Mental/psychological status and their effects on gameplay

[exwoll 255]

Disclaimer: Yes, I searched this time for this suggestion to avoid repeating, and although I found some similar ideas, they were only partially going the way I'll suggest and were topics from 2 years ago, mostly focused on "avoiding KOS" and some moral values that would be very relative in a post apocalyptic world. So you can keep reading :).

(In case that I missed a suggestion that was very alike to mine, please sorry, and I hope that at least this one gonna be useful to explain it)

 

I believe that the implementation of these statuses, could drastically improve the game in the sense that they could become an extra tool to making some threats more dangerous without changing the things (like for example infected quantities and predators). They would sometimes strongly affect the character, and sometimes only indirectly. 

 

Introduction (you can skip it)

People (and almost any living complex organism) are affected by a wide array of factors during their life cycle (understanding here the term "survival" as the unconscious need of every organism to complete this cycle and make it as long as possible). This factors can be divided in a couple of main groups, all of which create a reaction in the organism depending on the threat every one of them possess to it, :

• Physiological factors (external) - The ones that directly affect us in the environment, and that our senses evolved to detect and measure (temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, light/sun quantity/exposure, physical/chemical variables that affect the organism, etc)
• Psychological factors (internal) - The responses that our brain develops in response to the physiological factors and that direct our behavior towards our survival through a complex system of hormones, nervous impulses and mind/conscience mechanisms. (instincts, emotions, mental health,etc)
• Social factors (kinda mix of the previous ones) - This one only affect humans and other "social" living beings, where the survival of the specie as a whole was shaped thanks to groups of individuals interacting and helping each other, since every individual as a lone being is too weak to make it against other species or the environment. Because of this the brain of every one of us have like engraved in the deep of its core the dependence of the status of our relationship with other individuals as vitally important for our survival.

All this groups interact one with another creating complex responses to every kind of issue that affects us, giving direction to our thinking processes, decisions, behavior, etc. Where any pulled string affects 3423423423423 others. 

In DayZ we have the first one very well (or starting to at least) implemented. We have responses to weather conditions, biological factors (diseases), etc that affect our gameplay, shaping our behavior in the game.

But the other 2 are totally ignored, although they have a strong impact on human behavior (sometimes even beating the first one in hierarchy) and should strongly affect our gameplay too. In this topic, I will explain how and why this could/should be implemented and taken in count by the devs, creating a more immersive, realisctic, and full of challenges gaming experience.

  

Psychological Factors

I was thinking about describing everything with a lot of detail and fundamentals, but I think this will become some sort of doctoral dissertation, so I'll avoid it and try to go straight to the point:

Every person (or character if applied to the game) has a mental status that varies depending of a number of variables and that directly affects our behavior (one can even say that it creates it).

In game it could be represented by 5 scales (i'll detail them below, don't jump to conclusions only by the name XD):

• Happiness scale
• Fear Scale
• Social (loneliness) scale
• Moral (initial/decreasing importance) scale
• Mental Sanity

All of which are constantly calibrating and at some point affect each other, and have some dependency on health statuses. Some of them would have an effect on gameplay.

 

Happiness/Sadness Scale

 

This would be the general status that would be always seen. It's affected by the rest of the scales and also by some individual factors. 

Value (as example) 10000, where:

• 10000 - Happy
• 0 - Deep depression. 

Depends on:

• Fear Scale
• Social (loneliness) scale
• Moral scale (only at the beginning, read why in the explanation for this scale)
• Mental Sanity scale
• Hunger scale
• Health scale
• Some in-game actions (music, musical instruments, books)

How this dependence is expressed?

When one of these scales are lower that a certain degree, they start to affect the happiness scale:

• If they're all "good", the happiness scale increases by a certain value (lets say +5 every X minutes per each scale)
• Once they start failing, happiness is reduced by a certain value, depending on the impact of each scale (Moral scale for example, would only have an impact at the initial periods)
• Some ingame actions, like listening radio music, playing/listening musical instruments (if added) , reading books time,etc would increase happiness by a X value every Y minutes of action.

