Making the mod super hard is the wrong way…

[m.cab 83]

Yeah yeah, i know what you think…“1.7.7 patch is pissing me on thread #576“ but listen to this:

I think trying to make the game more of a survial simulation again, rather then a PVP military shooter (which it has become), is the right idea and direction.

The Problem is, you did it way over the top! I know DayZ never was a game for the regular casual player and i expect it never was supposed to…All the complicated ARMA controls, the bugs (broken legs, evil doors, inventory etc), the advanced ARMA weapon handling, the big ass map and so on…we all know that!

Then there was the Zeds. Every new player stuggled with them but at a certain point and after some experience one was able to master them. Go crouch-run behind a corner or a pine tree, run through a building and so on.

The biggest flaw about the Zeds was the delay between „approach“ and „attack“ and when you got „that feeling“ and kept constantly moving while they were around, they were unable to hit you anymorel. They were just to dumb! I think you guys know what i am talking about.

…Zombie apocalypse whitout scary Zombies..meh!

With 1.7.7. there are three big issues with the mod:

1. Zeds are super evil now.

Every one of them is a little Mohamed Ali now…they float to you like a butterfly and they sting like a freaking bee. Nomore delay between „approach“ and „attack“ and its very risky trying to get sneaky behind a corner or pinetree because when it doesnt work and they approach you…they will hit you.

2. No more loot.

Yeah i know, its a Apocalypse and its not supposed to have a NVG, DMR, and GPS laying around so much and to be honest, i agree. Problem is just, for many people the whole „collecting“ thing was one of their biggest push. What do you think why so many people are into base building? Its human nature to gather and collect! The hardcore gamers and squads on the other site still have their loot, they are moving around with SUVs, hueys and whatnot, raiding the NWAF and going bandit on the others. Currently there is a way bigger dissadvantage to the "rookies" and lonewolfs then to the hardcore guys.

3. Infection.

I know, its work in progress and its going to be changed and i wont discuss it here again!

What i basically want to tell you guys is, for a new player, or someone who isnt a hardcore gamer like 95% of the forum members are, this game is just way to hard!

I am in the lucky situation of having a big ass vacation at the moment plus i am a passionate and experienced gamer who loves challenging games so (like most of you) i played this game so much that i am able to handle all the flaws, bugs, tricky controls and even the bad ass new Zeds. BUT i am not that typical gamer. I have a lot of freetime (gamingtime) and i am a sardistic freakass gamer who loves the pain of permadeath! (:

„Normal“ gamers, like my friends, are working 35-40 hours a week! They cant play 50hours to get to „know“ the game and get used to all the flaws, remember the vehicle spawns, research about loot tables, knowing how to switch a weapon from your backpack to your inventory without losing it etc etc.

You made the game too hard for all the normal passionate gamers out there who are able to play the game 10-15 hours a week. Dont do that!

Long story short:

My oppinion is the game should get harder for the experienced players and squads, not for the people who are not so experienced…they are going to have a hard time anyways! Balance in a game (mod) is probably the hardest thing to achieve but also one of the most important. The way i see it, you broke the game for the rookies and gave an advantage to the hardcore players/squads...wrong way...

I know the SA is about to come and everything will change but still it hurts me to see the mod going in a wrong direction.

What do you guys think?

p.s. sorry about grammar and stuff, my english is not so good ):

Edited July 4, 2013 by m.cab

[JoeM (DayZ) 41]

The game is supposed to be unfair, the hardcore gamers are supposed to have an advantage over casual gamers because they can put more time into it. Anyway I know plenty of casual DayZ gamers that get on just fine with it, any semi intelligent person can get around the bugs and inventory with some direction and common sense.

It is supposed to be hard but if you play it right it isn't difficult at all. All it takes is some common sense.

Common sense on loot - Well highly trafficked areas are going to have very little loot, isn't that obvious to anyone in a zombie game?

Difficult zeds - Again it's a zombie game, you would be a fool if you anticipated that they would be easy. They now require a KoS approach or 100% sneak approach.

Infection - Infection is actually fine if you play smart, don't let zombies hit you. Antibiotics can be found in a lot of places now I've found, found 2 boxes on one loot pile in a barn. Of course you will be lucky to get them from hospitals, they are highly trafficked areas.

[dulix11 731]

1- I'm pretty sure thats being fixed in the SA. They won't be able to run through doors, knock you out in one hit etc.

