tent, doesn't this make you feel unhappy? I bet you would go and steal someone elses shit next time you run into it. These are things that definetly effect your mood!

Triggers.

Your experience level is displayed on the lifeline icon top-down, and once your moodindicator drops further then your experience level, psychological effects are starting to take place. This effects how your character behaves in certain situations without playercontrol.

The further the moodindicator drops from the experience level, the more extreme a situation becomes for your character.

This means that a player with little or less experience has more chance of screaming like a little girl when running into a bunch of zeds then the experienced survivor who kills zombies for fun.

The image below shows a lifeline for the new survivor as well as the experienced survivor. As you can see, the new survivor will have these effects taking place while the experienced one hasn't triggered any yet, though the moodindicator is at exactly the same point. Experience is the key to the survival!

Psychological effects in detail.

3 Stages.

The bigger the difference between your expererience level and moodindicator, the more intense your character's behaviour will be.

Psychological effects can be categorized in the 3 stages; Controlled, Uncontrollable and Extreme.

Overview of all psychological effects.

Making friends.

New Player-2-player-interaction

Making friends is a player interaction which happens between 2 survivors. Once friends, both players influence eachothers mood and get to share exp. points as long as they're in eachohters sight. Food and drinks can be shared as well. As it is now, the newly spawn can just team up with his old teammates, but with this suggestion implemented he's more likely to give away their location by screaming for help once a shot goes off and become the weakest link in the group. Loosing friends to death can cost you as well if you dont burry them properly.

What happens when you die?

You loose all the experience gained in your past life, and have to start over - shitting your pants again when encountering your first zed.

Friendships end and a new adventure lies ahead.

Have fun!

Edited November 18, 2012 by gooogle

[wolfstriked 143]

I love this and posted something similar yet very simple compared to your awesome suggestions yrs back.There is a shaking and ranting effect when your low in health that I feel when around infected that they should aggro from it if close enough.First time it happened I was like WTF Rocket your brilliant but found it not utilized fully.Another idea to add is what happened to me by accident.I was shaking and started screaming when a zed walked by and suddenly my character started running.Its actually my keyboard and that the W sticks that caused it but at the time it fit perfectly with the ranting effect.I was pressing A to counter and thought it was my character freaking out and just running and was trying to prevent it by fighting with A and D keys.This could tie in with your extreme panic level and be a very good way to instill fear of infected when players have none.

[colekern 1364]

I don't think a sanity meter or exp points should be added, but I do like the modified health indicator idea.

Edited November 18, 2012 by colekern

[Dreygar (DayZ) 178]

You posted this on another thread, so I will post my reply here. All in all, while well thought out I do not like it. The reason why is simple. Much like the bandit skins, I do not think a players choices within the world should affect gameplay in any way shape or form.

If I stumble upon a tent I feel like I won the lottery; I do not feel guilt.

If I encounter another player and decide their valuables are more valuable than their life and I take it, I may feel bad but short-lived as I now have some needed things for me to survive.

My character is the avatar, I am the player. Any psychological effects would be against me. Just doesn't work for me and it would probably frustrate me to the point of not playing if anything. I play this game because I can do whatever I want to do, it is my world and my story.

[Roac 19]

While some of it is reasonable, about the same portion is not. For example, not picking up items for 10 minutes when in order to get happiness up you would require to find loot... which you now can't pick up.

[Happymrsnowman 52]

This is one of the best thought out suggestions I have ever read. Absolutely fantastic. You have my beans!

[Failbait 60]

absolutely no thank you

[logan23 118]

Interesting concept and very thought out, but there are some issues....

If this was not DayZ and more of a "The Sims" game then this would work.

Where the biggest issues is that you take control out of the player and dictate what the player should feel.

Now in DayZ we have broken bones and feeling shock or cold which you could point to but in your system it trains the player to have to look at their meter and say I must do X not because I want to but because if i don't then I'm on the verge of the Extreme Loneliness and I will start screaming if chased by an Infected(pack).

Your trying to simulate human psychological reactions by telling players- you feel guilty, you feel happy, etc

These emotions can be felt by the player in real life and don't need to be dictated by the game mechanics.