Gameplay effects

Happiness scale at MAX.:

• Stamina and fatigue levels decrease less, your character has more energy
• Complete tasks/actions/soft skills a little bit faster depending on the level of happiness
• Other scales are less affected by some events (fear scale, social scale, mental sanity)

Happiness scale at MIN:

Depression kicks in, its effects would vary widely, some of them might be:

• Reduction of stamina at increasing rates, your character gets tired really often
• Color saturation is affected by the severity of depression (similar to blood loss)
• Tasks/actions/soft skills would perform slower or even interrupt from time to time with the character refusing to do them
• Depressive messages start popping up on the screen (I don't think my life has value, Everything is the same, There's nothing to do here, etc) (well this can be omitted, it could affect the player also XD)
• If depression reach the limit of 0 happiness value, your character starts trying to suicide, till after a time, you can't avoid it and he kills himself
• Character refuses to move at all at 0 

 

 

Fear Scale

 

This scare would start at neutral, where some ingame moments would affect your character behavor or experience.

Value(as example) 5000

• 5000 - Relaxed
• 0 - Panic

Depends on:

• Exposure to people
• Exposure to infected
• Gunshots sounds
• Other players aggressive actions (attacking you)

How the dependence would be expressed?

• Exposure to people would affect this scale for Y value depending on the total exposure time to people (the more you interact the positive and greater the value is)
• Exposure to infected would strongly affect this negatively, the decrease would be weaker with every hour of exposure you had to them (simulating adaptation) 
• Hearing gunshots would affect this value (or just give a gameplay effect)
• Being attacked would affect it too

Gameplay Effects

• Meeting other players would give a sound of heartbeat, stronger breathing (if the scale is healthy this would reduce, your character would "adapt" to this world)
• Encountering infected will greatly increase the breathing of the character, weapons would sway a little more, strong heartbeat sound
• Hearing gunshots would increase heart beating, and affect the overall scale
• Being attacked would greatly increase breathing, weapon sway and heartbeat (the character would adapt to this too with time)
• Predators would affect this too (hearing wolfs howling, etc)
• Stamina would increase for a short time, making your character to move faster, but at the same time more erratically with the level of fear
• Movement blur would increase with the lower fear scale values simulating the real life confusion one experience when panicking 
• If it reaches the min level, your character could become paralyzed to dangers.  
• In min levels, character would refuse to go into areas with infected or run in the oposing direction from them when encountering one
• Same with gunshots and other players.

 

 

Social Scale 

 

This scale will measure your time being exposed to other players, companion dogs/horses, and simulate the need for social interaction a human will endure in a similar situation.

Value(as example) 5000:

• 5000 - Socially fulfilled (being in a community)
• 0 - Very lonely

Depends on:

• Time exposed (communicating ingame) with other players
• Time exposed with companion dog (as in real life)
• Other things you do ingame (reading, playing instruments, crafting, fishing, hunting)

How is the dependence expressed?

The value of the scale simple increases or decreases at a given rate when interaction is happening (human, animal, object)

Gameplay Effects

This status would not have direct effect on gameplay, and will effect other statuses if it's low (happiness, mental sanity)

• If it's below 2500 it starts reducing happiness by X value (the effect would increase with lower values)
• Same with mental sanity

 

 

Moral Scale

 

This is a highly controversial scale, that has been discussed a lot here. I agree with the people that say it doesn't apply to Dayz World, but only partially. 

The survivors are supposed to be starting to enter the post apocalyptic world, taking this in count, they still have vestiges of a moral system from the old world. Said this, "immoral" actions, should affect the character, but only at the beginning. Once he starts adapting to Dayz world, the importance of this status would strongly diminish, since all rules would be washed away. A thing that we can for example see clearly happening in TWD characters evolution through the seasons, where they become more and more "brutal".

Value (as example) 5000:

5000 - I'm a good person

0 - What had I became? 

Depends on:

• In-game actions
• Time being alive
• "negative" acts count

How this dependence expresses? 

• Killing other players, or animals would negatively affect the status at the first hours of game
• Killing players that didn't attacked you, would greatly reduce the status
• Taking stuff from tents, stashes or people would also negatively affect the status

Gameplay effects

Since this would be only a temporary scale that doesn't directly affects the gameplay, the effects would be limited to:

• Messages dealing with the character moral dilemas ("I feel so bad for that man", What have I done, etc)
• Affecting moderately the Happiness and Moral Sanity scales (that would reduce with ingame time, and repeated instances)

Character Adaptation:

• The more people/animals your character kills the less this actions affects him (there could even be a happiness positive effect after a certain threshold is passed)
• The more tents, stashes, players, your character robs, the less it affects him
• The more time your character is alive in Dayz, the less this scale afects other scales (after a determinated time, it would even become inactive at all)

 

 

Mental Sanity Scale

 

This could be not so much a scale, but a set of psychological statuses that give the character a mental disorder. 

