character development as incentive [long]

[_Anubis_ (DayZ) 139]

I believe there should be far more emphasys on long-term character development, that is perks/capabilities you get by performing certain actions. Reasons:

1) As dayz is now, perma-death means utterly nothing. If I die due to PvE (not anymore happening since months...) I simply re-spawn, run back and loot my corpse. If I die due to PvP, it happens now only if I am in the first 2-3 hours of gameplay so I loose almost nothing if I die: honestly I do not even care, it is the stage where I am raiding Cherno or Elektro because I am too lazy to run up to Berezino, and even being careless, I survive 19 times out of 20, certain snipers suck big time...

2) There are zero incentives to survive on the long-term. The character can either evolve further in either a hero or a bandit, but nothing more. Humanity is the only player attribute that records some history/experience and has some relevance

3) End-game status (full tools/gear/food/nice survival spot close to game/water source and recessed location) is reached in 2-4 hours. It was 1-2 hours before 1.7.6 because deer stands could spawn military weapons, now it takes a little bit longer. Then the Zombie apocalypse is over.

As consequence, no wonder people resort to player to player interaction to "do something": there are different forms: hunting/KoS/banditing, helping/being an hero, clans and teams... Either way killing or being killed has little or no incentive at the end: we do not value our avatars beyond the gear, which can quickly and easily be recovered or renewed, nor we value another one (except for his rare NVG or AS-50 maybe, which can be lost 5 minutes later anyway).

How to give more depth to the game and give more value to players (both for themselves and for others)?

To me the answer is simple: perks coming from experience and experience coming from repeating actions over and over. Examples (it seems to me the SA is moving into that direction):

- by hunting and gutting you should be able to get way more meat compared to a noob and be able to eat raw meat with lesser chances of infections: that would make you more valuable to others as a skilled hunter and more resilient and able to survive.

- by healing/bandaging you should be more proficient in applying/using bandages: so you could apply a bandage more quickly (less blood lost) or the bandage could be more durable (if a bandage has to be replaced over time until the wound is fully healed) and so on. Again you would be more useful to others and to yourself.

Those are simple examples but I think you get the concept: same for repairing/fixing things (you need to gain xp in fixing, say, a car before fixing an helo and so on), maintaining/upgrading weapons (armorer skills), using water, switching weapons (slower/faster), re-gen health from food, running (faster/slower) etc etc.

In this way your character will evolve, grow, get better as time goes by: by doing something, not merely sitting behind a pine-tree. This could be a great incentive to team-playing and accept/be accepted as new member in an existing team: the system should be structured in such a way it should be very difficult to be a jack-of-all-trades, so people would specialize naturally.

This should give more value to each player (including ourselves) and maybe reduce casual killing and tea-bagging as a mere nuisance. Players would still kill each others of course, but more out of necessity, or fear, just like it would be in an apocalypse scenario.

_Anubis_

[GodOfGrain 191]

Exactly

On game design, progression through equipment and a system of micro skills

[dekartz 315]

Any system like this is of course open to exploits. And ultimately boils down to "Bandage X amount of times to make your bandaging skill Y"

[_Anubis_ (DayZ) 139]

just saw your thread and the picture of the fresh spawn vs. the experienced guy it is a perfect example of what I had in mind!

The only detrimental thing would be loop-holes allowing people to exploit/powerlevel as orlok said (I still remember in Morrowind how you could reach 100 shield skills by finding an extremely weak enemy,have an automatic health reg-en effect and simply ... Leave the game, go out with the friends and come back after a few hours having a character with 100 shield skills).

_Anubis_

[Steak and Potatoes 13480]

Any system like this is of course open to exploits. And ultimately boils down to "Bandage X amount of times to make your bandaging skill Y"

Like the old skyrim lockpicking trick to 100

[badluckburt 974]

Why not make things go 'faster' as you do them more instead of locking away abilities for higher levels? Where appropriate, you might obtain more items of what you're trying to acquire or use less of them.

I would imagine a skilled hunter being alot faster at gutting animals than a first-timer, he might also be able to get some more meat off the body. Same thing with fixing engines, it is NOT impossible to fix something you have never encountered before, it will just take more time and might cost some more parts due to trial and error.

The only thing I really can't agree to is regenerating more health from the same food because you have more experience eating it? Perhaps that's not what you meant, in which case forget I mentioned it.

[_Anubis_ (DayZ) 139]

Nope. I was meaning getting more raw meat from a given animal and suffer less from infections eating raw meat.

Re-gen health from food is linked to have a kind of progressive re-gen as opposed to 'insta-ok' by eating 5 cans in a row. An experienced/hardened player could re-gen quicker (not getting more health by the same amount of food, but getting back health more quickly).

_Anubis_

[badluckburt 974]

Nope. I was meaning getting more raw meat from a given animal and suffer less from infections eating raw meat.

That I can agree to. For raw foods that could also be cooked or otherwise prepared, this would be a nice addition. Eating raw meats frequently gives you a higher resistance to the diseases they carry so your body has an easier time fighting off infections thus regaining health faster. You should still be at risk of catching an infection though, just a smaller chance.

