Permadeath losing it's edge

[Dagwood 680]

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

[leviski 2152]

Good luck with that MP5

 

I have found 2

 

both of the dead bandits that I pried from the cold dead fingers of.

[q.S Sachiel 470]

TBH i find the game quite immersive for the most part.  I can be quite the naturist and spend hours just roaming (usually with the intention of finding stragglers or shooting the lone-wolf fox that i see, or hunting choppers) or i can sit about a building, watching the door to a barracks until I'm either rewarded for my time or otherwise.

 

My heart still does backflips when i'm out scrounging, or when someone's got the drop on me hard.  Brain ticks into overdrive trying to find a crafty way to bleed them without taking damage myself.   So i suppose it's the immersion and 'risk' to myself in general that I fear and enjoy.

 

oh, and the occasional RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHH!! when i'm walking through the woods, sipping on some notacola... or when I'm forced to shoot a Z for fear of making myself vulnurable switching to the quiet option, then cursing myself the whole way to the edge of the city due to the hungry hoard of assholes that follow me screaching and bickering, baying for blood.

Edited September 15, 2014 by q.S Sachiel

[Bororm 1156]

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.

[klesh 2423]

Welcome to DayZ, where no one is surviving a zombie apocalypse and everyone is Rambo.

[Bororm 1156]

Honestly it would probably annoy people more than anything, and it'd result in a lot of people just spamming through it and names like "adfkasdjkfas" but I almost think they should try making you have to create your character on every death.  Then at least it would be "permadeath" for that character.

[q.S Sachiel 470]

snips*

 

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.

the problem with skills is that while it does encourage the player to develop them, and may give an incentive to stay alive longer, it may also work against gameplay in the long run by becoming tedious or having certain levels / advantages be rather exclusive.

 

That said, I completely encourage ideas to get people to survive longer.  Personally, I think that they need to find a way to get people to work together, and work together against others.  I still dream of the day that large groups of organised para/mil groups rule the map (without being server owners and general elitist clanners) -NB not a generalisation; where these rag-tag groups discriminate on gear or ability and work against the other lesser groups, or for them against the stronger groups, ala Freedom and Duty factions. I know the 'factions' bit is discouraged by many, i'm talking an improv, casual thing here, which would require vast amounts of co-operation from individuals, so it's going to be restricted to clans or friend-groups without private hives enforcing rules on people, which I am not really interested in.

 

Perhaps having weapon proficiency in that the longer you spend with it (use) the better you understand it's mechanics, and with hopefully future increased weapon degredation you can repair it to a higher level only if you've spent time with that weapon in your life... Subtle things like this as you suggest, rather than just being 'skin X learn Y build Z' and then you rinse repeat just so that you can get Z item which is some OP or high-tier kit.  That said, if a progression system is introduced, i'd definitely want a more freestyle elder scrolls/runescape styled thing than set trees and restrictions.

 

Also pretty  sure there is no real perma-death in any sense of the word, because every time i check my blood type i end up with O+ so good news for all you negatives out there.

Except O-... you're still gonna get sucked dry ;)

edit: damn, just checked the charts and realised i'm the unlucky one as i only receive O type, but can give to all +... well fuck yall you aint getting a drop! The worms will have me before you taste anything.

Edited September 15, 2014 by q.S Sachiel

[skypig 139]

I kind of understand how the OP feels in a way.

right now it's easy to gear up (by design I assume) so gathering up those ak/mags, m4 pieces, food/clothes all that good stuff and then dying isn't a big deal really, just an inconvenience.

I'm hoping it's gonna be a struggle to even get ahold of a gun and ammo by the time beta hits... when losing your shit will really have an impact.

[The Aquatic Land Walrus 565]

It's hard to be immersed when you move like a sack of autistic bricks riding an elephant

but it's still immersive for the most part.

[svisketyggeren 662]

Right now there is no incentive for staying alive for prolonged time...other than that good feeling u get from having a old character. If there was some kind of gamemechanic/system that made u character better as u stayed alive for long, players would be more protective about the life. It wouldnt be only about loosing ur gear.

 

I guess these gamesystems would naturally be roleplaying related. Simple example would be better disease resistance if u stay alive for a long time. And im not thinking staying alive for several hours...but more like months. Develop ur strenght, stamina etc. U shouldnt be able to run like we do now when u start a new character...stamina should be developed as u play. New characters should not start with run speed and stamina like they are top athlethes.

 

U dont die in dayz, u loose ur gear...that is all. We need something more than gear to live for, bring in character development and u have a new reason to not die.

Edited September 15, 2014 by svisketyggeren

[GhostDivision (DayZ) 22]

Right now there is no incentive for staying alive for prolonged time...other than that good feeling u get from having a old character. If there was some kind of gamemechanic/system that made u character better as u stayed alive for long, players would be more protective about the life. It wouldnt be only about loosing ur gear.

