DayZ analysis

[SwiftSpear 2]

In the current generation. DayZ is a really bad game as a new player. I've read a bunch of different posts on the forums, and a lot of people here have half the picture, but most of you have forgotten what it's like to be a newbie.

I've logged around 10 hours trying to get into this game, and I'm responding to what I'm seeing on the youtubes, and what other new players I'm seeing are referring to. I've been watching destiny's stream, I've been watching many many dayz videos, I appreciate the endgame goal for this project, but, as a game designer, I want to address what I personally see as the issues in this project. I could make this post a lot longer, but I'll keep the points concise.

1. Player killing is HIGHLY incentivized: This game is loot driven, it is boring to try to stay alive a long time, it's only really fun finding new stuff, and BY FAR the best source of new stuff is that other player who has been scavenging for the last 3 hours. The greed level is just overwhelming. Losing your 2 hour old character might be tragic, but it's hardly as fear inspiring as real life death. Zombies themselves can be scary, but being sniped in the head is not really scary, it's just frustrating. The emotions involved with fighting other players are not very decentivizing. You win 50% of the time and receive a HUGE payoff, when you lose, you feel crappy, but not really terrified. This game HIGHLY encourages PvP behavior, and making people start off with shitty items, and making deadly items rarer has done NOTHING to decrease that.

2. The barrier of entry is prohibitive: DayZ is literally an impossible game for new players. I picked up this game with significant premature knowledge, I had watched HOURS of gameplay in stream and youtube video. I KNEW this game would be tough, I'm a dwarf fortress addict, I have experience with games with very high barriers of entry. I'm previously an Amateur competitive FPS player for a CAL team. I read the wiki, I read the forums. It STILL took me a good 5 hours to learn through trial and error simply how to find a few items without zombies chasing me down. Zombies effectively spawn everywhere items are in this game, there are no safe item stores. Sneaking by zombies takes a huge amount of time, it's difficult, there's a delicate dance to doing it effectively, and your chances of finding useful items is HIGHLY dependant on knowledge of where to go given any specific spawn location in order to have the best chance of actually finding something useful. You CAN NOT just jump into dayZ, wander in a random direction, and have fun.

This is a MAJOR MAJOR HORRIFIC design flaw. I'm not going anywhere, I'll be continuing to play this game, I am not rage quitting or whining, I just want to CLEARLY communicate my experience of learning this game. This game is simply bad when it comes to how it treats new players. It's not "difficult", it's bad. Survival depends on knowledge that is not intuitive, it not trained to players in any rational way, is not reasonably achievable. Even with extensive reading on the wiki and watching "how to survive" tutorials, for the most part you can't just spawn in any location, you have to quit and rejoin until you get the spawn locations close to where weapons actually spawn in order to give yourself a reasonable chance at an early game. That's bad, simply put. I don't expect every game to do this, but ideally you should be able to actually learn the majority of the gameplay through trial and error. DayZ has reached the point where this is impossible.

3. Teamwork is WAY WAY WAY overincentivized: You cannot generally fight a zombie hoard with a single weapon the way ammo is doled out in this game, at least not without taking a few hits. And then, as a solo player, you cannot heal those hits in any reasonable way. It's bad enough that you basically need buddies to actually face down a zombie encounter. Fair enough, the game wants to encourage players to play cooperatively, but seriously, bloodpacks are bullshit. There is literally a 10/1 return on the multiplayer healing items as opposed to the soloist healing items. Not only that, but there's no global chat in this game. If you don't have a microphone, well, dayz is just a shitty game. If you don't have a couple of buddies to play with from the getgo, or you don't have preemptive knowledge on how to actually find each other when the game starts, dayz basically says "well, fuck you"

Solutions: 1. Karma. Punish players who rely heavily on murder for personal rewards in the long run. Decrease the profitability of their start locations, start loadouts, give them bandit models that persist beyond death. Improve the spawning conditions of players who make the play experience more pleasant for others through donation of items, salvation of others from zombie attacks, and cooperation with healing. It's not realistic, but it's fun in the same way that all the other unrealistic things about this game are.

