How can we fix camping ?

[Dagwood 680]

If there isn't enough loot in the big cities after people play urban combat, they will migrate north. Maybe not on the public hive, but it would happen on private hives. Give it time.

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

Nothing has officially been announced yet, but the designers do have something in store for this topic (it looks very promising). Just hang in there, and I'm sure that Brian or Peter will include some info + screenshots in upcoming status reports and on the Trello board.

This is the strongbox stashes?

[Nebulae3 420]

I don`t support camping in dayz,

In my opinion it`s the most low risk play in dayz similar to BF4 - just camp to get a good K/D ratio. And when a guy actually take risk to loot that tent

or building get not rewarded at all by the current dev. dayz team. Because the zombie AI helps the camper to locate the high risk looting guy, because they start moving when a player is located at 600 + meter range - otherwise dayz zombies just stand still which is easy to spot if there are any other players nearby.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Ori42

[Zurvivalist 300]

I don`t support camping in dayz,

In my opinion it`s the most low risk play in dayz similar to BF4 - just camp to get a good K/D ratio. And when a guy actually take risk to loot that tent

or building get not rewarded at all by the current dev. dayz team. Because the zombie AI helps the camper to locate the high risk looting guy, because they start moving when a player is located at 600 + meter range - otherwise dayz zombies just stand still which is easy to spot if there are any other players nearby.

Read the post . Not talking about that type of camping 

[Nebulae3 420]

I read the post, but it affect more than just setting up a tent camp concerning a dense forest - it also affect gameplay somewhat..  

Besides, nettings is almost non existence on the current 0.59 build - if it should be possible to camo the tent to conceal it better with the terrain. All items related to netting is too rare which is the issue with our current Dayz build.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Ori42

[pilgrim* 3513]

..//...

Nothing is a more attractive player magnet than two simultaneous things: Where the best loot is...and where other players gather.

 

Nobody goes up north because there is no reason to

. .//..

 

I just yesterday found 14 barrels stocked together around a forest tree in the NORTH West -  FAR to the WEST

someone put them there, so why say "nobody goes up north" ?

 

Last Week I found 3 barrels together full of ammo..(fairly mid North, FAR from the coast, FAR from cities). When I see tents (NW and the West)  I go away from them; I scope out hidden vehicles from a distance. I don't need a truck or any gear so why look for trouble?

 

Players put all this stuff there. Players in the North and in the West.

 

Small and medium villages North of the "great north road" are always looted, from the West side of the map all the way back to the East, every day of the week (I mean every village and individual house and wrecked car in that whole area). Always. On every map I have played, Private or Public, mini-pop or max 50/50 players.

 

It is not a surprise - to find a half-rebuilt car in any quiet village street up there.  (to me it's a warning)

 

ALSO In all the FAR WEST of the map  - from the SW corner all the way to the NW  - it is "normal" - not a surprise - now to see military fully kitted-armed players with vehicles

(apart from the military tent camp that whole area used to be occupied mainly by hunters)

 

Now it is difficult and more dangerous to hunt in that area, shots attract killers.

 

MY game style is that I keep eyes out, move carefully, use cover, and I usually try to AVOID meeting other players.. this is getting MORE difficult to do.

I know other players have a similar style, i see evidence of them as I pass. It is not "uncommon" gameplay.

 

Even on a map with  less than 10 players (as well as on a map with 40+ players), you can NOT be sure everyone is death-matching in a city or all crowding round a military base.

If you think so, you are in danger.

 

The WEST edge of the map is too crowded for me now, so I have been looking for new safer routes and areas to hang out.

But so have a lot of other players.

 

( hey, player X, if you read this - I left your 14 barrels where they were, OK ?) Enjoy.

 

==

 

Of course - if players want to death-match, they must get their military gear from somewhere.. Everyone always finds out in every game ever made where the gear-up places are. You know where to find the BFG, right? (did you ever not know, in any game?) So it is no surprise some player-styles are attracted there.

If you are looking for a crowd of players, you know where to go.

But be careful in the North and the West, it not so empty as you think, and maybe some of the players up there are smarter ? Be happy if you don't meet anyone.

