Does DayZ need aeiral transport?

[Whyherro123 2283]

Who gives a flying fuck whether or not you need certification in order to do legal plane maintenance. I could read a book on a particular plane and have a general enough understanding of it to do some maintenance. Just because you need a certificate as per safety protocol doesn't mean I cannot learn about planes in a zombie apocalypse.

 

The only reason why you need a certificate to work on a plane is because people will crash and die if you screw up. You can be a laymen mechanic for a car all you want because when you find out something is installed incorrectly you aren't about to die. Small planes simply do not require an insane amount of maintenance. If you understand the engine (which requires the most maintenance)then flaps, elevators and ailerons are relatively simple mechanical apparatuses.

 

Your argument is literally crap. Most people don't know how to operate firearms. Most people don't know how to do effective agriculture. Most people don't know anything about ground vehicle mechanics. Most people cannot make a splint to fix their own broken legs. Most people cannot do blood tests, or give and receive blood infusions. Most people don't know how to install, repair or maintain a lawnmower engine let alone a V3S. Most people are either physically or mentally unfit to do most of the things that the features of DayZ allow you to do.

 

 

 

There is a very large difference between recreational/makeshift aircraft than there is between people who own private jets and corporate helicopters. Recreational aircraft are smaller and usually more dangerous statistically speaking. People who like to fly small planes and recreational light aircraft like autogyros don't need to be rich or to own a shit ton of land that requires or merits air-travel. They do it because it is within the realm of their knowledge, economic affordability, and their pursuit of happiness.

 

Given however that Chernarus is a deadly place where you starve in hours and are likely to get murdered, flying can become about improving travel safety. There are plenty of industrial sites and airfields in chernarus, so resources aren't really a problem.

 

 

As I already explained earlier, the average person is a consumer who relies totally on specialized service industries for actually getting things done. Most people cannot do something so simple as set a snare.

 

So your vision, for a totally realistic survival game where the un-dead magically roam would create a game where people run around for several minutes looking for soda pop, beans, and a can opener (or else they wont be able to open it, as per your average person bit), until they inevitably run into a zombie, and because they likely have no experience with guns or self defence, they get killed by the zombie. Sounds like a really boring and shitty game to me man.

 

I feel like you have a very narrow view of what human beings are capable of adapting to.

 

When the zombie apocalypse hits, not every pilot or mechanic is going to be at the airport, and some airports are going to be overrun. Hospitals are going to be instantly overrun, and 'doctors' might hope to escape the hospital on foot, but they certainly aren't piling into a chinook with all the worlds pilots and mechanics on the roof.

 

Hippocrates, some old greek person that the average person doesn't know about, said that war is the only proper school for surgeons. What did he mean by this? Well, in war (or in zombie apocalypse survival) you are continuously thrust into difficult situations for which you have no applicable certificates. You are forced to do or die, and you end up gaining experience on the spot; a lot of experience. In fact you gain so much experience and skill by being forced into a real world environment that you wonder how you could ever have learned anything at all in a classroom.

 

Important knowledge like how to fly aircraft, how to maintain them. Medical knowledge surrounding setting bones and suturing wounds, even blood transfusion will be something that everyone will need to learn eventually.

 

Mechanical and engineering skills will be among he most heavily prized and shared fields of knowledge that people who want to survive are going to need to expose themselves to.

 

In addition to this, the people who survive and actually make it as far as the freshly spawned bambis supposedly have are already going to be people who had the correct skills to survive that long in the first place. Boat captains, drivers, mechanics, doctors, men with military knowledge; these are going to be more represented in the survivors of an apocalypse than the average person of today.

1) Sure, I can read a book on maintaining a single-engine plane, and thats when I get the aeronautics off by 3mm, don't recognize the mistake due to inexperience, and die horribly in a fireball. Not even talking about actually learning how to fly a plane. The same thing can happen to you in a truck, but unlike aircraft, generally you don't have to get 500 feet off the ground to discover something is drastically wrong.

 

Face it, unless you were a pilot pre-apocalypse (and if that is the case, why the FUCK are you still in Chernarus?), you will 99.9999% of the time lack the resources necessary to learn how to fly even the smallest of planes. Planes require fuel, hydraulic fluid, oil, electricity. You require food, a safe place to sleep, and, most importantly, TIME, to learn how to fly a plane. A person learning how to fly a plane is effectively 2 people (trainer and trainee), and in all likelihood probably more, removed from the workforce, and they aren't just not working, they are using up valuable fuel, oil, food, water, space, and labor. Only the largest of groups, and here "groups" means BURGEONING NATION-STATE, would have the excess resources to do that. That survivor group living in a boarded-up house by the airfield? Probably don't have enough resources to support a pilot.

 

2)

• Guns are pretty easy to use, to the point where an illiterate dirt-farmer can become a threat to an organized army in about a week.
• The farming we do in-game is far from effective. The only reason it is a viable playstyle right now is because 1- plants grow in 15 minutes and 2- we don't have to worry about diseases, animals eating the crops, or crop failures. 
• I know next-to-jack-shit about trucks and cars, and yet I can generally tell when something is going on with my truck. "Ground Vehicle" mechanics exist in the general population at a MUCH higher rate than "air vehicle" mechanics, so therefore more truck mechanics were likely to survive than aircraft mechanics
• Protip: splints don't actually fix broken legs IRL anyways, and they totally don't let you run on them like you can in-game.
• Same thing with blood transfusions and blood testing. The WHOLE "health and medical system" is due for a severe overhaul, anyhow

 

3) We have yet to see any evidence of there being any sort of "flying culture" as you mention existing in Chernarus. No wrecks from small planes/autogyros crashing, etc. In fact, according to the ARMA II lore, which applies to the Standalone, Chernarus in general and South Zagoria in particular is rather "downtrodden" and underdeveloped. 