2. More intuitive start conditions. This isn't that hard. Spawning with the makarov alone was better than the current state. Healing items specifically would be nice. This could be tied to Karma. Starting players could have an innate karma bonus that would make the learning curve more fun for them before they've learned to become murderous assholes. Removing those hotspot locations that everyone tends to gravitate to in the random item generator system would be a good step forward as well. The more you decrease the advantage of memorizing the map, the more you improve the starting condition for new players.

3. You don't need to punish solo players soully for playing solo. It's bad enough that you can't really kill a zombie hoard while playing alone. You don't need restrictions against using base healing in the form of blood packs. 1 zombie offsets the healing of the second best healing item in the game in 2 hits. Where as a blood pack can single handedly offset the damage of being hit 20 times. It's literally absurd how abused solo players are. This is not appropriate incentive to not immediately kill eachother, it just promotes gang mentality, and rewards the few at the expense of the many. You don't even need to remove items like blood packs completely as a multiplayer item, you just need to make them less absurd in the degree at which they are advantageous vs the options available to a single player alone.

At the end of the day I'll keep on plugging, I just wanted to put in my 2 cents, and express how frustrated I've been with this game recently. Thanks.

[fml 29]

TL;DR

[hombrecz 832]

I dont know man. DayZ can be tough but its they way it is.

Personally I liked more when bandit skins were around but oh well...

Also Rocket is NOT done with this alfa yet, I think there are more things to come.

[Remix (DayZ) 14]

You lost me at "Spawning with the makarov alone was better than the current state".

All your points have been raised a thousand times and will most likely be adressed in the future.

[SwiftSpear 2]

I dont know man. DayZ can be tough but its they way it is.

Personally I liked more when bandit skins were around but oh well...

Also Rocket is NOT done with this alfa yet' date=' I think there are more things to come.

[/quote']

I'm mostly depressed because, at least in the next patch, nothing coming to make the game easier for new players, and nothing coming to make the game easier for solo players. I love games like this, I hate being forced to interact with other people though :P

[chickychickson 0]

i did not read everything but a few sentences of point 2 but even that point is NOT valid.

i started with 1.7.1 without any arma knowledge. just bought the game out of an impuls watched a few letsplays during install and started right of even without playing the shooting range.

while Z behaviour is pretty easy to predict (even in super spider sense times) i actually needed the weapontraining. simply to understand how the gear works, the backpack and of course the shooting.

but it was never frustrating. i dont know how often i died at the start but now i mange to get basic gear pretty fast and i can survive quite long in the north, at least until my morphine or blood runs out.

if you know how to use your brain and if you have the ability of having patience. this game is easy even for starters.

i think there are flaws in the alpha that are much stronger than pve difficulty.

[Esoteric 2]

You have two conflicting points,

firstly you say player killing is highly incentivized then you say teamwork is way way over incentivized?

Kill a player or work with them, these are the choices you and others will make during your adventures.

Players that kill each other for items generally don't actively seek people to kill them, they just happen to come across them, you can kill them or choose to ask if they are friendly, if you already are playing with friends, you'll be in the position of power.

However, those that kill people for the 'lulz' won't care whatsoever about being marked as a bandit, and geez, will they love spawning with a makarov if thats brought back in.

[Jugzilla 0]

I'll commend you for the fact that you have offered your points in a constructive manner instead of just whining incessantly like others... however on a basic level I have to disagree with where I feel you want the game to go.

If you've seen or read interviews with Rocket you'll already know that he has intentions of implementing ways to balance the game and offer incentives for ALL styles of play, not just outright player killing and death matching. It's still early and it's going to change a whole lot more before it's done... some of the changes will work and some wont but I'll bet the end product is better for it.

I think the key point I took from your post is that you DID learn how to make your way around and survive. Not that it took you 5 hours on top of all your other research... that you did still learn. It's not impossible... it's just hard. That's a good thing too... not enough games have such a learning curve anymore, gamers are becoming soft and having everything hand fed to them. We need more games like this one because they give you an actual sense of achievement when you get somewhere. The only other game that's done this for me recently was Dark Souls.

It's brutal and it's not going to be for everyone... that's the beauty of it though.

