Lines in the sand and hollow victories, some thoughts on DayZ in game ethics....

[therunningmanz 255]

Hi, 

I just put together some thoughts on DayZ ethics and it seemed like here would be a reasonably decent place to share them.

For those that don't know, I'm a Twitch Partnered streamer who somehow, having started making YouTube vids on DayZ at the age of 37 in 2014 managed to make playing DayZ my full time job in 2016. It wont last forever but its been a lot of fun for now! I'm gonna cut and paste something I shared on my Twitter feed below around DayZ in game ethics, glitching and so on. However before I do I just wanna make one thing clear. I have written the below from the perspective of a DayZ player but also with some insight from streaming the game too as that is what I do. Just because I am a streamer, that doesn't mean that I think my opinion counts any more than anyone else's. I'm just one DayZ player, with one opinion like everybody else. Have a read if you want, don't if you don't....

 

Lines in the sand and hollow victories, some thoughts on DayZ in game ethics....

 

Hi all,

Something I'm often thinking about as a DayZ player and streamer is in game ethics and I just wanted to get it off my chest a bit. I don't see me changing the way I play at the moment, but it is something I seriously consider on a daily basis in terms of whether I play fairly or whether I don't. I have changed over time a little in how I play, I would like to talk a little about exploits and where we are all at with them. I am always thinking about morals in DayZ and whether I am doing the right thing and playing the game fairly. Sometimes I have not been perfect as a DayZ player since I started learning the game, but I always try to learn from my mistakes. I think I have changed a little over time as I have realised some things are wrong. I'm sure there are many DayZ players in the same position.

A couple of examples of this would be that when I first started playing I would use the FOV slider to get extra zoom when trying to kill someone. I'd seen it used in a YT video of a massive YouTuber and thought it was ok. Back then if you changed the FOV to be more narrow, you would get massive zoom increases when scoping a player. It was from visiting the r/dayz reddit that I really understood that it was an exploit and so I very quickly stopped doing it and this helped me when the FOV exploit was removed. Similarly about 3, maybe 4 times I have used the "strafe in a particular direction to get almost perfect hip fire aim" bug. The times I used it were to get around cover where I needed to move to the right but I did it in such a way as to gain an advantage with aim. I don't do this any more and have learned from my mistakes. If I'm honest, I was really unsure about using it and it was a conversation with FT whilst streaming that kinda convinced me not to do it anymore. Naturally the players that don't use this exploit will be in a better place when it is removed because they wont have been relying on an animation/player controller exploit to get a lot of their kills.

There is always a line to be drawn in DayZ about what any player considers to be fair. The line is in a different place for many of us. As a streamer these discussions come up a lot in chat and no matter what I do there is always someone coming from an angle where they play the game more fairly than I do in their eyes. I don't often feel pressure to perform in DayZ, those of you that watch will know I have more than my fair share of potato moments in the game and that sharing those experiences with an audience can be just as entertaining (or more so) as the "MLG moments." However pressure does creep in from time to time, getting killed by people who are prepared to use the hip fire exploit on a regular basis becomes very hard to swallow when you are trying to effectively play DayZ for your livelihood. It is moments that happen where you feel hard done by in some way that makes us more likely to falter.

I don't use the hip fire exploit, it's not OK to do it and gives you just as much as an unfair advantage over genuine players as turning your gamma up massively at night would do etc. I'm not looking to have a go at people that do it, people always have a "line in the sand" in terms of what they do and don't do in game as they play. But for the players that do try to avoid these type of things, all I would say is, it is far better to try to encourage people to change than it is to try and "tell them off." It's far better to encourage people to try something new and to change than to just flat out tell people that they are cheating, or glitching etc. If you get your kills with an animation exploit (for want of a better way of describing it), they are far more hollow than if you play the game as intended. I learned the FOV glitch from YouTube myself and then assumed it was OK before I realised later it wasn't, as a streamer, I don't want to be effectively saying it's OK to a fairly large number of DayZ fans to use exploits that make it easier to kill genuine players in game. I don't do the glitch for that reason, but I don't do it primarily because killing people using an animation bug just gives you a hollow victory. It doesn't make you a good DayZ player, it makes you the one using an exploit to kill a player who either chooses not to do it intentionally (so you won the fight), or they may not even know about the exploit (so you won the fight), or they just aren't as good at the exploit as you (so you won the fight). With any of those three options there is no sense of achievement to be gained from a kill like that. That is the reason not to use exploits, so that you can actually take some enjoyment from surviving a PVP encounter playing fairly, rather than gaining a hollow victory using an exploit.

