TheRunningManZ's open letter to the DayZ developers

[Kathosky 111]

TRMZ posted and open letter of feedback for the developers in twitter:

"An open “letter” of feedback for the @dayz @adamfrancu and the devs on a few things. Sorry, I usually send it in private but kinda feel like this one merits some conversation. To any followers and fans of DayZ, please feel free to chime in and say what you think. You don’t just need to agree with me, trying to keep things polite and having an open discussion would be cool if possible.

I really feel like some of the recent changes have been to the detriment of the game and what makes it so amazing. Just wanted to go over a few of them (it’s mostly the infected but not just their hearing). I almost wanted to make a video on this subject but I don’t really want to occupy my channel which is meant to be for entertaining people with more of an essay style vid. Instead you get the essay on Twitter!!! 😉

For the last few days I’ve been playing Livonia official, one day on 1pp and one day on 3pp and these are the few things:

The spawn system is broken: the “everybody spawns in the same area for 6 mins” (I think it’s 6) experiment just hasn’t worked for me. The spawns are a mess and it feels utterly forced and meta’d now. You spawn in and there are three dead bodies, two people at the well and one mad player running around killing everyone with an axe or sledge hammer. This may seem fun but every life is the same, and some people just do this. Knowing that every time they spawn other players will be there and when the spawns move to the next location they can just spawn there and carry on the fight. It’s not fun. It may have the benefits of spawning close to your team mate if you’re in a duo/trio etc. But for everyone else it’s a meta’d clusterf~~k. It feels like every spawn on a full pop server is like hot dropping into a popular area of a Battle Royale. Most people are out for blood and there is no loot because everyone has run through. In the early stages of a run inland you mostly feel like you’re following someone always because you usually are. It’s changed the game for the worse IMO and if we must pander to groups then please can we have a choice when we join servers between the “group spawning” and a random spawn for a none meta’d DayZ experience? It was better before IMO and not by a small amount.

The Zombies/infected are broken: it was planned to work on the AI in 2023 in your roadmap and it turned out not to be possible. They don’t pathway very well, they get stuck in doorways and wont run into containers. They do laps of an open doorway sometimes for what feels like minutes before they come in. Then one will come in and another 1 or 2 get stuck on a door so that you are stuck inside and cant trap them. The idea of zeds being harder is a good one and I would like to see it. But this to me needs to start with the pathing being better, maybe some zombies being able to force doors open. Id love to see all military zeds be able to break down doors do within a fairly short space of time and in spawn areas perhaps only firefighter and maybe police zeds doing it. In the past we were shared animations by you guys of this! The zombies are how they are, but the decision to massively increase the rate at which they ruin clothes when they hit us, how often they make us bleed when they hit has become really annoying. It’s not hard, it’s not to me compelling gameplay. It’s moved into being tedious. Regularly I go to kill a zed with a melee and while it's facing completely the other way, it hits me and causes a bleed without turning. The zeds aren’t just annoying atm because they can hear from miles away and stealthing seems to be not an option unless it’s heavily raining at night or something. They are annoying to deal with in general anyway, they are like a dripping tap on your forehead all the time you play. You spawn in, don’t have a melee, find gloves and then have to take your gloves off to punch zeds. If you kill even 3 or 4 zeds with gloves on the gloves are damaged by it. So we have to keep taking the gloves off to kill zeds, if you find a pristine kitchen knife and kill 10 zeds with it, it is now likely badly damaged and you need to find another until you get a sharpening stone. These aren’t hard things to do but they are very repetitive, this isn’t hardcore survival it’s turning the game into a plate spinning exercise in some ways and it’s not just the zeds.

