Player Identification and Classification System

[Zymi 64]

I'd prefer customisable clothing within "realistic" constraints upon creating a new character that randomises before each selection. Then you can identify/remember a player by their appearance instead. I think the less aids we have the better.

I don't have anything against your suggestion, I think it would fit in nicely together with regular servers that use name tags.

[MrBrown (DayZ) 26]

I like this idea very much. I have one suggestion to take this system one step further: Give players the possibility to exchange information on peaceful encounters. Like if you spend time in close proximity of another player for some time period, his knowledge will slowly become part of your memory too, just simulating the smalltalk between the characters in the game. For this to be useful, the categories and their corresponding color would need to be fixed though, although I don't see this as a big drawback.

Then if you find a person somebody else has told you about, you would at least see how he categorized that player. The name of the player who gave you that information could be shown in brackets, so you know that's not your own categorization. But it would still be useful. Perhaps you don't really trust the categorization of that weird nut you walked some miles with, contrary to the categorization of a friend you regularly play with.

This mechanism would avoid that it's too easy to get rid of a bad reputation. You have to consider that as long as nobody observes a bandit killing another survivor, you won't have the chance to "flag" him in your character's memory. If he kills you, your memory would be gone along with your character. But IF you can observe a murder and tell other survivors about it and the information spreads, then that bandit will have a hard time playing wolf in sheep's clothing.

P.S.: An alternative, simplified approach:

Imagine a "gossip meter", which fills up whenever you have a human encounter where the people at least talk before shooting, don't shoot at all or perhaps even team up for some time. It would be a gameplay mechanic which mimics the ingame characters talking to each other like: "Yesterday I saw this psycho with that tatoo on his neck murder some fellow survivors in Elektro." The more people you interact and talk to, the more knowledge the ingame character gains about other people. More knowledge would make it more probable to identify those badass bandits you've heard so many horror stories about. Not through some artificial skin he wears, but just by heavy breathing, some indicator when you're looking at him, or whatever. The opposite would also be possible, like identifying someone as a good person who is well-known for helping other people out. If you didn't hear enough gossip, you get no indication.

I think that knowledge about other players should persist across different servers and also after a character dies, even though that would not exactly be realistic. If the player wants to change his image, it should take him some work. And if you have a very bad reputation, you'd have a hard time finding somebody who will let you come close with your blood bag to help.

But this leads to the problem: How to automatically identify "bad" or "inhuman" behavior? I'm not really sure myself, I just see this as a brainstorming session where the DayZ devs can pick some ideas from if they read it.

seems kind of complicated, not sure if it would work

The same could be said about DayZ as a whole. I think it would be worth to give it a try.

I'd prefer customisable clothing within "realistic" constraints upon creating a new character that randomises before each selection. Then you can identify/remember a player by their appearance instead. I think the less aids we have the better.

In reality people have different sizes, different shapes. Having different shirt colors and some baseball caps to choose from just isn't the same. We won't ever see a Bethesda-RPG-like character creation system in Day Z. And in reality some people can easily identified just by the specific way they run or walk, etc., but it's just technically impossible to get that into the game. And that's the point where the OP's suggestion comes in.

Edited August 1, 2012 by MrBrown

[SEF 0]

Im not sure if this idea cant be cheated, but any idea that gives consequences to one's actions is welcome to be tested. Right now bandits have only advantages in game, they are perfect in concept, collecting the spoils of war and fully disguised, while survivors that struggle to gear up and live without killing have...nothing. It makes more sense to me that any choosen way has its down and upsides.

In your idea what if clan players judge each other as good when they arent actually? What if somebody is lucky enough to flag one's kill as murder and actually that person was killing a bandit who you havent seen? What if people troll you by flagging you wrongly on purpose? And i guess 20 meters isnt far enough, maybe 50. Unless you have a scope or whatever tool, 20 meters far is likely to see a bullet coming than somebody(specially with friends) unaware of your presence.

Edited August 1, 2012 by SEF

[kieran.thorpe88@gmail.com 12]

absolutely great idea, not sure how it would be possible but if it was this is a cracker!

[kieran.thorpe88@gmail.com 12]

Im not sure if this idea cant be cheated, but any idea that gives consequences to one's actions is welcome to be tested. Right now bandits have only advantages in game, they are perfect in concept, collecting the spoils of war and fully disguised, while survivors that struggle to gear up and live without killing have...nothing. It makes more sense to me that any choosen way has its down and upsides.

