DayZ would probably be better without any military gear

[NewArk 39]

people left the game not because of glitches, lack of weapons or villages, but because of no survival and too much pvp

 

 

Source for that? This is just a guess, right? I think the reasons for decreasing playerbase are by far more complex.

 

Back to topic:

I love finding miltary gear! Without it, I would bail.

I do lootruns for hours and hours, walking along all the freaking crashsites, an then finally, my beloved SVD. Noice! :D

[KenoSkir88 181]

I want helicopters SOOOO badly :P

 

The harder to fly the better :D

[BleedoutBill 1636]

I would disagree. Neither the loot, the weapons, nor the military gear have anything to do with the decline of this game. The problem is the mentality of the people who are playing the game. Once upon a time, we had proper bandits, who interacted with their victims and so long as you cooperated with them, you had a good chance to live and probably even keep the bulk of your gear.

 

Then we had a phase where it seemed like the bandits were all psycho, antisocial types, who enjoyed torturing and killing their victims above all else. Gradually, people decided that they had nothing to loose if they resisted, because nine times out of ten, they would be executed anyway. RIP proper bandits! As a result, the psychos started KOS'ing everyone in sight, because most of them weren't very skilled and being a bandit was now a very dangerous preoccupation.

 

I think that most people object to the indiscriminate KOS'ing, more than anything else and it doesn't matter if they are shot with a M4, or a bow and arrow. This is doubly true on the Experimental build, where most of us are working to recreate and document bugs. Don't get me wrong, I fully expect KOS in Cherno, Elektro, the NWAF and other "hot spots" (on both stable & experimental), so I only visit those areas when I am looking for PVP. The part that I don't understand is the new breed of "psycho bandit" who gets a thrill from KOS'ing a pumpkin farmer in Kamensk. This guy isn't a threat to you, killing him is no challenge and if you need the food, he'd probably be both proud and delighted to give you all that you can carry.

 

KOS'ing is not interaction; KOS'ing eliminates any possibility of interaction. KOS'ing also requires very little skill. The more that you behave in this way, the more people will continue to migrate to private servers, or abandon the game, all together. This is bad for all of us! If KOS'ing is truly "your thing" and nothing else "does it" for you, then go to the well known "hot spots" and do it there.

 

Now, before you get your panties in a wad, yes, you have the right to be an ass if you wish. No one is saying that you don't have the right to be an ass. What I am saying is that the consequences of being an ass are bad for the longevity of the game. It's just too bad that the pumpkin farmer in Kamensk has no rights. You can adopt any play style that you wish, but he doesn't have the right to opt out of your play style. His only option is to leave ... and he will.

 

So, my recommendation is that when you play, engage with like-minded players and when you're wandering through the countryside, give interaction a try. It is exciting, dangerous, challenging and rewarding. It is also better for the health and longevity of the game.

[scriptfactory 620]

Interesting thread. So you guys just worked out that people dont all like the same stuff... gj on that. now you should see why the devs cant maker the game everyone wants,

 

Well, they can. They just need to give the community the right tools for the job. This is exactly what the ARK developers did and it is now the most successful survival game on Steam. More CCUs than DayZ, Rust and H1Z1 COMBINED.

[KenoSkir88 181]

I would disagree. Neither the loot, the weapons, nor the military gear have anything to do with the decline of this game. The problem is the mentality of the people who are playing the game. Once upon a time, we had proper bandits, who interacted with their victims and so long as you cooperated with them, you had a good chance to live and probably even keep the bulk of your gear.

 

Then we had a phase where it seemed like the bandits were all psycho, antisocial types, who enjoyed torturing and killing their victims above all else. Gradually, people decided that they had nothing to loose if they resisted, because nine times out of ten, they would be executed anyway. RIP proper bandits! As a result, the psychos started KOS'ing everyone in sight, because most of them weren't very skilled and being a bandit was now a very dangerous preoccupation.