For a lot of people the apple glitch falls inside their "line in the sand" and they are prepared to do it. I think this is not OK. In DayZ we are meant to be surviving the landscape and keeping ourselves alive in a "surivival game." If you take finding food out of the equation by choosing to glitch an unlimited supply of apples then you are robbing yourself of part of the game. It's meant to be hard at times to find food, survival is meant to be hard and in DayZ I think it is only going to get harder. Yesterday when "orange hungry" I cooked 4 chicken fillets before moving on to loot the next town to make sure I didn't go "red hungry" or worse. Using a glitch to get enough food to travel anywhere on the map without having to stop and loot gives you an unfair advantage over players that are actively playing the game. It should be that at times you have to cook chicken to survive! If you loot your way to the NWAF from say Berezino it takes a decent amount of time to do it properly (maybe 90mins or more). If you spam apples, you can pretty much be there in around 20mins. This is not the game as intended, DayZ is not meant to be a "die in PVP, exploit your way back to the action and get stuck in again." People excuse the apple glitch because there is no loot, and they don't want to look etc, or that they play the game for PVP. The simple truth is there is plenty of food in the servers, if you go in most hospitals for example and check inside the clothing there is normally plenty of food. If you make a stone knife, cut a stick from a tree and use it to kill infected, there is a plentiful supply of food to be looted from them when killed. When a genuine player is on their 90min or more route back to the airfield or wherever else they may choose to go, that is when in my opinion the better encounters in DayZ happen. If you are looting around, you are more likely to bump into a fellow survivor who is friendly and doing the same thing, you can trade with, or team up with them, or if it suits your playstyle/mood rob them, or murder them! The "sandbox" aspect of DayZ comes into play far more in the random encounters in interesting places than it does when you've run 20mins straight back to a KOS zone from where you spawned.

Any playstyle in DayZ should be welcomed whether it be KOS or "Rene" ;). But using the apple glitch to speed up the "path to PVP" is not what the game is about IMO. If you want to keep the game fresh and interesting, then avoiding the apple glitch and exploring the map as you look for supplies will give you a lot more satisfaction in DayZ and make you a better DayZ player in the long run. Food is only going to get harder to find, if you are already using the apple glitch then you are in for a shock when it is removed and food is even harder to find. Aside from the survival aspect, if all you do is apple glitch your way to a mil base, you are going to burn yourself out of the game very quickly IMO. It becomes a vicious circle of repetition, if you choose to explore the map and take different loot routes you will get different encounters with each DayZ life you live in Chernarus and hopefully keep the game fresh for much longer.


Finally I wanna talk about the one thing that falls inside my "line in the sand" currently. That being spamming the well. This topic comes up a lot in my Twitch chat and in writing this, I'm hoping this will be the last time I talk about it (expect a nightbot Twitch chat command linking to here as soon as this goes live!). I spam the well to drink when I don't have a bottle or a cooking pot, sometimes I still spam the well when I have a cooking pot! I don't know if this makes me a bad DayZ player or not, in a small few peoples eyes it makes me a terrible person I think. I really don't know, but I do see a difference between well spamming and apple glitching. This gets raised nearly every day in my chat and maybe, just maybe, this blog can be my line in the sand for not having to discuss it anymore! ;)

Here is the difference as I see it personally, the apple glitch/bug requires a series of steps to be replicated to make it happen. You have to kinda "crack the code" to get all dem apples! With the well, all you do is go to it and "middle mouse" to drink and tap the button to drink, that you are meant to tap to drink. There is no series of buttons to press etc. More importantly whether you feel it is realistic or not, when you try to find an apple, the game is designed currently so that you only find one occasionally. This is so that you cant just stand there, search 15 times, get 15 apples and then go anywhere you want on the map. This would be too easy and kinda make any other form of food finding redundant.