 

4) Hippocrates world is different from ours, and different from Chernarus. Take a random person and throw them into surgery/the woods/ a firefight, and chances are they will not, in fact, gain a lot of experience at once. They will FAR more likely kill the patient/die from exposure/ freeze up and get shot/develop brutal PTSD, and then never want to do said activity again. If I did that with my Wilderness Survival students, I would end up with 15 dead teenagers and a murder conviction.

 

See, this is why I want an actual "skill system" in Day Z, like "mechanic", "1st Aid", "Advanced Care", etc. You randomly get assigned a skill upon fresh-spawning, and develop that skill through use. Not "instantly know how to do EVERYTHING". You could also "apprentice yourself" to someone more advanced than you in a skill, so you can work on the skill with a lowered chance of failure/reduced failure risks (working as an assistant during surgery, helping that old mechanic work on trucks, help your clan medic during triage, etc)

 

5) I agree with you on Mechanical and Engineering skills being important.

 

6) You obviously have no idea how disease immunity and transmission works.

 

According to the Devs, when the "zombie disease" first went viral, 98% of the worlds population was susceptible to the illness. That means 98 people RANDOMLY, based entirely on genetics, out of 100, would get sick. 

 

Of the 98% of the population infected (remember, 98 random people from 100), 60% of them died (59 of 98, rounding up). The remaining 40% of the infected population got turned into the in-game "zombies" due to degredation of the mental state. 

 

All of this means that only 2% of the worlds previous population was "untouched" by the disease. And, here is the funny thing about diseases: They don't care about "correct skills to survive". Old, young, strong and weak, survivalists and urbanites, all will die unless they have the entirely random gene sequence that prevents the virus from latching onto your cells and triggering cell death.

 

Of course, this means that within a few generations, the "zombie disease" will essentially become obsolete unless it mutates HEAVILY (which is unlikely, as it lacks viable hosts), due to the remaining human population breeding immunity into the new generations. Effectively, "natural herd immunity".

 

Uh....sorry about the tangent. What all of that meant is that the immunity is essentially random, and your "life skills" don't come into survival unless you are already immune. 

 

This is a world where there is no international trade (no more fuel, no more bullets, no more oil, no more hydraulic fluids, no new synthesized medicines, etc). Only what we have and what we make.

 

Unless you have access to resources that 99% of the surviving population doesn't, you are almost-prohibitively unlikely to be able to learn how to fly/maintain a plane or helicopter. Only small nation-states-in-essence would be able to, and in that case, you have won Day Z.

 

Sorry, just how I see it.

[Bigbadchuck 97]

The only way I'd be ok with helicopters would be of there were significant anti air weapons to counter them. Like a V3S mounted twin 57mm canons, stinger SAMs or even a SA8 system

[FlimFlamm 509]

1) Sure, I can read a book on maintaining a single-engine plane, and thats when I get the aeronautics off by 3mm, don't recognize the mistake due to inexperience, and die horribly in a fireball. Not even talking about actually learning how to fly a plane. The same thing can happen to you in a truck, but unlike aircraft, generally you don't have to get 500 feet off the ground to discover something is drastically wrong.

 

Face it, unless you were a pilot pre-apocalypse (and if that is the case, why the FUCK are you still in Chernarus?), you will 99.9999% of the time lack the resources necessary to learn how to fly even the smallest of planes. Planes require fuel, hydraulic fluid, oil, electricity. You require food, a safe place to sleep, and, most importantly, TIME, to learn how to fly a plane. A person learning how to fly a plane is effectively 2 people (trainer and trainee), and in all likelihood probably more, removed from the workforce, and they aren't just not working, they are using up valuable fuel, oil, food, water, space, and labor. Only the largest of groups, and here "groups" means BURGEONING NATION-STATE, would have the excess resources to do that. That survivor group living in a boarded-up house by the airfield? Probably don't have enough resources to support a pilot.

 

2)

• Guns are pretty easy to use, to the point where an illiterate dirt-farmer can become a threat to an organized army in about a week.
• The farming we do in-game is far from effective. The only reason it is a viable playstyle right now is because 1- plants grow in 15 minutes and 2- we don't have to worry about diseases, animals eating the crops, or crop failures. 
• I know next-to-jack-shit about trucks and cars, and yet I can generally tell when something is going on with my truck. "Ground Vehicle" mechanics exist in the general population at a MUCH higher rate than "air vehicle" mechanics, so therefore more truck mechanics were likely to survive than aircraft mechanics
• Protip: splints don't actually fix broken legs IRL anyways, and they totally don't let you run on them like you can in-game.
• Same thing with blood transfusions and blood testing. The WHOLE "health and medical system" is due for a severe overhaul, anyhow

 

3) We have yet to see any evidence of there being any sort of "flying culture" as you mention existing in Chernarus. No wrecks from small planes/autogyros crashing, etc. In fact, according to the ARMA II lore, which applies to the Standalone, Chernarus in general and South Zagoria in particular is rather "downtrodden" and underdeveloped. 

 

4) Hippocrates world is different from ours, and different from Chernarus. Take a random person and throw them into surgery/the woods/ a firefight, and chances are they will not, in fact, gain a lot of experience at once. They will FAR more likely kill the patient/die from exposure/ freeze up and get shot/develop brutal PTSD, and then never want to do said activity again. If I did that with my Wilderness Survival students, I would end up with 15 dead teenagers and a murder conviction.

 

See, this is why I want an actual "skill system" in Day Z, like "mechanic", "1st Aid", "Advanced Care", etc. You randomly get assigned a skill upon fresh-spawning, and develop that skill through use. Not "instantly know how to do EVERYTHING". You could also "apprentice yourself" to someone more advanced than you in a skill, so you can work on the skill with a lowered chance of failure/reduced failure risks (working as an assistant during surgery, helping that old mechanic work on trucks, help your clan medic during triage, etc)

 

5) I agree with you on Mechanical and Engineering skills being important.