 

I think that most people object to the indiscriminate KOS'ing, more than anything else and it doesn't matter if they are shot with a M4, or a bow and arrow. This is doubly true on the Experimental build, where most of us are working to recreate and document bugs. Don't get me wrong, I fully expect KOS in Cherno, Elektro, the NWAF and other "hot spots" (on both stable & experimental), so I only visit those areas when I am looking for PVP. The part that I don't understand is the new breed of "psycho bandit" who gets a thrill from KOS'ing a pumpkin farmer in Kamensk. This guy isn't a threat to you, killing him is no challenge and if you need the food, he'd probably be both proud and delighted to give you all that you can carry.

 

KOS'ing is not interaction; KOS'ing eliminates any possibility of interaction. KOS'ing also requires very little skill. The more that you behave in this way, the more people will continue to migrate to private servers, or abandon the game, all together. This is bad for all of us! If KOS'ing is truly "your thing" and nothing else "does it" for you, then go to the well known "hot spots" and do it there.

 

Now, before you get your panties in a wad, yes, you have the right to be an ass if you wish. No one is saying that you don't have the right to be an ass. What I am saying is that the consequences of being an ass are bad for the longevity of the game. It's just too bad that the pumpkin farmer in Kamensk has no rights. You can adopt any play style that you wish, but he doesn't have the right to opt out of your play style. His only option is to leave ... and he will.

 

So, my recommendation is that when you play, engage with like-minded players and when you're wandering through the countryside, give interaction a try. It is exciting, dangerous, challenging and rewarding. It is also better for the health and longevity of the game.

 

You can't blame the players for naturally migrating to the best method of play to suit their current needs. It's down to the game developers to tweak the game to attract the players that suit their vision. More helpful than insulting the people who are doing the KOSing (everyone) would be to suggest game tweaks to encourage other methods. Currently the safest option is to kill someone before they kill you, and the good guys accept some extra danger in return for the extra content of interacting with you instead of eliminating you. You can't expect everyone's plan to include a conversation with you so you must expect them to take the best option as far as their own survival and completion of their personal mission whatever that may be. If the game can make it so that his best option is not necessarily to kill you on sight, he will be less likely to KOS in general. Calling him an ass because he chose to remove you as a threat is short sighted since in the current climate it genuinely was his best chance at survival most of the time.

[BleedoutBill 1636]

You can't blame the players for naturally migrating to the best method of play to suit their current needs. It's down to the game developers to tweak the game to attract the players that suit their vision. More helpful than insulting the people who are doing the KOSing (everyone) would be to suggest game tweaks to encourage other methods. Currently the safest option is to kill someone before they kill you, and the good guys accept some extra danger in return for the extra content of interacting with you instead of eliminating you. You can't expect everyone's plan to include a conversation with you so you must expect them to take the best option as far as their own survival and completion of their personal mission whatever that may be. If the game can make it so that his best option is not necessarily to kill you on sight, he will be less likely to KOS in general. Calling him an ass because he chose to remove you as a threat is short sighted since in the current climate it genuinely was his best chance at survival most of the time.

I don't think that you can lay this at the feet of the devs. At the most basic level, this is a maturity issue. People just aren't thinking through and recognizing the consequences of their actions and then they want to complain about the direction of the game. The griefers need to recognize that with freedom, comes responsibility.

[scriptfactory 620]

I don't think that you can lay this at the feet of the devs. At the most basic level, this is a maturity issue. People just aren't thinking through and recognizing the consequences of their actions and then they want to complain about the direction of the game. The griefers need to recognize that with freedom, comes responsibility.

 

It's a game, dude. If you allow griefers to do something, they will do it. The only way to limit KoS would be to add some kind of governing game mechanic. Either players need to be able to limit KoS themselves (which means they need the tools to do so) or griefing needs to be regulated through an in-game reward/punishment system.

[Mukaparska 55]

Well, how many average people can shoot a plethora of guns with perfect accuracy (on their end - players can still have shitty aim and guns aren't perfectly accurate in any case, but the player character never has a problem lining up the iron sights or shouldering their weapon no matter what it is.) How many people can perform the wide variety of complex medical procedures in the game? How many people can make all of this random, intricate survival stuff (i.e. ghillie suits, bows, etc.) from purely wilderness materials?