In your idea what if clan players judge each other as good when they arent actually? What if somebody is lucky enough to flag one's kill as murder and actually that person was killing a bandit who you havent seen? What if people troll you by flagging you wrongly on purpose? And i guess 20 meters isnt far enough, maybe 50. Unless you have a scope or whatever tool, 20 meters far is likely to see a bullet coming than somebody(specially with friends) unaware of your presence.

youve not read it corectly mate, the flags are personal its how YOU categrize someone no1 else sees this just you

[MrBrown (DayZ) 26]

youve not read it corectly mate, the flags are personal its how YOU categrize someone no1 else sees this just you

While this is true, I think this is also problematic. It's just a too rare occurrence to randomly meet someone you've randomly met before without dying inbetween - but this is actually the only situation where the system outlined by the OP would be useful. To encourage cooperative survivor style gameplay, there needs to be a way to tell if that random encounter with a person you've never seen before is most likely a dangerous one or not, as unrealistic as it may be.

[kieran.thorpe88@gmail.com 12]

While this is true, I think this is also problematic. It's just a too rare occurrence to randomly meet someone you've randomly met before without dying inbetween - but this is actually the only situation where the system outlined by the OP would be useful. To encourage cooperative survivor style gameplay, there needs to be a way to tell if that random encounter with a person you've never seen before is most likely a dangerous one or not, as unrealistic as it may be.

i think maybe persistance through death then? rather than the tags you apply wipe on death they are always there?

[ZedsDeadBaby 2287]

While this is true, I think this is also problematic. It's just a too rare occurrence to randomly meet someone you've randomly met before without dying inbetween - but this is actually the only situation where the system outlined by the OP would be useful. To encourage cooperative survivor style gameplay, there needs to be a way to tell if that random encounter with a person you've never seen before is most likely a dangerous one or not, as unrealistic as it may be.

That's a problem for another thread, I'm afraid. This is just laying the groundwork for future additions and mechanics that enhance and expand on player identification.

To your point, though, I think you are right - in the current system of distributed private servers the usefulness of this mechanic would be undermined by the sheer vastness of the player base and their transient nature. But, I do not believe this server setup will be the final hosting solution for DayZ - especially when it goes stand-alone. I fully expect rocket to attempt to create a more persistent player community by devising a way to segregate the player base into smaller sub-sections to increase the odds that you interact with the same people more often. Something akin to WoW's "Battlegroups" where a subset of servers are combined - so a single instance of your player can travel between servers within the group freely, but not outside the group. This would vastly increase the usefulness of my system and others like it.

Though, in fairness to the concept even today, if you find a server you like and play there consistently I think you would be surprised how often you run into the same players. On my home server we have a long-standing rivalry with another clan who plays on the same server at roughly the same time and this has been going on for well over a month among the same ~20-30 players or so.

[MrBrown (DayZ) 26]

That's a problem for another thread, I'm afraid. This is just laying the groundwork for future additions and mechanics that enhance and expand on player identification.

Fair enough, I'll avoid going off-topic.

About the persistence, I think there should be a way for the information to "survive" the death of a single character to be really useful, even when servers or smaller communities with their own database become more common. For example a clan/squad system, where the "knowledge" is not stored per player but for the whole squad. Or some system where you can spread that knowledge to other players. So that they can give it back to your new character after death. If they want to.

[Heiduk 265]

I really like the idea of per character memories and think it would add a lot more attachment and value to the gray beards. I agree with those who are apposed to sharing memories though. It gives the clans one more thing to hoard and it isn't very realistic. It's well documented how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, especially when said witness was under stress. I also have a couple issues with the details of the system proposed here.

The main problem I see is that once you've IDed someone, any kind of automatic visual indicator puts the IDed player at a major disadvantage. Even if the system simulated your characters line-of-sight it will always be better at picking out those few pixels of the player's head peaking out from behind a bush than your eyes. Even just a text message in the log, "So and so is nearby", puts you on alert when you might not be otherwise.

