SA should have Sanity!

[DayZoey 110]

So here's a crazy thought, why can't the humanity meter be the same for sanity?

Think about it while I explain my line of thought on this. We human beings are violent by nature but our psyche isn't. How many people go to war come back in anything but an emotional wreck due to PTSD? Well imagine a world where there were no more therapists and no more counsellors to talk us through our problems. We would continue to stew in them.

How many people would we kill before we started to become desensitized to it and begin to develop psychopathic tendencies? How many times could a character execute someone begging for help before it started to haunt them? How many days and hours could a character spend alone before their mind began to play tricks on them in order to cope with being alone?

Just a few ideas... Being around other humans would give you a positive boost to humanity based on how their humanity was. If you're hanging around people that have been alone forever and talk and giggle to themselves randomly, you wouldn't lose humanity but you wouldn't gain it either. However the giggly crazy person would slowly regain their humanity and become more sane. The more "sane" people you have in a group, the better your humanity restores. Humanity lost by killing players is irredeemable, your character will bear that guilt until they die.

Killing people (as it is) puts a massive drain on humanity but even if they're bandits it should still drain humanity some. Taking a life is still taking a life, at the end of the day we need to cope with it and if we have no one to share our guilt and worries with, we begin to become self destructive.

Not drinking when needed would drain humanity (as our kidnies shut down from having no fluid, they allow hallucinogenic poisons to course through our brains)

Lone wolfing would gradually drain humanity. We human beings are social creatures, only a rare few can life completely without social interaction and they tend to be fairly odd despite that anyways. Without others to interact with, we seek out interaction sometimes with inanimate objects or ourselves until our brain begins to play tricks on us and convince us that these inanimate objects are capable of talking back or we start having entire conversations and debates with ourselves simply because we need some form of interaction. The problem with this is when we are introduced after awhile of social deprivation, to another human being, it's difficult to recover from because we don't actually believe that person is there after a certain point. After a certain point, real from imaginary becomes indiscernible.

Benefits to sanity: It would encourage players to work together and pick up new members of the group. The more people around, the more of a boost to humanity you will get. People are less likely to kill each other on sight because it would drain their humanity and bring consequences of insanity upon them.

Negative effects of becoming insane...

-Your character will hallucinate. Seeing zombies that aren't actually there (it would be hilarious to see someone running around being attacked by imaginary animals/zombies. Nobody else can see it but the player can see it)

-Your character will talk to and argue with themselves (increased noise generation for when trying to sneak by zombies, essentially making stealth impossible because the character can'ts top bickering with themself)

-Your character will be guilty (somewhat falls under hallucination but maybe names/faces of characters they've killed will jitter on their screen occasionally, becoming more and more frequent the more and more guilty they become. May also involuntarily break in to crying fits in which they can't move and are completely vulnerable in)

-Your character will act unpredictably (The voices in their head said that they wanted to run through the streets shooting their gun, the voice in their head takes priority over your fingers on the keyboard. You run in to the city streets screaming like a crazy person because you are and shooting your gun like an equally crazy person. May turn on fellow survivors if humanity is at its lowest)

-Crazy characters will be shunned (For the above reason, nobody wants to chance being shot in the back because the voices in that character's head said you deserved it)

[GOD™ 2795]

Let me guess, lose your sanity then rub bacon all over yourself?

[DayZoey 110]

Wrong thread but bacon would solve that problem yes :D

[Mos1ey 6301]

Sounds incredibly artificial and gamey.

[-Gews- 7443]

Taking a life is still taking a life, at the end of the day we need to cope with it and if we have no one to share our guilt and worries with, we begin to become self destructive.

But what if I want to role-play as a highly intelligent cold-blooded psycophath completely unaffected by human emotions?

Animated gif for Orlok.

[Blondedash 403]

these people have seen worse things than army men course they would be ridiculously insane.

[DayZoey 110]

I'm pretty sure that's a sociopath, not a psychopath. Sociopaths (to my knowledge) know what they are doing is wrong and they don't care, they'll do anything to get the satisfaction they crave.