 

6) You obviously have no idea how disease immunity and transmission works.

 

According to the Devs, when the "zombie disease" first went viral, 98% of the worlds population was susceptible to the illness. That means 98 people RANDOMLY, based entirely on genetics, out of 100, would get sick. 

 

Of the 98% of the population infected (remember, 98 random people from 100), 60% of them died (59 of 98, rounding up). The remaining 40% of the infected population got turned into the in-game "zombies" due to degredation of the mental state. 

 

All of this means that only 2% of the worlds previous population was "untouched" by the disease. And, here is the funny thing about diseases: They don't care about "correct skills to survive". Old, young, strong and weak, survivalists and urbanites, all will die unless they have the entirely random gene sequence that prevents the virus from latching onto your cells and triggering cell death.

 

Of course, this means that within a few generations, the "zombie disease" will essentially become obsolete unless it mutates HEAVILY (which is unlikely, as it lacks viable hosts), due to the remaining human population breeding immunity into the new generations. Effectively, "natural herd immunity".

 

Uh....sorry about the tangent. What all of that meant is that the immunity is essentially random, and your "life skills" don't come into survival unless you are already immune. 

 

This is a world where there is no international trade (no more fuel, no more bullets, no more oil, no more hydraulic fluids, no new synthesized medicines, etc). Only what we have and what we make.

 

Unless you have access to resources that 99% of the surviving population doesn't, you are almost-prohibitively unlikely to be able to learn how to fly/maintain a plane or helicopter. Only small nation-states-in-essence would be able to, and in that case, you have won Day Z.

 

Sorry, just how I see it.

 

I will number my replies as they correspond to your numbered points.

 

1) small aircraft don't always require hydraulic fluid. Many of them require the exact same caliber of parts that land vehicles commonly require. One of the good things about 98% of al humans dying is that there are all kinds of leftover products everywhere. I don't need an icnredible amount of resources to gather parts that I could concievably use to build a makeshift biplane, autogyro, or DIY mozzie type helicopter.

 

2) Guns that are not standard revolvers or long rifles are actually pretty complicated. Being able to shoot one is one thing, being able to shoot one accurately is another, and finally understanding gunfighting tactics, positioning and flanking is something else entirely.

 

The average person doesn't know how to clean load and attatch a drum mag to an AK but I have no problem with this. It's something that can be learned.

 

Vehicle mechanics involve many of the same mechanics as aircraft. Engine maintenance is the most important and complicated part of maintaining either a plane or a car, and if you understand car engines then understanding aircraft engines is not far fetched at all. The design of the plane is the most important part of the thing, but simple bi planes are reliable and stable formats that people used to build from scratch so long as they had an engine.

 

3) I'm not talking about Chernarus lore, I'm talking about what people loved about the mod. Many people loved to be pilots. They had reputations as good pilots and as such were the designated pilot whenever aircraft were needed. Having a real skill requirement for flying aircraft does away with the stupidity of experience points and grinding systems and replaces it with actual experience. Just like what happens with the rest of the features and aspects of the game.

 

4) Minecraft is a good game that I can use to demonstrate why I think experience systems are trash, especially for games aiming for so called realism.

 

In minecraft, with the addition of thousands of complicated mods, and dynamic and versatile/modular elements of gameplay like redstone, what happened is that you had some players who were hard working and dedicated, and learned how to use the tools they are given in awesome and unexpected ways. Most players would kill mobs, build a hovel, hand mine for diamond, and then make friends and enemies with their neighbours. Other people, more cunning and clever people, decided that they were going to become masters of the tools they were given, and they therefore vastly outshined the regular naives who either didn't have the patience, intelligence, or desire to become a competent survivor.

 

In minecraft there was really no special experience or level system. When you died, much like in DayZ, you respawned fresh and had to in some ways start over. Your base was only as secure as you could hide it or build traps to defend it. How industrious you could become depended on the player, not on how much superficial time they put into grinding stat levels. Some people were hopeless and good for only a few tasks, others were masters of everything. Not because there was some sort of flaw in the game design, but because they themselves were exceptional.

 

Flying airplanes or helicopters in sims is incredibly hard at first, but if you have the right patience and aptitude you can master it. I hope that everything in DayZ is so complicated and difficult to achieve (like minecraft came to be) that the heights you can soar to depend solely upon your own will power and ingenuity.

 

5) The mechanics of a V3S engine aren't too much more complex than the mechanics of plane engines (small ones made out of cheap materials). The same mechanical skills that will become prevalent will also be appllicable to most aspects of aircraft.

 

6) The major flaw in your argument here is that a 2% random sampling of the population will have the same proportion of pilots as there are in a 100% analysis. There will be SOME pilots and SOME engineers and mechanics who understand planes, and so the knowledge has a chance to enter the mainstream.

 

My point was that people who are both immune, and have survived for some time already (meaning not being killed by zombies) are going to be on average more skillfull than the original 2% immune group. The strongest and smarted of the 2% will survive, and given that more and more are dying each day, soon we might be down to the people who do have these special knowledges, like how to fly a plane, or sail a ship, or build/maintain an engine.

 

Everytime you die you can imagine that a less experienced survivor who came ashore did not make it. Your new character, being more knowledgable (from your personal experience, but role play wise that is just their background) ought to be better off, having survived for longer (given a realistic timeline where the old character is dead while the 'new' one goes on living in the future).

 

8)You don't need a small nation state. You only need the materials, tools, and knowledge required. Generators can power the tools. Manuals, books, guides, improvisation and general mechanical experience can provide the rest. I'm not suggesting that big ass helicopters resembling modern day helicopters with their precise electronics. I'm suggesting classically timed and mechanized helicopters of reasonable proportions and size. Anything bigger than a 4 seater strains the realism of maintenance and construction (for bigger helicopters you need higher quality parts).