It could range from Maniac status, to schizophrenia, Depression (yes this could be triggered by the hapiness scale), etc. Like Kuru

All of this statuses would depend on the level of the other ones as triggers for it.

Each different status would have their effects on the character behavior, like:

• Hearing weird sounds 
• Having hallucinations
• blurriness
• Too colorful view of the world
• speaking to himself
• weird laughs 
• erratic behavior (like randomly using hand signals)
• panic attacks 
• etc

This scale would need more detail depending on the diseases and I believe it goes beyond the thread.

 

Ok. Done with 1+hr writing and organizing my thoughts lol, hope this could be found useful for the devs or future modders that could implement this in-game for hardcore gameplay at least :)

 

Edited September 20, 2016 by exwoll

[odin_lowe 3686]

Very nicely detailed suggestion. I would be interested to see how this would play out in game, but seeing the status of the game as it is, I fear if we ever get something slightly similar to this, it would be very far down the line.

Like you said, maybe when we get mods someone could try making this if we never get an official mechanic like this.

[Tigermonk 140]

Nice idea... good detailed explanation BUT....
like odin says: this will likely NEVER be in the game..
you know how many status warnings would flood the system?

plus the fact of 'fear' is always present in the game anyways when it comes to other players...
how would your system work? steps of 10/100? being 'happy' with 5000 happiness is good.. but how would that go in the game mechanic?

I feel happy and relaxed
(mosin round or M4 round flies past ur ear)
OMG OMG OMG OMG what the *()&*(^&( just happend!!?!?! what is happening I'm scared... <- full on panic

so you go from 5000 happiness to 0 in an instant.. because THAT is how psychology works (human brain) I can go from 0-200 MPH in MILLISECONDS (thats what its designed to do)
flooding the body with adrenaline and everything goes full on beast mode for a few min (fight or flight response)

so happiness/fear factors... doubt that'll work in this game in general without causing major frustration
(like we have now with 'I'm fully hydrated' 'I need a drink' <- OH COME ON you bastard you've just ran 5 clicks in 30 degree heat... sure you're a bit thirsty but that does NOT burn 4L (1 gallon) of water in 10 min!!!)

[exwoll 255]

 

4 hours ago, Tigermonk said:

Nice idea... good detailed explanation BUT....
like odin says: this will likely NEVER be in the game..
you know how many status warnings would flood the system?

plus the fact of 'fear' is always present in the game anyways when it comes to other players...
how would your system work? steps of 10/100? being 'happy' with 5000 happiness is good.. but how would that go in the game mechanic?

I feel happy and relaxed
(mosin round or M4 round flies past ur ear)
OMG OMG OMG OMG what the *()&*(^&( just happend!!?!?! what is happening I'm scared... <- full on panic

so you go from 5000 happiness to 0 in an instant.. because THAT is how psychology works (human brain) I can go from 0-200 MPH in MILLISECONDS (thats what its designed to do)
flooding the body with adrenaline and everything goes full on beast mode for a few min (fight or flight response)

so happiness/fear factors... doubt that'll work in this game in general without causing major frustration
(like we have now with 'I'm fully hydrated' 'I need a drink' <- OH COME ON you bastard you've just ran 5 clicks in 30 degree heat... sure you're a bit thirsty but that does NOT burn 4L (1 gallon) of water in 10 min!!!)

I put 10000 for happiness scale and +5 as example to give a hint about that (used 5000 for the rest) :D.

It would be a GENERAL indicator that would take a lot to change, it doesn't have to say anything if he's ok. Only when the indicator is too low and depression kicks in. Doubt it will flood the system. Unless you're trying really hard to do specifically that (like when you get all the possible statuses for a nice screenshot lol)

Fear scale is mostly for how strong your character reacts to outside factors (infected, gunshots, other people), it will not flood anything, just add some cool effects from time to time, AND make infected more dangerous at the beginning. It doesn't go from 5k to 0 with one shot. It will increase decrease a faster than the happiness status yes, but not as you stated it. If someone shoots you, you gonna get the physiological response (that will reduce itself when the character adapts with time) and it will affect the scale. If the scale get's too low, then you start getting some messages, and if it goes lower, the character starts acting on its own in certain situations.

And not, that's not how psychology works. Adrenaline kicks in fast yes, and its effects are what the fear scale introduce. But FEAR takes time to creep inside yourself. You can get scared easily, but thats more of a surprise factor, that doesn't affect you deeply. Fear is what phobic people experience towards something. Is what you experienced in the night after a terror movie as a child. 