The proposal addresses this by limiting the range at which indicators can be applied and seen. This is certainly necessary, but what should the range be? Ignoring optics, if we go with 20 m, realistically the only players you will ever tag are Friends and maybe Acquaintances. 99 out of 100 times if you are 20 m from an Enemy only one of you will be walking away. Unfortunately, the more you increase the range the less it mitigates the disadvantage to the other player. Given that most engagements occur at fairly long ranges, most players probably won't risk trying to get within 20 m to ID a player. They will either attack or retreat.

With these issues in mind I propose two modifications.

First, the IDed player's tag should not be shown automatically when within range. To see the tag you should have to hover the cursor over the player for a couple of seconds before it is displayed, just like when you are initially applying it. This, along with LOS checking, would help reduce the perfect computer vision problem. It also means you still need to mentally keep track of your buddies to prevent friendly fire casualties during group operations.

Second, I think the previously proposed "consensual tag" sharing would work better than being able to tag everyone you meet. For one thing, I don't think you would really lose any granularity. As noted before, in practice I think you would end up with only two groups no matter what: Friends and Everybody Else. In addition, giving someone your tag becomes an overt sign of trust, something that is sorely lacking at the moment. One issue I see with this is that it doesn't necessarily remove the strong incentive to befriend someone then shoot them in the back. After all it doesn't matter if I gave you my tag if you're dead. Maybe that's not a problem, but I do think that we are generally better at reading the intentions of people in real life than we are over VOIP. It's a little gamey, but to compensate perhaps a respawn could remember the name of his killer, if that killer was a Friend?

As a side effect of those two changes I think you could safely increase the ID range to a more useful, and realistic, value. I might not be able to see their face but I can pretty easily recognize my friends, based on body type how they move etc., at 100-200 m and significantly more under the right conditions.

Thoughts?

[CLewis 31]

First of, I think this is a great idea and is something that is missing in the game.

I (like many others) have had ideas along those lines too, but with some tweeks:

I think memory should be timed. The memory time could be 10,20 or 30 hours or something (tested by devs and players for balance). I also think that memories should fade after the first meeting (unless you stay within a certain distance), but be "recharged" every time you meet.

I really like the idea of permadeath, and think that death should suck balls. Keeping the memories after death would be more to my likeing, but either way is good to me.

If you only remember those you tagged as friendly, it wouldn't really have a negative impact on bandits, i.e. no punishment for killing you (wich is good). For this to work then if someone kills you, who you had tagged as friendly, the tag would automaticly be cleared.

This way loners have just a little bit of help with trusting strangers, and groups would be able to recognize each other. (Win-win?)

A little bit of gamey elements, to create a somewhat realistic recognizion system.

Just my thoughts.

EDIT: @Heiduk I like your ideas. They would fit in well with the realism/authentisity the game/community is looking for. Remembering the killer is a hard one to sell, because many would see it as a punishment for a certain behavior.

Edited August 1, 2012 by CLewis

[Heiduk 265]

EDIT: @Heiduk I like your ideas. They would fit in well with the realism/authentisity the game/community is looking for. Remembering the killer is a hard one to sell, because many would see it as a punishment for a certain behavior.

I agree about the hard sell, I'm not even sure if I like it, but it's all I could come up with. I do tend to think that if the goal is an authentic experience people should have to think a little more before betraying someone. Even if it's someone you just met, I think, for most people, it is much easier to betray some pixels and a voice on the phone than a real person.

[indominator 95]

it would not work because nobody would care, the murder skin was better because you could see the murderer, and without a easy to identify stuff without too much bother the player is afraid of anyone, also u should play with friends and be wary of strangers, just shoot them

[BryceAroni 2]

It seems like a well thought out idea, and not a bad one. I just don't see how that would change anything...(KoS). I'm fairly new to the game, didn't get a chance to see the bandit skin be implemented. Although when I come to the forms it looks like its segregated into Survivors Vs. Bandits, I think they should make the game that way. It's that simple lol, I do however like your idea for adding additional info to the players

[Vigilance 9]

First of, I think this is a great idea and is something that is missing in the game.

I (like many others) have had ideas along those lines too, but with some tweeks:

I think memory should be timed. The memory time could be 10,20 or 30 hours or something (tested by devs and players for balance). I also think that memories should fade after the first meeting (unless you stay within a certain distance), but be "recharged" every time you meet.

I really like the idea of permadeath, and think that death should suck balls. Keeping the memories after death would be more to my likeing, but either way is good to me.