2- I find stuff just fine. I had a M4A1, a backpack, food and water, some medical supplies last time I played. The problem is people spawn in Kamenka, run through the town looking for loot, find none, and then whinge about it on the forums. However I think a big problem with the loot is that it is very limited as in where it can spawn. There aren't that many enterable buildings in Chernarus, and you might get 4 -5 loot piles in a entire house. The SA will have loads more enterable buildings, and many more locations for loot to spawn: On tables, under beds / drawers, on shelves etc...

3- *facepalm* not this again. Don't attract attention, and it won't happen.

New players are just going to have to practice. You can't spawn them in with a M16, an ALICE pack and food supplies so that they can 'get used to it.' The first few times I played, all I did was die. Die. And die again. Hell, I still die on a daily basis now! You just have to keep at it, keep going, and eventually you'll get much better, get a little further, get some more loot every time you play.

[Crazy one 124]

I'm loving the patch and it's changes,i'm a new player, maybe i'm a sadist and love the hurt/fear and paranoia this game gives, iv'e tried servers that cater to base building/vehicles everywhere, weapons in abundance etc etc etc and they just don't do it for me, i always return to official servers with the bare minimum, bandage and flares only. for me the loot rareity is great hard but great.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Crazy one

[kander 80]

Regards the loot: I'm just coming back to this after nearly a year and, sure, it's harder, but I'm enjoying it just as much. Scratch that, even more.

I think it comes down to 'little victories'. If you sneak around for ages and end up with just enough to be able to leave the towns and cities and become self-sufficient, THAT's a goal, an achievement. If later on you find some military gear, and you have enough other supplies to support yourself, that's an achievement too. Before it was too easy to get supplies, stay alive. Now, I don't care if I don't have all the military stuff (previously I was getting bored if I didn't get hold of it, and quickly). With the latest patch I can still beat a tooled-up guy with a Lee Enfield and a little cunning, and God does it feel like an accomplishment.

Why do you need gear to have fun? You just need enough to survive. My point really is it doesn't matter if you can't get 'the good stuff' without a lot of work, because you only use that stuff against other players and they are in the same situation. If other players invest loads of time server-hopping etc to fast track this then it’s their own time they’re wasting IMO.. They’re still gonna die sooner or later and have to do the whole lot again... Are they playing the game for the immersion and the post-apocalyptic experience, or just to grind their way to good equipment?

Edited July 4, 2013 by kander

[applejaxc 2500]

1: Zombies could get nerfed a little, but dynamically changed. New animations, 3+ attack options shouldn't be so much to ask for. Heavy hit (against standing/slow players), grab-and-scratch (when the zombie running but not sprinting) and lunge-tackle (when sprinting, to knock down an uncareful player who's run into a wall or tree).

2: I wish ammo was more rare. I really do.

3: I wish cars got nerfed. A lot.

4: I hope Rocket fucks the helicopter flight models just to piss off long-term bandit groups. You want to fly your little helicopter around Cherno? Too bad. Fuck you. That'd be awesome. And all the more respect to helicopter owners.

5: Making the game hard is the right direction, as long as you aren't going overboard. A lot of what Rocket has been talking about sounds fun in the way cheap killstreak gimmicks do in CoD. It's all fun and games until some fucking asshole gets a A10 or whatever the bomber is called and you literally die 5 or 6 times right out of spawn with no chance to defend yourself. I feel like the disease is going to be the same way, and it's going to absolutely truck new characters that spawn in the rain, swamp, or away from a city. If disease is anything like it is now, everyone is going to have typhoid fever in 5 minutes and the plague is going to wipe out Chernarus. I trust Rocket to make a great game... with time. I want to get my hands on DayZ as soon and as cheap as possible, but I'm not going to enjoy getting salmonella or gingivitis every time someone breaths on me or I eat some food.

[applejaxc 2500]

2- I find stuff just fine.

Why is everyone but you and I complaining about loot spawns? There's literally 4 places to find M16A2M203ACOGSUPERWTF assault rifles in Elektrozavodsk that don't take any skill to find or loot and 3 in Chernogorsk. Plus there's dead bodies everywhere with guns on them. I once (fresh spawn, 2 weeks ago) joined and had NVGs, camo clothes (which I ditched because they look retarded), M1911 + ammo, a M1014, a AKM, and a half-fueled all-repaired truck without leaving my spawn city (which was in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with 1 lootable building). I found the M1911 and 2 magazines, a dead body with the shotgun/NVGs/clothes, popped the tire on a truck when it rolled through town, killed the driver when he got out of the car, got the rest of the loot off of him, fixed the FL tire, and left. Took maybe half an hour.