Btw, the hydration status is working quite fine for me, I would even say that flawlessly for the last couple of weeks :)

An example of the happiness status could be This War Of Mine. When in TWOW your character(s) reach a certain degree of this, they get depressed, they refuse to obey your commands, don't do stuff, interrupt their actions and just sit there crying. If you want to take them out of that, you have to make them interact with other characters, have them listening music or reading books. If you fail to do this, they will just suicide after a while. 

 

[Tigermonk 140]

On 20-9-2016 at 3:43 PM, exwoll said:

 

I put 10000 for happiness scale and +5 as example to give a hint about that (used 5000 for the rest) :D.

It would be a GENERAL indicator that would take a lot to change, it doesn't have to say anything if he's ok. Only when the indicator is too low and depression kicks in. Doubt it will flood the system. Unless you're trying really hard to do specifically that (like when you get all the possible statuses for a nice screenshot lol)

Fear scale is mostly for how strong your character reacts to outside factors (infected, gunshots, other people), it will not flood anything, just add some cool effects from time to time, AND make infected more dangerous at the beginning. It doesn't go from 5k to 0 with one shot. It will increase decrease a faster than the happiness status yes, but not as you stated it. If someone shoots you, you gonna get the physiological response (that will reduce itself when the character adapts with time) and it will affect the scale. If the scale get's too low, then you start getting some messages, and if it goes lower, the character starts acting on its own in certain situations.

And not, that's not how psychology works. Adrenaline kicks in fast yes, and its effects are what the fear scale introduce. But FEAR takes time to creep inside yourself. You can get scared easily, but thats more of a surprise factor, that doesn't affect you deeply. Fear is what phobic people experience towards something. Is what you experienced in the night after a terror movie as a child. 

Btw, the hydration status is working quite fine for me, I would even say that flawlessly for the last couple of weeks :)

An example of the happiness status could be This War Of Mine. When in TWOW your character(s) reach a certain degree of this, they get depressed, they refuse to obey your commands, don't do stuff, interrupt their actions and just sit there crying. If you want to take them out of that, you have to make them interact with other characters, have them listening music or reading books. If you fail to do this, they will just suicide after a while. 

 

only flaw here.. being you've taken an example of the MOST depressing/unable to win game EVER made... I've played this war of mine.. and this thing is impossible to win LOL
all this game shows you.. are the horrors of war for the civilians trying to 'survive' I know how this game works... 

tried to 'break into' a house my scavenger got his head blown off by a shotgun... so he didn't return home.. took me 2 weeks to fight off the depression half my guys had.. totally BS.. LOL

but as far as this system being in dayz... doubt the devs will go as far as this.. TOO much work for them to start with.. if everything like that detail has to be put into a game.. just wait for the notice of: this title has been moved up from 2017 to 2027 and will be discontinued in 2028.. LOL

[exwoll 255]

lol I finished it in 3 tries, once I saw that "moral dilemmas" gave hard hits to my chars (one suicide xD) I only attacked the "bad guys" and it was ok. I had most troubles with winter temperatures and the lack of loot. You only have to survive 45 days to finish the game! 

It was hard at the beginning but at the end I really appreciated the work that 11-bit guys put into the game realism, specially simulating what a real civilian would think/feel/pass through in a situation like that (they supposedly based the game and characters on real events and histories). 

And since DayZ chars are civilian survivors thrown in a world worst than TWOW, I believe that the survival aspects (specially psychological ones) and mechanics are really close to what Dayz could have. 

1 hour ago, Tigermonk said:

but as far as this system being in dayz... doubt the devs will go as far as this.. TOO much work for them to start with.. if everything like that detail has to be put into a game.. just wait for the notice of: this title has been moved up from 2017 to 2027 and will be discontinued in 2028.. LOL

 Yeah, my hope is with future hardcore modders :) (mostly because the devs mentioned how they expect them to develop the PVE aspect of the game, since they kinda have their hands tied with the pvp/pve balance). Just hope one of them reads this XD

[General Zod 1118]

1. Reading books in game. I would rather stop playing games altogether than read books in game. Want to read ? Read in real life. 

2. And another let's punish for killing post. I honestly lost the count but I think we need exponents to number those. 

[Arthur Dubrovka 376]

This will be a real nice Mod!

I just have to think about how your charakter always starts to "F11" because hes so sad and alone... no but I like your ideas alot, keep them up until modding is available!

Edited October 10, 2016 by imunone

[scarecrow382 6]

Would like to see some sort of sanitation factor. The ability to keep yourself clean or not. Might effect wound scale. If your clean a small scrap means nothing. If your filthy it might lead to fatal infection.