Plate spinning: there are so many examples of this. Some I can see making sense like suppressors needing a lot of maintenance because of how powerful they can be. But many of the others I just don’t get. Why is wringing out clothes even longer now? As one example. It feels like there is only limited development options available for the game atm and you are experimenting with moving dials on existing features in order to try and change the gameplay. I feel a lot of these are not making the game better. Your tag line is “this is your story” but where is the story in maintaining every miniscule aspect of things that don’t really matter for your survival every life over and over again? I’m sure this makes me sound like I don’t like DayZ, I love it and believe it or not I am keen for it to be harder than it is right now. I want DayZ to feel like a compelling survival game. On Tuesday I was on a hardcore night server and stepped on a bear trap at a hunting area at night whilst starving, I struggled like hell to survive, I had to collect up rags with a broken leg in the dark to make a splint, limped to the next town, stuggled to find food, cooked a chicken to eat something, just about turned the corner and then got gunned down by a geared guy just after my leg healed. That is compelling DayZ survival story. Constantly mending your jacket, constantly fixing a bleed, constantly mending gloves because you slid down one medium sized ladder is not fun. We need an element of this and we have it with how much the characters need to eat and drink etc. I loved the changed to bandages needing to be disinfected and what that means. I really like the changes when there feels to be a reason for it. If you aren’t prepared and you have to bandage with an unclean rag and then you need to go off looking for meds that is a really cool mechanic of a survival game. These reward players for staying where they spawned (if they made it through the battle royale stage) and actually looting the medical areas in Berezino, or found that alcohol before moving on. If you don’t search for the stuff you need, it could bite you on the ass later and then you need to search for meds then.

However carrying 6 bandages (im known for this already), 3 sewing kits etc because you are forced to isn’t feeling very fun to me. Constantly having to mend my clothes while I’m in a town, or look for a new jacket after I’ve dealt with 4 zeds is becoming brain numbingly dull to me. Please can we have a rethink on the “punitive simulator” direction we are headed in? There is no choice in dealing with zeds, we all have to handle them and they are a needed part of the game. They are vital to it. But every time I’m in a town right now I find myself really annoyed by the experience and it repeats over and over again until you are geared enough to shoot them suppressed pretty much. There is no “survival mechanic” in having to fix your trousers and jacket every 5 mins, and bandage multiple times. I guess it slows the players down but I think the balance feels off with this massively.

Rain on official: There is just no let up. It rains on Livonia so much. It feels incredibly atmospheric but there is no counter to it. It rains, you get wet, you get heavier because of the water, you get cold and sick because of the water. It then stops and you dry yourself off at a fire and then 5mins later it starts raining again. Why did we change the wringing out of clothes to be longer? You wring everything out, and then it rains again. There is no counter for this, there is no “if only you looted xxx you can deal with it.” Such as a rain coat that keeps you dry, or soft skill that means you can handle cold/wet conditions better as you live longer etc so you don't get sick or as cold. All there is atm is “you are going to be cold, wet and heavy and there is nothing to do about this, oh and when you sort it out and dry up, it will be raining again in 15 mins.” We need survival features that we can prepare for, that we can counter act. Not punitive ones where there is nothing we can do about them and then to top it off we make drying take much longer both at a fire and by hand and now it seems if you’re by a fire you get red heat in seconds too. Please can we have a look at balancing this a little?

I know some people will want to be telling me that I should go and play an arcarde game. That DayZ clearly isn’t for me cos I should just get gud. But I really enjoy DayZ and I play mostly DayZ survival, I didn’t shoot anyone all day yesterday for 8.5hours on official and I still enjoyed it loads. But the game is not offering enough compelling survival mechanics for us. It is turning into the ugly sister constantly pointing a finger into our chest screaming “fix the jacket cinderelly, mend your gloves cinderelly, you need a new knife cinderelly, you may as well pick up all the knives cinderelly, don’t slide down ladders cinderelly, its raining and there is nothing you can do cinderelly, carry a bag full of bandages cinderelly!” You get the picture!

If you want to make the game harder make it harder to carry more guns. Make only one gun go on your back again. Stop fully working full size guns like M4s etc fit in so many backpacks and still be fireable, make the SMG class needed again. Make the large guns collapse so that they can be carried for storage in bags but not whipped out in a firefight in half a second. Reduce the spawning of shotguns and take them away from tier 1. Increase the spawning in tier one of the likes of the sporter and repeater (and importantly the bullets) and make one tap shotguns spawn a bit further in land and make them rare, I know they are really common IRL but they are really OP in DayZ. Maybe don’t make the zeds brain gnawingly frustrating in so many ways while they just don’t really work so well.

Sorry for what is meant to be feedback and maybe has turned into a bit of rant. I love DayZ. My story on official seems like it is turning into a bit of a maintenance exercise lost in a sea of kinda dull mending moments rather than in the compelling survival of being forced to hunt for food because I am starving or run away from someone trying to hold me up or shoot me. I feel like it’s being set up for me to be punished for just playing the game but not with compelling survival mechanics but with “go in that house, start a fire, dry your clothes, mend you bleeds, lose you flu with meds and get back to looting.” Only for the first zombie to ruin my jacket, make me bleed just as it starts to rain again for the 5th time that hour. Help us out a bit and have a think about spinning a few of the dials back a bit and maybe dial the rain down a touch. Or give us ways to counter act these, the current soft skill in vanilla is not that used other than by the odd hardcore baser perhaps. How cool would it be if we had a version of the Namaslk frost resistance but for cold and wet? It could be more subtle but would feel like a nice reward for living longer.