 

The answer to all of those is not many. DayZ SA will have a pretty advanced flight system compared to A2, especially considering that it comes from a flight simulator, so don't expect that people will be taking off and flying around easy or anything. However, you have to suspend your disbelief for a lot of the game's content to be enjoyed.

 

Taking care of a bleeding wound is not rocket science. Neither is shooting a gun. But flying a helicopter is entirely different (and so is indeed the variety of "crafting" you can do). 

[BleedoutBill 1636]

It's a game, dude. If you allow griefers to do something, they will do it. The only way to limit KoS would be to add some kind of governing game mechanic. Either players need to be able to limit KoS themselves (which means they need the tools to do so) or griefing needs to be regulated through an in-game reward/punishment system.

I believe this conversation already happened when cannibalism was initially introduced into game. The devs determined at that time not to introduce a reward/punishment system. Besides, in light of the fact that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to kill and also, in my opinion, there are large swaths of the map where griefers are perfectly welcome to grief each other, what would the mechanic look like that would analyse the motivation for someone to pull a trigger and then either reward, or punish based on that analysis? In my opinion, such a mechanic would fail spectacularly.

 

While I don't consider this to be a fix, I think that Hicks' latest initiative to make every round of ammo valuable and count for something, may help somewhat. Perhaps as a result of this, we won't see quite as much griefing unless the antagonist genuinely feels threatened. Hopefully this will be enough of an incentive to bring things back into balance.

 

Now, to your first point, I absolutely agree with you and this was the point that I was trying to make. It is in everyone's best long term interest to moderate the griefing, for the good of the game. I'm not saying that everyone has to be an angel, but they need to recognize that routinely pissing people off may be funny today, but it won't be funny two years from now, when everyone has moved on and is playing something else. At the end of the day, each of us have the power to determine the direction in which this will go, but it is my belief that far too many of us are too immature to have thought this through.

[scriptfactory 620]

I believe this conversation already happened when cannibalism was initially introduced into game. The devs determined at that time not to introduce a reward/punishment system.

 

Kuru.

 

Besides, in light of the fact that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to kill and also, in my opinion, there are large swaths of the map where griefers are perfectly welcome to grief each other, what would the mechanic look like that would analyse the motivation for someone to pull a trigger and then either reward, or punish based on that analysis? In my opinion, such a mechanic would fail spectacularly.

 

I came up with an "RP" ruleset loosely based on similar rulesets already implemented in MMOs (e.g. DAoC, Mortal Online, etc.)

 

If you want to PvP, flag yourself for PvP. If you shoot someone not flagged for PvP then you get flagged as an attacker for a short time period. If that person dies you are flagged as a murderer. Murderers can be killed by everyone with no penalty. Don't want to get flagged? Defend yourself with non-lethal weapons or just die (this will happen anyway to non-KoSers). For this to work players would need fixed usernames (for forum/website bounty boards) or an in-game item would need to exist that could detect a player's murderer status (e.g. bounty list). Murderer status must also be persistent through death or people would just suicide to continue griefing.

 

With such a system you could easily add gated communities where players have to present identification before being allowed inside to trade. And this is just one idea out of hundreds.

 

 

While I don't consider this to be a fix, I think that Hicks' latest initiative to make every round of ammo valuable and count for something, may help somewhat. Perhaps as a result of this, we won't see quite as much griefing unless the antagonist genuinely feels threatened. Hopefully this will be enough of an incentive to bring things back into balance.

 

It will do nothing. The same method was applied in several survival games (i.e. H1Z1/Rust/ARK) and players ran around with craftable weapons shooting each other. It did delay the murder process but not dramatically.

 

At the end of the day, each of us have the power to determine the direction in which this will go, but it is my belief that far too many of us are too immature to have thought this through.

 

Never going to happen, IMO. I'm not saying I am 100% correct but I have seen no evidence to the contrary.

[BleedoutBill 1636]

Kuru.

 

 

I came up with an "RP" ruleset loosely based on similar rulesets already implemented in MMOs (e.g. DAoC, Mortal Online, etc.)

