TITLE UPDATED: No more SOLO corpse runs = Player driven missions

[Malleovic 3]

This thread was previously titled "Expiration Needs More Lacrimation"

There are a lot of topics and posts about making death more punishing, painful, or permanent, using methods ranging from taking away the so-called "starting gun" (yep, I am probably the only person who calls it that) to actually preventing players from playing at all for a period of time following death.

The problem is that while the first idea certainly makes life after death more of a pain, it's not really all that bad if you died without a gun to begin with anyway, and if you have a friend who can protect your stuff if you did long enough for you to get there, then there really isn't any extra pain except for an inconvenient trip. The second idea is just ridiculously bad for obvious reasons, example: "oh hey, what a great game! it has this great difficulty feature built in that doesn't even let you play it for a while when you die" yeah I can't even keep a straight face while typing that. I just vomited everywhere.

However, I have recently read two threads (one by Strategos and one by mike_mareen) that attempt to tackle the issue in the above paragraph head on (getting your stuff back). Because you shouldn't be able to get your stuff back. At all. Strategos' and mike_mareen's suggestions both entail server-access-cooldown-functiony-thingy-ideas-whatever that also has the benefit of stripping anyone who dies of any vehicles or tents that they had on the server AND keeping them from linking up with comrades, at least for the duration of the cooldown or until their comrades disconnect and rejoin them in another. As usual, a certain portion of the responses to their ideas were just a bunch of people bitching in one or two phrase responses either because the ones doing the bitching hadn't read the whole post or because they were to lazy to make their fingers work a little bit harder to engage the suggestions at hand (I know I might catch flak for this from the bitching parties in question, and I don't care. Your short posts will be easy to skip with a flick of the mousewheel).

Sorry, short rant over.

Personally, I'd like to suggest a feature whereby any tent, vehicle or item (equipment, ammunition, weapons, food) that a player touches should be made permanently inaccessible to them upon death (unless someone else picks it up/touches it), to the point of despawning if they get too close (obviously such a restriction would be lifted the instant another player touches the item, or else literally everything would make no sense and explode). This allows players to stay on the same server (very important if good connections are few and far between). Basically, you will never be allowed to loot your own corpse (or tent after death), under any circumstances, and someone will have to actually steal any vehicles or items you want to keep before you can obtain or use them again.

This doesn't address the issue of teammate aid in keeping these valuables, but it does make it dicier. Your teammate knows that to help you get your stuff back, he would have to drop something of his (potentially for good if he's running to you rather than camping the stuff) to put it in his inventory/pack, AND that he has to pass up actually stealing for himself any vehicles or items that you might have had (and he now has the perfect chance to do so) just to help you get it back, because you can't on your own. Presently all he has to do is just camp your corpse until you get back. Couple this with a function that forces a player to spawn at a point on the coastline literally as far away as possible from their site of death, and I think dying just got wonderfully more inconvenient.

Feel free to criticize, flame, bluster, call me names, and in general tear my ideas to shreds. Do your worst.

EDIT: Updated thread title.

EDIT: Updated thread title again to reflect the side effect of player driven missions (corpse retrieval)

[Lady Kyrah 1109]

I like.

This game being entirely gear driven, the ability to do a corpse run completely nullify the penality of death.

[Malleovic 3]

I like.

This game being entirely gear driven' date=' the ability to do a corpse run completely nullify the penality of death.

[/quote']

Exactly! And the distance thing (requiring that the area of coastline you respawn at be as far as possible from your death site) also makes it harder to link up afterwards. You and a team want to invade a town? Well, unless you ALL survive, it's going to take a lot longer to keep the team at full strength, forcing you to make compromises.

[Scerun 227]

I like the idea, but perhaps not so much an implementation exactly like this. I get that it's just speculation, so let's speculate:

I feel that a higher death penalty system would work better, if certain frustrations with death are dealt with beforehand. Once you nullify the experience of unfairness when you die (For example, zombies hitting you through a wall, their super speed, other player communication break-downs resulting in utter KoS-play.

I don' find it frustrating to die, mind, as I feel it's great fun looting new gear - the challenge - which is why I don't entirely sympathise with those clan-guys who farm NWAF and have shoot outs with the enemy gang encroaching their turf...Those who'd feel that this system you mention is bullshit.

[Imbalanxd 59]

Explain to me the difference between a friend of yours camping your corpse until you run back to it, and you running to your groups camp site and taking a gun out of a tent.

[Malleovic 3]

Explain to me the difference between a friend of yours camping your corpse until you run back to it' date=' and you running to your groups camp site and taking a gun out of a tent.

[/quote']

I'm suggesting a way that prevents both (assuming the tent you mentioned is your own). If a player dies, all items they have stored in tents or on their person should be inaccessible to them until they pass through the hands of another player. Not very realistic, I know, but it would sufficiently increase the inconvenience of death enough to bring a spark of desperation back into the game that is currently totally lost on people who can just respawn and run back to loot their corpse.