The well is not like that, when you drink from a well you always get a drink every time! However the in game animation goes through a very painful (for me) "3 scoops" animation to get one drink of water. This isn't very realistic, but I don't really wish to use "realism" as a reason. "Realism" and in game mechanics are never truly going to meet, otherwise it would be a hell of a while before you could harvest any crops you'd grown for example in DayZ! Maybe I'm just not patient enough, but if I sit by a well, press the button once and then watch my character go through the "3 scoops" animation to get a small drink of water I find myself getting wound up in real life, it breaks my immersion in the game and I feel detached from what is going on. That is why I do it, more than anything else. In a game where you can grow pumpkins from scratch to being edible in 20mins, is it really unreasonable to expect to be able to drink freely from a continuous source of water until you are hydrated without going through a series of painful animations that just serve to detach you from the game? The well spamming "bug/exploit" was removed on an experimental patch over a year ago (maybe 0.55 I think) but was then brought back in again before the patch was released to stable. I don't know if this was by design or not, but it felt like it could have been removed then if that was the intention by the devs. Yet we still have it now.

On a stream about a month ago I asked Hicks who was in the chat at the time if well spamming was a glitch and he said yes. So in the interest of transparency I guess that means i'm doing something bad and I wanted to make sure I highlighted that here. I would have liked to have had more of a conversation on the subject at the time with him but it really didn't seem the right time for it. Since then what Hicks' said in my chat has been relayed to other DayZ players and streamers some people now don't spam the well as a result. But we all have our lines in the sand at the end of the day. I have a friend who now doesn't spam the well, but for a time they were happy to use a bug that allowed them to get their primary weapon back as a new spawn on the coast from their previously killed character so that they could carry on with their weapon on their next life. Now the friend in question realised this wasn't really on and stopped doing it. I guess that is my main point in all of this! We are all learning as we go, with regards to in game ethics and what feels right and what feels wrong as the DayZ alpha progresses. The trick I guess is to try and encourage good ethics and maybe try to explain the benefits of playing fairly to all DayZ players, including streamers /YouTubers that are not doing it, without it turning into a flaming war about "glitch abuse and cheating!"

I do also think there is a huge onus on the devs with some things too. There will be many changes to weapon sway, out of breath, player movement and hip firing etc. We know there are fixes coming for apple glitches and Peter Nespessny tweeted just the other day about an ongoing prototype test to the way apples will spawn on servers which was good to see. How far this goes I guess is down to them. If the well drinking method changes when the player controller comes out so that it is a long animation for each single drink of water then I will of course have to play the game that way. But for now I do not feel like I have bad DayZ ethics for spamming the well and I intend to keep doing it. I avoid the exploits (or learned from my mistakes and now avoid) that allow me to kill players more easily to gain an advantage over others and win hollow victories, I avoid getting an unlimited supply of food which would allow me to get to military areas more quickly and gain an advantage over others whilst potentially spoiling the game play for myself. I'd love to really know what will happen with well drinking animation in the new player controller, I really hope it is a "hold f to drink, release f when done" type of process, the well is after all a continuous and effectively unlimited supply of water in DayZ (how cool would it be if some wells randomly ran dry? "there is no water in the well" as a status indicator would be cool!). However it is going to be in the future, in the meantime I am going to drink from the well in game now like it is a continuous flow of water that can be drunk quickly because that is after all what a well with a tap is.

Sorry for the incredibly long load of old waffle! However on the upside if you are Twitch viewer you may not have to listen to the "apple glitch/well spamming" conversation anymore, every day, day after day, after day! Every cloud has a silver lining, every DayZ player has their "line in the sand."

Paul

[ImageCtrl 719]

3 hours ago, therunningmanz said:

Finally I wanna talk about the one thing that falls inside my "line in the sand" currently. That being spamming the well.

Same here. As bonus I use sometimes the fire station ladder glitch. Shame on me. Personally I would not do this (both glitchs) in a twitch stream.

But your "line in the sand" is ok and fair for me.

 

 

[IMT 3190]

TL;DR? No just kidding. Thank you for your input Paul and I completely agree with you.

To be honest, I and even some hardcore DayZ players I know have used or still use the apple glitch. Lately I try to avoid the apple glitch and tend to do it in a more fair way by picking apples how it's supposed to be and only picking a few and not until I'm fully stuffed just to prepare myself already for the future.