[Boshed 29]

Your whole point is based on the fact that more experienced players have an advantage over those new players. Well of course they do, they have 'been there and done that'. We all started off not really knowing WTH was going on and/or what to do, which is part of the charm of this game IMO and what stirs me on to experience more. I have a full time job and have picked things up fine. Yes it would have taken me longer in real-time than someone pumping 50hrs p/w into the game, but you get there. There are people with families and much more responsibility than I here and they also do fine.

It's just the 'you get knocked down, you dust yourself off and start again' type of philosophy. Those that can't handle that fact are going to have a bad time.

My final point would be that making it 'super hard' is EXACTLY the right direction. If you want to play an easier game there are LOADS of them on the market. This game sits in a niche that tailors to those not wanting another 'mass market/casual' experience.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Boshed

[Sutinen 635]

I wasn't struggling with dying at all, I just started sneaking and avoided zombies. What I really struggled with was finding loot spawns, food and weapons. It was more fun for me than anything.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Sutinen

[JSparks (DayZ) 109]

You just summarised three valid arguments and proceeded to neutralise them in the same sentences. Bravo, thread point defeated.

[Snowkea 10]

Now that the game is incredibly hard, the 10 year olds who treat it like one big deathmatch will hopefully leave. I think dying over and over is worth it for that.

[Trizzo 632]

Wrong in theory but in practice as the mod stands... you're wrong again ha! But I would like to qualify this.

Take Cormac Mccarthy's The Road. The father and son travel with a gun, two bullets left. He never uses those two rounds because he saving them for himself. Every bullet has meaning as does every decision they have to make. Lets take the scene where the father shoots one of his two bullets in self defense and imagine a similar scene in DayZ.

I'm looting and get cornered. I'm panicked, deciding between trying to dodge the zombie or shooting it. Will I alert the horde or other players? I make the decison that concerns my immediate safety. I fire a gun to kill the zombie because I know they have been buffed and are now very dangerous infection monkeys (as they should be). This is where the problems happen.

Zombies clip through walls, they run in manic zig zags due to wierd pathing/AI and i cant headshot them because they seem to teleport around the map like Nightcrawler. They hit me through buildings, i'm stuck on some glitch that's causing X,Y,Z to go wrong, i'm infected from 10 meters away, zombies walk in slo in buildings for no good reason, my avatars animation is not ideal to this style of game because DayZ was built using an engine for an open world sim and tried to make a CQB/CQC game...etc..etc... At a glance DayZ mod replicates the oppression The Road but once we look behind the veneer and it's buggy nature is laid bare we have the feeling of a game, rather than actually having one.

Making DayZ harder, even super hard, is where it should go but hand in hand with making this experience bug free and with appropriate changes to gameplay. I feel there is no way around this until SA. For now I pretend that i'm playing the best surivial sim ever made. It's also pretty poor reflection on the state of gaming that this buggy mod does a better job of building an emotional connection than most AAA big budget games.

tl;dr I think these complaints stem from the dissonance that DayZ is a compelling experience that feels like a game but it is actually a broken buggy mess with mostly undeveloped/unrealised ideas. It should be hard, wait for SA to deliver a hard, bug free, game.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Trizzo

[JoeM (DayZ) 41]

Now that the game is incredibly hard, the 10 year olds who treat it like one big deathmatch will hopefully leave. I think dying over and over is worth it for that.

Not really, all those people are in private hive server with starting gear hundreds of choppers etc. etc. etc.

[thelonewarrior 886]

People complain about not finding loot because they go to the same places everyone else does

Every time I've gone to a castle ( except devils Castle) I've found 3-4 assault rifles with ammo, mostly m16/ m4 and ak variants

Came away with more ammo with an m4 cco than I could carry the other day

There are a load of new places that loot spawns, people are just still running straight to the firestations expecting to find good weapons

[The Jackall 55]

all to his own. but i think the more difficult they make the game, the more players you will attract. I don’t want to play an ARCADE game that is why i play DAYZ. If you want it easy join a noob server with crosshairs on, map, gun and bullets already in your backpack and stop people from exploring around towns. Loot is everywhere, and kicking yourself in the nuts because you didn’t run away from that infected body is your own fault. Please let’s not make a ARCADE game and rather stick to what makes the game work. Survive, survive, survive.

Edited July 4, 2013 by The Jackall

[m.cab 83]

Please dont nail me down about the three points i criticized about the current patch. We all know about them. I just wanted to make kind of a summary about the current changes!

My general point was more about not to make the game harder and harder for the first one or two hours of gameplay, rather then for the later game and so for the advanced players.

[Boshed 29]

As touched on by Trizzo, I think the issues and frustrations some are experiencing (especially new players and myself included) are the product of bugs more than anything else.