[erectij 0]

From what I gather, the difficulty of the game stems from Rocket's desire to elicit an emotional response from the players. The time it takes to both learn the ropes and then, newly trained, acquire decent gear makes a player attached to his/her in-game avatar. Thus, losing all that hard work is an emotional event.

I've never played a game that has raised my heartbeat so much upon contact with other players. This is a direct result of the early game's difficulty.

[Jack Dant 158]

You have two conflicting points' date='

firstly you say player killing is highly incentivized then you say teamwork is way way over incentivized?

Kill a player or work with them, these are the choices you and others will make during your adventures.[/quote']

You really think those are the only two options? :huh:

This game, both against players and zeds, is much easier if played with other people. People you know and trust.

People you don't know or trust are either a risk to be avoided/killed, or a resource to be exploited.

So, if you have out-of-game friends to play with, you are a big advantage. But there is nothing wrong with that, imo.

[SwiftSpear 2]

You have two conflicting points' date='

firstly you say player killing is highly incentivized then you say teamwork is way way over incentivized?

Kill a player or work with them, these are the choices you and others will make during your adventures.

Players that kill each other for items generally don't actively seek people to kill them, they just happen to come across them, you can kill them or choose to ask if they are friendly, if you already are playing with friends, you'll be in the position of power.

However, those that kill people for the 'lulz' won't care whatsoever about being marked as a bandit, and geez, will they love spawning with a makarov if thats brought back in.

[/quote']

I think it's fallacy that these two things are necessarily pulling against eachother. Making it difficult to survive as a soloist doesn't mean that I won't kill that other guy I see who has way better gear than me while he's wandering around in open fields. Zombies won't come and attack me while I'm looting his stuff. If I'm not shivering or bleeding to death already I don't actually need him for anything right then. Even if I do, he's far more dangerous to me than any zombies, and he doesn't likely need me right then. The "team play" incentives in place right now really just incentivize people who have buddies already to come and join up together in an evil gang that is biased against other players and zombies equally. This game has utterly failed to produce in game communities that police each other in anything remotely resembling a fair way, and ultimately, it's because the game, purely by design, makes other players extremely valuable loot drops, as opposed to making them actually valuable allies.

[Esoteric 2]

The options are endless, you could play chasy if you wanted, I don't know.

I'm just pointing the two major options that everyone is evantually faced with.

EDIT: @Swift, it is difficult to build ingame friendships amongst players -at the moment- doesn't mean you can't go ahead and use these forums and build a community together with like minded players without the threat of either one of you blowing each others heads off before they represent themselves.

This mod is growing, new content will no doubt be added to help ingame community involvement amongst players.

[septuscap 42]

1. Player killing is HIGHLY incentivized:

I have a feeling if/when rocket adds base building features (prevent log-ins within X radius' date=' construct walls, etc) and we start seeing survivor cities and the like, gameplay will become a lot more dynamic. Trade is one of the biggest reasons for civility.

It STILL took me a good 5 hours to learn through trial and error simply how to find a few items without zombies chasing me down.

I pretty much just picked up the game and figured things out immediately. Never played ArmA. I do have a lot of FPS/MMO/sandbox experience, so maybe it was just more familiar for me.

I also didn't sneak around as much when I first started. I find in general you learn faster if you just don't fear death early on, get to know the game, etc. I also had a group:

3. Teamwork is WAY WAY WAY overincentivized:

You can blame PvE players exclusively for this. They keep thinking if we incentivize teamwork it'll mean that stranger you encounter won't kill you. Bandits have a group already and KILL EVERYONE THEY ENCOUNTER.

give them bandit models that persist beyond death

They already tried this. People would get attacked' date=' kill in self defense, and get stuck with bandit skins. Rather than try to implement a system that will ultimately be gamed by trolls, griefers, unintended cases, etc, I think we're better off implementing functionality that adds to the game as a whole (ie. let players make cities)

2. More intuitive start conditions. This isn't that hard. Spawning with the makarov alone was better than the current state.

You can blame PvE players for this again. They seriously thought removing makarovs would make people team up.