Also, I don't do it to get to a location to PvP fast, it's not really in my playstyle to go somewhere to just PvP there. I also know this glitch will be fixed eventually and that the game will be much harder. But I'm already prepared for that and know a lot of ways to survive but I guess that doesn't justify the usage of a glitch.

I and also everyone I know use the well glitch if it can be called a glitch. There is also a glitch to fill up the cooking pot in one go when it's raining which I use but to be honest if it's raining your not raising your cooking pot, fill it a bit and put it down.

All these things will be changed or fixed in the future, specially with the new animations where you can hold 'F' to continuously eat or do actions. I'm sure this will be the case with the well where you can keep drinking as long as needed just like in real life. I'm really looking forward to the new character controller and the new animations where you can keep moving and eat or fill your cooking pot on the go.

Lastly, I don't think there is any right or wrong unless you use severe glitches like wall glitching or your example of getting your weapon back in your new life. Still, you shouldn't keep abusing these glitches your entire characters life. After I leave the coast I rarely have to pick apples because I'm usually energized because of all that delicious meat from wolves or cows and all the food which I scavenge while looting or killing infected. If the glitches were having a severe impact on gameplay the developers would've either fixed it or disabled it like the loot which isn't spawning anymore in the camo building.

[mithrawndo 166]

Good evening Paul. We've met several times, but you probably wouldn't know that as I try not to gush at "celebrities", nor let people get near enough to discover my name.
 

Quote

getting killed by people who are prepared to use the hip fire exploit on a regular basis becomes very hard to swallow when you are trying to effectively play DayZ for your livelihood. It is moments that happen where you feel hard done by in some way that makes us more likely to falter.

Something to keep in mind here: Youtube video creators and twitch streamers don't gain their popularity from their skill (at least in my not so humble opinion; why should I lie about being arrogant?), but rather from their dedication to contributing and their personalities. By heeding your moral compass you don't risk your viewership, but rather you strengthen it. In my opinion, the day you cross that line is the day you decide to stop making streaming, entertaining and educating a part of your life, let alone your day job.

Regarding exploitation of the well glitch versus the apple glitch: Whilst it's not perfect, I actually feel that given that water pumps in DayZ are of the piston variety, the act of spamming your interact key actually closely mimics reality; to attain a steady stream of water, one most work the pump handle with vigor! I rather hope that the new player controller will take this into account in the way it allows us to interact with this object. The apple glitch on the other hand is equivalent of shaking the tree to make it rain apples; whilst this might work at the height of the season, it's utterly unreasonable in January!

[sneakydude 480]

5 hours ago, therunningmanz said:

I would like to talk a little about exploits and where we are all at with them

Nice write up however, did you post any of these bugs and have you

Read the rules? on posting any exploits or cheats?

Just saying people have said much less and get removed.

[therunningmanz 255]

4 hours ago, sneakydude said:

Nice write up however, did you post any of these bugs and have you

Read the rules? on posting any exploits or cheats?

Just saying people have said much less and get removed.

I use the bug tracker if that is what you are asking.

I don't remember actually discussing precisely how to do any of the exploits. With the exception of saying you use middle mouse to drink from a well I don't go into any detail. I don't think we are meant to deny exploits actually exist here as far as I am aware. If people want to learn how to do them I'm not sure that massive novel will be the source they will seek out to teach them.

[therunningmanz 255]

5 hours ago, mithrawndo said:

 

Something to keep in mind here: Youtube video creators and twitch streamers don't gain their popularity from their skill (at least in my not so humble opinion; why should I lie about being arrogant?), but rather from their dedication to contributing and their personalities. By heeding your moral compass you don't risk your viewership, but rather you strengthen it. In my opinion, the day you cross that line is the day you decide to stop making streaming, entertaining and educating a part of your life, let alone your day job.

 I've always been acutely aware of how I act in game, for perception terms on YT etc. In reality though, the way I am is the way I am. I believe in playing fair full stop. 

 

However I think its only human to have momentary lapses. Sometimes in DayZ we all get salty at a death. If you get killed be someone you can see was out of breath and moved in a way to suggest he was using the aim bug, you get really salty. It's life. When you share that experience with 800 people and many are calling you a noob and many others are laughing, that you don't know the "special technique" etc. It becomes somewhat of a different beast. You already as salty as sin, and it really can get to you in the moment. When that then happens three times in one day or something, you can start to feel a degree of pressure.