 

xx pilgrim

Edited January 14, 2016 by pilgrim

[SMoss 2101]

This is the strongbox stashes?

Something other than the pirate treasure chests :)

[Jex 1104]

It was mentioned over and over again that increasing the towns all over the map left nothing for bases.

 

Even the old map on the MOD had few places to put anything because of the way the graphics work. Stand a 100m from a forest and you can see everything inside thew forest. Tents practically glowed and hiding tents underwater became a good place to stash your things. Then they introduced stashes which were the best way to conceal things - the should bring those back (along with the underground bases we can make - has anyone heard anything about those or are we just forgetting that now?)

 

They might not want you glitching things into rocks or water but that's not the players fault. If the game could show more vegetation, have better options for stashing gear. Let's face it, if we all wanted to hide something that nobody else would find it wouldn't be too hard, would it.

 

In DayZ, you can't have a camp because the moment you make one, it'll be discovered, especially in DayZ given the current graphical issues it has. The other and most glaring issue is you can't have a camp because there's no map left to put one in unless you want your camp ransacked over and over again.

 

They need to give us small, camouflaged tents and bring back stashes at a minimum. The barrel thing is asinine.

[Jex 1104]

I think booby-traps might be part of the answer to camp security (as well as being able to craft foliage camo, as suggested before). If you've got, say, 4 barrels at your camp and you store stuff in one of them with the other 3 wired to some improvised explosives, if someone, even a group, did find your stash, they're less likely to actually rob you.

 

Other than that, reducing player speed would make a big difference. If it takes a long time to traverse the map without a vehicle, people aren't going to find stuff like camps so easily. And people that are in vehicles aren't going to spot them easily anyway. I'd favour the default, most energy (and therefore time) efficient movement speed over longer distances to be walking, once stamina is functioning properly and the survival mechanics are more fleshed out. If long journeys require preparation and time to complete without seriously damaging the health of your character, it will make the map feel much larger and wilderness areas more perilous to cross without the appropriate kit.

 

Nope - the people you are thinking of that won't find camps easily are the people that don't going looking for them. One of the things my friend and I loved to do in the mod was specifically go looking for hidden items. It was a fun challenge and we got to roam about the map most people never venture and we always found things. We weer not alone. Many people will go out there way to find the stuff you think you've hidden and whilst the map might seem large to us, I can tell you now that the map is tiny having spent 2 years doing this.

 

It's tiny because once you start looking, you figure out all the limited areas on the map you can actually make a camp. You know which routes to take that give you the best viewing area. This is made easy because as everyone knows here, looking into a forest from a few hundred yards away is so easy it's ridiculous.

 

People who say the map is huge don't go wandering about it. To put it into perspective, lets say that there are only 20 spots you can really hide something on the map. How long do you think it'll take for people to find that out. You might think of a great spot that you see on the map only to get there to find someone already put a tent up. That happened loads of times in the mod with us. Once all the good spots are known about, nobody puts their stuff there so what do they do? They put them in rocks and I can't blame anyone for doing that.

 

If the devs could find a way to render forests from miles out with all their vegetation then you are in with a chance. If they could achieve that you would cut the head off the camp hunters as they would then have to increase their search times ten fold.

[Jex 1104]

I wholeheartedly agree with ya Jon. We had this same discussion in our little group last night. Between all of us moving from opposite directions to the castle north of stary we must've found atleast 6 seperate camps under an hour.

Seems like military style camo netting should definetly be in, the models are already in the game and can be found at the nwaf and other military spots.

I really like the idea of denser forests, for most of the map they're just way to sparse and don't feel alive or vibrant. But the idea you've got there with shortening the rendering distances appeals to me too.

All in all there's definetly room for improvement and alternative means of hiding camps.

 

Camo netting is useless. They had it in the mod and like I've already said, outside 100m the thing is bigger than your tent and the wrong colour and angular and sticks out like a sore thumb on a sore thumb lol.

[Jex 1104]

Wrong. Fifty is woefully underpopulated. 

 

Chernarus is approximately 19 Kilometers from the Northwest corner to the Southeast island. From Kamenka to Novodmitrovsk is 16 Kilometers. The walk from spawning in at Kammywobo to the NWAF is 10.5 Kilometers as the crow flies. That is an immense amount of real estate.