[kopo79 426]

yes,yes,yes!!!!::

:D
and interesting article....
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17095605
at the end is writings about mental state.
of course some people are just psychopathic and nothing will affect to them but they are usually pump with drugs and meds.
if not in this scale but dayz needs this kind of factor.
and dayz need more discussion about this.
 

[t3h_kgb 6]

On 9/20/2016 at 8:43 AM, exwoll said:

 

An example of the happiness status could be This War Of Mine. When in TWOW your character(s) reach a certain degree of this, they get depressed, they refuse to obey your commands, don't do stuff, interrupt their actions and just sit there crying. If you want to take them out of that, you have to make them interact with other characters, have them listening music or reading books. If you fail to do this, they will just suicide after a while. 

 

Yeah, no thanks.... Between the insane metabolism (eating 15 apples and being hungry again inside of an hour!? REALLY!?), having fewer than one hitpoints at any given time because humans are actually made of glass according to Bohemia, items becoming "ruined" simply because they felt like it, the character bitching about everything from a 1/4" high fall to the color of the fucking sky, being "soaked" because you dared set foot within twenty feet of water, freezing to death whilst sprinting across the map because one piece of gear was "damp", bugs, other crap not working right, getting jumped by other players, bleeding to death when anything more threatening than a chicken looks at you cross-ways, et. al., I'd rather NOT be forced to socialize (how exactly are we expected to do that, when 100% of DayZ players only want to kill other players?) and read books and all that other garbage, just to keep my stupid character from crying over yet more bullshit... Worse if the character wants to start disobeying player commands and ultimately becomes suicidal, because I'd honestly just let the bastard go until they punched their own ticket because I have no remorse or pity for crybabies...

Shit, the character the way they are now pisses me the hell off!!! "I'm hungry and thirsty and cold and stuff!! I'm DYING!!", coming from a freshly-spawned character....

If I wanted to be emo and cry and cut myself, I'd go listen to Fall Out Boy and Breaking Benjamin and do just that....... I play DayZ to.... Well, I don't even really know why I play it, it's just a "collect stuff and avoid everything, especially other players" simulator.... But I most definitely don't play it to watch my character cry and pout and kill themself. We already have a suicide button, do we really need a whole engine dedicated to making our character kill themself!?

And what about the fact that no two human psyches are the same? What makes you think we all need to socialize in order to feel happy!? Why do you think humans ONLY think a certain way? What about sociopaths? What about introverts? What about the id and the ego and all the Freudian crap?

Sorry, but your idea just doesn't sound fun at all... And the point of a "game" is to have some level of fun to it; NOT to be a taxing chore that ultimately only exists to piss you off...... Thus why I rarely play DayZ anymore.... And honestly, if Steam hadn't scammed me with their fake refund option (if they don't want to issue refunds, why do they offer a refund option?), I'd have gotten my $30 back and done something far better with it........ Like light it on fire, or pay a homeless guy to beat me across the head repeatedly with a heavy stick...

Edited June 30, 2017 by t3h_kgb

[Sqeezorz 839]

Yes you do not really need ... you should not cry ingame and whine .... you make it already outside of the game. Sry, your text is not a good critic.

[exwoll 255]

On 6/30/2017 at 1:50 PM, t3h_kgb said:

Yeah, no thanks.... Between the insane metabolism (eating 15 apples and being hungry again inside of an hour!? REALLY!?), having fewer than one hitpoints at any given time because humans are actually made of glass according to Bohemia, items becoming "ruined" simply because they felt like it, the character bitching about everything from a 1/4" high fall to the color of the fucking sky, being "soaked" because you dared set foot within twenty feet of water, freezing to death whilst sprinting across the map because one piece of gear was "damp", bugs, other crap not working right, getting jumped by other players, bleeding to death when anything more threatening than a chicken looks at you cross-ways, et. al., I'd rather NOT be forced to socialize (how exactly are we expected to do that, when 100% of DayZ players only want to kill other players?) and read books and all that other garbage, just to keep my stupid character from crying over yet more bullshit... Worse if the character wants to start disobeying player commands and ultimately becomes suicidal, because I'd honestly just let the bastard go until they punched their own ticket because I have no remorse or pity for crybabies...

Shit, the character the way they are now pisses me the hell off!!! "I'm hungry and thirsty and cold and stuff!! I'm DYING!!", coming from a freshly-spawned character....

