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SwiftSpear

The Sociopathy problem

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I just wanted to draw attention to the split between DayZ and a hypothetical real world apocolypse scenario, and why DayZ encourages sociopathic murder.

Stashes:

- Real world: If you kill someone, you probably will never find their stash. People in the real world would be unlikely to carry everything they own on them, as it makes them a target, and it's heavy. "Tents" would be the universal standard, NOT rare. Everyone would have a home base somewhere, most would probably be houses and buildings, hidden cellars, crawl spaces.

- Dayz world: If you kill someone, you now get everything they own, unless the rare chance they had a tent occurs. Don't worry, the tent disappears if they die anyways, so might as well not be concerned with it. The survivor has really good stuff anyways. Take your chance or someone else will.

Loot:

- Real world: The biggest jackpots are entirely likely to be in the world, as opposed to on the bodies of other suriviors. Loot stashes hidden by others. Locked premises with shops, grocers, warehouses. These places may be guarded by others, but at any given time, most property will not be on the person of another individual.

- Dayz world: Every world jackpot is moderate or disappointing. Your survive by dropping by many locations collecting bits and bobs here and there. Consequently, any survivor who has taken 3 or more stops, probably has a better loot loadout than almost ANY world spawn. The best loot is ALMOST ALWAYS on the person of another survivor. It makes them the ideal target. Why waste your time doing work someone else will do for you?

Revenge:

- Real world: You can track someone through the woods, you can meet with your community and negotiate mutual protection, if someone is identified, everyone knows it and no one will willingly become victim to the same individual. There is substantial evidence of any given crime being committed, the murderer can be tracked down after the fact in many instances. If someone is caught they will probably be punished by death, and are no longer alive to commit the crime again.

- Dayz world: Server populations are small and constantly cycling, the individual who was the worst offender at one place, might disappear an hour later to the point where they might as well have never existed. Because a victim respawns, they can easily identify their killer, but even if they killer is caught and killed, he will simply respawn, and has no reason to not kill next time. You're more likely to be killed for selfish reasons anyways, why fear revenge? Server populations are too variable and small to make community justice realistic in any but the most contrived scenarios.

Fun:

- Real world: Don't get me wrong, I like fun, but in the real world I'm not going to take stupid life risking moves on a regular basis. Especially not in the name of fun, and not when messing up might mean a gruesome death in pain over a two day long period rotting in some hole with a broken leg and slowly wilting out. Survival would ALWAYS be #1 priority, I'd sneak around on my belly for 3 hours in a town if it meant I stayed a little safer. Unnecessary risks would be, for most people, kept to a minimum, except in cases of extreme desperation.

- Dayz world: At the end of the Day, DayZ is a game, it needs to be fun. The biggest risk is always loss of all your loot, weather that's from death or swimming. There's no such thing as a real slow and painful death, let alone a real game over. Watch almost any DayZ livestreamer. You VERY rarely see hours of crawling around for pennies. Most of them stick to the high player conflict areas where risk and reward is high... simply put, that's really the only way right now to speed the game up, to show off the interesting parts of the game, to have a good chance of something legitimately fun happening on a regular basis. The best longterm survival strategies in DayZ are not very fun, where as gunfights and huge loot drops from other players you caught with their pants down, that is much more adrenaline fueling. More often than not the interactions with the entities of the game world in DayZ are slow, frustrating, and boring. You're either crawling by zombies like a slug, or you're running from them for the next 10 minutes after spooking a hoard. There aren't too many really interesting environmental locations. There are no waterfalls to slide down, no trees to climb, no abandoned buildings to parkour through, no islands or caves worth exploring. Murder is the most fun thing in DayZ for many people, and so, for many, it becomes the standard in most scenarios.

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At the end of the day, it's a tough issue, but I think the problem we perceive right now, comes from the design of the game. It's not something to blame on players. If it's something that needs to be fixed, it needs to be fixed by large scale design modifications. Not little tweaks here and there like spawning without guns or adding overpowered blood packs.

What do you think?

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Reasons I kill people:

- Not being killed by the other guy

- Fun/Challenge :D

- Vehicles

- His weapon or maybe Mags for it

- NVG / GPS / Rangefinder

- Backpack (If better)

Other than that I don't give a fuck about his stuff and what I am looking for is most likely what he is carrying even if tents were way more common.

Anything else can easily be found so why would I kill for that ?

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Real world: You can't respawn

Dayz: You can respawn, it's a minor inconvenience. You also respawn with the knowledge of any tents that you had in your past life, as well as teh knowledge of where your dead body is form your previous life.

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It is a major problem...I understand people killing out of desperation and looting my corpse, but the fact is, people don't do that most of the time.

I was just on Elektro, and there was one other guy there drawing a hell of a lot of attention to himself. I asked him if he was friendly a couple of times, even specified his location. I could have shot him on a couple of occasions, but chose to let him live.

Anyway...I went about my business, got a bit more ammo and headed for the hills. I heard the guy again and went to the top of a hill to see if I could locate him and he must have circled around, came up behind me and shot me in the back...

The kicker? I respawned and went back to my corpse. All of my gear was there.

A Czech backpack, Lee Enfield with 5 clips, Makarov with 4 clips, a frag grenade, 2 red smoke grenades, food, drink, water, and more...Literally everything was still there.

The guy literally just shot me for the sake of killing me, in the most cowardly way possible...

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There's a fine line between realism and video games, and video games can only step across the line by inches.

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See if tents were easy to place and more common people mainly bandits would bitch because killing players would have a less likely chance to have good loot on them.

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I don't think using reason is worth it. This is the type of person you're playing against:

http://youtu.be/uG6y1mOjqdQ

At least this one was funny at the end but, I mean, I just don't know how to engage a mind like that.

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At least this one was funny at the end but' date=' I mean, I just don't know how to engage a mind like that.

[/quote']

Engage it with projectile perforation ;)

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