Character Value: A discussion.

[Whyherro123 2283]

3 hours ago, exwoll said:

That's exactly why we're discussing that. You see, 8 out of 10 people try to kill you because:

1. You don't risk much doing so . The game at this point is too forgiving with the running speed that enables people to escape from bullets, and the hitbox system makes people safe from a couple of bulllets by having a couple of cloth layers, etc
2.  Death has no value other than the loot you have on you, so if you have more of that loot in your base, or your loot is ez to get, you can take the risks
3. The environment is too forgiving for your aggressive actions. A couple of shots in a big city pass unnoticed if there are no players in the are. Infected reaction radius is too small and there's little changes of you getting caught in surrounded by trying to kill a player. 
4. Also related to 3 and 1. Escaping from infected is way too easy. They don't grab you  slowing you down or stopping you, you just have to know how to run to escape form 10+ infected.
5. Ammo is too common. People don't lose anything by trying to shot you. They know that they can find 200+ rounds in the next hour of playing. Self-defense is really easy right now.

The only way of somehow limiting that is to affect the Risk/Reward equation for any decision a player has to take when encountering other players or dealing with the environment. Any addition to the value of your character or the loot he has will influence that ratio.

And at this point we have:

• Ammo/Weapons quantity: The less of them, the more valuable every bullet becomes and the risk taken in using it against random friendly players and having nothing for defense from infected/enemies will make everyone think twice
• Food availability: The less food in a server, the longer it will take to a player to change his game objectives from keeping him alive, to searching some fun
• Environment reaction to shots: The more infected/other players are attracted to each shot, the more risky becomes the use of your weapons for direct reason.
• Skill systems that would add the things your character can do, to what he carries to your perceived value for the character (and for others in case of hard-skills)
• Players per server: the more players in a server, the more you risk being detected by heavily armed players when trying to shot a bambi (for example)
• Death penalties: We are afraid of death, because it means that we can't be alive. In game language it would translates with the limitation of your access to the game. A long respawn timer (there are a lot of suggestion about how to implement that depending on the time being alive, etc) or even the permanent ban from the server if you die, would add A LOT of value to your life. 
• Incentives for being alive longer: In real life, you have the biggest incentive to survive you could have - your own life. In-game we can't have that, but there are ways to simulate an attachment to your character which would make you care more for him. (visual things, scoreboards, skills,etc)

 

I've been here since the beginning of 2014. You ...... don't need to tell me this, I already know it.

You aren't revealing world-shattering knowledge, here. This exact topic has been debated many, MANY, MANY times before. Hell, many of the ideas you bring up were first discussed by me, several years before you even joined this forum.

Maybe I am just getting burnt out, but I found your attempt at education "annoying", for a lack of a better term.

Here is a hint: If someone has more than a thousand posts, don't presume to "educate" them, especially not when they can read the thread for themselves.

-deep breath-

Unfortunately, I don't really see much in making loot "valuable", until we get loot that is actually scarce. Until guns and ammunition don't respawn, and you can't just jump into another server and loot that one dry, loot will only be as rare as you have patience. I've seen people spend hours jumping from server to server, sucking up weapons, clothing and food like a demented Hoover. If you are patient, loot isn't rare.

In my perfect Day Z, you wouldn't be able to bring characters, or, at the very least, gear, from server to server.  That, in and of itself, would lead players to sticking to one server, and, by proxy, forming "communities" of the regular players.

Dramatically slowing down the healing rate, and making medicine actually difficult and meaningful might make players slow down and think about things before they get hurt. Right now, any and all healing is basically administered via dirty rag. 

 

[svisketyggeren 662]

On 17.3.2017 at 9:17 PM, lrishjake said:

1. Character value, in dayz, has almost always been placed on the items you possess. I think this is an issue. While I believe its important to feel value in finding rare items, I also don't think players should instantly feel like going off and hiding once they find a nice weapon, or a working car.  There should be a balance between "loot" being important and your player being equally important.