 

You might not be aware but small helicopters, complex as they are, are feasible projects for individuals, not just nation states.

 

Here is some russian flying his homemade helicopter

 

 

Planes are also doable with the right knowledge, and so your desire for fidelity for having knowledge of physics and mechanics be limited to some statistical norm strikes me as very odd when videogames are mostly about filling roles that you cannot in real life.

 

[FlimFlamm 509]

The only way I'd be ok with helicopters would be of there were significant anti air weapons to counter them. Like a V3S mounted twin 57mm canons, stinger SAMs or even a SA8 system

All you really need is a 7.62 MG which you basically have in the form of an AKM. An M240 would work.

 

The more lightly armored and flimsy an aircraft is, the more getting anywhere near something that is going to shoot at you is suicide.

[Bigbadchuck 97]

All you really need is a 7.62 MG which you basically have in the form of an AKM. An M240 would work.

The more lightly armored and flimsy an aircraft is, the more getting anywhere near something that is going to shoot at you is suicide.

True, but even a truck mounted 12.7mm would be beast. And being an ex-soviet republic there might be a Hind sitting somewhere that could be airworthy. You'd need more than a 240b to take it down

[FlimFlamm 509]

True, but even a truck mounted 12.7mm would be beast. And being an ex-soviet republic there might be a Hind sitting somewhere that could be airworthy. You'd need more than a 240b to take it down

 

This is why I am in support of MG nests with tripod mounted MG's being constructable. Their primary purpose being defensive.

 

The caliber of the mountable MG's needs to reflect the relative balance of everything else, so I am leaning towards m240's and PKT's given that this is what I would expect enemy aircraft to be carrying.

 

If a 50 Mg is added like the M2 then it should be only firable when mounted, can only be carried strapped to your back (and must be carried separately from the tripod). Ammo for it should be rare enough to reflect its strength. If you are about to open fire from an M2 at an aircraft then you should not want to waste even a single precious bullet.

[gibonez 3633]

Why stop there why not add stingers or s300 missile systems.

I got an even better solution that is balanced.

No air vehicles thus no need for escalating means of countering them.

[sachad 1016]

No air vehicles thus no need for escalating means of countering them.

 

This is the single most important sentence in this entire topic. 

[Grimey Rick 3417]

Aerial transport is a very bad idea for a game that people want to be realistic. You can't balance a game that includes extremely rare planes and helicopters. Only the most coordinated groups would have access to them, and then they'd be at such an advantage it'd be stupid.

Chernarus is at the very best a Second World country. You're going to be lucky to find a functional CAR OR TRUCK, let alone a helicopter or plane. And even if you did, how common do you really think the parts works be to upkeep them?

You guys can't bitch and complain about realism in one thread, and in the next demand something that's COMPLETELY unrealistic. In an apocalypse, there probably would be a handful of people zooming around in aerial transport, however, the vast majority of us would be hoofing it in search of our next meal.

The thing about apocalyptic situations is that they'll NEVER be fair or balanced. But y'see, this here video game has to maintain some level of balance or it'll never go anywhere.

[pilgrim* 3514]

..//..

Hippocrates, some old greek person that the average person doesn't know about, said that war is the only proper school for surgeons. What did he mean by this?

..//..

 

He meant that in war you get a shitload of people with smashed bones and big holes, and you can patch, saw, hammer, cut open and stitch shut as many as you like for as long as you want all day ever day - and no one expects them to live so you got no problem when they die - and if you do this for long enough you start to know how the human body works and all the different ways you can kill a patient faster than his wounds can, and at last you begin to avoid killing patients yourself and you might eventually help one or two of them. And you also learn when there's no point in even trying, because you tried it already and it didn't work.

That's Hippocrates on surgery, without going into infection and convalescence. His main rule was "do no harm"

Now how do you apply that to aircraft maintenance ?

xx

[xalienax 621]

Aerial transport is a very bad idea for a game that people want to be realistic. You can't balance a game that includes extremely rare planes and helicopters. Only the most coordinated groups would have access to them, and then they'd be at such an advantage it'd be stupid.

 

 

That IS realistic tho. Look at any place where law and order has broken down (Social collapse). what you will generally find is that it's the orginaized criminals and warloards who have the nice things and working vehicles- and not normally because they are nice to others or a benefit to the society they exist in.

 

As to the topic of aircraft; Primitive things like ultralights/autogyros which in their most basic form could be built by a mechanicly-inclined individual with some basic understanding of aerodynamics would NOT require any advanced formal training to fix or operate. If anything it would be the logistics of gathering all the assorted items needed to build or get one running then the 'waste' of fuel to run it that would be the main limiting issue.

[Grimey Rick 3417]

That IS realistic tho. Look at any place where law and order has broken down (Social collapse). what you will generally find is that it's the orginaized criminals and warloards who have the nice things and working vehicles- and not normally because they are nice to others or a benefit to the society they exist in.

As to the topic of aircraft; Primitive things like ultralights/autogyros which in their most basic form could be built by a mechanicly-inclined individual with some basic understanding of aerodynamics would NOT require any advanced formal training to fix or operate. If anything it would be the logistics of gathering all the assorted items needed to build or get one running then the 'waste' of fuel to run it that would be the main limiting issue.

Yeah, I somewhat addressed that in my post. An apocalypse would be a seriously imbalanced situation; even more so than day-to-day life. But issues of imbalance don't mesh very well in a video game. DayZ is, unfortunately, still classed as such, so any imbalanced features implemented would only serve to damage the game, not help it.

