Am I the only person that really doesn't care for 'base building'?

[Steak and Potatoes 13480]

I hope it is stupidly hard to build a base, really give people something aim for.

^ Right here nailed it, I dont really care to much for base building but if it had more depth than locking items in place for 30 seconds I would be interested.

[JeffDetroit 717]

I think that if there was a little personalization (low level) it'd be fun to be able to "find a spray can" and (go into tagging mode) be able to put up your own markings, warnings, clan-sign. I know this could be a data/bandwidth problem if there were 5,000 individually spraypainted graphics that had to be "broadcasted" but perhaps there could be a 1 per player limit (your previous spray painted tag would delete upon making a new one).

Then folks could "decorate" their bandit house, their base, or even "post" an in-game message, warning, or threat on a wall in Cherno.

[Mr Mouse 61]

Base building is just an option.

In an apocalypse, I would imagine the human population would do one of the following, 1) find a group of survivors and start to build some sort of settlement - a place to call home, or 2) stay on the move in an attempt to look for items that could keep you alive - food, water, shelter etc.

Edited May 5, 2013 by Mr Mouse

[pxxl 259]

I want an underground lair with large concrete tunnels that will echo my evil laugh as a haul in new looted gear.

Oh and i want a hydroponics section for my weed vitamins.

[Gordon Axeman 191]

The problem is that there is too less vehicles. It is unrealistic and somewhat breaks the gameplay.

I like what Razor is doing now - the stashes. Having some little hides with gear for emergency situations is pretty cool.

I can't imagine building a large base without NPC's introduced - as any great base is easy to break when there is nobody to man the guns. Large bases suck anyway.

Personally, I don't see a point in car hoarding. My clan of 5 men had an UAZ and a pickup truck. Truck for scouting and looting, UAZ for the main group (when we needed a storage/a big fight was rolling at the scouts).

[Darkwater (DayZ) 63]

I'm not much fond of the idea of playing the game as a nomad. I need a sense of progress in my games, and just surviving would not give me the satisfaction I need to continuing playing the game.. nor do I get any pleasure out of doing the other thing which is banditry.

It doesn't take you long to stock up and your character would be fit for survival for weeks... what then? Are you supposed to seek out danger only to survive it to get a rush? Why would you even think of approaching any town if you have a full toolbelt, a tent full of food and drink, a relatively powerful automatic rifle with plenty ammo and no illnesses to speak of?

DayZ, at that point, degrades to a pure PVP game. Zombies don't present any threat to you and the excitment is gone. The only rush you get is when you see other survivors. Whom you will either want to kill or avoid. Furthermore, the only times you would actually MEET said players is if you venture close to towns for that spesific reason. (There is the occational bump-in in the middle of nowhere, yes.. but the chances of that are slim to none). Stock up, survive, kill players for shits, giggles and kicks, die. Rinse repeat. That is all DayZ is to me in a gameplay sense.

And I loathe it. I love the game idea, but I despise the excecution of it. You get bored if you have nothing to occupy yourself with, and then you start either being a vigilante or bandit, both in a sense being EXACTLY the same. You spawn, stock up, store it and begin your spree of killing either bandits or anyone that is not you or your friends and in the end you die. There is the occational players that play supporting roles like medic too, but it's not enough for me.

I want to play the game as a trader. I want to build a smaller settlement. A settlement anyone and everyone can know of. Hidden nicely away, but not a danger to approach with honorable intentions. Not even if you have dishonest ones. A place of safety and trade. Gamble and games. Wanter posters for bounty hunters. The list could go on, if DayZ supported it, it would be there. But most importantly, it is a place of prosperity in a world ruined by Zeds and Bandits on killing sprees.

It could be done with tents, but they would hardly provide any kind of shelter. It would take houses made from wood, stone or scrap metal. Power generated by generators. Walls made of anything solid. Guards patroling the area. And all this would be done by players, no NPC's. The only residents would be the ones that actually work for the community, the rest would be visitors.

It's a stretch to hope for something like that, but that's what I would want to do myself if presented with the opportunity to. If not.. well.. DayZ will quickly fade away for me.

Edited May 5, 2013 by Darkwater

[ihaywirei 12]

The thing about base building in the mod that i dont like is that its not a necessity and its only to stockpile guns and vehicles.

I think it would be a cool idea if you had to set up camp before you logged out for a long period of time. This would include a tent or a bed or sleeping bag or something similar.

It feels weird to me that i can log out for a week IRL and come back to my character still being alive. If you needed to log out at a camp it would add importance to making a base and also give you a sense of having a real home to go back to at the end of every playing session.

However DayZ is a game and this might be too much and there are probably better ways to accomplish base building

[hatfieldcw 184]

Too persistent. I'd be all for it if there was a way to prevent people from using the base after they'd been killed. Being able to respawn, report to base and be restored to 100% of what you were takes so much more away than it contributes. It gives you a sense of accomplishment and cooperative goals, yes, but it takes all the survival out of the game.