 

This is the reason why newly started players run around like maniacs. As ive said before, we need some kind of punishment for dying. Ur life needs to be worth something, even when starting a new character.

Only way to do that is to have some form of value, like skills, tied to how many times u die. If u die over and over u lose those skills slowly. U build those skills by staying alive.

Right now the game dosent reward u for staying alive...and thats just bad gameplay.

Edited March 19, 2017 by svisketyggeren

[exwoll 255]

7 hours ago, Whyherro123 said:

I've been here since the beginning of 2014. You ...... don't need to tell me this, I already know it.

You aren't revealing world-shattering knowledge, here. This exact topic has been debated many, MANY, MANY times before. Hell, many of the ideas you bring up were first discussed by me, several years before you even joined this forum.

Maybe I am just getting burnt out, but I found your attempt at education "annoying", for a lack of a better term.

Here is a hint: If someone has more than a thousand posts, don't presume to "educate" them, especially not when they can read the thread for themselves.

-deep breath-

Unfortunately, I don't really see much in making loot "valuable", until we get loot that is actually scarce. Until guns and ammunition don't respawn, and you can't just jump into another server and loot that one dry, loot will only be as rare as you have patience. I've seen people spend hours jumping from server to server, sucking up weapons, clothing and food like a demented Hoover. If you are patient, loot isn't rare.

In my perfect Day Z, you wouldn't be able to bring characters, or, at the very least, gear, from server to server.  That, in and of itself, would lead players to sticking to one server, and, by proxy, forming "communities" of the regular players.

Dramatically slowing down the healing rate, and making medicine actually difficult and meaningful might make players slow down and think about things before they get hurt. Right now, any and all healing is basically administered via dirty rag. 

 

Yeah congrats! What a great achievement for a lifetime lol, you're already burnt out if you see my listing of the info I've seen in the forum already or had in my mind as "annoying". I'm not educating you (doubt I will be able, if your "more than a thousand posts"  haven't placed you in a normal mood towards an online board from an alpha game), just responding to your negative post. 

 Just stay in topic dude, keep toxicity away.

[emuthreat 2837]

Soft skills will increase player life values.  Period.

Beards? Scoff.  I'll shave my beard off and go to the coast in jeans and a T-shirt, fully healthy, just to see which froggy freshies try to hop at me; assuming that my babyface somehow implies that we are on equal footing. LOL

Basebuilding will be a mere time-sink between deaths for PvP-centric players; and in reality, may not have much effect on player behavior from a diverse group with some players preferring to collect, hoard, and curate massive stockpiles of loot for their more mortally motivated associates to spend in the field.

If you want to add value to the character, I'm afraid it will require adding some tangible value to each character lifespan.   I don't see any viable way to do this, other than to add cumulative experiential value to the lifespan of that character over time.

 

I would prefer to see a very diverse and deep offering of soft skills for characters to learn throughout a lifespan; so diverse that a character that fully masters ALL skills would be almost unheard-of.

The skills would initially be based on an occupational/hobby background, randomly assigned as a combination of two or three complimentary skills and one or two unrelated skills when a new player spawns.
Additional skills could be acquired slowly through trial-and-error, and significant expenditure of resources; or slightly more quickly through the use of instructional books, and modest expenditure of resources.

I do not believe that there should be any limits to the amount, or nature, of skills that a players can concurrently learn.
If you try to tell me any different, I will plant a garden, kill and cook a deer, clean my rifles, cut some greensticks, weave a basket to store the food, cross-stitch a cheeky note for you, fix a car, drive cross-country to your base, ram open the door, chop a tree, build you a nice table to hold the gift-basket, craft a molotov cocktail  to improve your home-decor, and then apply emergency first-aid to my acutely splitting sides.

Seriously, the only thing limiting a player's skills, should be the amount of time and resources they put into learning those different skills.  Of course, surviving long enough to do all this would be the limiting factor.  And now we have incentive to survive...