If you only remember those you tagged as friendly, it wouldn't really have a negative impact on bandits, i.e. no punishment for killing you (wich is good). For this to work then if someone kills you, who you had tagged as friendly, the tag would automaticly be cleared.

This way loners have just a little bit of help with trusting strangers, and groups would be able to recognize each other. (Win-win?)

A little bit of gamey elements, to create a somewhat realistic recognizion system.

Just my thoughts.

EDIT: @Heiduk I like your ideas. They would fit in well with the realism/authentisity the game/community is looking for. Remembering the killer is a hard one to sell, because many would see it as a punishment for a certain behavior.

Take a look at my familiarity player identification post. It has what you're looking for. Memory of other players to grow over time based on proximity and visibility. Higher familiarity meaning username displays at greater distances. And memory fade over time is considered as well.

While tagging is useful, the primary issue is a non-morality based means of identifying players given skins can only do so much, so simulating memory seems the solution. The base idea can be done in the current DayZ I believe.

[Heiduk 265]

Although when I come to the forms it looks like its segregated into Survivors Vs. Bandits, I think they should make the game that way. It's that simple lol,

I not so sure it is, people may claim the Bandit or Survivor flag but there are a lot of shades of gray in between. As others have said there are no innocents in DayZ. This is something a bandit skin system will never be able to capture. It's also an aspect of the game I really like. In real life the line between the good guys and the bad guys is rarely clear cut and by taking a mostly hands off approach DayZ does a reasonable job of simulating that.

I like this proposal becuase, if implemented well, it could increase the complexity of social interactions beyond simple deathmatch without taking away your choice to play a character that is black, white, medium gray, or anything inbetween.

[Slpy 10]

Hey,

I really like the idea, mainly because it adds another kind of goal to the game, and indeed adds another incentive to survival.

Personally, I really tried to avoid being killed once I had 'ok' gear on me, then some day I died trying to climb down a ladder but instead kind of jumped while still being attached to the ladder, losing a lot of stuff gathered over several ingame hours of playing.

Needless to say I was kinda furious, stopped playing DayZ that day, as it was kind of my first death, having more than a makarov/lee enfield, the next day I managed to get almost equal equipment within 2 hours of playing, and at that point my behaviour changed drastically. I just sprint through towns, kill zombies indoors, then sprint around some more, no sneaking if not really necessary. I don't really care about other players either, bandits or survivors, doesn't matter, I"m thinking, if I die, I'll just start another run and I'll have my equip back within 1 maybe 2 hours, no problem.

So I really like your idea, it would actually change my behaviour in the game again, for the better, as I would try harder to survive.

Anyways, as Vigilance said, I think it would be most useful to have just 3 categories within mousewheel-options, maybe with the added ability to later change it, and/or add notes to it, as this would decrease the time you would have to spend while close to another still unknown player.

I also thought about adding another item to the game, for this feature, a kind of notepad.

In this notepad your identifications are saved, kind of like diary maybe, with the option to write additional stuff into it, if you so please.

It could be lootable, maybe taking up a slot in your toolbelt, that might also open up possible decisions about identifications being wiped upon death, or even information trading.

Say you have your notepad in your toolbelt, identified about 23 different players, who are all on that notepad, you get killed, someone loots your rotting corpse, finds your notepad, either takes it or adds it's content to his own notepad.

You might be able to retrieve your own notepad from your body, or a friend could loot it and hand it back to you, or trade it back to you.

Just some food for thought I guess, but again, I really like this idea, it would add more depth to this game.

And to all those crying it would not make any difference because you will probably die within 30-40 minutes of playing, so what?!

Don't use it than, it's optional, you know about that strategy where you gather a hunting knife, a hatched, a box of matches, a water bottle and then go and live in the woods?

Yeah that's optional as well, doesn't mean you have to do it.

But I think that if you would actually manage to not die at the first sight of anything that moves, and actually live for maybe a whole day, you might appreciate this 'possible' feature.

Edited August 3, 2012 by Slpy

[Vigilance 9]

it would not work because nobody would care, the murder skin was better because you could see the murderer, and without a easy to identify stuff without too much bother the player is afraid of anyone, also u should play with friends and be wary of strangers, just shoot them

You should always be wary of strangers whatever skin they wear. Bandit skin doesn't prove someone is a murderer if they kill in self defense. Your argument to just shoot strangers practically guarantees you will look like a murderer as you put it, and be shot in kind.