 

If you want to PvP, flag yourself for PvP. If you shoot someone not flagged for PvP then you get flagged as an attacker for a short time period. If that person dies you are flagged as a murderer. Murderers can be killed by everyone with no penalty. Don't want to get flagged? Defend yourself with non-lethal weapons or just die (this will happen anyway to non-KoSers). For this to work players would need fixed usernames (for forum/website bounty boards) or an in-game item would need to exist that could detect a player's murderer status (e.g. bounty list). Murderer status must also be persistent through death or people would just suicide to continue griefing.

 

With such a system you could easily add gated communities where players have to present identification before being allowed inside to trade. And this is just one idea out of hundreds.

 

 

 

It will do nothing. The same method was applied in several survival games (i.e. H1Z1/Rust/ARK) and players ran around with craftable weapons shooting each other. It did delay the murder process but not dramatically.

 

 

Never going to happen, IMO. I'm not saying I am 100% correct but I have seen no evidence to the contrary.

Kuru really isn't much of a deterrent, especially for those who do not play from a stealthy approach. Kuru should screw with your aim, coordination, stamina (when implemented), and/or eventually kill you in order to be a deterrent.

 

Yes, which is why a good deal of the PVE players have already abandoned the public servers, for the private counterparts and others have given up all together.

 

You're right, or course, but perhaps it will cut back on fully geared players camping the beach, picking off fresh spawns. And, with melee weapons, at least I have an even chance of defending myself, whereas if they sneak up and start blasting away with automatic weapons, I am at a significant disadvantage ... unless they are a very poor shot.

 

Yes, that's my fear.

Edited November 10, 2015 by BleedoutBill

[KenoSkir88 181]

To be honest, it's a tough world in the apocalypse. Think some people need to harden up or die.

[Merc. 37]

***** Yes, I know the game is not finished. Yes, I know there is plenty of work to be done. I KNOW*****

 

I believe that the game is 1) Far too focused on PvP in general, and 2) far too focused on gunplay-style PvP in specific. Let me get more into specifics.

 

1) "Far too focused on PvP in general.

 

Now, don't get me wrong, I like getting into firefights. I enjoy out-thinking other players. Coming away alive from a scuffle is awesome, and if you are lucky/good, getting their gear is even better. 

 

-However-

 

I bought this game for the "survival", and before you buttnuggets scream at me to tell me that "survival is against other players, too!!!!111??!!!". Yeah, no shit. But that shouldn't be everything this game has to offer.

 

PvP, for me, is any and all competition for resources between players. Looting food that other players need to survive is PvP. Taking medications they need is PvP. Hell, trading could be considered PvP, if you squint and tilt your head far enough. So long as you are competing with other players for survival, that is PvP.

 

So, to facilitate that, there needs to be actual scarcity. Not " hey, 2 bags of rice and 5 cans of beans in a single house". You should be concerned about food. You should be concerned about drinking water.  Infections and keeping wounds clean should be a major part of "down actions" between firefights. Firefights should happen for a reason, other than "because we met each other". Fighting over clean water sources, medication drops, etc. Right now there is so much of everything that players don't have to worry about anything. 

 

Secondly, the weather. Yes, South Zagoria is a temperate deciduous maritime climate, which is probably the second-most hospitable environment on the planet for human life. However, getting wet should be a big deal. It should get cold at night. Diseases should be more important than the current "almost nonexistant". More environmental threats.

 

2) "too focused on gunplay"

 

Yeah, I said it. This game is too focused on gunplay, to the point where other mechanics get half-done and thrown aside. Like, for example, the melee system, or the medical system. Both are completely inadequate for a supposedly "anti-game", being so simplistic where there is basically one answer to any issue. An axe for the melee system, and rags for the medical system. Yet ...... the melee system has been announced as "basically finished" and nothing appreciable about the medical system has been said in a while.