Edited March 21, 2017 by emuthreat
spells

[Sqeezorz 839]

I still have a few thoughts about the value of a chars or even the experience.
In addition a small offtopic idea.
1) offtop-idea. Softskills an example of weapon repair: at the beginning without skills, it should only be possible to repair simple weapons, in case of more complex weapons the skill of the Weaponcleaningkits should be high consumption (of kit) and a low Result or fail . So you have to learn how to deal with it. That also presupposes that generally some objects are almost only in bad condition.

Loot Find and Loot points.
A) It should have a lot more Useful Loot almost only in bodies of infected people. As an Idea: ammunition and also weapons in Military Infected. Other infected other Useful things. (There is already so, but not in a very meaningful system, I find Infected such Loot have the otherwise almost not on the map is to be found, almost as with Crashsites).
B) Dead player bodys. There is the idea that there should be complete "player bodys" as Loot. These are not real players, but only loot-bodys. They should only be recognized with check-pulse as loot-bodys. These bodys have an equipment like an average player and doing this would make Loot the usable. That means a lot should be ruined to get only 2-5 usable parts.
This could cause fear and fright in the first moment, since you do not know for sure whether that is a real player body or just a Loot body .... the experience would rise.

[Irish. 4886]

1 hour ago, Sqeezorz said:

Loot Find and Loot points.
A) As an Idea: ammunition and also weapons in Military Infected. Other infected other Useful things.
B) Dead player bodies. These are not real players. These bodies have equipment like an average player
 

Off topic but a great addition none the less.. :)

A) I've been complaining about loot for some time now. The way it spawns in is so cheesy to me. Which in the mod, was fine.. but for a finely tuned game like what dayz will be come final release, it seems very rudimentary to have loot spawning in so statically, and without any real feeling of genuineness. I have for a long time thought that infected should be carrying items on them. If weapons and backpacks were on infected, and you had to attack them to get at the loot.. the experience would grow tremendously. With all the specialized infected models, I could see this being highly feasible, and perhaps where BI would already like to go to some degree. 

B) This is a great idea that I have never heard of.. dead AI bodies as loot tables. Check the pulse, and says typical "he been dead like forever bro.." message. So you never know if its a real dead player or not. Bodies could spawn in on existing spawn locations, complete with random gear. On the coast, mostly "fresh spawn" models. Up North, models with rare loot items and "better gear". Keep the zoning idea, keep all the other stuff.. just add in deceased AI bodies throughout the map randomly.

Make us feel like Chernarus really is alive.

[Sqeezorz 839]

Thank you for understand my "badly damaged" english  ... Google-Trans is my helpful friend, but we two often have differences  :-(

[Irish. 4886]

5 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

Thank you for understand my "badly damaged" english  ... Google-Trans is my helpful friend, but we two often have differences  :-(

Gör de talar svenska där, eller något annat språk? Jag suger på den här skiten.

[Sqeezorz 839]

German, pure Swiss-german ;)

i give my best

[scriptfactory 620]

My most memorable play sessions happened when the tension of death was high. After dying too many times my character's "life" means little to me. I don't really feel the desire to hang on to a character anymore. Is that a problem?

I would much more prefer new game mechanics. Like adding way more infected that are all blind and only react to sounds (...try camping now). Or player-controlled infected (DayZ factions). Create opportunities for emergent experiences.

[FlimFlamm 509]

Here's a neat way to make players value their life at any given point in time: increased respawn timer

 

60 seconds is nothing, 2 minutes is nothing, 5 minutes is annoying (even in terrible medical condition, with no gear, and on the fresh-spawn coast, your life becomes slightly more valuable if the wait for a new body is 5 minutes), 10 minutes and you have something worth pausing to consider: "Would I be able to get to a fresh-spawn like health-condition in under 10 minutes?", 20 minutes and we're on to something.

If we had to wait 20 minutes to respawn each time we die, not only would death not be worth it in many situations where currently death is easier/quicker, but people would in many cases prefer to continue to play the life they currently have, even though they may be in a piss-poor state, because playing your way out of starvation and sickness/injury is more stimulating than a death timer even though the frustration and anxiety of playing under such pressures feels "bad" (arguably a part of DayZ).

