Server hopping suggestion

[ThePugman 280]

Regarding the new server hopping mechanic. I, and many others feel it’s crazy to end up back on the coast. Once again, legitimate players are being penalised for the way others use exploits.

Whats the point in sharing the same hive (something you’ve always insisted you want to keep) when you put in a huge change that puts people off using it? i.e meeting friends, or to escape the night?

I think the new mechanic would be fine, if it kicked in the SECOND time you server hopped, in a certain time frame. You shouldn’t be penalised so harshly for hopping once. This would still prevent ghosting, since they need to hop twice to do it. 

Is it to prevent duping? To put people as far away from their ‘dropped’ loot because I don’t think it will make that much difference, since dupers just need a squad member to pick it up for them.

This issue will barely affect my gameplay, since I play on community, but we all want the balance to be correct. This could affect the player count in the long run.

Don’t get me started on the people abusing the system to ‘teleport’... Which you know they’ll do. The words ‘running simulator’ are often thrown at this game, and if people can skip an hour long journey, they will. Doesn’t realism matter, in this sense? 

 

In my opinion, there should be spawn points in every town (which you cannot build around). When your server hop, you should spawn to the nearest town, or designated spawn location.

[ICEMAN-FMCS 69]

Check this post out, much better solution.

Edited June 28, 2019 by ICEMAN-FMCS

[Lee Hafer 3]

Main reason people server hop is to escape from the night it is way too dark . The other reason is to jump in bases and that sucks alot. 

[ImpulZ 2491]

Let's go through some points here that we had to consider when coming to our solution.

Why change the spawn? Because players were able to abuse it to get inside bases, precisely change their positions during combat or be close to their gear when abusing it to dupe.

Why change it drastically? Because players were abusing the mechanic to hop across servers to loot several military bases. A 50-200 meter spawn move would end up pretty random and still not help this cause.

Where did we put the hopping spawns? The new spawns are not too close to the respawn points of new players. And while new players have less to lose, geared players can be in danger. We've also changed the respawn points, so that new players have better spawns than hoppers.

Can the system be abused to teleport? Maybe. But we've scattered the spawn points in separate areas along the coast, so those players would have to go through the effort of hopping multiple times (each with a spawntimer of 75 secs plus) just to spawn at some coastal area without any gain.

The goal is that players stay longer on one server and only switch if they want to join a friends' server. This will hopefully help to establish more server-specific rivalry, especially as bases gain security now. If players use server-hopping to get an easier game experience by escaping night or rain, that's not something we can prioritise over obvious exploits.

[Lt.Master 78]

3 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

Let's go through some points here that we had to consider when coming to our solution.

Why change the spawn? Because players were able to abuse it to get inside bases, precisely change their positions during combat or be close to their gear when abusing it to dupe.

Why change it drastically? Because players were abusing the mechanic to hop across servers to loot several military bases. A 50-200 meter spawn move would end up pretty random and still not help this cause.

Where did we put the hopping spawns? The new spawns are not too close to the respawn points of new players. And while new players have less to lose, geared players can be in danger. We've also changed the respawn points, so that new players have better spawns than hoppers.

Can the system be abused to teleport? Maybe. But we've scattered the spawn points in separate areas along the coast, so those players would have to go through the effort of hopping multiple times (each with a spawntimer of 75 secs plus) just to spawn at some coastal area without any gain.

The goal is that players stay longer on one server and only switch if they want to join a friends' server. This will hopefully help to establish more server-specific rivalry, especially as bases gain security now. If players use server-hopping to get an easier game experience by escaping night or rain, that's not something we can prioritise over obvious exploits.

Thanks a lot for the explenation 🙂

The system in place fix the problem for good indeed. I just think it's sad that a player who just want to switch server because the server crashed or suddenly dropped to night time without any warning after a reboot have to be penalize that much. But it's only the smallest piece of the cake... And the night/rain is not as a much a problem like we had in 1.0...

If you want to keep this system or something near the one we have currently, could you try to make the new players aware a bit better ? Something telling them "hey if you join this server, be carefull to not join another after" (first time he join a server for example) or a "are you sure ?" to alert the player just before he try to join a new server.

We can join the server with the "play" button but it's harder to see our current server with the server browser. Even if you want them to use the first option, it would be cool to see a new icon or a different background color... Something to tell the player "hey this is the server you played last time with this character named xxxx".

I'm just throwing ideas to reduce the bad surprise for the new players and the clumsy players 😉

Edited June 28, 2019 by Lt.Master

[ImpulZ 2491]

14 minutes ago, Lt.Master said:

without any warning after a reboot have to be penalize that much.

That is not the case. Players have at least 75 seconds to decide otherwise, with a warning right in front of them. When you press "Leave" you get back to the server selection without any repercussions.

But it becomes apparent that this is not enough to explain this behaviour to players, so we are currently discussing if we need to force the player to confirm a pop-up. 🙂

[Lt.Master 78]

11 minutes ago, ImpulZ said:

That is not the case. Players have at least 75 seconds to decide otherwise, with a warning right in front of them. When you press "Leave" you get back to the server selection without any repercussions.

But it becomes apparent that this is not enough to explain this behaviour to players, so we are currently discussing if we need to force the player to confirm a pop-up. 🙂

I know you have implemented this warning box while joinning a server and it probably helped in a lot of situations. But lot of players are used to this background with the queue or the cooldown... We all saw someone pressed the join button and leave the mic to get a snack 😉

To make it quick, I just think we need a warning box before joinning a new server. Something like a pop-up should do the job to prevent any mistake and to make the navigation better while in the main menu.