[gibonez 3633]

That IS realistic tho. Look at any place where law and order has broken down (Social collapse). what you will generally find is that it's the orginaized criminals and warloards who have the nice things and working vehicles- and not normally because they are nice to others or a benefit to the society they exist in.

As to the topic of aircraft; Primitive things like ultralights/autogyros which in their most basic form could be built by a mechanicly-inclined individual with some basic understanding of aerodynamics would NOT require any advanced formal training to fix or operate. If anything it would be the logistics of gathering all the assorted items needed to build or get one running then the 'waste' of fuel to run it that would be the main limiting issue.

Still not realistic.

Look at Isis a well funded terror group estimated at 60k strong..

Still does not have a single pilot for the large amount of captured helos and planes from the Syrian military.

Trained pilots are incredibly rare.

[FlimFlamm 509]

Why stop there why not add stingers or s300 missile systems.

I got an even better solution that is balanced.

No air vehicles thus no need for escalating means of countering them.

 

How is this even a rational response?

 

All you're doing is pissing and moaning about how badly you do not want aircraft.

 

Stinger missiles can destroy modern jets. they aren't needed to shoot down light aircraft.

 

Why stop at M240? Because it's possible to shoot down light aircraft without going nuclear.

[R2THEON 4]

Anything available in real life should be available in game. Helis, jets, battleships (why not), you name it. But it should have the same drawbacks as in real life. Flying a helicopter is hard as fuck, to much tilt one way or the other and you're dead. Most aircraft take more than one person to fly effectively, and it should be the same in game.

You want to fly around in a gunship, laying waste to anything below you? Cool. But make it as hard to do as if you were actually doing it. In an apocalypse. While trying not to get eaten/robbed. Ammo for any weaponized aircraft should be very large and rare as hell. Parts should be scattered EVERYWHERE, seeing as how the military would have put it together and put it in use if it was feasible. Finding fuel shouldn't be as hard as everyone else seems to think it should be, at least not at first. Maybe each server could get a set amount of fuel, and as time goes on, the resources would dwindle... Reset it every week or two?

In my opinion though, any aircraft should be added after smaller kinks get ironed out. Fix the bugs first... More game, less gimmicks.

[FlimFlamm 509]

Aerial transport is a very bad idea for a game that people want to be realistic. You can't balance a game that includes extremely rare planes and helicopters. Only the most coordinated groups would have access to them, and then they'd be at such an advantage it'd be stupid.

Chernarus is at the very best a Second World country. You're going to be lucky to find a functional CAR OR TRUCK, let alone a helicopter or plane. And even if you did, how common do you really think the parts works be to upkeep them?

You guys can't bitch and complain about realism in one thread, and in the next demand something that's COMPLETELY unrealistic. In an apocalypse, there probably would be a handful of people zooming around in aerial transport, however, the vast majority of us would be hoofing it in search of our next meal.

The thing about apocalyptic situations is that they'll NEVER be fair or balanced. But y'see, this here video game has to maintain some level of balance or it'll never go anywhere.

 

So your two fold argument is as follows: aircraft create unfair advantages, and even though the game should not be fair, it needs to be somewhat fair, or 'it won't go anywhere'. And also that because Chernarus is poor that aircraft would not be around.

 

In what way would aircraft in and of themselves be so game breakingly over powered? Why would it be unfair if the difficulty to construct or maintain aircraft reflected the benefits they grant?

 

How exactly is the experience of teh bambi or the lonewolf going to be ruined because there are a few light aircraft buzzing around?

 

Also, there are three airfields in Chernarus, two of them are military airfields. Parts can reasonably be assumed to exist within Chernarus. That said, I would prefer to see constructable DIY makeshift aircraft instead of prefab spawned ones (which is more realistic than spawned in ones, and less powerful) which would rely on mostly improvised and homemade parts.

 

P.S The Czech republic isn't a poor nation, which is where Chernarus is located. They have the 50th largest GDP in the world.

[FlimFlamm 509]

He meant that in war you get a shitload of people with smashed bones and big holes, and you can patch, saw, hammer, cut open and stitch shut as many as you like for as long as you want all day ever day - and no one expects them to live so you got no problem when they die - and if you do this for long enough you start to know how the human body works and all the different ways you can kill a patient faster than his wounds can, and at last you begin to avoid killing patients yourself and you might eventually help one or two of them. And you also learn when there's no point in even trying, because you tried it already and it didn't work.

That's Hippocrates on surgery, without going into infection and convalescence. His main rule was "do no harm"

Now how do you apply that to aircraft maintenance ?

xx

 

In war you get a shit ton of patients. You get them all at once. So not only do you have the extreme emotional and mental pressure of everything being life and death, but you also have an incredible volume of work to do.

This environment motivates surgeons as much as possible and the severity of work volume makes it so that they become extremely practiced. The faster and more precisely a surgeon can operate (meaning more time for more patients also means a better experience for the guy being operated on because the surgeon will need to spend less time inside of them). It's not that you are expected to lose patients which makes it a good learning environment, it's actually inevitably losing patients and the learning that occurs from it.

I wasn't applying the original quote to vehicle maintenance specifically but more so experience in general. One poster was suggesting that we have experience levels that we need to grind with each life, like mechanics skills, medical skills, farming skills etc... I rebuked him by focusing on the same realism mantra that he kept repeating. In real life there are no experience points or leveling systems. When it comes to surgeons raw experience of actually doing surgery is what makes them excel. When it comes to mechanics, actually doing mechanical work gives you experience in the same way. When it comes to piloting, it's the same thing. Real experience is what makes you good.

There is a game called SS13 (space station thirteen). It is a round based space horror survival role playing game. Dean notably used it as an example in the early days of the standalone in order to explain how he wanted the immersiveness of the game to work.

