Fluffy bases.

[Parazight 1599]

Bases are fluff.  They're a time sink, and that's great for players, but they're not reliable or a tier 1 activity to advance your character.  Especially in vanilla public servers.  Community or Official.

Overlooking bugs and just focusing on the holistic design and scope of the title this becomes clear.  Let's compare some things.

Bases, Hidden Stashes, secondary accounts.  Bases can be fun to build.  It's something to socialize over and this is important.  But it's not practical.  Destroying things is quicker and easier than building.  All it takes is one bad apple to taint the whole pie.  Hidden stashes are much more secure, harder to find, quicker to establish, and generally, much more practical.  You can find Sea Chests on the coast, in cargo containers.  Along with Drybags, they're the premier choice for storage.  You can fit four assault rifles and eight mags into a sea chest.  You can store assault rifles in Drybags.  And you can hide them almost anywhere.  Hidden stashes seem overpowered, by a huge margin.  If you have important items that you don't want to lose, you don't hide them in your base.  Beyond that, the very best storage device is a second account.  You create another player and store items there.  Hidden Stashes and additional accounts completely negate permadeath.  Is this a problem though?  I guess I'm not sure.  What about secondary skills, will they be able to mitigate losses?

Public hives vs. private shards.  It's going to be very obvious, very quickly, in public servers, that ghosting into bases will be a real problem.  I've yet to see an official response with a solution that sounds like it will solve this problem.

Security; bases vs. non-bases.  All other forms of storage are mobile, easily placed, or well hidden.  Evil do-ers, pirates, hackers, and lowlifes of all kinds, throughout history, in every aspect of life, are always one step ahead of the good people.  It's been a constant struggle, since the beginning of forever, for the good and righteous to circumvent the dastardly cleverness of people trying to take advantage of other people.   It's always been easier and more profitable to take advantage of people than to follow ridiculous notions of morals.  So what does this mean for DayZ, the land where breaking morals has no consequence?  I'm not sure, but the only solution probably lies in a mechanic that isn't authentic to the title's intended experience.

 

I guess, that's kind of the problem base-building faces.  So, what can be done?  Probably not a lot before 1.0.  And that's okay!!

I didn't want to start a thread and complain without spit-balling some potential solutions.  The first solution is to only play on private, whitelisted shards.  This seems boring.  Another might be to introduce mechanics for base destroying that involve multiple players.  This might hedge it a little.  Maybe limit base building structures to one per character.  Maybe make them invulnerable.   Mechanics tied to items that are bound to a specific IP address/server might be a possibility.  Hopefully there are other solutions.  I don't have them, but it seems obvious that they're needed.

What do you plan on doing?  How much will you invest into bases? Thoughts?

[gizzlembos 2]

Yep, right now buried stuff is a lot safer, and it makes sense to stay like that because you will always see a base before a buried chest. But we really need more incentives to base-building and solutions to server-hopping. 

Some partial solutions that comes to my mind:

• Some AI guards protecting the base (reparable drons or mercs)
• Hidden death-traps. We kinda already have some but we probably need some more options if we have to protect the base with only that. 
• Some kind of new lockable-storage/strongbox opened by password or id-card and only breakable by strong explosives.

 

[Tarkules 153]

• We should be able to train a wolf and put it on guard when needed, or take it with us for hunting / journeys.
• Barbed Wires are supposed to keep a distance from you and the fence, so you won't be able to interact with it, but you will need to use pliers first to get rid of them, and then an axe to destroy the fence.
• When you destroy a fence - Instead of having an option to destroy the entire fence, you should be prompted to destroy each plank or metal sheet in the fence, so you''ll need to destroy them piece by piece to be able to get through.
• You should be able to build an Underground Storage Unit inside the base - using wood, metal and the right tools, to store your item. For example: you place the kit wherever you want to build it, then you dig it (should take a long time, or multiple excavations to complete this step) so you create a big hole, then add wood and metal sheets and nails and build it once. The final structure should have 2 appearances: Covered and Uncovered. And you use a shovel to hide (cover) it. And you should be able to place anything on top of it. Otherwise it's not really practical. Also, this structure should be an underground option for watchtowers, so it could save you a lot of space and allow more flexible designs. Just a thought :)

Edited November 30, 2018 by Tarkules

[cirkular 178]

It's good to be thinking about this.

I can't think of a reason for the base except to secure a clean water source, and have a safe farming zone for food source.

As far as protecting/attacking bases, I have sort of real couple of scenarios in mind:

If I'm building a base at all, I'd want it to be really secure while I'm not there, on the other side of the map. If I'm building it with a group of friends, and we need to go out to scavenge for some more supplies, two can leave and do it, the others can remain and guard the base and do some other useful things in there. So that's kind of solved then. If I'm alone, it's logically tougher to deal with it. I understand that that's why the coded lock got introduced into the game. But it's still not really impossible to break in, right? I mean nothing and no one is safe in such an environment as Chernarus is. Put some barbed wire, fences, but they can be cut through, fences and walls can be vaulted over (when and if climbing mechanics get into the game). Get those gas canister and set their wall on fire. If we get electrical fences, that could be quite a challenge then. And then, it should be a challenge to set it up in the first place.