If I wanted to be emo and cry and cut myself, I'd go listen to Fall Out Boy and Breaking Benjamin and do just that....... I play DayZ to.... Well, I don't even really know why I play it, it's just a "collect stuff and avoid everything, especially other players" simulator.... But I most definitely don't play it to watch my character cry and pout and kill themself. We already have a suicide button, do we really need a whole engine dedicated to making our character kill themself!?

And what about the fact that no two human psyches are the same? What makes you think we all need to socialize in order to feel happy!? Why do you think humans ONLY think a certain way? What about sociopaths? What about introverts? What about the id and the ego and all the Freudian crap?

Sorry, but your idea just doesn't sound fun at all... And the point of a "game" is to have some level of fun to it; NOT to be a taxing chore that ultimately only exists to piss you off...... Thus why I rarely play DayZ anymore.... And honestly, if Steam hadn't scammed me with their fake refund option (if they don't want to issue refunds, why do they offer a refund option?), I'd have gotten my $30 back and done something far better with it........ Like light it on fire, or pay a homeless guy to beat me across the head repeatedly with a heavy stick...

Dude, there will always be an easy mode for you :). Let other people search for a difficulty that goes with their capabilities.

[Guy Smiley 534]

No thanks.  I don't need the game dictating my interactions.  If people want this for a mod by all means but outside of the games core survival design, I don't need the game telling me it's not ok to kill someone without any emotional repercussions 

Edited July 2, 2017 by Guy Smiley

[t3h_kgb 6]

On 7/1/2017 at 2:52 PM, exwoll said:

Dude, there will always be an easy mode for you :). Let other people search for a difficulty that goes with their capabilities.

So what you're telling me is that DayZ, an interactive survival videogame where literally EVERYTHING is designed to kill you and worse every mechanic is broken to the point of being completely random, isn't "difficult" enough for you, and you really want the game to stop obeying your commands and force your character to kill themself.......

If you want snuff films, go pirate a copy of Faces of Death or some shit, and go be a sick twisted fuck someplace else.... This forum is for people who enjoy interacting with videogames, and receiving some level of fun and entertainment from the experience..... You know.... Interaction.... The thing that separates a videogame from an .avi file....

Also: There is no "easy mode".... There is no "difficult mode"... DayZ is DayZ-difficult... So NO, there is NOT an "easy mode" for anyone... Your bad suggestion will force all of the rest of us to fight through yet another completely randomized, broken, worthless, buzz-killing mechanic... DayZ is made difficult by player inexperience and random chance..... And if DayZ's broken combat mechanics aren't random enough for you, maybe you should go play Yahtzee... And instead of marking down scores, just hack off a finger or hand with a hatchet every time you roll triples.... It would groove well with those self-harm fantasies you keep having at least....

[exwoll 255]

On 7/12/2017 at 2:28 PM, t3h_kgb said:

So what you're telling me is that DayZ, an interactive survival videogame where literally EVERYTHING is designed to kill you and worse every mechanic is broken to the point of being completely random, isn't "difficult" enough for you, and you really want the game to stop obeying your commands and force your character to kill themself.......

If you want snuff films, go pirate a copy of Faces of Death or some shit, and go be a sick twisted fuck someplace else.... This forum is for people who enjoy interacting with videogames, and receiving some level of fun and entertainment from the experience..... You know.... Interaction.... The thing that separates a videogame from an .avi file....

Also: There is no "easy mode".... There is no "difficult mode"... DayZ is DayZ-difficult... So NO, there is NOT an "easy mode" for anyone... Your bad suggestion will force all of the rest of us to fight through yet another completely randomized, broken, worthless, buzz-killing mechanic... DayZ is made difficult by player inexperience and random chance..... And if DayZ's broken combat mechanics aren't random enough for you, maybe you should go play Yahtzee... And instead of marking down scores, just hack off a finger or hand with a hatchet every time you roll triples.... It would groove well with those self-harm fantasies you keep having at least....

Dude, just go play EZ mode.

[exwoll 255]

 

uncuepagamer made a great video with a similar system! Hope a modder is reading/watching this, and will decide to add this stuff to a realistic mod :3

[Guy Smiley 534]

Game should not dictate the mental state of your character nor should it dictate who you should or should not kill.  Terrible idea

[cirkular 178]

@exwoll mate, my hat off to you for putting much thought into this. Also this uncuepagamer guy too. Now, I hope someone agrees with me here, to some extent at least. My thoughts on all the 'karma' systems etc: It would go well with some other RPG game or maybe a Dayz mod as you said.