In SS13, like in DayZ, if you are sick, you might simply get a message which hints at that fact: "Your throat throbs with pain". Players who do not understand the intricate medical system of SS13 might ignore it, and continue romping around the station, all the while spreading their disease.

To actually play as a doctor, there is required a ridiculous amount of learning to even have the first clue about treating disease and injury. In order to go from being  a civilian on board the station (a completely uneducated naive who knows nothing about anything and is good only for assault and vandalism and getting locked up in the brig) players need to spend sometimes years learning and mastering all the aspects and mechanics of their profession and department.

For example, if you are engineer, and you want to deconstruct a reinforced wall, you need to apply tools to it in the following order: Wirecutters, Screwdriver, Welding Torch, Crowbar, Wrench, Welding Torch, Crowbar, Screwdriver, Wirecutters, Wrench. People who cannot remember how to do it can look it up on the wiki, but it is tiresome and laborious to do so. Nothing in the game tells you what to do next or how to do it, and just about everything in the game is much more complex than simply deconstructing a wall.

In DayZ, knowing how to construct certain things, how health and medicine works, how to properly maintain vehicles, and it is my hope, how to build, maintain, and fly light aircraft, should be as complex and as diverse/dynamic as possible. In this way the difficulty of the game will naturally create different play styles which focus on dedication towards specific things (like medicine, base building, mechanics, or piloting) because mastering any one field would be so difficult that people would not have time or patience to master them all.

Edited April 11, 2015 by FlimFlamm

[R2THEON 4]

Jets and large helicopters are beyond the realistic maintenance limits of the DayZ scope.

Small planes however like cessnas are not maintenance hogs. Older model planes like bi planes of various kinds, and recreational grade gliders like ultralights and autogyros are well within the maintenance capabilities of a post apocalyptic zombie world.

If you are a survivor off the beach getting something together should be impossible. If you have an established and a group of teammates who have been scavenging and hoarding parts and resources then there are all kinds of things that can be built.

All you really need to get airborne is a para-sail, a small engine, and a home-made propeller. The most complex plane that could possibly be built would be some sort of bi plane with improvised everything. The most complex helicopter that could be built would be a renovated huey sized helicopter or some sort of death trap makeshift little bird sized helicopter. Auto gyros and mozzies aren't rocket science. Only aeronautical science.

It doesn't matter to me much that the average person doesn't know how to design a plane that can actually fly, or that building a helicopter requires a degree of precision that can only be had with the correct tools and knowledge. All I care about is that I can pretend that I know all that, and then invest inordinate amounts of time into completing it so I can enjoy it for those few precious hours (or minutes?) before it goes all wrong and we all die in a firey wreck so some lucky bambi can come buy and pick through the wreckage.

As an aside, the more difficult it is to fly the aircraft, the more realistic the game will be along the lines of your argument that the average person is not a pilot.

In the DayZ mod helicopters were easy to fly. They all had auto hover and generally were simple as shit. Even still, some people just suck at flying. They crash land constantly after spending ages descending. They cannot maneuver for shit and you're lucky if you don't die as a result of your decision to enter the aircraft in the first place.

Take autogyros for instance. These were the things in the DayZ mod that looked like a mozzie (a small 1 person helicopter) but they flew like a glider or a plane. Almost nobody could fly them. I could fly them though, with extreme prowess because I was dedicated enough to study and practice with them endlessly. Whenever my autogyro was stolen I knew that they would simply crash and burn a few hundred meters away. As a skilled pilot I was a valuable commodity for a group of players. I could land cessnas and bi planes along the coast with ease and could defend against enemy helicopters with an armed CAMEL or other bi plane. Other people filled their roles as well. Some were base builders, some were fighters, some liked to drive ground vehicles, and some people liked to be gunners. Once I learned how to survive in the DayZ mod, piloting aircraft, for any reason, became the most enjoyable part of the game for me. Most people liked to go on murder sprees or do clan battles or build bases and live peacefully, but I liked to fly.

Survival was easy in the dayz mod and so players had more time to engage in war against one another. In the standalone there is more to do and more roles which are crucial like farming/resource gathering; more roles to fill.

Aircraft will be hard to get and so players will mostly be inexperienced with any given aircraft. Given the value aircraft will represent, groups who collaborate to construct/maintain them will want to be sure that qualified pilots are flying them.

Why not have aircraft of a reasonable tech level and of appropriate difficulty to acquire in order to allow for this dynamic role? What is the real sacrifice other than to statistical fidelity?

Would the game honestly be more fun if there was absolutely no access to flight? (I cannot imagine how that is possible. More options=more fun right?)

. This. All of this.

[FlimFlamm 509]

Yeah, I somewhat addressed that in my post. An apocalypse would be a seriously imbalanced situation; even more so than day-to-day life. But issues of imbalance don't mesh very well in a video game. DayZ is, unfortunately, still classed as such, so any imbalanced features implemented would only serve to damage the game, not help it.

 

I think you need to flesh out this argument you are using, because I think it is deeply flawed.

 

P1: imbalanced things are not good in videogames

P2: DayZ is a videogames

P2: Aircraft are imbalanced

 

C1: Aircraft are not good in DayZ

 

Firstly I want to know what you mean by "imbalanced" in and of itself. What is the exact problem that imbalanced things (as you define them) create in videogames.

 

Secondly, I want you explain how the problems of imbalance in video games as you define them will apply directly to DayZ.(Are there any comparisons you can make between potential DayZ imbalance and imbalance in other games?). For example, A mosin with a scope is a pretty powerful thing. If you are on the coast you have almost no hope of defeating someone with a mosin who wants to kill you and knows where you are at. I could argue that mosins give an unfair advantage which is a direct threat to my survival as a bambi. Does this make them imbalanced in such a way that they ought not to exist in DayZ?

