Some thoughts on the game after 100 hours

[compforce 0]

I wanted to contribute my thoughts on what I see in the game so far.  Some of this is covered in other posts, some isn't.

 

The challenge right now is that PvP is so prevalent that there is no opportunity to form groups for the average player.  Yes, clans have the ability to form up fast, but for the casual gamer, there are too many meta-gaming challenges with finding people to group with.  Add in the KOS factor and it's pretty much impossible to just "find new friends" on servers.  The KOS mentality will continue until there is a disincentive to do so, but you also need people that are playing KOS/PvP to make the game more than another "kill a giant bat" (PvE) game.

 

How do you fix it and add the PvE elements while preserving PvP?

 

1. limit the number of guns and military loot items in game.  Seriously, does anyone think that military grade equipment will just be laying around after a zombie apocalypse?  They will be hoarded by those that have the ability/cunning/power to get them.  The same applies to ammo.  In four hours of game play you can fill up a box with more ammo than you'll possibly use before the next restart or your death, when you can fill up again.  As long as everyone has military grade weapons, plentiful ammo and there is no disincentive, people will shoot people.  Griefers in other games have taught us this lesson over and over.  Civilian weapons with lower capacities and high reload times like the magnum or a bolt action hunting rifle should be the norm, not the exception, and even those should be rare.  Ammo should be like any other consumable and run out (maybe a crafting idea to create or find shells, powder, caps and projectiles and fashion them together into a bullet).

 

2. Private Hives - For all the reasons in other threads, but this also ties into some of my other suggestions.

 

3. Lower the food spawns OR No/long term loot respawns - If things are scarce, it will create an economy based loosely on Mazlow's hierarchy.  Right now, you can go to any town and find food that is just laying around because people didn't want to stuff their inventory with it.  That would be fine if it was consumed via eating or rotting to make it scarce over time.  As it is, a bag of rice will last multiple restarts, after which there is plenty more to be found.  Forcing people to trade for what they need will turn the game social rather than the current - spawn, gear up, kill and/or loot until you are killed, rinse wash repeat nature of the game.

 

4. Create a trade hub town that is "safe" and place it way up north in all that empty space up there.  Populate it with police or military ai that are geared up, not lootable and will come down swiftly on any aggressive actions.  In the city you can rob, hurt or kill someone but it's at the cost of your life 99.9% of the time.  Call it the last city that still has a working government for RP purposes.  This will create an entire class of merchant players that will help set prices for the economy as well as create a black market underground.  It'll also give people somewhere to run to when they are a fresh respawn.  How many zombie movies and shows have a safe haven that is the goal?  Most of them...  These will also provide a place for people to team up before venturing out into the world.  In 100+ hours I've never actually seen another person unless I was in a high traffic area where everyone was killing everyone and there was no social interaction.  A safe area would allow for those interactions to happen.

 

5. Persistent storage on a given private hive server.  When a person either buys or gathers enough components (wood, hammers, nails, screwdrivers and screws), they can build a shack to store stuff they find.  When a group of players buy or gather enough components , they can create a compound (by building a wall around their shacks).  If the player dies, their shack "burns down" destroying most or all of the contents so it can't be used as a way around permadeath.  The shacks and compounds stay, once built, even after logout so they can be looted if not protected.  This will cause new "cities" and high value areas to be dynamic and located based on player desires.  Ultimately, this will cause people to venture away from the coast and air fields to explore the wilderness in the hopes of finding an undefended building or one they can take by force.  I do think this has to be server specific or you are just allowing server hoppers to create caches all over the place.  i.e. a public hive for this would be very bad as people would go to a low pop server, grab a bunch of gear, hop to the server where their house was and drop off there.  A smaller hive would work, 2-3 servers would make it something where a down server didn't cause the game to be unplayable.