[TIC 1050]

Simply put; the mod is fairly easy to survive. All it takes is going through building to building without distracting zombies otherwise players will know where you are from where the zombies are chasing you from.

Lately I been playing on Namalsk. It is quite a hard map since it has harsh weather conditions, mutant 'Bloodsucker' and EVR sequences, most players happen to be bandits and it's very hard to acquire food/water.

[GOD™ 2795]

My thoughts from reading this is watching my character grow a beard.

[liquidmind 320]

I'd be very interested in the different types of skills they plan to implement. How they categorize.

Will it be "good at cooking" "good at hunting" "good a repairing"? Or more like a recipe-based skill-system, where you are likely to learn new skills, the more you practice it? like f.e. everytime you cook a piece of meat, "meat-cooking" gets +1 until some mechanism decides that you have enough to go to the next level, giving you a new thing to do, like "Create a Stew", that can later be combined with "fill Food-Can" to create nutritional, food that can be stored for longer periods of time.

I do hope that it is more than just to reduce the time needed to do something, but considering that rocket said crafting will be trial and error, I don't see how special crafting-recipes, that only work with a certain level, would work with that. People would get confused as hell, if they never knew what skill they can actually use and what skill they could use before they died the last time.

How would a player react, that lived for 3 weeks, driving around in his car, being used to repair it all by himself, if he died for some stupid reason and had to re-learn everything again. Even if he got to his car and got back his stuff, he couldn't repair the car unless he re-trains the skill.

At this moment, I'm only curious in how they will implement it, because I cannot imagine how all that would work together.

[badluckburt 974]

How would a player react, that lived for 3 weeks, driving around in his car, being used to repair it all by himself, if he died for some stupid reason and had to re-learn everything again. Even if he got to his car and got back his stuff, he couldn't repair the car unless he re-trains the skill.

If these are tied to your in-game GUID, whenever your character respawns he has 'your' knowledge so you pick up where you left off skill-wise. Having to 're-learn' skills would suck ass as much as fetch quests. I would be OK with having to learn certain steps to complete tasks sort of like the recipe-system. That way, if I memorize that shit I can do it when I need to.

Edited March 31, 2013 by BadLuckBurt

[mr_chabowski@live.co.uk 2416]

Skills tied to your GUID as opposed to your character's life would provide ZERO incentive to survive.

If the point of it is developing skills over time, death has to reset it, otherwise it's just a feature to be exploited by xp farmers and grinders.

Player-skill plays a big part in your ability to perform certain actions well (driving, aiming etc.) but character-skill should be used as mentioned in the OP to represent affinity and improvement in skills and abilities which are reduced to simply "click to perform action" in-game.

Edited March 31, 2013 by Chabowski

[badluckburt 974]

If people keep killing each other at the rate they do now, there might be a chance that we'll never see anything fixed beyond bikes :)

[Captain Speirs 9]

Food and water should also decline faster. Make beans and other conserved food more rare, there's way too much of that shit right now.

Remove hero suit bonuses, as much as I like incentive to be good it should not in any way make you superior. Instead make it supershiny or customizable.

Edited March 31, 2013 by Captain Speirs

[_Anubis_ (DayZ) 139]

How would a player react, that lived for 3 weeks, driving around in his car, being used to repair it all by himself, if he died for some stupid reason and had to re-learn everything again. Even if he got to his car and got back his stuff, he couldn't repair the car unless he re-trains the skill.

Your comment is interesting for at least 2 reasons:

1. you are automatically considering ways to avoid/move around the perma-death concept (get back gear and -if possible- skills), which is natural, I would also try to loot my body, but we should all keep in mind we are cheating a little bit by doing that...

2. Dying for stupid reasons (a Z glitching, leg broken vaulting, touch a branch and the car goes ka-boom, ...) is considered an "unfair" way of dying and therefore upsetting. Makes sense of course.

But those 2 things are related. dayz is still ridden by bugs and therefore there are "unfair" ways of dying and therefore we kind of accept to cheat perma-death and do things like loot ourselves.

Would that still be acceptable with a polished game? Clearly it is not in the concept of Dean. I am assum8ng dayz and SA will improve as time goes by.

_Anubis_

[shadowjack 254]

Your comment is interesting for at least 2 reasons:

1. you are automatically considering ways to avoid/move around the perma-death concept (get back gear and -if possible- skills), which is natural, I would also try to loot my body, but we should all keep in mind we are cheating a little bit by doing that...

2. Dying for stupid reasons (a Z glitching, leg broken vaulting, touch a branch and the car goes ka-boom, ...) is considered an "unfair" way of dying and therefore upsetting. Makes sense of course.

1. I favor a true hardcore Perma-death. As it is now we don't have perma-death. As long as we can loot the previous life's body or visit the previous camp/tent/vehicle to re-gear there is no perma-death.

2. I actually would enjoy a realistic "Dying for stupid reasons" like say you go to vault over a stone wall but your foot slips and you crash face first into the wall breaking your neck or at the least knocking you out for x amount of time. Way it is now i take the glitch events as unintended consequences and move on. It does add an element of the unknown which adds to immersion in my book.

[CreepySalad 108]

No thank you.