BUT ... I don't agree it's realistic. I think it's anal. It's something what you'd notice on some characters, that you can't control at that. I think what we have now in Dayz (which is nothing much really) is pretty realistic. You can VOIP communicate. What you're looking for there, essentially, is a way to punish KOS, reward hero type playstyles and eventually being able to tell one from another just by observing. I think this is wrong and I think that this whole system would be an 'easy' mode for you, in fact. :) 

I am afraid I sound like a smart ass, which I regret. We, the humans are masters of deception and manipulation :D there is no one better (that we know of yet). Some of us are really bad liars, some really excel in it. Some are disgusted of this evil power and are not using it. Either because they are bad at it, or they are 'well behaved', raised by their families: strict following of the religious code, to be socially acceptable etc... or maybe a combination of those, which makes them naive and expecting someone else they encounter to be treating them the same as you would them. Now it's all perfectly okay and desired in a civilized world, in a closed circle, so to speak. And even then, some people find ways to avoid all that. Survival, in an apocalypse, with unknown individuals, is a whole different level, and a much lower one.

I think anyone good at deception would be able to keep his mask on, all the times. If he's really good at it, he'd be able to fool himself easily too. If I'd think of a such character, who killed several people, but is hiding it, I guess only moments he is making introspection at all is when on his own. At best, he'd seem somewhat absent sometimes when surrounded by people.  That's why I think there really should be no penalty for KOS. I assume KOS is the biggest problem, and being played for a fool is okay? You had interaction. Well, you had interaction even with KOS. In fact he had interaction with you through the iron sights / scope, his bullet had interaction with your body, and that's it in that case :D That's real.

It's totally your obligation and responsibility to keep your eyes open for danger. When you see someone, you don't want to be in the open. You are responsible if you decide if you will trust this person or not. If you don't see that person at all and you get shot, it's your perception that was at fault. Now I know, this is a game and with the rendering  bla bla bla...

Edited February 21, 2018 by cirkular

[exwoll 255]

 

On 2/21/2018 at 3:30 PM, Guy Smiley said:

Game should not dictate the mental state of your character nor should it dictate who you should or should not kill.  Terrible idea

It's not a moral/karma system, but a morale one. I mean your character has a separate life from yours, one that's dictated from the game itself. He's not sitting in a confy chair with some potatoe chips  running around waiting to get kosd and respawn again :). 

The idea isn't to tell you that this thing is bad or good, far from it, what it does is applying extra survival pressure on your character based on the environment you're in. 

A person in the apocalypse will fill the total weight of the human psychological distress, which is observed in the majority of people that happen to find themselves in a similar RL situation. 

Your character isn't a gamer, soldier, etc. From the conditions of your spawning, you're a normal person that found himself in a really bad situation. 

Apart from having no one to rely on (your gf, family, friends, pets, porntube, etc) he/she has to deal with the hardships of a post apocalyptic world, which are physical, psychological and moral. The first person you have to kill will severely affect you, stealing will do to, the constant stress of living in fear will also leave a deep scar into your psyche.  And these things, which arent visual, but are really important IRL aren't considered in the game actual system. 

The "moral" scale I mentioned, isn't the main one, and certainly isn't necessary at all, but I believe that it would be interesting to have it since newspawns are regular people heavily affected by it, and the effects of it should decrease with the time your character is being alive, the more situations he's gone through, etc. At least in hardcore immersive servers/mods where players are in for the genuine experience and not for fun. 

 

 

[cirkular 178]

@exwoll I got your point completely about the differences between the in-game character and the player behind a monitor. It makes sense but with chances to die being much bigger than staying alive for long, it could prove to be even more repetitive and painful for the player when respawning. I don't believe average in-game character even gets to the point where the average real person would go insane. Some of us deal with horrible amounts of stress quite easily, yet some of us become paralyzed facing same kinds of situations. Which then brings us to character diversity and I think it can only be done with some character stats introduced into the game. Another thing is it's an additional system that needs to be incorporated into the game. It could take even more time to develop it which sucks, in my opinion :) So maybe I'm wrong, but that might be too deep and heavy both on devs now but then on players too.

If there's really anything to improve here, I like the idea with a character starting from fresh, and 'getting over it' during a period of time spent alive. Similar to the plans earlier with stamina. I'd like that kind of lite system. Maybe something like abnormal adrenaline rush during fights. Both your aim and melee attacks could turn out to be a mess, but over time you'd put your stuff together and be able to place a shot easily like we are able to do now. It could be hard for you to catch your breath early on in the game. Also, it could take more time for you to reload your weapon, or even craft something. Maybe, if you stick with that faithful shotgun of yours, you'd become lightning quick reloading it or even getting proper aim. That sort of thing. 