Uhm... Maybe sociopathic characters could be random. Every now and then you'd land a character that doesn't suffer guilt from killing people but it'd be akin to the rarity of finding really high value military gear. It's only something that would happen once in awhile statistically and even then you'd have no way to test it other than by killing people, in which case, if you've got it, you've got it. If not, you've just permanently damaged your current character.

@nousernamehelp: Exactly my point, the human psyche isn't meant to deal with the stresses that would come with a zombie apocalypse. Seeing someone eaten alive, especially if that someone was a friend of yours; screaming and flailing as the undead rip their organs from their body and tear their limbs asunder... That would seriously f**k the witnessing people up.

edit: @mZLY care to elaborate? That doesn't really... make sense o.O

Edited March 30, 2013 by DayZoey

[Lady Kyrah 1109]

Oh look it's this topic again.

There are currently sociopath everywhere, banks, stock exchange, investment companies, law firms, insurance companies, big corporations. The capitalist world highly reward sociopaths, what makes you think that they would disappear?

Edited March 30, 2013 by Lady Kyrah

[VisionTwelve 24]

Oh look it's this topic again.

There are currently sociopath everywhere, banks, stock exchange, investment companies, law firms, insurance companies, big corporations. The capitalist world highly reward sociopaths, what makes you think that they would disappear?

totallly unrelated, but, your sig says it all;

There are only two types of DayZ server admins: "What's in it for me?" and "How can i help?"

glad to be the "how can i help?" kind

anyways, as for the topic from OP

it'd be interesting to see this, but as said, it seems a bit artificial.

[-Gews- 7443]

Oh look it's this topic again.

There are currently sociopath everywhere, banks, stock exchange, investment companies, law firms, insurance companies, big corporations. The capitalist world highly reward sociopaths, what makes you think that they would disappear?

Shooting for teh lulz already occurs...

Go watch videos of people making varmints explode at several hundred yards... even a prairie dog is far cuter and less bothersome than some raggedy-ass "survivor" running around with a rifle and taking vital supplies for himself.

So - keep making those "survivors" fail to live up to their name...

[dekartz 315]

Insanity isn't necessarily debilitating. You're not likely to start hallucinating just because you haven't spoken to someone in a while, nor are you going to be so removed from reality that you'll talk to yourself when there's potential danger about.

If periph-dots were still in SA, the occasional false-positive would be the most I'd go for in the "Hallucination" department.

That said, the suggested system doesn't really seem to add anything to the game. It just punishes certain playstyles.

[DayZoey 110]

Oh look it's this topic again.

There are currently sociopath everywhere, banks, stock exchange, investment companies, law firms, insurance companies, big corporations. The capitalist world highly reward sociopaths, what makes you think that they would disappear?

For one: I don't believe that there are sociopaths in those lines of business because people in those lines of business rarely interact with the names and numbers they see on the screen. Sure they know it's happening but they don't have to see it, they don't have to watch someone's life get snuffed out. For two: The capitalist world rewards greed, not sociopathic behaviour.

People keep saying "This seems artificial", what is that even supposed to mean? Can we have a clarification of terminology because to me "artificial" means "Man made" or "Not naturally occuring without outside influence". In which case.... Uh, yeah, it's a video game guys. The whole thing is artificial.

@Dekartz: I don't think it punishes the playstyles as much as it makes them more difficult than they already are, encouraging team work and less psychotic tendencies in people (read: less Call of Duty team deathmatching in Cherno).

That being said, your idea of false positive of peripheral dots is a good idea. My suggested ideas are more for the -really- deep end of the insanity spectrum, like for the people that have racked up more than 20 murders in one single life, spend all their time alone and such.

[dekartz 315]

"Makes them more difficult than they already are"

^ For no reason other than to encourage another playstyle. Thereby "punishing" those who don't adhere to the preferred playstyle.

I have an alternative suggestion though:

As you murder other survivors and engage in acts of general "villainy" you get better at it.

The first time you take aim at a survivor, you might start breathing heavy, your hands will shake, and that first kill will be all the harder, hell maybe you even vomit afterwards.

