Map balance

[Calvin Candie 189]

Yesterday made a trip from balota to elektro and back on a full 40 man server. Did not see anyone. Day before the same thing. Day before that saw 2 dudes in elektro. Lit a fire on the balota airfield, noone cared.

I know they are experimenting with spawn places and as a result, coast is empty. But how will it work in the final release if spawn places will be all over the map? Chances of meeting another player randomly will be very slim.

Maybe if they implement 100 people servers, but far as I know thats sci-fi currently.

It would be cool if people spawned in hospitals of major cities. Like Rick in Walking Dead.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Calvin Candie

[blacklabel79 949]

meh...tried to escape the ne region on EXP...man...got shot in cherno fleeing a Horde...HA! People ARE out there...

[LeeVanSpliff 156]

Yeah, friend was on about some days ago "we need bigger servers". Ten minutes later we had both been mosin'd.

 

I wouldn't call it lucky or unlucky, but sometimes you just meet people, at other times you don't.

Edited August 4, 2014 by LeeVanSpliff

[Khanarac 252]

It's rare.

 

NWA seems to be populated more recently, for whatever reason. Maybe people wanna try out the AK101.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Khanarac

[omgwtfbbq (DayZ) 1069]

100 man servers seem silly to me, there's already a lot of people (in high traffic areas), and the feeling of isolation and survival in the apocalypse is lost if I can have an army of 75 people running with me.

[Exorade 214]

I think the best solution would have been to not put Karmanovka to the east but instead to the west.

Have all the prizes and big cities in the west so that when people spawn in the east, they naturally migrate to west.

 

Plenty of people do that already but apparently the masses need more encouragement. Of course those who think that walking is too much for them, would in the real world perish, while the more determined people would simply keep moving.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Exorade

[Papanowel (DayZ) 34]

Some players stay in the north east because they just want to play DayZ as a deathmatch game (lazy walkers)... I don't think the problem is about map balance nor size.

[hombrecz 832]

I'm starting to hate Berezino with passion. Why o why so many players end up deathmatching there, never to explore the map fully?

From what I've seen, majority of players are always in north-east so mostly in Berezino, some at Svetlo, Chernaya Polana or Novodmitrovsk.

 

Ok I've met few folks at NWA, but those were rare occurances. Far more rare that I would like.

Some people say:"Enlarge the map! Expand it more!". While I like the idea, I don't think it would help anything. 

 

Maybe, once we have completed loot tables, will folks move towards barracks more.

Maybe Mosins and SKS will be more rare, making coastal deathmatching less plausible.

 

I so wish that in the end folks will spread over the map a lot more than now.

[Calvin Candie 189]

In my eyes the problem is what I mentioned several times in other threads - patterns. Looting patterns, moving patterns, know hotspots. If there would be some kind of randomness about looting and gearing up, people would be all over the place. Maybe bases help with that as they would become mobile points of interest redirecting players away from standard places - cities, mil. bases.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Calvin Candie

[Irish. 4886]

Im just gonna have to say.. wait.

 

You will see, if you played the mods you already know, how people will change their patterns once vehicles and tent camps/bases are working properly. Then it will get even more drastic once they tweak the spawn points and allow for higher pop servers..

 

Trust me, from playing the mods, it gets better than what we have now.. much better. 

Edited August 4, 2014 by lrish

[way455 40]

Go north young man, go north.

Berenzino is the new Electro and Balota is for loot farmers. No one like the +1 hour travel to get there when 90% of the spawns are in the NE. It's easier to raid NWA and the few military spots in the NE.

[trev186 389]

I think they are going the right way with things.

U cant just make loot spawn everywhere randomly that isn't what is stopping epople from exploring..

If you think about it the best loot is all on the western edge of the map...which is rarely where players are right now.

The issue is people just want death match in the NE. Their goal is to find just enough gear to get by. Since in dayz it is more important tto get the jump on another player as opposed to having decent gear u dont need to have all the BIS gear.

What needs to be done is to continue to offer tiered rewards for exploration. Look what the MP5K spawning in police stations did. Suddenly people went all over the map to every police station for one.

Also there has been more and more people heading west as new gear such as AKM was added. 3 months ago I could loot NWAF on a 40 man server and not see a soul 90% of the time. Now It is more like 75% of the time.

Once there is a way to stash gear it will increase more. Right now people dont wanna put in 8 hours worth of work to build a decent kit to die in an instant. It is easier to just get a mousin 1 box of ammo and kill a pvp focused clan member and take his. Sure u risk dying...but what's a mousin and a box of ammo ?

[James Hawke 114]

I actually think for an Alpha the map is quite well balanced. You have Novodmitrovsk in the north, NEAF, Berezino to the east, Elektro, Balota and Cherno to the south, two or three (?) military compounds in the west, plus the NWAF - And of course the few 'normal' cities in the middle of the map.

 

Where the players wanna end up is really their own prerogative. I've had times where I could freely run across NEAF and NWAF on a server with 30 players and nobody gave a flying toss. It's a lottery really.

[Dagwood 680]

The problem is that a lot of "death match" players do their looting on nearly empty servers. So while we're looting the west on full servers and finding nobody and the rest of the server population is in berezino, the exact opposite is occurring on the hundreds of low population servers: military bases are being looted while the towns in the north east (deathmatch arena) are empty.

I hate to say it, but this trend will likely persist unless we go to a private hive structure. Or the hive is broken up into geographically segregated "shards". This would give players only a few dozen servers to hop around on instead of the limitless supply they have now.