 

I guess these gamesystems would naturally be roleplaying related. Simple example would be better disease resistance if u stay alive for a long time. And im not thinking staying alive for several hours...but more like months. Develop ur strenght, stamina etc. U shouldnt be able to run like we do now when u start a new character...stamina should be developed as u play. New characters should not start with run speed and stamina like they are top athlethes.

 

U dont die in dayz, U loose ur gear...that is all. We need something more than gear to live for, bring in character development and u have a new reason to not die.

Months? There's almost no way to stay alive that long. If you don't get randomly sniped you might die to doors (or other bugs), your character data may corrupt. server may shut down... I guess it would be possible to survive that long if you either "parked" your character on a server and went on only once a month, or if you played super passive i.e lived in the woods on the west side of the map and only hunted for food and never went into towns..

[svisketyggeren 662]

Months? There's almost no way to stay alive that long. If you don't get randomly sniped you might die to doors (or other bugs), your character data may corrupt. server may shut down... I guess it would be possible to survive that long if you either "parked" your character on a server and went on only once a month, or if you played super passive i.e lived in the woods on the west side of the map and only hunted for food and never went into towns..

 

It dosent have to be months. And im not talking about developing abilities passive. If u want to run faster u need to run...so parking ur char on the server isnt going to help. Similarly...u want disease resistance....u have to get some diseases and get rid of them.

 

Staying alive for months is quite possible...had several chars that stayed alive for that long. The problem is that most players arent carefull enough, they dont value their life enough.

 

And why dont they value their life enough...cos they only loose some gear that they could spend an hour to find on a new char.

Edited September 15, 2014 by svisketyggeren

[Deathlove 2286]

Months? There's almost no way to stay alive that long. If you don't get randomly sniped you might die to doors (or other bugs), your character data may corrupt. server may shut down... I guess it would be possible to survive that long if you either "parked" your character on a server and went on only once a month, or if you played super passive i.e lived in the woods on the west side of the map and only hunted for food and never went into towns..

I normally go through towns as well as stay in the woods. What do you do? Run around in the most obvious spots for ppl to spot you not paying attention to your surroundings? The ONLY places you should ever be super cautious at are military areas and police stations as some places maybe only have one access point or 2 in and out. You can live for months and still get into cities. Just don't take forever roaming around in one area. Stay on the move and use the binoculars they gave you when you can find them to scout out possible danger zones for few minutes before entering.

[GhostDivision (DayZ) 22]

I normally go through towns as well as stay in the woods. What do you do? Run around in the most obvious spots for ppl to spot you not paying attention to your surroundings? The ONLY places you should ever be super cautious at are military areas and police stations as some places maybe only have one access point or 2 in and out. You can live for months and still get into cities. Just don't take forever roaming around in one area. Stay on the move and use the binoculars they gave you when you can find them to scout out possible danger zones for few minutes before entering.

 

What is there to do? I usually loot Vybor and NWAF and then go to NEAF/Krasnostav and back again. After I'm geared up, there isn't really much point in looting the military bases, but I do so anyway (mostly to find other players).

[doctorbadsign 645]

They definitely need to add something that makes the permadeath hit harder. I'd say some kind of character progression that doesn't unbalance the game (so no 'bullets do twice as much damage' perks or anything). Just subtle things like getting more proficient at crafting etc. 

 

If this were wiped when you died then you would have lost hours of work that you couldn't just reclaim by killing a geared fella.

[Evil Minion 943]

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.

I think you should be able to put a typical game of a typical solo player into three different phases:

1. Basic Survival - Your main focus is on staying alive in the first place. Thats the first phase of looting but also features a great deal of PvP. Here the game should play like a typical surval game where you try to make it through environmental hardships and gain supplies simply to keep going.
2. Gearing Up - Your main focus is to improve your situation by getting better equipment. Its still a fight for survival but it slowly gets easier as you collect better and better items. However, here you will most likely come into conflict with your fellow players as good gear isn't all that common and other would like to get a hand on it as well.
3. Other Things - This phase starts of your situation is good enough that environmental hazards and other PvE are no longer challenging enough. Now the focus of the game switches from survival to sandbox gameplay. While you still need supplies getting them is easier because you got the means for it. Getting better equipment is still possible but its not a necessity for survival.

Obviously those phases can overlap but thats how the main focus of most survivors should be: PvE survival -> PvP survival -> Sandbox.

 

Now I think by forcing a quite challenging first phase on players (by making survival and PvE much harder) and greatly increasing the second phase (by making gear much rarer) death would have a greater impact as you now have to go through those phases again. Now cooperation would probably increase you progression speed - a good thing on its own - so the game should be hard enough to challenge groups as well. In fact it would not be that bad if most solo survivors would struggle with the first phase and fail quite often and most non-solo survivors would meet there end during one of the first two phases.

 

The third phase should be hard to reach even for organized and close-knit groups. Getting there should take a lot of effort in the first place - something you shouldn't throw away. Now we got persistence etc. - if you have a tent hidden somewhere or a base protected by friends this might allow you to skip straight to phase 3. How to avoid?