3. You don't need to punish solo players soully for playing solo.

Frankly I think DayZ has the best "anti-zerg" environment of any MMO-style PvP game to date. You simply make less noise with one or two players. I find three to be optimal. In most any other game you're pretty much hosed if you have fewer #'s so it's just escalated until you have huge armies and the gameplay turns to shit. Here' date=' the larger group is often noticed first, stalked, and ambushed. Or at least avoided.

I don't play solo, but on respawn I am as solo as anyone else, and I've had no issues running through cherno, gearing up, and moving on (except when EVERY spawn location has tin cans, that's pretty enraging). And that's with no weapon either. You just need to know where the "two-exit" buildings are. Run through one door, out the other, and you're good to go. I really don't see the issue.

[hr']

I think it's fallacy that these two things are necessarily pulling against eachother. Making it difficult to survive as a soloist doesn't mean that I won't kill that other guy I see who has way better gear than me while he's wandering around in open fields. Zombies won't come and attack me while I'm looting his stuff. If I'm not shivering or bleeding to death already I don't actually need him for anything right then. Even if I do' date=' he's far more dangerous to me than any zombies, and he doesn't likely need me right then. The "team play" incentives in place right now really just incentivize people who have buddies already to come and join up together in an evil gang that is biased against other players and zombies equally. This game has utterly failed to produce in game communities that police each other in anything remotely resembling a fair way, and ultimately, it's because the game, purely by design, makes other players extremely valuable loot drops, as opposed to making them actually valuable allies.

[/quote']

Really well said -- PvE players need to get this into their heads. Incentivizing "teamwork" on its own won't breed cooperation between strangers.

[SwiftSpear 2]

From what I gather' date=' the difficulty of the game stems from Rocket's desire to elicit an emotional response from the players. The time it takes to both learn the ropes and then, newly trained, acquire decent gear makes a player attached to his/her in-game avatar. Thus, losing all that hard work is an emotional event.

I've never played a game that has raised my heartbeat so much upon contact with other players. This is a direct result of the early game's difficulty.

[/quote']

I consider it unfair to call this game "difficult" it's not "difficult" so much as it is requiring of knowledge. You don't really get too in trouble from anything in the game world as long as you know where to go, when to run, when to fight, what not. The "difficulty" comes from the unpredictable element of other players, and the game does a HORRIBLE job of managing that factor.

I would REALLY like this game to be difficult, to punish me for poor decisions in a logical manner, to discourage rote behaviors like respawning until you get near Balota where you have a higher chance of getting guns (and finding other survivors to kill). To encourage meaningful social interactions and not constant murder. I just don't see that as the direction the game is taking right now. The incentive to not kill other players keeps decreasing, not increasing. Making stuff harder to find means the random guy I just ran into is more likely to have what I need than the barn across the road. The game is hard because I want to kill that random guy, it's not hard because I have to be afraid of zombies unless I don't really know the map and I don't have a plan for where to go next and what to get next.

The game should be difficult WITH that rote knowledge, not just UNTIL you develop that. It should be hard because it's hard, not because every other player is inhumanly murderous.

[twil 0]

In Dayz you can face the truth about Humanity. Its all about killing und grouping for selfish profit. Humans take always the easiest way!

[Wulfear 6]

The no weapon on start really is a kick in the balls to new players. They don't have any clue where the loot spawns are, and they NEED to really explore lots, and being unarmed really retards that.

For experianced players, it's not a huge deal, just annoying.

[Esoteric 2]

The game will punish you for mistakes, Swift, dangerous players are apart of this game although they aren't the only thing that will punish you for mistakes

Following powerlines to a major city, get killed by a bandit, you should have followed powerlines from a distance, preferably within a treeline.

Walking and attracting zeds when you should be stealthy.

Shooting a zed with a loud weapon just to attract more.

Seeing a vehicle in the middle of the road and sprinting straight for it only to be ambushed, should have scouted the area beforehand.

Theres loads and loads of mistakes to be made or avoided, yes the ones wherein a zed punishes you are much easier to avoid and learn from. Simple things such as getting food though, are hazardous due to a combined force of other players wanting those supplies as well as zeds being nearby.