 

And all the devs do is gush about more firearms and the upcoming helicopter. Every new patch brings in several new firearms, yet 99.9% of the melee weapons remain as shit as they were when they were introduce. You can sit there and stab someone with a knife 15+ times, and they can still pull out a gun and kill you before they die

Do vitamins even do anything? How about the syringes? Every problem, with very few exceptions, can be solved via "slap a dirty rag on it". Infections? No big deal. Bullets to the gut? No big deal.

 

Oh, and certain firearms are, and have remained so, particularly shitty. There is a certain subset of firearms that get used all the time because they are the only ones that are remotely effective. Shotguns have been bugged to hell and back since Day 1. Half the handguns in the game are essentially useless, doing little more than insulting the targets mother when pointed at them. There are certain firearms that I am almost certain no-one will ever use, like the asinine single-shot 7.62x39mm rifle, due to the "inadequacy" of them compared to other, more-accessible firearms. 

 

-sigh-

 

I don't WANT to be this negative, but lately it seems like this game has been going in the "wrong direction". And, the playerbase has been showing it. Let us compare players in-game on a Monday afternoon, which is, granted, a rather slow time to be playing.

 

Day Z ~6,600

ARK: ~45,000

H1Z1: ~16,000

 

 

And those are just two of the various "Day Z clones", which saturated the market after the Standalone when EA.  And, I used to say that "Day Z is much more fun and in-depth than those games!", but .... they really aren't any more. 

 

And don't say " Wait for .59!". I am playing .59, and so far it looks to be more of the same old, same old. Guns, military loot, less-than-basic, bare-bones survival. The zombies are back in, but they aren't any more difficult to avoid.

 

Just getting burnt out on Day Z in general. And this was with taking a 3 month break from the game with .57 and .58. The soul just isn't there any more, it seems. Just more guns and more asswipery.

 

 

I can agree with this. Even in developer reports it still seems like the primary focus is player VS player rather than elements and other things to get the survival part of this game up and running. And this is one of the big things the game was trying to break away from with the mod.

 

 

Idk how people are missing posts by the devs on these topics about how the game seems PvP because of the proliferation of weapons. See this all the time, so if I answer it here I should never have to post this response again right?

 

Check it out, the game is alpha. SURPRISE! =)

 

In context though, because the devs want people to test out everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, they have to have a high amount of loot everywhere. Not just testing how you pick up a cereal box, but what happens when you have a cereal box and a tire and you try to put the tire on the cereal box in your inventory. Shit like that. So basically, right now, yeah it's too easy to survive, which would in turn turn into PvP. When the game comes out, they have said they will make it much harder to survive. Thus, lower PvP. 

[Chaingunfighter 917]

Taking care of a bleeding wound is not rocket science. Neither is shooting a gun. But flying a helicopter is entirely different (and so is indeed the variety of "crafting" you can do). 

Sure, bandaging properly isn't rocket science, but I wouldn't expect most people to know how to perform proper blood transfusions, utilize blood kits and administer injections, and build proper splints to set a broken wound easily. And even though none of them are quite as complex as flying a helicopter it's still not likely that all of our survivors would know how to do everything in the game at once.

 

My point is that we shouldn't judge whether or not something should be added solely on the idea that it's not common real world knowledge.

[Mukaparska 55]

Sure, bandaging properly isn't rocket science, but I wouldn't expect most people to know how to perform proper blood transfusions, utilize blood kits and administer injections, and build proper splints to set a broken wound easily. And even though none of them are quite as complex as flying a helicopter it's still not likely that all of our survivors would know how to do everything in the game at once.

 

My point is that we shouldn't judge whether or not something should be added solely on the idea that it's not common real world knowledge.

Yes we should, but of course we must make quite a few exceptions, for example those blood transfusions. But I don't think a helicopter is one of those. I even think that a helicopter doesn't fit to this game at all. As I stand behind my original point, I think a brand new flyable helicopter would make things even worse looking from that perspective. Of course wandering from city to city would feel even more boring when you know that you could actually get military gear AND a helicopter. The system in "7 days to die" is pretty cool where you must read guidebooks on different things to learn to craft them. Sadly such system would be very impractical in DayZ. But even a guidebook wouldn't teach you how to fly a helicopter, but maybe it would teach how to make blood transfusion. 