• First: By making those gameplay elements part of phase 3 on the first place so players are very likely to beat phase 1 and phase 2 before they even get to use them.
• Second: Risk - your storage can be plundered, stolen or destroyed. Even if you fortified your goods in a huge locked castle - if you die you lose everything you had which of course includes the keys as well.
• Third: Some other element that makes death worth avoiding. A significant timer (most likely server specific), a spawn point as bad as possible (away from any storage and your body), a loss of non-gear-related things like the healthy status etc.
• Forth: Nerf server hopping. Right now it allows you to skip most of the game by moving between high loot areas at extremely high speed and extremely low risk. The path from NWAF server A to NWAF server B should have a greater cost attached to it. Now simply increasing the cost would hurt other players just as well and cause frustration. So the cost should start out low but increase significantly when a player is switching servers in quick succession. The goal is not to avoid server switching alltogether but make it more attractive to play on one server for a longer period of time before switching (e.g. Monday server A, Tuesday server B, ...)

Edited September 15, 2014 by Evil Minion

[benedictus 160]

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?

 

Not much, after tents the penalty for death is even more insignificant.

 

Maybe when theres something that actually requires time and effort to accomplish and is lost upon death, maybe then there will be reason to live.

[Cpanther 221]

The question is; What you going to do once you find the M4 and the MP5 ? Normally once i reach that stage, the game loses significance for me.. is either you become a serial killer ( which gets boring very fast ) or you wonder around the map like a lost ant looking for something to do.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Cpanther

[skypig 139]

Not much, after tents the penalty for death is even more insignificant.

Maybe when theres something that actually requires time and effort to accomplish and is lost upon death, maybe then there will be reason to live.

tents and stashes won't stay stocked by themselves though. they'll save you some time gearing up a couple/few lives but eventually you're gonna have to spend the same amount of time stocking up again.

unless you have teamwork and people are taking shifts/turns playing the stock mule... but then that's a benefit to working in groups.

[skypig 139]

The question is; What you going to do once you find the M4 and the MP5 ? Normally once i reach that stage, the game loses significance for me.. is either you become a serial killer ( which gets boring very fast ) or you wonder around the map like a lost ant looking for something to do.

lol that's been "my dayz story" right there for a while now.

for fun, and out of boredom, I usually gear up and drop my shiny kit in random spots... then strip down and run to wherever the most action is and start singing in direct.. "do ya really wanna huuuurt meeee.. do you really wanna maaaake me cryyyyy..."

but lately I get as far as "do you really wa*BANG!!*" before I'm back at spawn

[Evil Minion 943]

Normally once i reach that stage, the game loses significance for me..

Thats currently the problem with DayZ gameplay. In two ways: "once I reach that stage" is way too soon - you should spent much more time actually surviving and searching for good gear with a good chance of failure. And then there two many further features. As the earlier stages are so easy helping others is not really viable, As people get geared so fast socializing is hard because everyones threat level is extremely high. As death is only a small setback more people will actually go for the psychopathic maniac route. As there are few features that require a lot of effort there are few long term/cooperative goals.

 

But its alpha so we can't really expect those dynamics yet. However, if that M4 was worth extremely high effort and could then be used to force your way inside someones base to pick one of those precious vehicle parts out of his cold hands pushing yourself one step closer to owning a Humvee while also netting you some valueable supplies - there would be much more significance to later stages and much more reason to actually survive.

[pjano 34]

I've said this before in other threads but they really need to bring back the endgame elements such as zombie kill count, wire fence/ tank traps/ barricades, tent storage, higher server population, vehicles that are hard to fix and maybe some sort of humanity goals/statistics to keep players coming and interacting with each other. Maybe it is because I've already sunk over 300 hours in the mod and game but I spent hours running around the map today surviving quite easily, going to NWAF, dodging some snipers, going over to the coast etc. and the game feels kind of soulless / pointless in its current state.

[Evil Minion 943]

endgame

Oh noes - he used the word. Now this topic is doomed! Shitstorm incoming!

 

No really, I think some further elements in this area would be a pretty nice thing. However, I think the earlier stages also have a lot of potential for expansion as this should be the stage most players will be in most of the time. There should be bigger goals with actual ingame rewards (base building, vehicles etc.) - but thats nothing a frehspawn should worry about for quite some time. Those are features for long time survivors.

 

As for statistics - why not? But they should only be visible to the player himself and should be limited to the current character. So if you really want to get those 1000000 zombie kills you better survive. Karma/humanity should be (ingame) player enforced rather than artificial - by being able to recognise specific characters and ingamne interaction.

[benedictus 160]

tents and stashes won't stay stocked by themselves though. they'll save you some time gearing up a couple/few lives but eventually you're gonna have to spend the same amount of time stocking up again.

unless you have teamwork and people are taking shifts/turns playing the stock mule... but then that's a benefit to working in groups.

 

You store ammo and basic guns there, and your back in the fight asap. Allthough it might be that you need to store food there also later on.

[blunce 991]

There should be so much content, & so much of a threat from the environment, that players almost never reach "end game". Those who reach "end game" (acquiring everything to the point where there's nothing left to do) should be few & far between.