[turel2 0]

+1 to this idea.

It might make people team up with a few others in order to get thier loot back, or maybe to just steal it lol.

[TheDesigner 1197]

So, basically, this is supposed to support teamwork, directly or indirectly. Well, sorry to say, but this is a horrible idea. ALL items the player has touched will respawn, unless picked up by another player? So, a hard working looter of your team dies, he has mixed in his loot at your imaginary-teams camp. Now, you have to manually go through the items and pick every single one up, to ensure none despawn when he gets back. No thank you. Spawning you far from where you died is pointless, since all you have to do is hit "respawn". I don't see the harm in looting your own body, really, where is the harm in it? You still have to hike to your body AND if a bandit killed you, hope he didn't take your stuff and if zombies killed you, kill the horde that is now munching on you. I recently lost all my stuff due to the server wiping EVERYTHING I had, yet people are worrying about bandits and own-body-looting. Fix the major bugs, worry about small things later.

[Malleovic 3]

So' date=' basically, this is supposed to support teamwork, directly or indirectly.[/quote']

Incorrect. This is supposed to make dying more inconvenient. It's also supposed to give would-be team players more temptations to screw each other over. ex: Have some hot shit in the woods somewhere that nobody knows about when you die? To get it back you'll have to tell someone, and convince them to help you. Being able to continue to live with the benefits of previous "lives" flies right in the face of what I can glean about the philosophy of this mod.

Well, sorry to say, but this is a horrible idea. ALL items the player has touched will respawn, unless picked up by another player? So, a hard working looter of your team dies, he has mixed in his loot at your imaginary-teams camp. Now, you have to manually go through the items and pick every single one up, to ensure none despawn when he gets back. No thank you.

No, you have to make sure that anything he wants to get back, you have to hand him directly because he's a stranger now and not some friend who died and then magically came back to life. We're stuck with respawning because this is a game and not real life (though by golly I wish we had it in real life); what I'm trying to do is make respawning carry as few advantages as possible, to make death as friggin annoying as possible. Because then you'll worry about it more, and it will suck more when it happens to you or a teammate.

Spawning you far from where you died is pointless, since all you have to do is hit "respawn".

No problem, there's a couple ways to deal with this. Either put people on a timer that overrides all possible respawn points inside of a certain distance. Even better, combine this with a system that automatically despawns your corpse (and anything in it) when you get too close to it. Like 50m.

I don't see the harm in looting your own body, really, where is the harm in it? You still have to hike to your body AND if a bandit killed you, hope he didn't take your stuff and if zombies killed you, kill the horde that is now munching on you.

There is a lot of harm in it, if you consider that the current first priority of a recently-killed-with-good-gear-survivor is often to do something that you would never be able to do in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world: get back to my own corpse to get my stuff back. It breaks the authenticity (***BOOM) of the experience in a big way. Therefore if it can be gotten rid of, it should be. It's also massive, hypocritical metagaming in the worst way for a mod based on consequences and how players have to WORRY about them, (though apparently there's nothing wrong with metagaming itself).

I recently lost all my stuff due to the server wiping EVERYTHING I had, yet people are worrying about bandits and own-body-looting. Fix the major bugs, worry about small things later.

It's called the "Suggestions" forum. Not the "fix all of MY in-game problems" forum. If you have bug issues, there's a forum for that. And it's not here.

EDIT: I've just realized that an added benefit of this will be a lot of people on servers requesting the help of others (how about THAT for combating KoS) to retrieve their shit, and having to trust the person who they enlist to help. This means the creation of essentially entirely player driven missions, the outcome of which is dependent on the players themselves, rather than on some scripted nonsense. Players can accept to help, kill the survivor who needs help (who could be lying to gain their confidence), or help them juuust long enough to steal the pot of gold (the other player's corpse) at the end of the rainbow. More opportunities for something to do (which I hear people whining about all of the time), more opportunities to backstab eachother in the course of doing them. Think about it, each player would have something the other wants (one has knowledge of the location, the other is the only one who can retrieve it) but NEITHER could just up and take it by force.

This would of course either simply piss off the lone wolf types like myself who'd rather not have to trust anybody(too bad, playing alone should have disadvantages, especially when you die), or push those types to start trying to talk to people if they reeeeaaally want their stuff back.

I've updated the title to include this massively interesting side effect of adding the main feature I proposed.

[vincent.cheesbrough@gmail.com 0]

Global lockout for say 1-2 hours on death would be neat and effectively ensure that someone else has to help preserve your gear as it will have de spawned in that time. Server specific lockout is a bad idea it encourages server hopping, also it perhaps is a little un fair on Australia and New Zealand as I assume they would only play on their own local servers due to bad pings.