 

At fifty players, most of the map is a snorefest. It's a playerless expanse of nothing but podcasts playing in the background of an occasional wanderer. The problem is not that we have too many players, the problem is that those players are spawned in a condensed area at the coast and not spread out across the map, they are not incentivized enough to move inland which creates a clusterfuck in spawning areas and relatively little else apart from maybe the NWAF and Veresnik.

 

 

 

The threat/apprehension of encountering potentially hostile players should always be a possibility wherever you go. You should not be able to make extremely accurate guesses that people will not be where you are. I shouldn't be able to, in a survival game, predict where players are. Your guard should always have to be up and you should always have to watch your back. If I can travel for literally hours from town to town and not see another player in a fully populated server, then there are some serious questions that need to arise from spawn locations and total populations and mobility encouragement. 

 

If that was the case, how is it the MOD worked so well on the same sized map? Players still spawned along the coast though but you're correct about the spawns - they should be all over the map.

 

The other thing they desperately need to add are POINTS OF INTEREST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

People aren't interested in copy and paste towns. They're good for finding loot but boring. I've mentioned this before but going back to the MOD, the map was more limited which probably increased player interactions.

 

The stores were always areas you needed to be careful in the MOD. Now they're crap and have as much gear as anywhere else so not as important as they used to be.

 

With points of interest they should really go to town with them. This could be anything along the lines of

 

Creepy Carnival

The Farm (fields of sweetcorn, big farm house, etc

Better castles. - sorry, but copying the same tower is frikkin lazy. You go to one castle you've been to the all. More enterable areas, more ramparts and battlements etc. Not this half arsed lazy attempt in boring. It should be fun to explore and easy to defend. Also, each one of them should be unique so they all feel different. If you want help, look at the UK's castles for ideas.

The laboratory - speaks for itself but it'll have all those sealed labs and elevators that take you 3 stories underground - think Umbrella Corp

The Camp Site - make a dedicated campsite with tents that are broken and ripped, a pushed over truck - make it so it looks like the campers were over run by zeds

 

Whatever - it doesn't matter what these POI's are but having them would give players places to go and see and loot and increase the chance of interaction. Personally, I love the idea of battling it out on a castle. Shooting from the battlements and  in the tunnels, corridors....

 

I'm the King of the Castle

 

Dover Castle, Kent.

 

 

 

Here are some pics of it's tunnels, imagine fighting in these....

 

     

 

[Jex 1104]

Too meany cooks wreck the game! Let B.I. finish the game the way they want the game to be ! 

 

NOPE!

 

;)

[Jex 1104]

I don`t support camping in dayz,

In my opinion it`s the most low risk play in dayz similar to BF4 - just camp to get a good K/D ratio. And when a guy actually take risk to loot that tent

or building get not rewarded at all by the current dev. dayz team. Because the zombie AI helps the camper to locate the high risk looting guy, because they start moving when a player is located at 600 + meter range - otherwise dayz zombies just stand still which is easy to spot if there are any other players nearby.

 

You're shitting me! FFS is this true? If so might as well make the fucking things spawn in and save the server processes since it's pointless having the zeds there before a player gets there. The whole reason they were put in everywhere I thought was to stop the very thing you're talking about. In the MOD, the zeds would spawn in when a player got near so all you had to do before going into a town was to look at it from a hill and see if you could see zeds. If yes, you knew a player was there. If you had mates, you could coordinate your guys to go get him, easy peasy.

 

Having zeds stationary until you're 600m out then suddenly walking just tells anyone looking "oh there's a player over there" and we're practically back at square one.

[Jex 1104]

Even on a map with  less than 10 players (as well as on a map with 40+ players), you can NOT be sure everyone is death-matching in a city or all crowding round a military base.

If you think so, you are in danger.

 

You can be with the only other person on the server and the regularity that you cross each others paths is spooky. Never assume a low server population means you are safe. Countless times my mate and I have seen people, killed them, got killed by them when there were only 3 people on the server and not always at the hot spots.

