Permadeath losing it's edge

[svisketyggeren 662]

We dont need a defined end game...we need players to care for their life. Once players start caring for their lifes there will be no quick looting a town in the middel of the day, running carelessly over open areas, making loud noises, stupid bambies risking their worthless lifes to punch u or gearing up in 30 min.

[Mookie (original) 799]

Um, can I just ask that on our way to whatever this 'endgame' is, we don't end up with a game that's hopelessly complex as it tries to micro-incentivise players or account for the myriad small considerations of getting around in life to the nth degree.

 

Apologies for the sheer age of the reference, but can we please avoid the terrible journey from (eg) Shogun:Total War (excellent game), to Medieval:Total War (excellent game, but a bit complicated), to Rome:Total War (getting too damn convoluted now), to Empire Total War (er, wtf?). Thanks.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Mookie

[pillock 850]

Right. There's several aspects that could/will go a long way towards solving the trivialisation of permadeath. These are some: (of them)

 

- Dangerous animals. You spawn in after death and b-line towards the nearest military base? Get attacked by wolves or a bear. No weapon = no defence + can't outrun them = dead. Start again.

 

- Character progression through physical fitness. Fresh spawns could be made weak and feeble, low stamina, low sickness resistance, slow injury recovery, low hunger/thirst/cold/heat tolerance. You might then build up on all these things over time by carefully managing the health and well-being of your character. Death = start again with a shitty newspawn character.

 

- More debilitating effects, slower death. Dying of 'natural' causes (ie. not murdered) should take longer, but have a significantly drawn-out process of increasingly debilitating effects on your character. This helps slow the game down a bit, and adds variation to the experience (rather than just having hunger/thirst/sickness/thermia as ticking clocks towards unconsciousness). As your condition gets worse, so does your character's performance. If you manage to survive the ordeal and recover properly, you could be rewarded with better tolerance of that condition.

 

-General slowdown of movement speed. If you want to go from the East to the West, it should you take a long time (on foot). You should need to prepare for the expedition. You should need to collect supplies, specific to that journey. Travel light and fast, or slow and better-prepared for mishap? Slower pace means greater opportunity for the unexpected to happen: more decisions to make, more variation, more replay value.

 

- Server lock-out after death. Maybe 24 hours? So you have to change servers (unless you rent it yourself) and start again in a new world of unfamiliar player and loot locations. (This would help mitigate "regearing" from your own corpse or your loot stash.)

 

Some of these things are already planned, I think (at least to some extent) - some are just suggestions. But that's what springs to my mind reading this thread.

[Irish. 4886]

The last few firefights I've participated in have done little in the way of exciting me. Being attacked out of the blue or even seeing a player unexpectedly used to be enough to get my heart racing.

What's changed? Part of the problem is tolerance. I've been playing for over a year and become accustomed to the way dayz plays out. But the other issue, which I would like to share, is the extreme commonality of every top tier piece of equipment in the game. Even when loaded up with an AKM carrying several magazines, my favorite clothes, and all of the other goodies, I find myself unconcerned at the prospect of death. Why? Because gearing up is as easy as one trip to the west side of the map.

In the mod, the reason you were afraid of dying was because of all the gear you stood to lose. An M4CCO (one of the easier rifles to obtain) might take an entire evening of playing to get your hands on.

I believe that players go through two distinctive life stages with each avatar: looting and surviving. During the loot phase, acquiring better equipment is the main objective. Sacrificing safety for speed is acceptable. During the survival phase, acquiring additional gear is unnecessary and the main objective is to survive while completing various tasks (usually killing). Interactions during this stage are what I crave. Heart pounding, nerve racking terror.

Lately, I haven't been able to achieve a level of attachment to my character that makes the game enjoyable for me.

Rather than just whine about it here and put the game down, I've decided to hunt heli crashsites until I find an M4. After finding the M4 (for which I now have various attachments) I will find an MP5 for the MP5 mag I've been humping around.

My hope is that once I have obtained these relatively difficult to find weapons, dayz will regain some of its edge that it has missed in the last few weeks.

Because this is a discussion forum, and not just a place for whiners to whine, I will leave y'all with a question: what about dayz keeps you on edge? Is it the threat of losing your time investment (as it is for me)? Is it the thought of the other guy "winning" and you losing? Or is it just the unpredictability of not knowing what could be around the corner?

PS: if you would like to make a donation to the "help! dayz isn't scary anymore" rehabilitation program, I will be accepting M4s and/or MP5s in need of a loving owner.

Dagwood

 

This.