The second time, maybe you just breathe heavily.

By the third time, they're no longer "people" to you, just walking loot-piles.

But yeah. Look at your original post and compare the disparity of "Benefits to sanity" to "Negative effects of becoming insane"

[DayZoey 110]

See you call it punishing playstyles, I call it getting the CoD deathmatch sniper kiddies the f**k out of the game where they shouldn't be. Muahahahaha, my master plan. Seriously though, no. It is not punishing people who spend too much time by themselves, or people who just kill on sight. It is making an easy playstyle not easy anymore. You know what's hard? Finding other people you don't know and teaming up to survive together. Wanna know what else is hard? Being able to tell whether or not the person you're with is on the level. Rocket has said multiple times he's going for an authentic experience, if you ran across someone giggling and talking to themselves because they A) have murdered 50+ people for sport or B ) have spent waaaaay too much time by themselves and are going to act unpredictably and therefore could be a liability. Obviously it's not a fool proof system, see the earlier bit with sometimes people playing a character that is a true sociopath.

Wanna know what isn't hard? Just shooting everybody you see that isn't a friend you've known before coming in to the game. Wanna know what else isn't hard? Just playing by yourself and going from town to town looting supplies, avoiding people at all costs. (I do the latter more often than not, so yes, this suggestion would push me out of my comfort zone)

That being said...

I do like your alternate idea and maybe it could tie in to the loss of humanity, from an onlooker's perspective you would be able to tell how easy it is for someone to kill other people based on how they behave when they're under duress. Though maybe another way to implement it would be when face to face with someone new, someone who is nervous that hasn't killed before or killed much would be breathing very rapidly. Someone that just sees people as loot-bags with legs wouldn't be nervous at all, they know they're gonna get what they want.

But no, there is very little if any disparity. I count the first point as two because teamwork should be the name of the game, every zombie apocalypse comic, film, show that I've ever seen has people working together and seldom striking out on their own (unless they're the black dude, in which case by rule of Hollywood they have to die) and working together to achieve a common goal. I also count the last point of the benefits to be double as well because it would actually force people to -think- about Killing on Sight, to think about the consequences of it. Right now the only two consequences for killing on sight are: He might have friends that will shoot me and I might miss and/or he'll shoot back. There needs to be more thought in to murder in the game, it should be something that isn't done so lightly without ramifications.

Edited March 30, 2013 by DayZoey

[dekartz 315]

Wat. Doing things in a group is already ridiculously easy. You have extra sets of eyes covering you, extra guns for when things go bad, and someone to transfuse blood into you when things go really bad. Also, there's no reason this will encourage people not to kill strangers on sight as most people who play this game have a group that they run with already. So they'll run with their group for a bit of extra sanity, then cap some random in the face the next day.

Lone-wolf playing isn't in any way "easy" in comparison to running with a group.

Without the rules set up by society, we see time and time again that people are a lot more "vicious" than we give each other credit for. Look at most good zombie movies: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (original), -something else with Dead in the name- they all involve groups or individuals pitted against each other in the midst of the apocalypse. Why? Because some people get real nasty when they realize there aren't consequences for their actions.

To sum up "IT AIN'T HOW IT WAS BEFORE, R- ZOE!"

[ImageCtrl 719]

Because some people get real nasty when they realize there aren't consequences for their actions.

To sum up "IT AIN'T HOW IT WAS BEFORE, R- ZOE!"

I don't believe this... These "some People" realize quick, they are worth something. Not because they have something, but because they do something for the Society.

[CreepySalad 108]

-1.

Didn't I...?

I could've sworn I posted in here.

[shadowjack 254]

Another artificial emotional mechanic that will put players into a box. The problem with these "humanity/emotional" ideas is that there is no way to measure intentions

[Steak and Potatoes 13480]

http://i.imgur.com/GJqX9GS.jpg"]

[liquidcactus 719]

"Makes them more difficult than they already are"

I have an alternative suggestion though:

As you murder other survivors and engage in acts of general "villainy" you get better at it.