A huge chunk of all servers will almost certainly be private hive, and these servers will get to decide for themselves how long the death timer should be. As long as they are popular enough and people want to play there badly enough, they could raise their respawn timers even up to 60 minutes, at which point character value would be pretty much through the roof. People who have clans/bases/gear/revenge plans on a given private hive server will certainly be back despite a lengthy respawn timer

On public hive servers I would set a respawn timer of 150 second (two and a half minutes) just because it's annoying but not egregiously so. This would in a way train players to be much more annoyed with death over the long run but would not be too hardcore for the average player.

On private hives, I will be looking for a server with a rather large respawn timer, anywhere from 20 minutes to 60 minutes. I want to beg and plead with my captors to spare my life from a place of authentic emotion, and when I take the life of another player I want to actually feel real moral gravity from what I've done. Every time someone dies on such a server, via whatever means, it will be a harsh lesson that gives value directly to staying alive (character value). The more someone dies, the more they get the lesson.

Interestingly, this would also eliminate the age old DayZ immersion breaking problem of the dude you just killed showing up a few minutes later for round 2 because he spawned close enough.

Long respawn timers would make no sense if you needed to stay logged in and connected to a server for them to countdown (it would waste a server slot and people's time/computer) so timers longer than the standard should use time-stamps to avoid this problem.

Edited March 24, 2017 by FlimFlamm

[Sqeezorz 839]

12 minutes ago, FlimFlamm said:

 

Here's a neat way to make players value their life at any given point in time: increased respawn timer

 

You can also turn this system over. Reverse Increase Respawn. In words: every time you kill a player, increase your own respawn-timer by 5-10 min. Which means that you will pay the penalty at your own death. So a Bambi is not punished who fights for his life and dies by KoS. The killer piles up his own risk account when he dies. So you have to consider whether a kill is useful or not.

[FlimFlamm 509]

23 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

You can also turn this system over. Reverse Increase Respawn. In words: every time you kill a player, increase your own respawn-timer by 5-10 min. Which means that you will pay the penalty at your own death. So a Bambi is not punished who fights for his life and dies by KoS. The killer piles up his own risk account when he dies. So you have to consider whether a kill is useful or not.

This is an interesting idea but it would penalize players arbitrarily for killing other players. Unless the game could tell when someone is just psychotically murdering it would cause too many innocent players trouble.

The more you die - the greater your respawn timer - could work though. Might be tricky to balance because if it's too harsh new and bad players will suffer too greatly.

[Sqeezorz 839]

To create a balance is possible with a cooldown of the respawntimer. Long life will be rewarded, and kills will be forgotten. All in dependence of the real playtime. But this is a tricky thing because we do not know what else is coming, maybe we have a lot more problems with 1.0 than kill other players.

[Irish. 4886]

On 3/22/2017 at 1:42 PM, Sqeezorz said:

German, pure Swiss-german ;)

i give my best

Das ist richtig, deutsch.

Du musst meine Unwissenheit vergeben.

Es war Jahre her, seit ich irgendwo in der Nähe war.

[exwoll 255]

On 3/24/2017 at 5:28 PM, FlimFlamm said:

Here's a neat way to make players value their life at any given point in time: increased respawn timer

 

 

Yup. I would gladly play in servers that have very long respawn timers (even days). As Idea there could be a "decreasing timer" with the highest point when you're a fresh-spawn  and decreasing a minute with every hour ingame.

[Irish. 4886]

Thats gotta be mod stuff guys.. no video game creator should ever punish a new player. It turns people off of your game. 

 

Think about that new guy, just bought dayz.. logs in, gets shot or killed immediately. 

 

Now he sees some timer that says, "You cannot spawn for X minutes." 

 

You and I both know how fucked up that would be. 

[Sqeezorz 839]

4 hours ago, lrishjake said:

Think about that new guy, just bought dayz.. logs in, gets shot or killed immediately. 

The point of the big risk to new player leave the game in short time.