[pillock 850]

Nope - the people you are thinking of that won't find camps easily are the people that don't going looking for them. One of the things my friend and I loved to do in the mod was specifically go looking for hidden items. It was a fun challenge and we got to roam about the map most people never venture and we always found things. We weer not alone. Many people will go out there way to find the stuff you think you've hidden and whilst the map might seem large to us, I can tell you now that the map is tiny having spent 2 years doing this.

 

It's tiny because once you start looking, you figure out all the limited areas on the map you can actually make a camp. You know which routes to take that give you the best viewing area. This is made easy because as everyone knows here, looking into a forest from a few hundred yards away is so easy it's ridiculous.

 

People who say the map is huge don't go wandering about it. To put it into perspective, lets say that there are only 20 spots you can really hide something on the map. How long do you think it'll take for people to find that out. You might think of a great spot that you see on the map only to get there to find someone already put a tent up. That happened loads of times in the mod with us. Once all the good spots are known about, nobody puts their stuff there so what do they do? They put them in rocks and I can't blame anyone for doing that.

 

If the devs could find a way to render forests from miles out with all their vegetation then you are in with a chance. If they could achieve that you would cut the head off the camp hunters as they would then have to increase their search times ten fold.

 

I'm not talking about how the game is now, or how it was in the mod. I'm thinking about how Standalone can improve on that and make it more reliable to put down a camp without it being found and ransacked within hours. It'll never be totally safe, but the balance could certainly move towards better security.

 

In my view, slowing down player movement and ramping up the survival aspects of the game will go a long way towards this. No matter how well a player or group knows the map's layout and its best camp locations, if the scope for quickly covering large amounts of ground on foot are reduced, it will take them longer to search - and that will make the map "feel" larger, and remote places more remote, surely?

[BluesAdam 9]

Just face the fact...the map is too small for what they want to achieve with the game.

 

I dont know the technical reasons for why they dont expand the map, im sure there are some. I personally would be happy to see a large wilderness area added, miles of forest to get lost in...where u actually had to hunt to survive. Where all this survival gameplay aspect they are developing actually matters, cos it will never matter on the small map we have now. And if they had to make it so that u loaded into this map separate from the orginal map, thats fine. We already have players serverhopping all over the place on public servers...like the game is some kind scifi-shooter with alternative dimmensions.

The video got removed a long time ago, but some dude created a sketch of a very cool map for DayZ and commented on it like 30 minutes or so on YouTube.

 

Edit: Nevermind, it seems he reuploaded the video again. Here, check this out if you want. In my opinion, that's the kind of map DayZ needs and deserves.

 

[sneakydudes 278]

I agree with the mountains, i don't think putting in a wide open ocean is worth it. Since we cant build bases on a raft like we can in ark. I do like the idea of boats, and becoming a pirate :)

Now we could put in zones, that once you go through it opens up the other section of a new map. Something that most of us know of from games like everquest, and other MMO's of that time, sandboxes is just another term for cut down versions.

 

I also feel we need to have more dense woods. It seems rather spaced out to hide a small log cabin in the woods. Sure you would do clear cutting and make room however some of us would pick a nice squad region inside a dense wooded area.

 

Right now its completely useless to have tents, barrels, and anything else in the game as it only encourages robbers (like myself) to go around stealing and KOS you to steal your gear. Now with server hoping it only makes that much easier.

 

We need more anti hack tools also against ESP's so they don't follow you to your cabin, or wonder why your sitting in the woods so far from anyone.

 

Adding more content to the game, only makes it long and longer to beta. Maybe in the future dayz devs expand on this, so we can load it in our inf, as active, and loading the PBO's information when you zone into that area.

 

all i want from Dayz is a working game, so that we can build on it later. Until then release everything so we can start building on it. Ive tested enough things, i dont want to test anything again over and over. Get the engine working, the map working good and the items in the game. Let us start to debug the problems, then we can move on.

 

Not sure what stages we are at internally. Since we have no real info where we are along the lines of the roadmap. I looked the other day and it almost looked like we where at q1 of 2015?

 

am i wrong?