 

Thirdly, I want to know in what precise ways particular types of aircraft are going to give rise to imbalance as you define it, in a context that makes sense as it applies to DayZ, which is a unique video game where 'imbalance' can mean something very different than what it means in other games. (different types of aircraft can do different things, so not all of them have the same level of 'balance')

 

I disagree with the premise that aircraft are inherently imbalanced. Autogyros or ultralights give people convenient transport at an expense, nothing more.

 

I disagree that DayZ can have something be in and of itself, 'imbalanced'. The more powerful something is, the more difficult it needs to be to acquire. For example, I would be fine with stinger missiles in the game if finding them was literally one in ten million. That way, no matter how much of an advantage it gives you, it is still balanced based on rarity/expense. This kind of balance keeps all the other shit relevant and prevents people from only going for one type of gun, or one model of vehicle.

 

I disagree that DayZ, for the above reason, can be easily compared with many other games in terms of how things can be 'balanced'. I think you falsely presume that all aircraft are overpowered (chinooks and blacks are overpowered, i get that, but those are the pinnacle of modern military aircraft which would not fit into DayZ), and then go on to equivocate over-powered-ness with imbalance as it would cause in some games which cannot be easily applied to DayZ. I think you were onto that fact when you explained that a zombie apocalypse is not fair and balanced, but you failed to provide actual specifics which explain and prove your argument as it applies to DayZ.

Edited April 11, 2015 by FlimFlamm

[FlimFlamm 509]

Anything available in real life should be available in game. Helis, jets, battleships (why not), you name it. But it should have the same drawbacks as in real life. Flying a helicopter is hard as fuck, to much tilt one way or the other and you're dead. Most aircraft take more than one person to fly effectively, and it should be the same in game.

You want to fly around in a gunship, laying waste to anything below you? Cool. But make it as hard to do as if you were actually doing it. In an apocalypse. While trying not to get eaten/robbed. Ammo for any weaponized aircraft should be very large and rare as hell. Parts should be scattered EVERYWHERE, seeing as how the military would have put it together and put it in use if it was feasible. Finding fuel shouldn't be as hard as everyone else seems to think it should be, at least not at first. Maybe each server could get a set amount of fuel, and as time goes on, the resources would dwindle... Reset it every week or two?

In my opinion though, any aircraft should be added after smaller kinks get ironed out. Fix the bugs first... More game, less gimmicks.

 

The principle you espouse of more stuff being available is sound, but there is a reasonable limit. If battleships were available, let's say, via construction in shipyards by survivors who mine and smelt and refine their own steel. It should take a group of 50 survivors (the whole server) twenty years to even come close to completing the work on the hull of a battleship. Once they get it up and sailing, how are they going to arm it? What are they going to do with it?

 

Video games of the future might have the luxury of having anything and everything imaginable in them (maybe they can become educational tools), but for today we have data limits and such, so I lean more towards only having available that which is reasonably plausible*.

 

*reasonably plausible is a very ambiguous term, and intentionally so. Some people think that a glider or an ultralight or an autogyro is beyond the scope of feasibility in a zombie apocalypse, which I thoroughly disagree with. When it comes to anything larger, the issue becomes about sacrificing fidelity to statistical realism (the feasibility of finding/maintaining/building larger aircraft) versus the fact that it is a video game, and we want video games to have fun things in them. Then there is the they are too overpowered crowd... (I am actually finding this subject very entertaining because it very much like politics :) )

[S3V3N 1402]

The problem I see is that the choppers will probably be a bitch to maintain and keep in the air. So you need a big crew by default to get a chopper going. And most likely that won't be random survivors that grouped together on the coast. It will be organised groups that get the choppers, first. And that's fine, as far as realism goes, but as long as we can't hide tents better or lock storage it will mean whoever finds a chopper will find all tents soon after. And let's be honest, the map is perfectly fine to travel on truck, it doesn't really need choppers. In the mods you have Salvation City or remote islands to fly to. There's none of that here. I could imagine the following scenarios and settings that make use of choppers legit:

 

a ) changes to the map environment: e.g. there could be places that are extremely dangerous and complicated to reach, like certain mountaintops or new remote islands. A chopper would be an convenient way to get there

 

b ) culling of player constructed ground objects: if you wanna find tents you have to fly extremely low, risking to get shot at. If you fly any higher than 10 feet over the trees, the tents will become invisible to chopper crews. 

 

c ) certain abilities may be required to fly a chopper. And let's just assume you can find and pick those up somehow. It would mean that one group may have a chopper, but another group has a pilot, which brings them together. Also: of course you can fly a chopper without proper training, but there could be something like "focus" or "concentration" that strains the untrained player, so he cannot fly as much or far as a trained pilot.

 

I massively enjoyed the choppers in the mods, but I thought there were too many of them (numbers and models) and they were too easy to upkeep. I also don't think chopper should be armed. A Little Bird will be fine + it will support flying at low altitudes best and give you a chance to kill someone inside from the ground. I don't know how many is a good number, but perhaps 2/map and 2 Cessnas.    

Edited April 11, 2015 by S3V3N

[FlimFlamm 509]

@S3V3N

 

There are a lot of ways that aircraft can be balanced along the lines of what you're saying.

 

There already are certain places that are hard to get to, the extreme north west is shielded by mountains and has few access roads. The prison island involves swimming, which nobody would want to do. Making more islands is a subject for which I have been planning to make a thread there is a lot of unused space and it would make boats/aircraft fill more of a necessary function.