[atempleton 123]

I foresee all these problems disappearing once stamina/weight is fully implemented. People can't run as far and this will slow the game down tremendously. They will also need to choose between gearing for war, or gearing for sustained survival. People will be running around with M4s and stacks of ammunition far less if they can't carry their basic survival needs without weighing 400 pounds. Their entire mentality and playstyle would have to change with it.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Handgun_Hero

[emuthreat 2837]

Wait, a helicopter? Really. I'm sure all the average Chernarusian people who are lucky enough to be alive can easily fly a bloody helicopter with no training :D Not even mentioning how such a complex machine would be safely operable. How many people would actually even consider trying to fly a helicopter in a real apocalypse when they have no knowledge about is condition or how it operates. 

Those with the balls, son, those with the balls...

[emuthreat 2837]

You can't blame the players for naturally migrating to the best method of play to suit their current needs. It's down to the game developers to tweak the game to attract the players that suit their vision. More helpful than insulting the people who are doing the KOSing (everyone) would be to suggest game tweaks to encourage other methods. Currently the safest option is to kill someone before they kill you, and the good guys accept some extra danger in return for the extra content of interacting with you instead of eliminating you. You can't expect everyone's plan to include a conversation with you so you must expect them to take the best option as far as their own survival and completion of their personal mission whatever that may be. If the game can make it so that his best option is not necessarily to kill you on sight, he will be less likely to KOS in general. Calling him an ass because he chose to remove you as a threat is short sighted since in the current climate it genuinely was his best chance at survival most of the time.

Guns, food, and plenty of it, combined with the lack of zombies all summer, made for a massive PVP arena experience.  I will be interested to see how the course of development can work to shift people away from their "placeholder playstyles" as the title becomes more feature complete.  KOS does steepen the learning curve to nearly vertical for many players, and it makes the idea of going into the game for interactions a virtual fantasy.  As it is, people are forced into a KOS looter/hunter, or a reclusive farmer/hoarder for many scores of game hours.  There is a comfortable medium somewhere in between the two, and it is the job of the developers to achieve the balance that makes it possible.  It would be a severe disappointment if the vanilla version of the game doesn't dominate the server roles for at least a couple years after release; and to do this, they will have to make the difficulty severe enough to force people out of the KOS box, and start cooperating with strangers.  At the very least forcing people to gain trust and get close enough to kill someone silently, for fear of the zombies hearing the gunshots.  As it stands, I move about carefully, scanning methodically for potential threats; and killing anyone who gets too close, or surprises me, simply because I assume they would all do the same thing.  But that's just kinda lame...

 

I don't think that you can lay this at the feet of the devs. At the most basic level, this is a maturity issue. People just aren't thinking through and recognizing the consequences of their actions and then they want to complain about the direction of the game. The griefers need to recognize that with freedom, comes responsibility.

Did you ever play the COD Zombies games?  I remember how, on the first Black Ops zombies, after people became proficient, then bored, they would turn to griefing.  Apparently it was way more fun to lay in a doorway and kill the rest of your team, just to finish the round and make them all suffer through it all over again, than it was to complete the easter egg for the "n"-teenth time.

 

Notice how in Black Ops @, there was a dedicated grief mode?  Notice how people still griefed on Tranzit and especially Die Rise? (How could anyone resist the urge to set up a trample-steam to toss that one guy, who never cooperates, off the side of the tower?)

 

Griefers will grief, and there will always be people both skilled, and bored, enough to turn to OGMLOLZ as a main mode of play.

 

Perhaps increasing the range of gunshot aggro for zeds will help some, along with massively inflated infected populations.  Anything short of 5000 zed servers will still be just a PVP playground.  Here's to hoping that the game can afford to make infected enough of a threat to FORCE COOPERATION for all but the most hardened and shrewd survivors.

[Noctoras 409]

As much as i like the idea of working for your gear that wont probably happen till after all the cogs are in place. Theres still so much in this game that needs to be refined and done before military gear can even be scaled back. Were in an alpha after all you have to remember that. So Dayz in general is nowhere near judgment of a completed game title yet.