Also footsteps of our own player are deafeningly too loud and the other players are like ninjas who can run right next to you and you only hear them if their stomach rumbles! ❤️

Sorry for the rant, Paul."

@scott.bowen @merropa93

I agree with Paul, it's a good thing such a big guy of the community post this. I think it is a good opportunity here in the forums to post each other's feedback and your opinions on this. I ping some active people around here, sorry if I left someone, I have been out for a while.

@Derleth @Riddick_2K @nemorus @JerseyD @DefectiveWater @Astalonte @Sid Debian @Pyongo Bongo @faltodeimaginacion @blueshorts44 @ChicagoFaucet

[Kathosky 111]

My feedback, to add to Paul's (which is quite complete), is about dynamic gas, which ruins immersion in the quiet Apocalypse experience that characterized it before the gas update. The gas hits, gas grenades and artillery sounds at the edge of the map are not interesting, in fact they become annoying very quick and don't add to (they worsen) the quiet Apocalypse experience that characterized the game until they were added in 1.14.

They are too prevalent/frequent, which makes them to play a huge part in any play through.

As skies look like a thing unique to each map, why gas is in both official maps? I hope they remove them from Chernarus, or at least reduce immensely their frequency because they are in every adventure all the time. And please don't add them to Sakhal.

[DefectiveWater 502]

There's not much left to say really. There have been hundreds of comments by the community on various topics (basebuilding, infected, gunplay, survival, modding, performance issues on consoles and AMD gpus and many more).
I don't want to discredit the devs but it's been 10+ years and many aspects of the game are still lacking.

One thing is obvious from the dev blogs, they are looking at the bigger picture and are laying the groundwork for the future of DayZ... or so I hope.

 

Edited June 15 by DefectiveWater

[Sid Debian 123]

I'm actually completely agreed with position about the Zombies. I'd seen that "it's not zombies it still alive entities", blah entity/zombie - not really matters it's your enemy that's will kill you and if you're enemy is still alive - congrats soon you will be dead. Ao kill, kill, kill and this is not the end!

About Limonia/enoch idk I'd hosted the server for 2 days and understood that map is only the tin can of sardines that's expired and shall be thrown away as a piece of trash (maybe that's one of the reasons why the map is so "popular" on private servers).

Chages... We have chages that surviving became to PVP game with open world just for nothing. I can suggest best map for such game it shall me the flat ground and size 500x500x500m (X, Z, Y) and 1 zmb in middle of that amp. No sea, no anything else and that's would be pure surviving game! Actually soon this game became to such amazing stuff.

I not really understand why do devs still not made it, they only make maps more smaller and smaller.  I wish to explore and not pew-pew on same spot. Lordy lord port Arma 3 maps to DayZ it has more scence then it has now.

[blueshorts44 37]

The only thing i dont agree with is his opinion on shotguns spawning on the coast, i think its good that a powerful weapon that has 1 shot capabilities can be found on the coast since it is a good deterrence to geared players who are wanting to KOS fresh spawns. 

[nemorus 198]

Yawn... All i care about now is the thing with placing. Can't install items how i want them to be - because someone messed up collision and things are glued to each other. Even tricks ain't cutting it.

There are million issues in/with this game - i just can't be bothered anymore... People are saying that in the future "DayZ 2" will be better. And that's bs. It will look different and it will also be another 10-year old journey of patching and modding all over again.

[Riddick_2K 136]

I very much agree with what "TRMZ" cited, and... unfortunately... I also agree with what "DefectiveWater" wrote.
I won't mention all the defects and "mistakes" (because deliberate choices) made in this game, but since the main topic is the changes to the behavior of the Zs, I would like to add only what I wrote in another thread on this topic:

I managed to play a little a few days ago and... it also seems to me that they see more and hear a lot more. I haven't tried many times but I can no longer surprise them from behind while walking crouched even in the rain, which used to work well, now it's impossible... but I repeat that I've tried a few times, maybe it was a temporary connection fault with the server ( I'm talking about the official vanilla ones, obviously).
I don't know... I don't see it as something "grave", but a stupidity like many others... they seem more like "changes made at random" (or by mistake).
I remain convinced that they should be more stupid, and see and hear like BEFORE 1.25... but they should go back to killing (like they used to) and with every scratch they should be plagued with infections... which if you disinfect and bandage IMMEDIATELY , okay. Otherwise you would have to get some serious illness and have a few hours to find medicine or you die... it's a pandemic of infected people, not a "Boy Scout trip".
My 5 cents.