[SwiftSpear 2]

The no weapon on start really is a kick in the balls to new players. They don't have any clue where the loot spawns are' date=' and they NEED to really explore lots, and being unarmed really retards that.

For experianced players, it's not a huge deal, just annoying.

[/quote']

Exactly. It's prohibitive expecting new players to know that they should continuously try to respawn until they spawn near Balota because that's where they are most likely to find guns without having to fight too many zombies. You can play the game for a hundred hours and not find an in game map, let alone just sort of naturally intuiting that information. You would never just naturally develop that intuition, it comes from hours of cumulative experience and group think communicated by players in long standing communities. You don't even have global in game chat any more, so you can't even get that information from a stranger in game at this point any more.

The recent trend in attempting to reduce player murder has been to make new adoption unrealistic for the vast majority of external gamers. It's a very bad policy.

I FULLY recognize the murder problem, I just want to point out that retarding newcomers is clearly not the answer, as it has clearly not worked.

---

The game will punish you for mistakes' date=' Swift, dangerous players are apart of this game although they aren't the only thing that will punish you for mistakes

Following powerlines to a major city, get killed by a bandit, you should have followed powerlines from a distance, preferably within a treeline.

Walking and attracting zeds when you should be stealthy.

Shooting a zed with a loud weapon just to attract more.

Seeing a vehicle in the middle of the road and sprinting straight for it only to be ambushed, should have scouted the area beforehand.

Theres loads and loads of mistakes to be made or avoided, yes the ones wherein a zed punishes you are much easier to avoid and learn from. Simple things such as getting food though, are hazardous due to a combined force of other players wanting those supplies as well as zeds being nearby.

[/quote']

You've effectively just confirmed what I said. The game is primarily difficult for experienced players because other players are unpredictable, not because the game is actually difficult in and of it's own devices once you have knowledge as to how to navigate the "natural" hazards.

What drives me up the wall is the rampant ignorance of just how dangerous those natural hazards are BEFORE you have the knowledge of how to deal with them. And how ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE it is to intuit the knowledge you need to survive at that point.

If you know what "Balota" is, you aren't qualified to tell a new player the game isn't too hard to learn. That area alone is virtually impossible to just intuitively figure out that that needs to be your first destination after spawning. You don't spawn with a map or compass in DayZ.

Knowing the map changes DayZ to an absurd degree, and it honestly IS pretty much impossible as a game before you reach that point.

What needs to happen, is the natural hazards need to be friendlier to new players, and more hostile to experienced players. Weather that means that new players start with better gear to adapt and learn those natural hazards, or weather that means that those natural hazards shouldn't be so dense in the areas near the spawns, either would work ok.

[khknight 3]

The more Independence rocket removes from the player the more dependent players are on others. That is either by killing them for loot or working with them. In real life survival, not everyone has to work with other people to survive. Some are just better at surviving alone than others and that doesn't mean they kill everyone they see either. I get the impression that most players think "If your a soloist, than you must be a murderous bandit."

As of right now, no one can get by without working together or killing each other for loot. That needs to be changed so players can avoid human interaction without being punished for it.

B4 you say its only kill or work together, that is true as of right now but it doesn't have to be so black and white. There is a middle ground that rocket isn't allowing, players should be allowed to survive without killing or working together.

The only fix I can think of off the top of my head is to just give the player more. Give the player a weapon and a decent amount of items at spawn because REALISTICALLY no one would of made this far in the zombie apocalypse with no weapon or food, that is ludicrous.

Also, some items should in specific places in plentiful but moderate amounts. Like if I go to a hospital for morphine and risk getting shot, then there should be morphine. Every risk has its reward, that may not always true in real life but this isn't real life,a simulator of anything can never be like the real thing so there is no point in going overboard to make it a real as possible.

And that is my 2 cents.

[Esoteric 2]

I believe the game shouldn't become soft, being new to the game you should expect to have some trouble, learning the ropes is what I find fun in a game, if anything, the problem is what you do when you're experienced and have everything, the only real option other than just 'staying alive' is to kill players since theres no real reward for killing zeds.

There should be more land marks to cross reference with an online map though, perhaps more signs stating 'blahblah distance to whatever', find the whatever place on the map and track the distance away from it to find where you are.