 

I concur and agree completely. I am in a clan, which makes it even worse.. but even as a lonewolf I found dying not really an issue. My main problem back then was I NEVER died. Even when I tried to get killed, I would in the end have the shots miss me.. or I would eventually kill them. Boring stuff if you do it for a few years over and over again. You get to the point where you realize the loot is shit. Playing the game for fun is where its at. In the mods, I had to find something. But in the SA, I can take off all my clothes and gear and still attack players and come out on top. Running around Svetlo or Berezino where bandits are killing everything that moves and you are in full EMT gear, handing out medical help with no real weapons.. now thats some exciting shit. Throwing a burlap sack over your head, and running around blind.. breaks the monotony. But getting attached to your gear, and being afraid to die or concerned I should say.. its not a negative thing. If you're concerned with death in this game you are missing out on the beauty in it. Death is what its all about. If you dont die often, its staleness creeps in. This is all only true once you put in serious time on the game. When you're fresh and new to Chernarus its a bright blue world.. but when you've been there for 1,000's of hours it starts to feel like groundhog day. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, Repeat.. repeat. Repeat. 

 

So go forth and have fun. Rush bandit clans with nothing but an axe. Attack a hoard of zombies with your fists. ;) 

[scriptfactory 620]

I think the game is moving in the right direction. Barricading, world containers, door locks/safes, trading(!) and more survival elements (like disease and aggressive animals) will be added soon. These features will dramatically change the way some people play the game.

 

No need to add skills and character progression just yet, in my opinion.

[Caboose187 (DayZ) 3036]

Permadeath means that once a character dies they have zero chance of reclaiming any of their lost items/gear.  DayZ does not have permadeath especially with containers coming.

[pillock 850]

I think the game is moving in the right direction. Barricading, world containers, door locks/safes, trading(!) and more survival elements (like disease and aggressive animals) will be added soon. These features will dramatically change the way some people play the game.

 

No need to add skills and character progression just yet, in my opinion.

 

No, certainly not yet. But before v1.0, I hope!

 

While we have server hopping, you can't effectively have permadeath. The two things are just not compatible. But things can be done, in time, to try and make character deaths more of a blow to the player than they are now, for sure.

[Judopunch 523]

Firstly, this game doesn't have perma death and Rocket shouldn't have called it that, you respawn like any other fps =P

 

However, I do understand what you're saying and I've felt the same way for a long time now, going back to the mod.  We're just too used to the game, and there's nothing that takes a significant amount of time to do.  If you're like me, you've also adapted enough that any weapon is a "good" weapon.  You might have your favorites, but you're perfectly capable of killing other players with basically any of the guns and so acquiring the "top" end ones becomes uninteresting.  I've personally never cared much for the military gear any ways, I like mosins and shotguns, but it only takes me a couple quick loot runs to come up with a scoped mosin if I want to snipe or a shotgun and tons of ammo.  Even if I was into using AKMs, it's a 10-15 minute run to the NWAF to deck one out with full mags.  Or even quicker you can grab one out of the junkyard outside Cernaya Polana.  The same goes for clothes.

 

So gear isn't an incentive to survive.  So what's the penalty for dying if not gear?  Getting bad spawn locations.  This applies more if you play in a group and care about getting back to where you died.

 

But 90% of the spawns are up in the north east corner of the map.  My group spends its time around either the neaf, or some of the new cities.  It's pretty much a 5 minute run from the vast majority of spawns to get back to where we are on any given day.  Sure, you'll get a bad one once and a while and suicide but it's pretty fast and effortless.  This even applies to the NWAF.  Get a Dubrovka spawn, or even some of the others and you're back at the NWAF before your body even despawns.

 

So there's no real penalty for dying, and there's no real incentive to keep living.  What can they do about it to make you care about your character?

 

I think the subtle skills they talked about would help.  If my character eventually got better at things I might be more inclined to care.  The problem there is that since they're going to be subtle, and not grant a huge advantage, they'll likely become something not worth caring about either.  Who cares if my character is slightly faster at bandaging or whatever (just examples) if its only like a second faster, is that enough to make me not want to risk my life?  Why not just respawn.  Same with building up immunity to diseases.  It'll help, but is it really going to stop you from taking a risk when you could pretty much die at any time any ways?  Maybe they should just make these things an actual big advantage, then you would be inclined to care.  It's an angle they could try.

 

I think another thing they can do though is give you things to do which creates incentive to live.  For instance, even though there's a big subset of people who  thinks storage and bases are contrary to survival/death, I think the opposite is true.  It gives me a reason to want to keep looting, it gives me incentive to go out and search for an item I haven't tried to get before.  And it gives me something I want to survive to protect.  Especially in the case of bases, I'm going to want to spend as much time as possible being alive to protect it.  This goes for vehicles as well.  You don't want to lose your helicopter, or even your car.