[Taso (DayZ) 13]

I agree with TheDesigner.

I like this game for the realism in wanting to avoid risky situations. It's already bad enough that, like he said, if I die, I have to hike back to my corpse AND kill all of the zombies there AND either kill the bandit who killed me or avoid him or hope he didn't take my stuff.

That, in and of itself, is a 20-30 minute endeavor. More than enough punishment for dying, since you can replace most gear in that amount of time anyway by going to a major city. The exceptions being especially rare gear, which someone else will likely take anyway.

It makes no thematic sense for my stuff to despawn when I get near it after dying. Nor does it make any sense that this feature stops happening if someone else touches my stuff.

If you want to make dying more inconvenient, make it so people have to deal with the first spawn they're given. Even then, the difference, instead of committing suicide for a better spawn placement, would be that they find the closest zombie and let it eat them- for a better spawn placement.

I say the game is punishing enough as it is and for the vast majority of people, this would just be an annoyance, not something that fills us with adrenaline or desperation.

[osiriszoran 33]

dumb idea.

[Malleovic 3]

I agree with TheDesigner.

I like this game for the realism in wanting to avoid risky situations. It's already bad enough that' date=' like he said, if I die, I have to hike back to my corpse AND kill all of the zombies there AND either kill the bandit who killed me or avoid him or hope he didn't take my stuff.

That, in and of itself, is a 20-30 minute endeavor. More than enough punishment for dying, since you can replace most gear in that amount of time anyway by going to a major city. The exceptions being especially rare gear, which someone else will likely take anyway.[/quote']

If you're correct (and I don't think you are, Chernarus is a big place and if you die by Zed attack its more likely that nobody will find your body and that all of the Zeds will despawn by the time you get there). The point is to stop people from even considering going after their corpse solo.

It makes no thematic sense for my stuff to despawn when I get near it after dying. Nor does it make any sense that this feature stops happening if someone else touches my stuff.

Neither does respawning and knowing the exact location of a corpse some large distance away with gear. I'm trying to make up for that by taking solo corpserunning out of the equation.

[Taso (DayZ) 13]

Short of claiming that each time you spawn, you're a new "person," it actually does make thematic sense if only for the fact that this is a game that would be dumb if you never respawned.

Besides, zombies spawn when you enter a town, and the despawn time for live zombies is relatively comparable to that of dead humans.

Furthermore, even if I were to agree that it's against the theme to respawn and hunt for your last dead corpse, your proposed solution to fixing one thematic problem would be to create an entirely new, far worse thematic problem.

[Malleovic 3]

Furthermore' date=' even if I were to agree that it's against the theme to respawn and hunt for your last dead corpse, your proposed solution to fixing one thematic problem would be to create an entirely new, far worse thematic problem.

[/quote']

As far as I can tell you've said that it makes the game too hard or punishes too much. But I don't see how preventing players from engaging in an entirely unrealistic and inauthentic activity is worse than the fact that they are currently doing it. I'm trying to remove, as a set of first possible priorities for the solo player, even the option of doing it. Once that's gone they can go back to, you know, playing the game like a person fresh off the beach. Just like I'm trying to remove the possibility that upon most of his group dying, the average player waits around (barring further threats) for them to get back. NO! He should, like the authentic survivor, have to make the authentic decisions, like, "how much of the best stuff can I take and move on, because there ain't no sense sitting around here with a bunch of bodies".

[diepepsi@gmail.com 22]

***I spoke about this in another thread, If a timer could be added to gear... then it could do what you are asking without impacting the players ability to play.

That means, that everyone within 100m of the dead player, would have their gear plus that dead players gear tagged as "not lootable by the dead player for 5 hours". UNLESS, the dead player, now respawned, killed someone within that 100m range, resetting that now dead players loot to be bound against the newly dead player, but free for the respawned player to loot.

With death, comes loot, even if it was previously yours.

Chances are some wacky respawn timing trick could get a whole group of people, to kill one another and cycle loot around in some odd chain. But that's also making them spawn oddly all over the map and I think would be a lot of hassle.

But, I really down this POS engine has any way to tag gear what so ever.

[Malleovic 3]

***I spoke about this in another thread' date=' If a timer could be added to gear... then it could do what you are asking without impacting the players ability to play.[/quote']

My suggestion doesn't impact their ability to play. It impacts their ability to break immersion by exploiting their own inauthentic knowledge of past events, AND it throws them the bone of saying: Ok, you want to get your stuff back, just get someone else to help you. I'm not at all suggesting placing limits on literally where the player can and can't go, or what they can and can't do, with items unconnected from their past "selves".

The only issue I have with timers is how arbitrary they seem. But they accomplish the task just as well (assuming they're long enough).