But once again, I think exploring and coming across a barn or deer stand on your own is more exciting than specifically walking towards it.

[Robert512 12]

There is no easy start in this game, you either learn and adapt or you die rather quickly, and die again, and again until you have learned your lesson and start making less mistakes.

If the zombie apocalypse was a real thing and it did occur than 95% of the population would dead within hours to a few weeks at the most. The breakdown of society would be swift and brutal.

When it comes to the game, take the following 3 rules in mind.

1. The other did not become a topdog by being passief.

2. the other became a topdog by being ruthless, efficient and merciless.

3. The other one will think that the first two rules apply to you.

In other words, trust no one, don't assume and above al go unseen, unheard and unnoticed. People yelling "Friendly?" might as well say "Shoot me".

[Lukio (DayZ) 24]

Whenever I read something suggesting punishing players for their preferred play style in a game where it is perfectly valid to do so, it irks me. Although I do not play as bandit, I will and have killed other players if I felt threatened by their presence or actions.

Yes, currently there is little incentive NOT to kill another player who has decent gear or just is wandering around in front of your scoped rifle, it will be difficult to change this. However punishing players for what they enjoy to do in this game is not the right approach.

[herd 69]

TL;DR

derp herp. Was it short for you to read ?

[1Macready 6]

In the current generation. DayZ is a really bad game as a new player.

I disagree. It could use some tweaking' date=' though.

1. Player killing is HIGHLY incentivized:

I agree with this, but do not see it as a problem. Even for a soloist it's a good thing. The threat of other players is what keeps my pulse racing most of the time.

2. The barrier of entry is prohibitive: DayZ is literally an impossible game for new players. Sneaking by zombies takes a huge amount of time, it's difficult, there's a delicate dance to doing it effectively, and your chances of finding useful items is HIGHLY dependant on knowledge of where to go given any specific spawn location in order to have the best chance of actually finding something useful. You CAN NOT just jump into dayZ, wander in a random direction, and have fun.

I agree the most with your "knowledge of the map is too important" points. It took me a while to identify which buildings could and could not be entered - developing that knowledge while crawling through zombies, often dying of starvation or thirst or both, was time consuming and annoying.

Then too, my current character is the first to have visited a market, and I was frankly shocked at how much crap is lying around in them. I'd really, really like to see loot scattered more widely and randomly, even if it is more "real" to have it concentrated in places like markets and military bases.

3. Teamwork is WAY WAY WAY overincentivized: You cannot generally fight a zombie hoard with a single weapon the way ammo is doled out in this game, at least not without taking a few hits. And then, as a solo player, you cannot heal those hits in any reasonable way. It's bad enough that you basically need buddies to actually face down a zombie encounter. Fair enough, the game wants to encourage players to play cooperatively, but seriously, bloodpacks are bullshit.

I disagree with most of this. Healing is not hard once you have the right hunting kit. And let's see how well you'd heal your own gunshot wound without help IRL. I do agree that blood packs should stop short of instaheal. Maybe a 3k jump?

Solutions: 1. Karma. Punish players who rely heavily on murder for personal rewards in the long run. Decrease the profitability of their start locations, start loadouts, give them bandit models that persist beyond death. Improve the spawning conditions of players who make the play experience more pleasant for others through donation of items, salvation of others from zombie attacks, and cooperation with healing. It's not realistic, but it's fun in the same way that all the other unrealistic things about this game are.

Interesting thought, but I think the implementation would be awfully tricky.

2. More intuitive start conditions. This isn't that hard. Spawning with the makarov alone was better than the current state.

I disagree with this point the most. No starting weapon is a huge positive. It cuts down on beach-griefing. When you do start with one, a new player would probably think "the path to survival involves shooting this thing." Nothing could be further from the truth. Starting with no weapon actually encourages the development of the right sort of survival skills.

Soloing is not prohibitively difficult. I can see where it might get boring after you've mastered the art of surviving though. But Day Z is a work in progress, and the patches will continue to shake up the status quo.

[jaakko_teppo 1]

Not again these "white knights defending new players" kinda threads.

If you cannot learn from your mistakes, you are then complete tool.

End of story