 

The point is, you will be loosing the relevant player base, if you make it a KOS fragfest till beta. People have looked and do look elsewhere. Alpha will decide upon the game's future.

[Noctoras 409]

When the new renderer is out and mods will start rolling in, the playerbase will multiply.

 

:lol: :lol:  at least someone in here makes good jokes ;)

Edited November 11, 2015 by Noctoras

[KenoSkir88 181]

many of the people who bought a survival game didn't look for yet another mil shooter on a bigger map.

 

Many possibly but FAR from everyone. I bought SA because the mod WAS a mil shooter on a bigger map (with zombies).

 

Even still i don't expect the devs to make my perfect game, i just like what i've seen so far from both the mod and SA individually and am excited to see the final vision. The vast majority of people i've spoken to are saying things like "I'm giving it a break" or "I'm not going to play til it's finished / they add helos / zombies are back and running smooth" rather than "I'm never playing DayZ again". I think as the game starts to become smooth and polished between now and release we'll see a lot of people making a return.

Edited November 11, 2015 by KenoSkir88

[Noctoras 409]

Many possibly but FAR from everyone. I bought SA because the mod WAS a mil shooter on a bigger map (with zombies).

 

Even still i don't expect the devs to make my perfect game, i just like what i've seen so far from both the mod and SA individually and am excited to see the final vision. The vast majority of people i've spoken to are saying things like "I'm giving it a break" or "I'm not going to play til it's finished / they add helos / zombies are back and running smooth" rather than "I'm never playing DayZ again". I think as the game starts to become smooth and polished between now and release we'll see a lot of people making a return.

 

I guess we will just have to wait and see

[Deathlove 2283]

The point is, you will be loosing the relevant player base, if you make it a KOS fragfest till beta. People have looked and do look elsewhere. Alpha will decide upon the game's future.

well you should know by now i agree with this idea COMPLETELY. Im just trying not to repeat myself with it over and over and over and over and over again.

[PieceOfDust 11]

I have a theory:

 

I believe that the abundence of military gear happens because there are static military gear spawns scattered throughout the map. With too many places to get it, and with most people rolling around in their own fecal matter along the coast, this means that anyone who actually wants it can get it with little risk.

 

The mod didn't have this problem because there were only three high-value military areas: NWAF, Balota, and NEAF (which wasn't very good). The good stuff like M4s and AKs had a low enough spawn chance that they wouldn't be in deer stands and fire stations very often.

 

Another issue is that the military gear is significantly better in Standalone. The mod (at least when I played) didn't have plate carriers and ballistic helmets; add this to the fact that bullet wounds seem to be far more lethal and you have a pretty damn good incentive for players to hit up military bases, which, as we know, is easy to do.

Edited November 11, 2015 by PieceOfDust

[MrAerospace 87]

DayZ's current loot system provides clear advantages for owning certain items and gear above all others. It reduced 'gearing up' to a very simple linear progression. Because there is almost no alternative ways for players to value gear, pretty much every item in game will serve as a catalyst for player conflict. Every single interaction that occurs will have one person owning a more valuable piece of gear than the other, so it doesn't matter whether military grade items are involved or not, that desire to 'gear up' paired with a singular value system will always be a powder-keg ready to go off.

 

The solution to diffusing the situation is entirely within the Dev's control, but the overall philosophy should be to add as much balance and variety to item choices as possible. The more attributes they can provide items with, the less linear player looting behaviour becomes, and the less conflict it creates. Examples of different attributes could include clothing with less item slots being stealthier (where tracksuits and sneakers becoming the ultimate ninja gear). Or have smaller and lower mass melee weapons strike faster, be more accurate than axes and sledgehammers, and allow players to manoeuver faster in melee combat.

 

There are things in progress that will affect how players gear up in other ways too:

Less ammunition will help with balancing weapons, but only as long as lower powered ammuntion is more abundant, and loot farming is stopped.

Stamina, encumbrance and momentum will also change how much stuff players move around with, but that doesn't necessarily translate to players preferencing non-military gear, just not carrying as much stuff in them.