Killed by players or influences of the game world (f11 as an exception perhaps?) Must not lead to a punishment.

Edited March 28, 2017 by Sqeezorz

[FlimFlamm 509]

5 hours ago, lrishjake said:

Thats gotta be mod stuff guys.. no video game creator should ever punish a new player. It turns people off of your game. 

 

Think about that new guy, just bought dayz.. logs in, gets shot or killed immediately. 

 

Now he sees some timer that says, "You cannot spawn for X minutes." 

 

You and I both know how fucked up that would be. 

You misunderstand.

The re-spawn timer would be server specific and would only exist on private hive servers.

Brand new players who join a private hive server with an established community and a set death timer will have to suffer the consequences and play public hives while they're dead.

This sort of thing isn't for everyone, especially new players, that's true. It's for hardcore players who want a hardcore experience. If I have a clan on such a server, with a base, regular enemies, the whole shebang, and i get killed, it means that I stay dead on that server until the re-spawn timer is up. Because all my friends and stuff would be there, it would force me to play extremely cautiously lest I get killed.

[FlimFlamm 509]

21 hours ago, exwoll said:

Yup. I would gladly play in servers that have very long respawn timers (even days). As Idea there could be a "decreasing timer" with the highest point when you're a fresh-spawn  and decreasing a minute with every hour ingame.

Counter-intuitively, I would actually want fresh-spawns to have a shorter re-spawn timer. Here's why:

If the re-spawn timer shrinks the longer I'm alive, then once I'm an old player death no longer has a large penalty in terms of re-spawn time.

If I spawn in fresh, and then die quickly to campers or the environment, this would be very frustrating.

So, once you have stayed alive for over an hour (let's say), then it becomes somewhat more tolerable to inflict a larger re-spawn timer upon them.

Death is the great equalizer. I would rather not have longevity of life lessen the cost of death.

Edited March 28, 2017 by FlimFlamm

[Irish. 4886]

2 hours ago, FlimFlamm said:

-snip- * you misunderstood that I understood perfectly well what you meant. On that server, he will get that message. ;)

So, Mods.

=)

Edited March 28, 2017 by lrishjake
stuff

[exwoll 255]

2 hours ago, FlimFlamm said:

Counter-intuitively, I would actually want fresh-spawns to have a shorter re-spawn timer. Here's why:

If the re-spawn timer shrinks the longer I'm alive, the once I'm an old player death no longer has a large penalty in terms of re-spawn time.

If I spawn in fresh, and then die quickly to campers or the environment, this would be very frustrating.

So, once you have stayed alive for over an hour (let's say), then it becomes somewhat more tolerable to inflict a larger re-spawn timer upon them.

Death is the great equalizer. I would rather not have longevity of life lessen the cost of death.

I proposed the largest amount for fresh-spawns because they're usually the most suicidal ones. They have no loot, will have no soft skills, nothing to value their life, so they just gonna jump on anyone with more stuff. 

That and the usual suicides to get a better spawn.....

I believe that deaths by campers are far less common than the two cases mentioned above. 

Edited March 28, 2017 by exwoll

[Spidey (DayZ) 78]

I'm sorry for not having the time and the patience to read through the replies. I also skipped through the last parts of your post, as I felt like I already know what you wanted to point out (namely, base building and soft skills). With that, I agree completely.

 

And the other things you mentioned. The story part of the game, which corresponds to, as you said, the loot and the artistic side of the game, is really something the DAYZ SA is missing right now, but it was in the mod, at least to some extend.

 

I am talking about the piles of bodies scattered around the military camps or bases. But that's basically all there was, right?

 

For a comparison, I am going to take another survival multiplayer game - I won't mention the name, as I'm not sure if I would be breaking any rules or advertising another game or something. But I'm sure everyone will know what I'm talking about. It is very similar to DayZ, and it does some things better and some things worse. The thing is, if more people played this another game, in my opinion, it has a potential to be so much better than DayZ. However, the number of people playing just makes it not so much fun.