The first time you take aim at a survivor, you might start breathing heavy, your hands will shake, and that first kill will be all the harder, hell maybe you even vomit afterwards.

The second time, maybe you just breathe heavily.

By the third time, they're no longer "people" to you, just walking loot-piles.

But yeah. Look at your original post and compare the disparity of "Benefits to sanity" to "Negative effects of becoming insane"

This is the closest it should get, kind of like when you see a bandit or someone whos killed ppl your character gets nervous and shakes

[Lady Kyrah 1109]

I do agree that people are more sociable IRL in a catastrophe than in this game.

BUT, they are usually acting friendly inside their community, not just with absolutely everyone. We as humans tend to gather in groups, an entire nation doesn't necessarly form a single group, but rather a myriad of them. It doesn't take much in the absense of laws to spring tensions between these groups.

In a catastrophe scenario, i know who i'm going to trust easily and who i will most likely never trust, do you?

I would even go as far that if you come trying to impose your rules on these communities, they will destroy you. Irak was a prime example of civies rejecting those who where supposed to save them from saddam, then from anarchy and chaos.

Edited March 30, 2013 by Lady Kyrah

[DayZoey 110]

It's spelled Iraq and the nature of the rejection is political and based on the behaviour of those being rejected.

It's a completely different subject but The Gulf Wars and the Vietnam Wars have failed for two reason: One the American military wasn't putting a sufficient amount of boots on the ground, you can't hold a place by bombing it to crap and spraying it with agent orange; second because the American military was bombing just about anything that wasn't them, there were even recorded cases of friendly fire on Canadian APCs/Vehicles to which many vehicle crews took to spray painting red Xs on the tops of their vehicles. Still they were bombed.

So... the people had very little to do with it outside of the way they were reacting to an outside force that was "trying to save them" but at the same time bombing the ever loving snot out of them.

I read in the morale thread that all of these effects should be on the person and that's true. Honestly I'm just trying to think of ways to make lone-wolfing and bandit play less rewarding and teamwork even more rewarding. Lone wolfing because I play by myself and I only die when I do something incredibly stupid (ie: run in to a building with only one exit with a trail of zombies behind me and not enough ammunition to get out) or when I come across another player who is more interested in playing Call of Duty or Battlefield 3 with zombie props kills me.

[SalamanderAnder (DayZ) 1747]

I DON'T LIKE IT WHEN THE GAME CREATORS DECIDE WHAT IS "RIGHT" AND "WRONG."

There, I said it.

Besides, it's just not fair.

1: I spend a lot of time alone in reality. This does NOT make me insane.

2: I spend a lot of time alone in DayZ, because EVERYONE IS ALREADY INSANE.

Doesn't anyone remember Rocket saying that he doesn't want to "punish players for playing in a particular way"? What if I like being alone? What if I like killing other people? What if I must kill someone? I mean, I already feel real guilt when I kill people in DayZ, sometimes. But other times, it's completely JUSTIFIED. I would NOT "lose my mind" if I killed someone who was about to murder me. That's self defense. I would probably just forget about it after a while, to be honest. That's the amazing thing about us humans. We can handle a lot. We can repress memories. We can rationalize our own actions to our self.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad idea. But I have to agree with mZLY. It's very artificial. Do not want.

Edited July 8, 2013 by SalamanderAnder

[SalamanderAnder (DayZ) 1747]

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

-Crazy characters will be shunned

So you're saying that I can become crazy just by being "alone for too long," but when I do finally meet survivors, I would be shunned and probably KILLED ON SIGHT. How is this an improvement? Maybe I had no ill intentions whatsoever, but because I spawned in the middle of buttfuck Kamenka and had to defend myself from a bandit, now I'm at a disadvantage?

How exactly is that even reasonable? Sounds like a broken game mechanic just waiting to shit on us.

[Lady Kyrah 1109]

It's spelled Iraq and the nature of the rejection is political and based on the behaviour of those being rejected.

It's spelled Irak in my country, so forgive me for not being "authentic" to the official spelling which is probably not in latin alphabet.