P.S.
Even the consumption of materials is actually absurd, like the doll's consumption of food... it is so out of reality as to be grotesque. 😕

Edited June 15 by Riddick_2K

[Nolhek 17]

I saw that letter of TRMZ on Reddit and from what I read people pretty much agree with all he wrote, so do I. Devs and BI would know with their metrics and stuff but summarizing, I agree with making the game harder not at the cost of making it more tedious but from mechanics that enrich and challenge the actual experience. Redirect the great game this is in the right direction again and redo/rethink the changes from the last year and a half back, please.

In particular for my case, there is a bug from a year ago that hasn't been solved yet, it is this one https://feedback.bistudio.com/T175043 and it happened from the day of the update 1.22 released on stable. It is said by the devs that it either for:

• Your computer is too slow to handle the processing time.
• Your internet is too slow to send the data in time.
• The server is too slow to process the received data in time.

I didn't change computer, and it's quite capable surpassing the recommended settings (SSD, high-end GPU/CPU, same OS...), I didn't change my internet neither ISP nor method of connection (using cable and fiber in developed urban area), and connecting to same servers as before the update, all this three casuistic since 2018 that started playing DayZ, and until August 2023, when 1.22 released and started happening from one day to the next without changing anything as I wrote https://forums.dayz.com/topic/256662-stable-update-122/ and they changed "Tweaked: All Launcher Server Browser tabs can now refresh simultaneously, and start refreshing upon Launcher startup" which I suppose might be the cause either this or related with something in this update for sure, some connection or launcher stuff they changed, why not put a tick box in the launcher that allows for disable the automatic refreshing of all tabs of servers upon opening the launcher?

[Pyongo Bongo 201]

Yes I agree with most of this, I will comment my own DayZ Veteran opinion below 🙂

Spoiler

 

- Group Spawn System:

It seems to me we have to pick between the less worse of two evils here.

The original spawn system was terribly abused in a meta way and made me completely leave certain servers forever.

People would spam respawns, especially if killed in Zelenogorsk, respawn as close as possible, grab a gun from a hidden crate and shoot you in the back before you had a chance to loot their body you just killed. One guy did it within 10 - 15 minutes.

If you are fighting a group, this makes it impossible to win the fight if they decide to cheese that system.

One down, the two others are hiding and scoped in on his corpse, can't loot, don't have anywhere near enough time to successfully find and suicide-charge them/him until his friend has respawn-spammed himself to Prigo/Cherno and ran back.

One time I took down a bunch of players with their car, FALs and such with my glock in Svetlo.

They did this exact thing. I was the underdog already, I had no chance of taking down the only survivor hiding in a house, watching the car and his friends bodies, as they endlessly flooded back, re-incarnating right down the street at the harbor every other minute.

Underdog-wins are amazing moments in this game, but how are you supposed to win when outmanned, outgunned AND the enemies have endless lives?

 

What TRMZ said about the new system is also true.

I don't see a solution which would prevent both force-respawn abuse (running right back to your killer, joining your group in the fight you just died in infinitely) and the repetetive, unimmersive crowded spawn towns. I also liked when you wouldn't know when and how many survivors would spawn with you and where.

It's good that the server owners can choose which system they want.

 

Zombies:

I had the exact thoughts many times.

Zombies NEED to be able to break doors, get players on obstacles and inside cars (in 2012 DayZ mod they could!), they NEED to be able to ENTER AN OPEN DOOR, NEED to face you if they actually hit you and so on.

VERY frustrating, the cheese-ing (go inside or climb some tiny obstacle to completely defeat any threat) completely invalidifies the Z in DayZ. 🙂

Plate spinning / Everything breaks always

I really appreciate the realism of my clothes tearing from attacks, being able to tell someone's been messed up, or is in a desperate situation equipment wise. Maybe scavenged clothes off a corpse.