On the other hand, if I'm / we're breaking into someone's base, I'd rather try to take it over. Why bother destroying something already usable? We just need to get rid of the owners. If I'm just a raider, I only care for eating their food and all the good loot I can take away with me. This is where all the ideas and solutions of breaking into a base should come to mind. So the same as above: some pliers or other tools, chainsaw, even explosives. Why don't we have simple explosives yet (except grenades and mines so far)? For some reason, there are no glass bottles in game. Gasoline is there, rags are there but we still can't make molotov cocktails. Anyway, it would all come to finding a point of easy breach and I wouldn't like it to be this limited. Basebuilding opened up so much more questions and issues.

Now, I have another idea with a couple of different scenarios again:

First I am still not clear how far the devs have been thinking through about this whole feature as it is now and what they have in mind for the future. I think there has to be some kind of a building start up process, menu or prompt. Then, whoever starts the base building, he will be registered as its owner. Since we don't have some simple teaming up mechanic with nature of a game such as Dayz, he should then be able to assign his friends as owners too, similar to admin and moderator thing on the forums,  various internet groups etc. Now, the reason for all this is that eventually all of the basebuilding group has to leave the game at some point. We can't expect the players to guard this base in shifts. If the base stays there as a persistent thing on the server, with all the different amounts of hours we cat put into the game and timezones, I think that's kind of unbalanced between real life and a game and unfair. Remember how you set up tent camps and come back the next day to find it's looted. If you're lucky, you'd get a note from the visitor thanking you for the gear. It's not really safe to just have to leave the base locked up at best and not being able to do anything else about it for x amount of hours or days. It's better to have some feature that will save your base with you when you log off. When you log back in, you are prompted to put it back there at the same exact spot if you want, or if deemed unsafe at the moment, use these saved finished assets to build your base at a later point or somewhere else together with farms etc. I think this should all be saved with all your registered owners characters databases on the server. The base thing gets updated for all the registered owner characters, if for some reason some owners are not present at the next play session. If all the registered owners die before they put back the base at the old or new location, they loose all their assets, like with the gear.

I'd like to hear from anyone what I'm missing, and what would not work with this.

[PandahFistophacleezeSykes 12]

Devs have said many times during this long ass journey that ghosting into bases will be prevented by using a simple “teleport to nearest area if inside X area with base” feature that they could code in .

 

Dont ask me which status reports it’s in because there’s too much junk on this forums to keep track , but it was said multiple times that this could be an easy solution for that issue .

 

[Guy Smiley 534]

Whatever happened to the "we're not going with base building but more of a fortification" stance from the devs?  Guess all the kicking and screaming paid off

[pilgrim* 3514]

16 hours ago, PandahFistophacleezeSykes said:

many times during this long ass journey

Only 56 posts in the whole 26 days since you joined sure is a long ass journey.. 

the Status reports are all under <<Focused Feedback & Status Reports>>  ( under FORUMS at the top left of this page )
do a search on "ghosting" in that section, you'll see the word occurs 9 times total

wont take you hardly 30 seconds

Edited December 2, 2018 by pilgrim*
~

[pilgrim* 3514]

problems with playing "Bases"

1) either you're not there, not even logged in
2) or you're inside and the enemy is outside

both of those are bad places to be

 

[Buakaw 274]

I was already voicing the exact thoughts 1 or 2 years ago when basebuilding was announced. Noone wanted to talk about it.

It's a nice timekiller I suppose, but it will never be as effective as a hidden barrel, treasure box or second account (the last one being the .. ahem... unmanliest option).

For me what would make dayz interesting longterm is only chase items, such as very rare weapons from random events like helicrashes. That and survival, raw survival. Like, actual reasons to go X places, say because only in X place you can find Y item. Your own story.

In the current state of the game, even when I try hard to have a spontaneous adventure, it is always the same: run towards NWAF and get military gear, becasue nothing else works or has a purpose right now.

I think the question of "lategame" and meta is one the devs themselves have struggled to or entirely failed to answer themselves, at least in my opinion. You could see the uncertainty when Brian Hicks was still on the project and talking, with utmost uncertainty and very wagely, about changing the spawn system around or creating/adapting things from a game like Rust, which nails the whole longevity/persistence part. Now obviously they can't add sleeping bags to Dayz so that is out of question.

Ultimately, the possible playstyles are very nuanced, but don't differ much from each other. You can be a hunter survivalist, but it is not necessary. In the end it is always run inlands, get geared, die eventually.

 

Edited December 3, 2018 by Buakaw