Edited January 13, 2016 by TheSneakyDude

[Jex 1104]

I'm not talking about how the game is now, or how it was in the mod. I'm thinking about how Standalone can improve on that and make it more reliable to put down a camp without it being found and ransacked within hours. It'll never be totally safe, but the balance could certainly move towards better security.

 

In my view, slowing down player movement and ramping up the survival aspects of the game will go a long way towards this. No matter how well a player or group knows the map's layout and its best camp locations, if the scope for quickly covering large amounts of ground on foot are reduced, it will take them longer to search - and that will make the map "feel" larger, and remote places more remote, surely?

 

Movement speed in the MOD was slower than what we have now and my mate and I would jog, not sprint around because the slower you're moving, the more you see. All my replies in this thread have been about making the game better in regards to hiding things as well as pointing out the flaws from the old game to show what was going on back then.

 

Slowing people down isn't going to help at all I'm afraid. To have an effective, the only really effective thing they can do is increase the vegetation and draw distance of it. Someone mentioned limiting the draw distance of tents which I also thought of and like that person went on to say, I also think it's the worst idea but might be the only option we have.

 

To bring the point home, I'll recount experiences in one summary. You might start up the west side of the map. You spread out and just head due north. given the lack of vegetation it's easy to see things. Back then my old laptop was so bad I had to play in low graphics. This makes it even easier to spot things and all you're looking for is a straight line or a different colour which is the easiest thing to spot in the world in arma. So you just carry on and every single time we would find something. A bike, a car, some tents, a chopper....we always came away with something.

 

The other game we played was "Let's look at that!" so we'd be running as a group and someone would say, "That looks like a good place to set a tent" - low and behold - we found a tent almost every single time we looked. Try to picture up north before the airfield. Things flatten out, fields are all over the place. When you're running through it, look around and ask yourself, "where would I put a tent?" You look around, you spot a clump of bushes - that's where camp hunters look. Every clump, every rock and everywhere the draw distance fails the guy trying to hide his shit.

 

What's slightly more aggravating than having your stuff stolen? Being a camp hunter and having your stash found LOL. When you are hunting camps it just pisses you off because you know you have very few places to hide things. It really becomes apparent when you start looking as a regular part of your gameplay. So when normal players are thinking they found a cool spot to hide their shit, they most likely haven't because they haven't experienced the hunting side of it. When you do that, it exposes the map and how small it actually is.

 

There were a few places we found that nobody else did but they were very few and far between. Other people found places too. My advice right now would be use the big cities. Get a barrel and stash it in a building among all the other buildings and be clever where you put it. Remember, 3rd person servers are harder to hide your stuff in ;)

[green_mtn_grandbob 594]

NOPE!

 

;)

so you think B.I. can't finish the game with out your input. :lol:

[pilgrim* 3513]

It was mentioned over and over again that increasing the towns all over the map left nothing for bases.

..//..

Even the old map on the MOD had few places to put anything because of the way the graphics work. Stand a 100m from a forest and you can see everything inside thew forest.

..//.

Then they introduced stashes which were the best way to conceal things - the should bring those back (along with the underground bases we can make - has anyone heard anything about those or are we just forgetting that now?)

..//.

They need to give us small, camouflaged tents and bring back stashes at a minimum. The barrel thing is asinine.

 

This whole post made me think (from playing DayZ since the Mod and from the start of SA, Jexter has gained some interesting knowldge and experience he's scattered around this thread) :

 

For people who never played the mod:the old "ground level" stashes were reasonably good places to hide things, they were harder to find than any tents.

- they were like a shallow pit covered with branched and vegetation, so they looked like a slightly raised patch of forest ground, reasonably difficult to see from close up  (unless you were searching), not obvious from a distance unless they were badly placed. If you did not have a location method or a remembered marker, you could miss your own stash by 15 feet and have to cast around for it - no one can say that about the tents.

The ground stashes did not have a lot of storage space =  for instance you could keep one gun and a handful of vital things in there. (or no gun and more stuff) - also they were "crafted" . When you needed one you could build it with a little effort.

They worked

 

So, I thought also - how about burying the oil drums ?

