Player Controlled Zombie discussion

[lev 39]

This may be a very hated idea but I'm gonna post it anyway.  

 

Background and goals for the idea:

To address the prevalence of KOS mentality.  Necessary disclaimer: I'm not against KOS and I've practiced it many times myself.  However, I do think that KOS player behavior is a bit too common (even in myself, and I admit that I could reduce the problem but I don't because I simply do not like to die to another player because of misplaced trust).  I think in the long term, the amount of KOS might lead to stale gameplay and reduce the success of the game.  I don't want to advocate for hardcoded methods of limiting KOS because I definitely think it is totally valid and makes the game more interesting.  Rather I prefer methods that naturally alter the players' mindset.  A lot of things have been suggested to do this such as increasing the amount of team work needed to do certain things, making survival harder, or increasing the zombie threat but I think one idea we have overlooked is the idea of a player controlled zombie.

 

Assumptions and rationale:

Generally, I believe that players have shifted to a KOS mentality because of how easy the survival component was.  Once zombies were well understood they ceased to be a major threat and the food/water/shelter component of survival had never been a strong factor in player deaths.  This type of generalization stems from my experience in the early mod days when players spawned with revolvers, ammo, and flares.  In these initial days of the mod, it was not uncommon to see bands of strangers in groups as large as 20-30 people running down MSRs tossing flares, searching for supplies and killing zombies together.  I believe that the main reasons that this was even possible came from several factors.  In those days almost all of the players came from Arma 2 where gameplay modes (coop, TvT, CoTvT) were well defined and ROE was clearly reinforced in mission briefs.  Thus in the early shift into DayZ, people tended to play it like a coop mode mission since they had not been led to believe that it was more than that.  More so, I believe an even larger factor was that because the game was so unknown at the time, working together in groups made it easier to survive and figure out the constraints and possibilities of the mod.  However, as the game became better understood and the mechanics were documented, players outgrew the challenge of surviving against the environment and naturally shifted towards PK-ing as the main challenge.  Coupled with the massive influx of players who learned of the game only as this hardcore zombie mod where players were the biggest threats, the KOS mentality began to progress as the de facto standard of gameplay.  Because of these reasons stated above, I think the major factor in the KOS mentality was the lack of environmental threats being supplanted by the pervasive human threat.

 

The Fix:

1. When humans are killed, they respawn as a zombie in a random location within 300m radius of their death location or any location with zombies (both player and AI which should be clearly denoted in the spawn menu).  Maybe this should be tweaked to a percentage chance instead of always occurring.

2. As a zombie, their speeds and stamina should be the same as an AI zombie.  Player controlled zombies should be allowed all the same movement options as a human including up right movement, crouched movement, prone movement, ability to lean, roll, toggle between walk/run/turbo speeds, and climbing ladders.

3. Player controlled zombies' hp should be base zombie hp + additional hp based on how long the survivor lived (this needs tweaking for balance, maybe they don't need higher hp at all or it should be capped to a limit).

4. Player controlled zombies interaction options are limited to opening doors and melee attacks (until barricades are properly implemented, in which case player zombies should be able to smash barriers).

5. When player zombies speak, their chat can only be heard by other nearby player zombies.  To a survivor human, zombie player chat will be heard as zombie moans and groans.  Player zombies will not moan or groan unless they are speaking on chat.

6. Player controlled zombies have an ability which they can toggle on or off to have nearby zombies follow them (# of zombie AI should be capped at some limit).  This should be configured such that the player can determine where in the group/horde they wish to position themselves (front,middle,rear, etc).

7. When a player controlled zombie dies, they respawn as a survivor as they currently do.

8. Players have the option to never respawn as a zombie if desired.

 

Why I think it will work:

Firstly I believe a human zombie would typically be more threatening than an AI zombie.  The attack patterns will be less predictable and the ability to draw in a horde will make coordinated zombie attacks much more dangerous.  This will satisfy the need for a more threatening environmental component by improving the zombie threat.  On a larger scale, I believe that player controlled zombies will be able to dynamically adapt to player driven behaviors and interactions and make the environment more responsive than the current system.  Instead of having a constant amount of environmental threat, areas of increased human activity will have increased environmental threat to match and thereby reducing the likelihood of KOS since KOS only makes it more dangerous for someone trying to survive.

 

Additionally, I think this feature would appeal and be enjoyable to someone who was killed by another player by offering a chance at revenge.  On the other side, I think it would reduce KOS behavior because of  the concern that player you just killed might come back as a zombie and either kill you or make you waste resources killing him/her again + any other zombie friends they might have brought along.

 

Some considerations:

-Zombie metagaming - i.e. abuse of the feature through zombie-human cooperation by either having humans controlling zombie armies to fight their specific enemies or simply walking a horde of zombies out of a town so their survivor allies can loot freely.  This might be avoidable by having a timer on being a zombie, slowly increasing the chance of becoming a zombie increase as the survival time increases, limiting the feature to engage only when killed by another human, or when dying ungrouped, etc.  I think this is my major concern in implementing this feature.

-Maybe we're opening a can of worms - the impact of this feature is very much unknown (including unknown unknowns) and human ingenuity can make this a game breaking feature or one that requires so many limitations that it renders it effectively useless in achieving its main goals.  In consideration of this, adding this feature may require much more time to fix it afterwards than simply going with other ideas.

 

Let me know your thoughts.  Constructive feedback, even if negative is welcome.

 

 

 

[TLa_Vanguard 52]

wow very interesting idea, thats some out of the box thinking  :)

[austen.fart@gmail.com 54]

But then people will complain about KoS'ing zombies. What if they are good players.. oh no what will we do :(

[mintypie007 57]

Dayz is a game with perma death and military grade weaponry. It is a hardcore survival game. Its not some my little pony friendship forever farming game. If you are seeing people and are not equipped to defend yourself you are playing wrong. Learn to adapt and avoid players. KOS is a survival method. If you are not in my teamspeak have a gun and i can not avoid you, you are near a gun, or you have something I need I am going to scrub the floor with you. People want create convoluted methods of marking players who kill each other or expect rocket to make the number ONE survival method have huge repercussions. Learn to manage your defense not ask rocket to.

 

[Beck (DayZ) 1768]

TL;DR

No

[CynicalBeans 9]

I thought that the dayz zeds are rabid cannibalistic humans rather than undead. Wouldn't make sense for dead players to come re-animate. Having player characters who have succumbed to an infection become AI controlled zeds would be cool though...