Look at Don't Starve. You survive, you collect, you craft, you build, you achieve, and you get a real sense of satisfaction out of what you're doing and making and becoming. If you die, though, then you're all the way back to square one, and you start over. If you could respawn infinitely in that game, then 90% of gameplay would be making fancier and fancier floor plans for your next palace, not trying to stay alive.

In a multiplayer game like DayZ, permadeath isn't an option. You can't very well ban players from the server when they die, and you can't make the player forget where their tent/car/corpse is, so they get to keep their gear and loot unless someone willfully destroys it. This effect is magnified by cooperation. Your squad is never diminished (except temporarily) by casualties, so if you have four or five dudes rolling together, you'll never need to recruit or cooperate with anyone else, since you're all immortal. As long as you hold the field after every serious fight, even an 80% casualty rate results in all of you being healthy and equipped again in a couple minutes, plus whatever loot you get from the guys you defeated.

Base building will compound this basic problem with the game, and I'm against it for that reason. Survival is meaningless if you cannot fail to survive. As it stands, the only things people are afraid to lose are ghillie suits, because they're tough to farm and can't be reclaimed. Guns can be scooped off corpses, vehicles can be camped and regained (especially if you're the only group who know that helicopter is due for a respawn) and food/drink/medicine can be stockpiled in vast quantities.

As a result, squad play is anathema to DayZ. It's inherently antisocial in the game world, it renders DayZ's challenges (zombies, looting, survival) utterly trivial, and it's boring enough that you eventually amuse yourselves either by hoarding finite resources (vehicles, chopper crash loot) or by griefing less organized survivors (who are seeking a more honest DayZ experience). Both of these activities impoverish the server, either by denying gameplay (toast a car once a day, you'll always have a reason to hunt for tires. Hide it in the woods and nobody has anything to do except look for your camp) or by actively inconveniencing survivors who are trying to survive without the benefit of a platoon's worth of eyes and rifles.

The only way to really hurt serious clan players is to smash their tents and hide their bodies before their buddies wipe you out. Having a base that rewards and encourages small groups with out-of-game comms and implicit trust will, well, reward and encourage that style of play, further disenfranchising less organized players and the organic, noteworthy experiences they have in the game. The clans will get an even stronger foothold and will proliferate and choke out the weaker organisms, and then it'll just be slow Wasteland. If you want squad vs. squad combat in Arma2 with high-quality weapons, you can do better than DayZ.

If anything, I'd like to discourage and punish serious, fireteam-level play. Have a system that detects badass commandos and directs zombies or reduces food and ammo spawn rates when they're rolling in a pack. If you have five bandits with M24s and Mk48s and M4 SDs, then you've got to get the stuff you want from killing people and taking it.

Anyway, rant over, bases are cool sometimes, but not in DayZ.

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

I agree with you to a point but one of the main things missing from the mod as it stands is any type of endgame or any need to keep playing beyond learning the ropes and/or getting whatever loot you want/need, which as it stands isn't very much at all.

It looks like in the SA even basic survival will be much more complex. Groups will have to worry about infections/viruses their team-mates have and seek the correct course of action to deal with these threats. Combine this with the new complex health system, crafting, hunting ect. and I can already see that life for groups will be much harder than just building a base and stockpiling, especially as Rocket has decribed that there will be the ability to take over these bases so although the bases may persist in the world, the group may not be able to maintain the strength to keep hold of it.

If a member of a group dies from illness then his gear will also carry the risk of passing on that illness (depending on the illness), if he died in a firefight then his gear may be damaged from that fight, this should lower the rate at which groups can just hold onto their friends gear whilst they re-spawn and run back to grab their stuff.

I guess groups will always have an advantage over lone-wolves, really that is the way it should be too. As long as playing as a lonewolf doesn't punish us to the point where there's no way to survive without joining a group I don't see it as an issue.

There's going to be so many more levels of complexity in the SA (maybe not initially but by the time it's finished) that really only very well organised groups will be able to take advantage of being part of a team. If you have a team of weak, lazy, unorganised or basically bad players then their lives will probably be harder than surviving as a loner. Being part of a group in the SA may give you an immediate advantage over others hostile players in terms of pure fire-power but it will also present new challenges for the team in terms of basic surivial. This is all speculation really as there's so much we don't really know about or that may or may not be added to the game but from what I've read surviving as a group will present it's own challenges.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Fraggle

[Target Practice (DayZ) 1335]

This thread has been a really good read, with some very good pro-base arguments that I hadn't really considered before. I'm still not wild about the idea of base-building, and will continue not to be until we get a few details on exactly how it's going to work - as much as I have faith in Rocket and the whole DayZ team, implementing it in a way that doesn't utterly break the focus of the game is going to be incredibly tough. However, there's been enough good points made that I can at least say that I'm not dreading it as much as I was before, and that there's at least some hope for the idea.