 

I think that barricading bases against players and setting traps for them ought to be how large bases avoid raids. Lone tents should indeed be invisible from the air if under tree cover, I agree with you there, but even still, it's only a matter of time before an unprotected tent gets found by players on foot or in a vehicle, no matter how remote. (other players also seek remoteness, which is ironic because they find inhabitants)

 

Regarding the difficulty of actually getting, building, and flying an aircraft, it should all certainly not be easy or simple. I don't actually think that pre-spawned vehicles are alone enough for DayZ. I think that DIY modular light aircraft should be constructable, along with modular land vehicles, and these should represent the bread and butter of end game transportation. Actually building a vehicle should be a long and arduous process with as steep a learning curve as the devs are willing to program into it. It should involve resource collection of as many kinds as possible and the rarity of the resources required should be balanced appropriately. This way there can be many vehicles on a single server, but it will only reflect the work that groups put into building them rather than competing with one another over super rare little birds and cessnas (and other land vehicles too).

 

When it comes to flying aircraft, it should be also as difficult and sim like as the devs are willing to program it to be. Without auto hover players will have a much harder time not crashing and dying, and so taking flight seriously will become an absolute necessity, given that crashing and dying means you have just lost something which an insane amount of work went into. If vehicles and aircraft are modular then different size frames and engines and wheels, etc, are going to make particular variations behave differently, which gives rise to a whole new emergent field of study over simple maintenance of spawned vehicles.

Edited April 11, 2015 by FlimFlamm

[FlimFlamm 509]

I think it's time for some good old fashioned STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!

 

There is an inherent margin of error in this analysis owing to the fact that multiple selections are permitted for each poll. The resulting margins of error will be represented where possible.

 

In the main poll, featuring the question "Do you want to see aerial transport in DayZ?", out of a total 186 participants, 63 people voted for the option 'No - I want to keep DayZ on terra firma/assorted bodies of water'.

 

From this we can infer that around 34% of participants do not wish for aircraft to exist in DayZ. However a total of 208 votes were cast in this category, meaning multiple voted multiple times. Given that all the other options inherently imply the existence of aircraft, the 22 vote discrepancy gives rise to a margin of error between who wants aircraft (aircraft of any kind) and who does not.

 

We can use the other two polls, "If you clicked No, why?" and "If you clicked Yes, why?" to corroborate our findings and reduce the margin of error. The option “I didn't vote no" was voted for a total of 120 times. The option  “I didn't vote yes” was voted for a total of 64 times. These numbers fit well with our previous findings 64/186 is 34% of participants, and they are saying that they do not want aircraft. 120/186 is 66% of participants expressing that they do wish to see aircraft in some form or another.

 

The 22 vote discrepancy margin of error can in a crude way be halved because of the corroboration of the secondary result. 22/186 ambiguous votes meant a potential margin of error of 12%, but since we can halve that, we can reasonably conclude from the polls that 66% +/-6% desire to have aircraft in DayZ, with the inverse being true for people who do not want to see aircraft, which is at 34%+/-6%.

 

To state it more formally, two thirds of participants think aircraft of some kind ought to be in DayZ...

 

This is along the lines of what I expected, and since I am one of those persons who wishes to see aircraft, I certainly like the result.

 

What is however I think more important and more interesting is the spread of reasons given within both camps for their choice. In the minority AA crowd there is disagreement between why there should be no aircraft and in the majority camp of aircraft supporters there is disagreement about what kinds of aircraft should be implemented or allowed. Analyzing the relevant statistics for these issues is a bit more complex than the broader scope which I have analyzed here, and if I have the time I will do more analysis on that subject in a later post.

Edited April 11, 2015 by FlimFlamm

[Grimey Rick 3417]

@FlimFlann:

Why do I need to point out why aircraft are imbalanced? Did you not play the Mod? This is a game that's seemingly trying to drive home how difficult day-to-day survival in apocalyptic world would be. I think (and always thought while playing the Mod) that aerial transport in general is stupid. It was more acceptable in the Mod where everyone was decked out in full military gear, but the Standalone has always pushed itself as a grittier, more visceral survival simulator.

Infected/zombies aside, aerial transport, if implemented, should be so fucking rare that it makes you stop and stare in awe as a helicopter flies over you. That's the only way I personally would ever be okay with it, anyway.

[FlimFlamm 509]

@FlimFlann:

Why do I need to point out why aircraft are imbalanced? Did you not play the Mod? This is a game that's seemingly trying to drive home how difficult day-to-day survival in apocalyptic world would be. I think (and always thought while playing the Mod) that aerial transport in general is stupid. It was more acceptable in the Mod where everyone was decked out in full military gear, but the Standalone has always pushed itself as a grittier, more visceral survival simulator.

Infected/zombies aside, aerial transport, if implemented, should be so fucking rare that it makes you stop and stare in awe as a helicopter flies over you. That's the only way I personally would ever be okay with it, anyway.

 

I played thousands of hours on the mod, and I must say that aircraft were the farthest thing from stupid.

 

Black hawks were annoying from time to time, but unarmed aircraft were never 'stupid'. What do you mean by stupid?

 

Why couldn't aircraft be acceptable if there were no military variations?

 

Why not have gritty aircraft to go with gritty survival rather than military aircraft to go with military gear like the mod had?

 

Having aircraft be so extremely rare or hard to get that merely seeing one induces a state of awe is too rare to be a relevant game-play mechanic.

 

Perhaps if aircraft were modular and upgradable, then the top possible tier makeshift aircraft should be something awe inspiring. The point of having aircraft at all would be so that players get to use them. I just want to know why you would consider the concept of ultralights and autogyros to be stupid, and why everyone being decked out in military gear would make light aircraft 'more acceptable'.

 

I want DayZ to be difficult, but I don't want the end game to consist of 'day to day survival' and roaming around engaging in banditry and the like. I want to be able to do fun things once I master the game and have invested so much time into it. Otherwise why play the game at all? Mods became so popular because they added features and functions and vehicles. The more content a mod had the more popular it became. Given this trend vanilla DayZ should strive for as much content as possible, and aircraft are too enjoyable and dynamic to leave out.

Edited April 12, 2015 by FlimFlamm