One solution is to display usernames on familiar characters according to how long you hang around them. Being branded when you kill a player is magical and unrealistic. Either you witnessed a murder or you didn't.

[RyuTakbir 1]

For this to work in a easier fashion it would probably be good to make a "party" or "group" system. Where you can "invite" people to your group and if they accept then your familiarity raises.

It would be a lot easier to make it raise that way because parties could be range based as well. Like you can have 10 friends in a party and 5 are around you (50 meters or so) while some are further away. Those that are away (maybe camping some hill) wouldn't get the familiarity bonus but you could still define them as friendlies.

If you just make it a visibility thing its kinda lame. Because you don't have to look at a person for hours to remember him. Maybe just interacting with him, like running, looting, healing etc could have a better effect at remembering someone better. That way you can run next to eachother and still gain the faimiliarity without having to stare at each other all the time.

Also the whole introduction thing can be done by yourself or by meeting people ingame. Like when you are close enough to someone you can "Attempt handshake" to identify someone, and if they accept they can say their real name, or fake name or just not want to meet at all. That could also display some kind of untrust towards you. And maybe if you meet someone else who knows that guy already and he knows his real name you could find out he lied? There could be so many mechanics, but it would be such a pain in the ass to implement all this and to iron out the issues :D

[kurozael 22]

This is a fantastic idea. So long as your "tag" for a certain player is reset when that player dies, and similarly another player's tagging of you would reset when you die.

I hope to see this implemented, and for players being able to set what message others see, this would be great for roleplaying. e.g: I could set my description to "A tall white spotty male wearing a suit", and other players would see the "tag" when they look at me.

[kurozael 22]

Say you have your notepad in your toolbelt, identified about 23 different players, who are all on that notepad, you get killed, someone loots your rotting corpse, finds your notepad, either takes it or adds it's content to his own notepad.

You might be able to retrieve your own notepad from your body, or a friend could loot it and hand it back to you, or trade it back to you.

This is brilliant, and other players can loot the notepad and see your list of "tagged" people.

[MrBrown (DayZ) 26]

One solution is to display usernames on familiar characters according to how long you hang around them. Being branded when you kill a player is magical and unrealistic. Either you witnessed a murder or you didn't.

The far too low inhibition threshold when killing people in a game (compared to killing people in real life) is MUCH more unrealistic than any "branding" could ever be.

[BrettHarrenton 29]

One of the dumbest ideas ever posted as it is in the upmost unrealistic and adds extra bullshit hud.

[Bjorn9486 9]

One of the dumbest ideas ever posted as it is in the upmost unrealistic and adds extra bullshit hud.

You don't have to use it you know...

[ZedsDeadBaby 2287]

it would not work because nobody would care, the murder skin was better because you could see the murderer, and without a easy to identify stuff without too much bother the player is afraid of anyone, also u should play with friends and be wary of strangers, just shoot them

The general philosophy here is that we might be able to bring some diversity and variation into the human encounters in the game. Right now we have "best friends" or "just shoot them" and not much of interest going on in between. It's very black and white which means it will inevitably be two things: predictable and boring.

If we can enhance player identification and squad mechanics, the social dynamic of the game can be elevated to include more than two sides and get a little more complex than "friend or foe."

You could establish peaceful alliances with other clans - no friendship, but a negotiated cease fire. You could target particular clans who have wronged you in the past for a long-term military campaign spanning multiple servers. You could take note of any survivors you helped out when they were young and be surprised when you find them again alive a month later and think about the role you played in their survival, etc.

Yes, plenty of people will ignore this feature altogether and just shoot the living shit out of everyone they see like they always have been, but the presence of a system like this would allow those who are interested to explore a bit more depth in the human interactions in the game.

And remember, I'm not necessarily interested in how this idea would work in DayZ at it exists today, but how it might incorporate into the larger list of changes that are coming up (in the stand-alone game especially) and how some of these features might work in the bigger picture. Just slapping this on top of the Alpha as it exists now would probably not work quite as well, especially given the transient nature of servers and their player bases/player lists.

Edited August 9, 2012 by ZedsDeadBaby