My main concern is that because DayZ is such a player-driven environment - more so than almost any other game out there, giving large groups too much dominance could potentially drastically alter the experience of the game. I'm sure in some cases, this could be a good thing, but having been round the block a few times on the big ol' interwebs, I'm pretty confident in saying that those occasions will be outweighed rather considerably by the bad times. As Fraggle quite rightly said, there are enough real-life advantages to working in a team to mean that DayZ should be no different, however, it's also worth noting that DayZ is a game designed to entertain, and that as such, it's important to at least consider players who for whatever reason cannot or do not play in a team.

[sausagekingofchicago 4711]

I think base building could work very well if we had a much larger map to roam. I just don't see that happening any time soon. Bases should take a lot of time to build but since the servers are run by individuals you can never really be sure if the base you spent 3 weeks developing is going to be there after the fourth week. Perhaps this is another plus in the instanced underground base column? Maybe your bases will be accessible even if someone decides to no longer host the server you originally started it on?

I personally like base building :) We were on a server once, had a few things set up at a base and a couple cars and some a$$holes hunted our base down ( took em like 2 weeks peeps told us about em in game when we were on) and when they found it they ran over our tents and blew up our vehicles. It was $hitty! Then to top it off, or to be more a$$hole-ish they put a note on the map that said SRY F8L.....it was very upsetting. We stopped playing after that, it is one thing to take stuff from our camp but to be a troll and just destroy the whole thing was a crap move! Anyways with base building we can put up walls and a gate that only we can enter. It is nice to know that when we get on everyday our stuff is more then likely safe and still there. Just my opinion tho! :)

I strongly disagree with that type of feature. No safe havens like this should be considered for the SA. There are no magic doors or unbreakable walls in real life. They shouldn't be in a zombie apocalypse either.

[bfisher 561]

I don't know. I haven't been thrilled about the current method of "base building" where people pitch a couple of tents and some tank traps or barb wire in some far off remote corner of the map and then hoard all the weapons and vehicles they can find. I mean what's the point? What do I need to create a stockpile of weapons for, just so random players can come along and steal a DMR or M4?

I'd much rather live out of the back of a UAZ than a fixed base. But that means playing on a custom server with hundreds of extra vehicles since there's no point in having one if they are so rare I'm afraid to use it.

What sort of bases do people want to build anyway? Do people want to be holed up in a fortified townhouse in Cherno, I Am Legend style?

[tajjuk 65]

I'd much rather live out of the back of a UAZ than a fixed base. But that means playing on a custom server with hundreds of extra vehicles since there's no point in having one if they are so rare I'm afraid to use it.

That's your preference though.

As many have pointed out the game should be about many flavours. If you want to base build then as long as it works with what everyone else is doing people should be allowed to base build. If you want to survive in the woods with a tent hunting then that is your preference but it shouldn't be what the whole game is about.

There will be risk/reward with all methods. I don't think you should have invincible bases, if they have locks/doors etc then within reason they can be broken into, on the flip side they shouldn't be so easy to walk up to a tent and pick up a load of gear. Locks and the like would add a whole new playstyle - thieves, fid lockpicks for simple locks, digital lock picks or explosives etc for harder locks doors, sneaking in bases in darkness to steal a clan's precious loot or even vehicles. For me that adds more options and that can only be a good thing.

With big bases you could end up with big clan v clan battles Mad Max style, roaming bandit hordes and the like.

There is nothing wrong with stockpiling either, things in game re-spawn. Guns will always need more ammo, players will need more food, stores can always be raided. People in a real life apcolaypse situation would stock pile.

Edited May 7, 2013 by tajjuk

[Target Practice (DayZ) 1335]

There is nothing wrong with stockpiling either, things in game re-spawn. Guns will always need more ammo, players will need more food, stores can always be raided. People in a real life apcolaypse situation would stock pile.

Oh yeah, I have no problem with groups/clans stockpiling anything that respawns, as long as they're not exploiting game mechanics to do so (see the 'tent' problem, where people spam tents over high-value loot spawns) - the main issue with stockpiling is vehicles. The 'vehicle' part of a player's DayZ experience is a key one, as it allows the player to be much more mobile and transport much larger items, such as heli spares and so on. It also makes for a key part of the 'social' side of DayZ, too. I've made many new friends simply by stopping to pick someone up who looks like they could use a ride, or by getting picked up by friendly passing drivers. That's simply not going to happen if every vehicle on the map is locked away in some clan's garage, and that's why I'm so concerned about the 'hoarding' issue. It has the potential to alter the gameplay experience rather significantly, and not necessarily for the better.