 

But even on a smaller scale this applies.  If I want to go fishing, right now it's a bit of an investment to get all the stuff together, once I do I don't want to die.  Now let's combine that with bases/stash and say I went and caught a bunch of fish, and let's pretend the fish actually are useful for something in the future and I want to get them back to my stash/base.  Now I have a reason to want to get there, and on my way I might be less inclined to engage in that fight with a random stranger.

 

TL;DR:  I just woke up from a nap so this is pretty rambly and I apologize, but basically once you play DayZ enough you don't care because everything is easy.  What we need is more stuff to do and that will result in wanting to live longer.  Whether it's vehicles/bases/crafting/skills.  Incentive to travel as well, and rarer items.

Unless your base/stash is damaged/degraded when you die.

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

I wouldn't be too concerned, all if it will change anyway. The loot tables are far from final and are being tweaked, the spawn locations aren't final, etc. It's also hard to "test" items and mechanics in an alpha if they're difficult to find. Let's be honest - anyone who "plays" an alpha is actually testing it, thus the definition of an alpha and why there's weekly builds and the feedback tracker. Enjoy this current phase of the game's development where we're in a time of plenty, that can and likely will change.

 

... although I must say with the amount of time I have to play if I die to a glitch, hacker, carelessness, or I just get honestly outplayed I know in an hour's time I can at least get myself hydrated, energized, and armed with *something*. Based upon my time windows of play that's helpful.

[hellcat420 212]

permadeath never mattered in the mod, and unless they add some actual stats to the standalone, permadeath wont matter here either.

[Dagwood 680]

If any of you played dayz aftermath you will know what I am looking for. In aftermath, when I was playing it, the only military rifles available were the M4 and the AK74. However, most players you encountered were carrying a Mosin, Winchester lever rifle, or a shotgun. Why? Because the ak an the m4 spawned in several pieces.

To field one of these assault rifles, players had to find 4 pieces: the receiver, the stock, the barrel, and a magazine. As individual pieces, they were useless. And even having a completed rifle didn't mean much if you didn't have enough ammunition; which spawned in stacks of 1-5.

This amount of dedication required to field a top notch weapon made my life, once I had one of these weapons, that much more dear to me. I think loot table balancing will achieve the same effect. But in the meantime, the rarity of the M4 and MP5 will have to do.

[Mark Darkers 151]

Well one of the reason the top gear is so common, is purely testing. It won't bet hat way in the final build.

How else are they going to know of their item's are going to work properly if only 1/10 000 player's find them.

 

You keep using the word 'game', but it is far from being a game, it is a development build in which we participate and every update we get to see a new development build of DayZ, not DayZ itself.

[Dagwood 680]

I found the M4, and the paranoia is real. A casual run through the western military bases, even late at night, has taken on a new level of intensity.

[chompster 171]

Right. There's several aspects that could/will go a long way towards solving the trivialisation of permadeath. These are some: (of them)

 

- Dangerous animals. You spawn in after death and b-line towards the nearest military base? Get attacked by wolves or a bear. No weapon = no defence + can't outrun them = dead. Start again.

 

- Character progression through physical fitness. Fresh spawns could be made weak and feeble, low stamina, low sickness resistance, slow injury recovery, low hunger/thirst/cold/heat tolerance. You might then build up on all these things over time by carefully managing the health and well-being of your character. Death = start again with a shitty newspawn character.

 

- More debilitating effects, slower death. Dying of 'natural' causes (ie. not murdered) should take longer, but have a significantly drawn-out process of increasingly debilitating effects on your character. This helps slow the game down a bit, and adds variation to the experience (rather than just having hunger/thirst/sickness/thermia as ticking clocks towards unconsciousness). As your condition gets worse, so does your character's performance. If you manage to survive the ordeal and recover properly, you could be rewarded with better tolerance of that condition.

 

-General slowdown of movement speed. If you want to go from the East to the West, it should you take a long time (on foot). You should need to prepare for the expedition. You should need to collect supplies, specific to that journey. Travel light and fast, or slow and better-prepared for mishap? Slower pace means greater opportunity for the unexpected to happen: more decisions to make, more variation, more replay value.

 

- Server lock-out after death. Maybe 24 hours? So you have to change servers (unless you rent it yourself) and start again in a new world of unfamiliar player and loot locations. (This would help mitigate "regearing" from your own corpse or your loot stash.)

 

Some of these things are already planned, I think (at least to some extent) - some are just suggestions. But that's what springs to my mind reading this thread.

These are some really solid suggestions that would definitely push things in the right direction.