If you have a spade you can bury the drum so only the top shows at ground level ??  that would make them more worthwhile

(also they only need to be about half their current stash size, max)

 

OK - J is right about that -  in the Mod, I used stashes by preference whenever I needed them  and only ever used tents in two well placed spots. The last one was found after more than a year of play by map hackers (and no one else). In the mod tents were half as big = 1 man low ridge tents (pup tents from Arma)  and were camo colored.  Even then with a lot more forest than SA, and denser forest too, they could be spotted easily unless you were really cunning, or lucky.

xx

Edited January 14, 2016 by pilgrim

[Jex 1104]

so you think B.I. can't finish the game with out your input. :lol:

 

Are you kidding??!!!

 

They can't wait for my posts. Every single one of them has the entire Dev team either on the edge of their seats or in stitches as I entertain them with hilarity. They keep emailing me for my autograph which to be quite frank with you, is getting annoying now.

 

On a serious note, they have a suggestions area for a reason. To think that some ideas haven't been incorporated or some things tweaked or changed a little is probably erroneous.

[Jex 1104]

 

OK - J is right about that -  in the Mod, I used stashes by preference whenever I needed them  and only ever used tents in two well placed spots. The last one was found after more than a year of play by map hackers (and no one else). In the mod tents were half as big = 1 man low ridge tents (pup tents from Arma)  and were camo colored.  Even then with a lot more forest than SA, and denser forest too, they could be spotted easily unless you were really cunning, or lucky.

xx

 

LOL whoa there cowboy. Before you make everyone think we had camouflage tents, you should also remember how they were bright puke green with brown poo slung over it and practically glowed LOL ;)

[pilgrim* 3513]

LOL whoa there cowboy. Before you make everyone think we had camouflage tents, you should also remember how they were bright puke green with brown poo slung over it and practically glowed LOL ;)

 

true - true.. but they were kind of smaller and a bit less tropical-fish-blue

also you could put them half-way under tree cover - until that was stopped and you were forced to "auto-place" them right out in the open

 

Strange thing, you can now do the same with the barrels as you could do originally with the tents in the Mod, Seems you can wedge barrels under trees so you can only just about target them OR you put them in too far in and then you can't pick them up or open them. I've found a couple of barrels that are easily visible from a distance, sticking up out of bushes, but cant be opened, targeted or seen in the inventory (NO way).

 

BUT in the Mod i DID have a tent legally placed between a rock and a pine - right on the edge of the beach - and a thousand people must have walked past 12 feet from it without spotting it for a year.

I don't think I could do that with a current SA tent, for sure.

 

[- until one day the teleporting map-hackers came back (the last wave) and cleaned up every tent, vehicle, heli and boat across the map in 20 mins. ]

 

xx pilgrim

Edited January 14, 2016 by pilgrim

[hemmo 55]

I have said this before. The forrests arent so dense as in real life. THe map is big enough, but the forrests, it should be denser. Maybe when fog and such comes, it will change a bit. but still

[pilgrim* 3513]

I think one of the best options would be to simply make the forests and wooded areas more "wooded" looking and realistic. This are some screenshots from Miscreated:

..//..

These forest areas look much more dense and real and lines of sight are far shorter than they are in DayZ's very simple wooded areas. Significantly breaking these long lines of sight would go a long way to making forest more interesting and easier places to hide stashes of goodies.

 

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/218621-about-the-environment/page-11#entry2267190

 

There has been a lot of discussion in the <About the Environment> section of Developer Discussion - worth looking through : some suggestions are going round for the 3d or 4th or 5th time (people forget or don't check) and some player ideas have been taken up and others have come from the Devs

 

Also here is a random selection from the last couple of years (or 3) about mainly -  trees, grass, forest and rendering.

There are many more threads than these examples:

April 2014 -

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/185396-save-the-trees-man-marginalized-wilderness/#entry1911375

May 2014

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/191684-vegetation-draw-distance-increase/#entry1957589

 

March 2014

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/181820-go-to-the-forest-of-trees/#entry1875574

Aug 2014

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/206785-grass-is-worthless-eye-candy/#entry2073467

August 2014

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/206662-no-more-towns/#entry2072449

April 2015 -

https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/224576-please-stop-building-villages-everywhere/#entry2258081