Edited June 28, 2019 by Lt.Master

[drgullen 596]

8 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

The goal is that players stay longer on one server and only switch if they want to join a friends' server. This will hopefully help to establish more server-specific rivalry, especially as bases gain security now. If players use server-hopping to get an easier game experience by escaping night or rain, that's not something we can prioritise over obvious exploits.

If this is truly the goal, why not just get rid of the hive system altogether?

Those of us who are not base raiders/destroyers or loot dupers or any other kind of cheater are suffering from this solution -- I should not have to be placed somewhere back on the coast if I have been "playing the game properly" and have made it all the way up to the northern part of the map, for example.  You've solved the hopping problem by creating a new problem for those genuinely not hopping.  I'm sorry, this is not a good solution.

[Lt.Master 78]

59 minutes ago, drgullen said:

If this is truly the goal, why not just get rid of the hive system altogether?

Those of us who are not base raiders/destroyers or loot dupers or any other kind of cheater are suffering from this solution -- I should not have to be placed somewhere back on the coast if I have been "playing the game properly" and have made it all the way up to the northern part of the map, for example.  You've solved the hopping problem by creating a new problem for those genuinely not hopping.  I'm sorry, this is not a good solution.

And if "playing the game properly" changed in this version ? What if the devs wants you to choose a server, settle on this server and stay ?

Rust was looking for a long time to do something similar by allowing players to switch server. The goal was to let the player settle in, loot and survive.... If he was looking to raid he would have 2 choices, raid on his own island or to raid another island. He wouldn't be able to predict where he would spawn in the new server or on his server at his return.

Now in Dayz ? We choose a server, loot and make a base in the same server. We switch server if we want to raid/pvp on another server but we need to regroup (in rust we would have to create a boat to prepare ourself instead of reprouping). So what is wrong ? We have to change our mind of how we use servers and we need to protect the players from any mistakes. If we don't want players who played the game properly we need to protect them from themself. This solution as you said erradicate dupers, hoppers, ghosters who try to exploit the game. As we try to exploit the game by switching server because the night/rain is coming... And if you switched server....

First of... Why did you tryed ? Just think about it ! If I ask to anyone in my discord I'll get a awnser related to exploit the game in a way or another (the night for example.... Why were they all empty 😉). 

What do we lose ? The ability to loot Tisy on 10 servers ?

What do we win ? No ghosting, no destroyers, no server hoppers.... Base are a bit safer and we are now forced to play in night time.

Second of.... By mistake ? This is the part I'll tweak, what we want is to prevent any mistakes by the player. He need to be aware of what he is going to do before even doing it. He need to know what is going to happen if he join for the first time of his life a server.

When you play Rust, you plan to play with your friends to play on the same server right ? This is what they want you to do. And until someone give us the ultimate solution, I prefer to talk about how we can improve in instead of making another one. All the ideas I saw to "fix" the current system have bigger flaws, for not the best thing to do is to improve this update instead of redoing it ^^

[ImageCtrl 719]

10 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

Let's go through some points here that we had to consider when coming to our solution.

Why change the spawn? Because players were able to abuse it to get inside bases, precisely change their positions during combat or be close to their gear when abusing it to dupe.

Why change it drastically? Because players were abusing the mechanic to hop across servers to loot several military bases. A 50-200 meter spawn move would end up pretty random and still not help this cause.

Where did we put the hopping spawns? The new spawns are not too close to the respawn points of new players. And while new players have less to lose, geared players can be in danger. We've also changed the respawn points, so that new players have better spawns than hoppers. 

Can the system be abused to teleport? Maybe. But we've scattered the spawn points in separate areas along the coast, so those players would have to go through the effort of hopping multiple times (each with a spawntimer of 75 secs plus) just to spawn at some coastal area without any gain.

The goal is that players stay longer on one server and only switch if they want to join a friends' server. This will hopefully help to establish more server-specific rivalry, especially as bases gain security now. If players use server-hopping to get an easier game experience by escaping night or rain, that's not something we can prioritise over obvious exploits.

 

10 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

We've also changed the respawn points, so that new players have better spawns than hoppers.

Sounds solid. I like it.

 

 

 

[ICEMAN-FMCS 69]

For all to read..

A better solution

[Deadboy (DayZ) 21]

I cannot overstate how much I think this is overshooting. ImpulZ, I've opened a ticket at the feedback tracker a while ago. So I don't spam or repeat everything all over again, can I ask -- would you please take a look. The changes made -- I believe they hurt the game especially for beginners, newer or more casual players, but this also a completely unnecessary annoyance for anyone who simply wants to enjoy hive play. Not to abuse it. There should really be other ways to deal with this. At the very, very least, I would like to be able to at least ONCE a day, jump on a different server without losing all the progress I've traveled.

https://feedback.bistudio.com/T141513

[ThePugman 280]

@ImpulZ Thanks for the lengthy response, dude. Actually, after writing my post, I did think about the fact that players could spawn anywhere from Balota to Berizinho (I presume?), which makes teleporting to specific places quite difficult.

I suppose we won’t know the true scale of the effects until 1.04 hits console (due to sheer numbers of public players) so it may be too early to criticise, anyway.

I do agree with @Deadboy (DayZ) who says we should be allowed to swap servers unpenalised ONCE every few hours, or even once day.

Also, I’ve seen the mechanic kick in when there have been several days between play sessions. That seems strange. MrBlackout, for example, played last Friday. When he played again the following week (Tuesday), he spawned in on the coast. This seems unnecessary for the purpose it serves. It should reset after at least 24 hours. 

Your post definitely helps explain the reasons behind your decisions. You’d be amazed at how helpful that is to us players. We don’t like being left in the dark on big changes like this.