You have it titles as Moral Compass but it doesn't function as one but more of a system of control psychological behavior and telling players how they must feel if their meter = X.

I can see your system working more in the area of altering the player's face's expression.

You could have different facial expressions that will be able to give a player an idea that this player is a loner, or etc.

By making it cosmetic and just hints at the player's play-style/or most recent play-style; and this won't place any restrictions on the player or force them to do things they don't want to just to get their modifier for X up so their meter is at a better level.

I know you might not think players will do this type of micromanagement to get their bar to X, but they will.

We have seen this in MMOs where players min -max their stats so they give out the best healing or best DPS.

You would see players saying hey can i group so I can get this modifier up. This would make DayZ from a game where you decide how you want to play to a tactical game of numbers for this bars.

We already see some of this with gear.

Again, the system is very detailed and well structured but it will not work as you have it in DayZ due to what i listed above.

[Roark92 90]

yeah you wrote it out very well and explained it very well, naturally i think some of it is very good. but when it comes to things like screaming when being chased by zeds... we dont really need that do we? hell when i started playing and zombies chased me i think i did scream irl! lol and i ran like hell away from them too! i dont think it needs to be simulated via the game. also i know that we get used to zeds and they no longer scare us, but thats the experience that you are describing, only the experience is within the player and not the avatar. same with killing/stealing. its actually NOT easy for everyone to do, some people actually do feel conflicted doing it, within themselves, not because the game dictates it.

that being said though, it is an issue when you are trying to make each new character an entirely separate character from the previous one... since we obviously dont die with our characters and we retain all that experience and knowledge... so yeah its a bit of an iffy one. SOMETHING should be done though for sure to make player lives more important than just the gear on their back. but i don't think it should necessarily be this extreme.

[DiazWaffleCrabstro 39]

My moral compas is simple, if a player has a gun or hatchet out, and i face an OMG ITS COMING STRAIGHT FOR US situation, i will shoot w/o hesitation, If i see a ghilley with a sniper raised and he drops on a knee and turns towards me, same end result. period.

[Trizzo 632]

A far more developed and interesting concept that most posts on "compass" or karma etc but it can't escape the fact that it is part of the same problem. Linear gameplay mechanics and systems that define a characters psychological disposition are not part of the dayz mission statement.

The game is about me. My story. I'm not controlling an abstract avatar with its own unique personality and inadequacies. I bring to DayZ my own skills, my own level of intuition and situational awareness.

When I get the adrenaline shakes (as no other game has ever given me) I earn that experience in my own right. Not because it was decreed. When i feel afraid of the Z it's because the game is working (or the AI has been fixed). When i've been around Z and know what to do I gained that experience myself. Yes i starve, yes i get chased by Z but I take that I my own way. Not the way it was programmed for everybody else.

All of these "compass", "experience" "moral/ethical/skill tres" should and will probally share the same fate. Non implementation.

Edited December 14, 2012 by Trizzo

[silkyskills 59]

I like the idea, i think Rocket could work with this.

[treecancer 43]

Meh something like this could work in WarZ, but DayZ is "my story". As in I shape the character, not have the character be defined by some in game rules or mechanics. This kind of thing runs contrary to the spirit of DayZ IMO. Like the panic mechanic, if im going to panic I will panic IRL. I don't need my character to start crying to know im in trouble. in fact most of the time when it happens im just thinking "not a problem stop being a baby".

[skilpad 43]

Yes yes very nice carry on and whatnot

[GotBeanZ 45]

In a word, simply No. Too many variables. "Guilt"? Some people don't feel guilt when they shoot someone, or raid someone's tent. You would be forcing "emotions" that aren't felt by the player, and it would take away from the real emotions by replacing them with the boredom of MMO grind. I don't feel guilt after I shoot someone that has purposely threatened my virtual well-being. Some people do feel guilt, no matter how justified the act. Like I said, just too many variables.

As for screaming when zombies are around, IRL I don't scream when I get scared or startled, it makes me jump and I freeze for a few seconds in terror! :P

[Dabaroony 86]

pyschopical

Uh...

On topic: Any "feelings" this game induces should only be IRL. To impose any mood or emotion on the player's character is not what this game is about. Good job putting it together, though.