 

6. Zombie spawns - Rather than populating the server with zombies on restart, change the logic so that when a player gets within x distance of a town, that town spawns a LOT of zombies, maybe 20 for every player in major metro areas and 4-5 in lower concentration areas.  This would create waves of the undead while saving server resources populating areas that no one is in.  It would also scale the difficulty for those playing in groups.  So if you had a group of three that was moving into a city, you would have 60 zombies to deal with.  If all 40 players on a server were in the same city (not likely), that would be 800 zombies.  It would be much more of a threat than the current system and would require a lower amount of server resource than the planned 4k zombies.  Note that you would have to have a distance a player had to leave before allowing another spawn or do a quick count of the current number of players or you'd have players figuring out where the trigger line was and dancing back and forth to cause the server to crash or to grief new players.  Use a periodic check to see if any players are in the town and despawn any zombies if it goes through 2-3 checks without any players to conserve resources.

 

7. I like the suggestion about an in-game logout timer that can be cancelled much more than the current timer.  The current one means you are logging blind and can respawn without knowing how you died.  The argument that you need to find a safe place doesn't actually work.  I was out in the very NW corner of the map just poking around and still got killed by someone that I never heard or saw.  I've also been killed so far west that it took me 30 minutes to get there after I left the end of the road past the supermarket.  Basically people can be anywhere and there is no such thing as finding a good spot.  I'm all for a timer to log, but I also think that you should be able to defend yourself if attacked while doing it.  As a compromise, they could even do both, sit for 30 seconds in-game, ala EQ, and then stay there for 30 seconds after logging.

 

8. Finally, add in the idea of slow wear and tear to degrade objects rather than them staying pristine until a zombie whacks them.  This will give players things they need to search for in order to stay viable.  It'll also help shore up the economy from #3 above.

 

OK, that ends the book, let the flaming begin!

[gerbilschooler 229]

You lost me as soon as I saw an implemented safe zone (not player created). And your one point about persistent items will come, that is part of the DayZ experience... having a place to stash your loot. That being said, I think once players have a place to hang their hat, i.e. permanent objects on specific servers (not necessarily private servers, public servers can handle permanent objects all by their lonesome), then a lot of th eproblems you see in the game will correct themselves a bit.

[compforce 0]

You lost me as soon as I saw an implemented safe zone (not player created). And your one point about persistent items will come, that is part of the DayZ experience... having a place to stash your loot. That being said, I think once players have a place to hang their hat, i.e. permanent objects on specific servers (not necessarily private servers, public servers can handle permanent objects all by their lonesome), then a lot of th eproblems you see in the game will correct themselves a bit.

 

Without a way to meet up and interact, players will have no chance at all of creating the very first safe area.  It'll take a clan deciding to do it, which will be abandoned after a few non-clan players wander in and just open up with their M4.  Maybe the very strongest clans could do it, but people who just want to grief will go, grab a weapon and take as many with them as they can just for the enjoyment of ruining other people's day.

 

Maybe an answer would be a "travelling" safe area rather than a fixed location with a flyer up in each town to let players know where it will be next.  No fixed location, no camping.  It would actually be a mini-quest to find out where the area was.

[mercules 1290]

I hate Zombies Spawns. It's an issue with the Mod. People at that point no longer kill zombies. Why waste valuable bullets or ruin your weapon when you know in about 10 minutes 20 more Zombies will spawn. At that point you just avoid them, run and loot, and lose them in the brush. I LOVE the fact that I can clear an area and know that for a while it will be clear of zombies. Zombies spawns also inform "campers" that someone is in the town. It would be fine if the server checked and respawned zombies that were killed say... 20 minutes after they died. 

[compforce 0]

I hate Zombies Spawns. It's an issue with the Mod. People at that point no longer kill zombies. Why waste valuable bullets or ruin your weapon when you know in about 10 minutes 20 more Zombies will spawn. At that point you just avoid them, run and loot, and lose them in the brush. I LOVE the fact that I can clear an area and know that for a while it will be clear of zombies. Zombies spawns also inform "campers" that someone is in the town. It would be fine if the server checked and respawned zombies that were killed say... 20 minutes after they died. 

 

 

Exactly my points.  If ammo was limited and you had to decide whether to "waste" it on zombies or not, it would add the hoarding mentality that would mirror real life.

 

As to campers knowing that someone is in town, if the zombies spawned when a player was 1.5k away, how would the camper know whether the zombie he was looking at was his own spawn?

 

I'm not advocating spawn points where they periodically respawn on a timer, I'm saying that they should spawn while you are too far away to know that they spawned and that, once dead, they stay dead unless another person enters the area.