 

So in this game I'm comparing, they have exactly what DayZ is missing so much right now - the atmosphere, the story. When you walk into a building, you see SO MANY THINGS - okay, you cannot loot 95% of this, but just look at this:

 

In the other game: You see a house. You walk in, there's blood everywhere, furniture half-destroyed, a lot of mess on the ground - newspapers, clothes, boxes, scatered glasses, you name it. It looks as if someone has had a really gruesome, long fight with a zombie and then either died in the basement or ran away. The paintings on the walls are misplaced or hanging in a weird, damaged way, windows are sometimes broken and the fridge might be open.

In DayZ: You see a house. You walk in, there's blood everywhere. There's a bed and a closet. And that's it. There is absolutely nothing else. What the hell? It's like somebody literally called a packing company before the apocalypse started, calmly took all their furniture and EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN PIECE OF CLOTHES, JEWERLY, NEWSPAPER, MUGS, PLATES, EVERYTHING and just went away. And then they came back to just drop some bood on the ground. This is so unrealistic it just hurts me every time I walk into a "house". It is so fake. So so so fake. This needs to be changed. What is the art department doing? We don't need more colorful clothing loot. We need more things to look at in the environment.

 

I mean come on. Just look at the two pictures.

EDIT: Now when I'm back-reading my post, I realized I kind of attacked the devs. Didn't mean to "sh*t" on them. All I wanted to say is, they should put at least one person who would simply make things prettier - add details. And I believe it is one of the easiest things to do and wouldn't really hurt the FPS or anything. Just, you know. Put some wallpapers or paintings in the houses. Maybe some slightly different textures. A body here and there. Just things that you cannot interact with, and don't affect performance. I'm sure nothing extreme would have happened if you put like, say, a pile of clothes in half of the houses.

EDIT2: Okay, not paintings, there are some paintings here and there xD But you get the idea. Any small detail that makes the game more immersive. Literally anything. I would imagine plates (broken or not) with some food leftovers in the restaurant/cofee shop building that's in the bigger towns.

 

And bodies. Lots and lots and lots and LOTS of dead, bloody mutilated bodies. The big piles of bodies with flies in the DayZ mod were really atmospheric. I'd start with that.

But maybe I'm horribly wrong and this would require insane amounts of work. I have no idea about game development.

Edited April 7, 2017 by Spidey (DayZ)

[Irish. 4886]

I have to add a thought.. the way the game renders now, once you are inside a building, the outside stuff has no need to render unless you look out the window, etc.. 

 

Anyhow, it seems like this would directly tie into being able to add items inside of a house/building, without having a performance hit (the major issue in the past with doing much like this). So perhaps, this is all already planned stuff here?

I certainly hope so. All of Senchi's work on the map, would seem fruitless if once you entered a house it seemed so empty in comparison.

[dorn956 43]

On 4/7/2017 at 7:48 AM, Spidey (DayZ) said:

 

And bodies. Lots and lots and lots and LOTS of dead, bloody mutilated bodies. The big piles of bodies with flies in the DayZ mod were really atmospheric. I'd start with that.

But maybe I'm horribly wrong and this would require insane amounts of work. I have no idea about game development.

Lots of work. Lol. Lots.

The hardest part about level design in atmosphere is getting the lighting just right. You don't want it to adjust to your characters "eyes" too slow or too fast, you don't want the brightness to really have to be played with for people to enjoy the way the game looks, and then on top of that, every instance of lighting generally needs to be rendered at one time. Considering my maps on Unreal Engine 4 are the size of that picture you posted, and for preview lighting (let alone realistic setting) to render takes about 5 minutes. Realistic takes about 25 or so. So on such a grand scale (while also considering how changing the lighting in one area affects another) it could take hours to days, even weeks to render the lighting. But then again, I don't know what software they run or how good it is about rendering. I'm just comparing personal experience in there.

 

So as we all know, it's going to be lovely when more atmosphere comes to the game, but just as everyone and their mothers have stated: The devs need to make the game work before they make it pretty :P