[exwoll 255]

Yeah, those little things your character gets better with time should 100% come :). 

For me the mental health of the character would be a great thing to have for the end game. My characters usually last at least a couple of months, the last one I had survived from the launch of 0.62 to the day I uninstalled the game because I needed some space, and that was this month. When one learns how to survive in the game, how to not be seen, things get boring, and  a mental health scale would be great to push your characters to have more interactions and constantly seek for things that would give him back some sanity (like reading books, or listening to the radio constantly). 

 

[cirkular 178]

Well that's a long way :) I did say 'an average character' though :) But I think it's just that the more you want to go deeper with details, the more difficult it gets to achieve, and then even more details come up to cover. But, we're just talking anyway, so here's a couple of more against getting too deep into systems like this mental health system in the Dayz.

I don't want to cover positives much here since it's obvious. So you reach the rock bottom and then what? Your character starts panicking and shooting out of control? Or does he get so hopeless and depressed that he shoots himself? That would remind me of Dark corners of the Earth ;) That was amazing and horrifying back then. But that might have worked well in single-player. Again, I think that's too much for this kind of an MMO approach where there's so much going on at moments so much to manage and to search for.

Some players are always looking to interact with others anyway, and some are avoiding players always. Forcing you to interact with others in game to keep/raise your character's mental health is open to misuse. Misuse should always be considered whenever thinking about game features. Because in this case, when familiar with the system, everyone would make sure to flap their gums and flood the VOIP prior to and while shooting another player. But then there should be distinctions which I don't know how a game could handle without a damn good AI. Distinction because, a positive interaction would be with positive result on your mental health obviously, what you've said. But there is negative interaction too, the ones that bring small or massive stress to you. Meaning turning away, mocking, molesting and/or robbing someone, leaving them with nothing. Or much likely dead. Even making them kill themselves. There's infinite stress coming your way with just getting shot at, or just one shot narrowly missing you too. The way some people play with others sometimes makes me more worried of those players' mental health, not their characters' :D

Suffering addictions and their drawbacks on the other hand sounds fun to me ;) For example making you less precise and slow with actions, or getting less energy from food. Healing it could happen and should take time, but could also bring some small permanent quirk to the character. The search for alcohol and particular substances to keep you steady would bring even more adventures.

[exwoll 255]

Yeah, the voip thing would be kinda difficult to track/implement correctly due to that. But other stuff would be easy quantifiable, like books read or music listened, etc, etc. This stuff can be easily coped with a "daily limit" where the character just says "I don't want to to read anymore/My eyes hurt, I think it's enough for today" in the books case for example. 

The main idea still remains the one of making the game fun to play in any scenario giving your character stuff to do anytime, no matter how well you're geared or how many food you managed to gather. 

Edit: Just thought that there could be a way of quantifiying positive interactions. Since the game tracks all the actions that involve a character, a hypothetic system to track this could involve: time speaking, shots fired/received during a VOIP window, stamina depletion and even mouse movement (we all move it like crazy to avoid being shot or looking if somebody is following us) 

[cirkular 178]

On 3/4/2018 at 5:14 PM, exwoll said:

------- Edit: Just thought that there could be a way of quantifiying positive interactions. Since the game tracks all the actions that involve a character, a hypothetic system to track this could involve: time speaking, shots fired/received during a VOIP window, stamina depletion and even mouse movement (we all move it like crazy to avoid being shot or looking if somebody is following us) 

Yeah, I'm generally for some addition in this field. I dunno about this hypothetic tracking system you mentioned come to think about it. It could all be too much of a strain on server systems, and also tracking time spent speaking would again be open to misuse. But especially erratic mouse movement. We'll see if it would make sense at all with the new player controller :D Books however, well that's kind of somewhere in between. You'd be able to exploit it but you'd have to find them first (if they become rare items). 

Now I don't want to be negative all the time with this :D so maybe something with gestures could be done. Maybe when you approach to a player, similar to 'check pulse' there could be an option like 'handshake' which could be one of positive influences in this mental health system.

A side thought: I'd try something with this name display when you 'check pulse' on the player. I'd remove the other player's name from these messages totally until this 'handshake' was done. This is just all too more interesting when you can't know who you are dealing with. Just someone who presents themselves as they want, through chat or VOIP, as it is in real life. Unless you can positively identify them visually, but we'd need more of character visual customization options for that.