However, making the game accessible for new players without 'dumbing it down' is important as you say m.cab, but I feel Dayz isn't the only game to have difficulties tackling this quandary.

[Dagwood 680]

This game needs to be hardcore. If it gets so hardcore that I only play 5 hours a week instead of 15, so be it. I've been playing for 6 months and now the survival part is easy. Now it's become "how many risks can I take and survive?" Survival shouldn't be guaranteed when I spawn in fresh. I think 1 in 4 surviving long enough to secure long term survival status (like hunting knife, matches and hatchet currently) is where the SA should find its balance. We should be proud walking away from town with the gear we need for survival. Not counting the minutes until we hit NWAF

Edited July 4, 2013 by Dagwood

[Feral (DayZ) 622]

Bugs are the key - no one minds dying if they fucked up or were out fought but everyone minds when death comes as the result of a glaring imperfection in the games engine or design.

Make it as hard as hell but first make it work.

[rn_max 202]

DayZ ... correction ... Vanilla DayZ, isn't too hard, it is just haemorrhaging entertainment value. The whole game experience has gone past a tipping point where it lacks interest and requires life sapping amounts of time to draw achievement from.

The uneven randomness and scarcity of mundane loot and vehicle parts is turning it into a dull, long winded, MMO resource farm 'n' grind, where a roll of the digital dice decides whether, for example, no tent spawns for a week, or eight spawn in one supermarket.

Overtly time consuming and wildly random doesn't equal difficult, it equals boring. The whole advantage and appeal over a typical WoW clone MMO was that it had persistence without having to expend weeks of subscription milking, grinding time to gain a sense of achievement.

There is already a wealth of choice for those who desire reiterative simulation of tediousness ...

Trucks

Railways

Farming

Fishing

Gardening

Courier Service

Street Cleaning

Zombie survival does not belong on this list ... no, really, it doesn't.

[Dagwood 680]

Who needs to spend multiple days gearing up...? If you're playing efficiently it should not take more than 3-4 hours. Sorry you can't sprint through towns, lose zombies in a building because of a bug nobody complains about, and then come out the otherside with 3-4 useful items. Sneaking is finally the effective way to loot. Learn it or enjoy spawning on the beach every 30 minutes

[m_mitchell 27]

I like the loot spawn EXCEPT with helicopter crashes and hospitals because they contain NOTHING. Heli crashes should be guaranteed some kind of military assault rifle like an M4 or military clothes. And hospitals? You go to those to save you. Or you used to. On servers where me and a few friends are the only people hospitals are still nearly useless. They contain nothing except tin cans 99% of the time. Need anti-biotics? Check sheds because it's more likely you'll find them there which I have.

But really if better stealth is implemented which it probably already is then we should be good. As well as if they add a way to pickup rockets like in Farcry 3 and toss them in under seconds unlike the current system to throw a tin can or something.

[klesh 2423]

Rocket wants the game to be "inaccessible". The rewards are all the more sweet this way.

[rn_max 202]

Oops .. must have used too many big words. Vanilla DayZ ... that's the mod played on public hive servers ... has not become harder. It has started to become boring.

MMO grinding ... that is repeatedly visiting loot spawns over a long period, in this case to see what has appeared by random chance ... is not very entertaining ... which loosely translates as is not fun.

Being entertained by something that is difficult, means that it presents a challenge, requiring skill and reasoning to largely affect, if not completely achieve, an outcome.

Being bored by something perceived as difficult, when it actually is not, by contrast, means that the outcome relies mainly on random chance and blind persistence, rather than skill and reasoning.

People with real lives, such as employed adults, have other things to do in a typical day, which are more important. These mysterious real life priorities prevent them from playing several hours of a game in one session, or indeed sometimes several sessions.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of money spent on games comes from those employed adults, in one way or another, A whole generation of them grew up with the beginning of computer games and still play them today.

Suck this horrible last thought up ... in less than a generation or so, there will be more grey haired gamers than spotty kids.

The first generation of gamers have long since grown up and so must games ... that is if they want to maintain the size of their customer base.

Edited July 5, 2013 by RN_Max

[SalamanderAnder (DayZ) 1747]

Isn't the whole point of this game to give players a unique experience? We all reap what we sow. You can't "balance" a game that is governed by cause and effect. If I just run around on the coast in a full sprint like a Bambi moron, of course I'm going to get killed. The people who find this game "too hard" just need to get more savvy. It's the apocalypse, it's not going to hold your hand. We all had to adapt, to survive. Quit complaining. Learn what to expect. Act on your expectations. It's a very simple process.