 

I completely agree with what you say in general. I have chosen to unfollow people that i've seen hiding in walls etc. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is that little bit of pressure there sometimes. ;)

Edited February 1, 2017 by therunningmanz

[sneakydude 480]

2 hours ago, therunningmanz said:

 I've always been acutely aware of how I act in game, for perception terms on YT etc. In reality though, the way I am is the way I am. I believe in playing fair full stop. 

 

However I think its only human to have momentary lapses. Sometimes in DayZ we all get salty at a death. If you get killed be someone you can see was out of breath and moved in a way to suggest he was using the aim bug, you get really salty. It's life. When you share that experience with 800 people and many are calling you a noob and many others are laughing, that you don't know the "special technique" etc. It becomes somewhat of a different beast. You already as salty as sin, and it really can get to you in the moment. When that then happens three times in one day or something, you can start to feel a degree of pressure.

 

I completely agree with what you say in general. I have chosen to unfollow people that i've seen hiding in walls etc. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is that little bit of pressure there sometimes. ;)

Its not you its what comes from others is all that is usually mentioned.

[emuthreat 2837]

Nice post about the evolving nature of the game, and what that means for player behavior.  The line in the sand is really a good metaphor for this subject, as players seem to take different approaches to what is acceptable and how the game is played.  

I believe that alpha has a lot to do with some people's justification of using janky tactics, or making their lives easier by exploiting certain unfinished game mechanics.  It is just a given for most people to understand any exploit that directly enables someone to kill another player unfairly is not cool.  Many people acknowledge this and continue to do so anyways, because if they don't someone else will just use it to kill them unfairly in the future; keeping up with the Joneses, in a sense.

The apple trees are an on and off subject for me.  Sometimes I prefer to completely abstain from apples or berries, and sometimes I'll grab a few and move a town or two inland from the coast; the latter probably being a holdover tradition from the bad ol' days geared players returning to the coast for some sure-thing thrill kills.
It also seems like a moot point, now that they have a new system for apples in the works.  Morally, it's not really an issue to use apples as a handy stopgap or some startup energy, but overuse seems to indicate a less "hardcore' mentality about the survival aspect.  Whenever I loot a well-geared corpse with a whole lot of apples, I tend to think of the person as a hack.
As the game progresses, and apple trees can no longer be abused in the same way, I suppose I'll still feel the same about apples, but maybe respect the time it took to find them a bit more with the new system implemented.

The drinking mechanic doesn't really seem to be a problem, because of how drinking from a steady source works IRL, and how drinking in general is still running on placeholders.
I do have a problem with casual bulimia being used as a way to nullify bad dietary choices preventing them from consuming enough to get fully hydrated and energized at the same time.  But a lot of things are still very unfinished, and I have to trust that many of these issues can be easily addressed once new systems are in place.

At this point, i think the game is still very much running on the honor system.  It's just too bad that so few people seem to care.  If you know what you are doing in .61, it is easy to get all the gear you want.  Yet people still dupe.  Some people will always take the easiest and cheapest way possible.  As long as it is possible.
 

 

[-Gews- 7443]

I will use S+D if I feel like it (depends). It's too simply achieved for me to view as a real 'exploit'. That's the way the mechanics work right now, the way I see it, this is basic game knowledge and it's not my problem if other players don't know the meta. Moving in other directions, too, will also have less sway than remaining still—is it an exploit to move at all? It looks and feels stupid so I probably wouldn't use it if I was to stream. Also the reason I don't use it every time I could.

I'm not going to waste my time by choosing to wait for apples or water, and I'm certainly not avoiding those easy food sources altogether, so I use those as well.

That old FOV adjustment I didn't see a problem with using. It was available to everyone, had its own disadvantage in speed and if someone surprised you at a closer range, and you needed to adjust the FOV to use the PSO-1 rangefinder as intended anyways. Some scopes were still underpowered even at minimum FOV.

 

Actually, I don't see much problem with using most of the things you mention, heh. 

I draw my personal line at gamma boosting, wall glitching, duping, etc. Just because (and of course, third-party cheats like TeamSpeak or Discord).