I really would not mind them breaking slower though, it would be more fun and realistic enough to be cool.

The exception being NBC suits for example, those should rip very realistically quick, one knife slash should let the gas inside.

IF real NBC suits are that easily torn, I have never tried.

 

What sometimes irritates me, something I see not a single Pro for is cooking-ware degradation.

It is EXTREMELY tedious, EXTREMELY un-fun and EXTREMELY unrealistic.

I really like making (anti-)social gathering points. In spawn towns... In the middle of the airfield... or anywhere else which is fun.

Sometimes we gather survivors in steak-form and have to wait long periods until the next batch arrives (pot breaks in the meantime as we wait), sometimes we like to cook along with them and share food like vegetables from a communal farm or fish.

QUICK, GET HE POT OFF THE FIRE, IT'S ABOUT TO MELT! ONLY PUT IT ON WHEN SOMEONE'S HERE! What? xD

It would be a whole lot more fun in the pot didn't melt after fifteen minutes, and nobody would become godly powerful from cooking slightly faster 😄

Besides, I was in Chernarus IRL and we cooked with Chernarussian pots and pans on gas stoves.

The pots and pans looked like they were decades old, but were still fully functional and unharmed 🙂

I really love that everything degrades, but it needs to be both fun and authentic, as Brian Hicks once said 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 16 by Pyongo Bongo

[Nolhek 17]

58 minutes ago, Pyongo Bongo said:

- Group Spawn System:

It seems to me we have to pick between the less worse of two evils here.

The original spawn system was terribly abused in a meta way and made me completely leave certain servers forever.

People would spam respawns, especially if killed in Zelenogorsk, respawn as close as possible, grab a gun from a hidden crate and shoot you in the back before you had a chance to loot their body you just killed. One guy did it within 10 - 15 minutes.

If you are fighting a group, this makes it impossible to win the fight if they decide to cheese that system.

One down, the two others are hiding and scoped in on his corpse, can't loot, don't have anywhere near enough time to successfully find and suicide-charge them/him until his friend has respawn-spammed himself to Prigo/Cherno and ran back.

One time I took down a bunch of players with their car, FALs and such with my glock in Svetlo.

They did this exact thing. I was the underdog already, I had no chance of taking down the only survivor hiding in a house, watching the car and his friends bodies, as they endlessly flooded back, re-incarnating right down the street at the harbor every other minute.

Underdog-wins are amazing moments in this game, but how are you supposed to win when outmanned, outgunned AND the enemies have endless lives?

That's very true. It was very frustrating that people took advantage of the previous spawn system to run to his body very quick (even Zelenogorst was perfectly possible if you had a lucky spawn) while his buddies camped it. This became more frequent the more close to the coast/spawns the fight was. Thinking it again, if I have to choose I choose the lesser bad of the two systems, which for me, I choose to keep the current spawn system, it can be bad for the beginning, the main advantage being to get rid of the possible run-up to body quick by exploiting suicide.

[oldfossil 59]

In my experience, dealing with infected and killing them with the stealth approach is not so difficult... I admit that until 1.24 version it was a little bit easy.

One of the worst actual features is the unreal item degradation speed, in particular for melee weapons (ok for opening cans, but not so good for peeling potatoes...).

The worst (in my opinion) game feature is the sickness mechanism. More than often I get sick without any apparent reason (no rain, good hydration and feeding, good food choice... all apparently fine) and when it happens the game is almost over. It is too annoying to look for meds only to discover that in most cases they are useless (even antibiotics combined with vitamines... one time I ate so many mixed meds that I should be died for drugs poisoning...).

[nemorus 198]

Thats it! You're getting sick because you're overdosing chems.

[oldfossil 59]

No, man 😄

I got sickness before trying to kill myself by a drug overdose.😁

[RZ0R 60]

Agree with absolutely everything. There's been too may incremental little changes over time which are making the game a little tedious now. The zombie AI is so dire that making them 'harder' is just highlighting how bad it is now.

Adding an SG5 15rd mag was weird. With plate carriers being so abundant the SG5 wasn't a good gun already. Adding a 15rd mag made it worse, and just cluttered the loot pool with another useless piece of loot

 

New zombie noises would be nice too.

 

I can only speak for consoles, but I woud also like to see a time penalty for leaving and joining a server in quick succession, to so stop players from using it to look through walls as the assets are loading in.

 

Edited June 23 by RZ0R