How To Fix the Pity Party of Dayz

[Habibabob 12]

Now hear me out, HEAR ME OUT

 

When we all spawn on the chernarussian coast either for the first time that day or the hundredth, the gameplay loop is always the same. Get some food, maybe a gun, and run as far inland as possible. Every single player is heading inland in the same direction, because the loot spawns all the way at the top. Sure, the first time we played, it was fine. Its the exact same as every other survival game does it. But in a larger perspective focused on the detriments of it, it soon becomes somewhat stale, and subtly guides the gameplay loop into the direction that people are trying so hard to avoid.

People come up with so many ideas as to why the gameplay gets so stale. Things such as repeated pois, the same path, similar interactions with everyone, and 99.99% of all geared players just being walking "you're dead" screens roaming the coast.

I 

 

Partly, i think the biggest reason for the albeit realistic but certainly exagerated hostility and lack of variety is in the very basis of the spawns themselves. Coast towns are NOT special, due to the lower tier of loot and as well as how accesible they are.

I believe a huge reason that contributes to immersion breaking players (the silent, stupid, and deadly ones, not the funny ones) is because every player interaction boils down to this: Coast/tier 1, people are underpowered, a few people have guns leading to power heirarchy, drama, freindship, interactions, betrayals, funny moments, cannibals, diddy's disciples, all of these happen on the coast. Tier 2 is mostly the same, just watered down. 

Then you get to tier 3, and interaction boils down to this: Get killed, kill people, maybe handcuff or talk to someone, but only because you shot and knocked them out first. The two reasons for this in my eyes, is due to the inherent value of LOCATION, not loot. Its about how good the loot around you could be, that naturally leads people to cut off competition without weighing the pros of not killing someone on sight, as well as the fact that if youre already that far up, you probably are GEARED AF, leading to a blatant divide between geared and not geared.

 

One of the first ideas i had was to increase player count to perhaps something like 100. It would allow natural and less cringy factions to take precedence, as well as push more players out of spawn and into the "real world" faster and in droves.

It would also just make 10-15 man coordinated groups a thing, which is fun for literally no one except the group themselves, and maybe the occasional 150 iq solo sweat in the roster. Anyway, back to the other reason.

 

The other reason is because of how easy and unintentionally encouraged pvp is. No matter your health, pvp stays mostly the same, except for things like flanking. Sights come up unrealistically fast, compared with fast paced movement (not about speed, but fast acceleration) leading to fast paced, unpredictable combat in which once you die, the only thing you realize you could of done better is: "dang, i should have just shot him".

The fix?

Well, its not a fix. There are still going to be a huge portion of players who needlessly kill on sight. What matters is that life is gonna get a LOT harder for those guys, satiating the desire for hard earned survival. Its gonna be as hard as everyone else who isnt kos. Kos will always be with us, but its the fact that its easier live by the KOS code that makes it so frustrating when someone kills you. Its angering because it is not in the least bit deserved (and if it was, only you would know that)

Sorry, but again after getting side tracked (i didn't, that was intentional) ...

The fix?

 

The beautiful, handsome, and the utmost highest magnitued of glazable human beings imaginable, that being, our esteemed dev team who we love very much for making dayz (please remember that guys),

shift the dynamic spawns at the coast to dynamic spawns througout the map. Instead of having one direction that you absolutely HAVE to take (unless you never wanna touch a piece of quality gear in your life), you would instead be able to shift your trajectory, plans, interpersonal code, and extrapersonal interactions at will. Instead of feeling like dayz is giving you a hundred options that you can techinically choose, but the rest of the 99 choices end up with an ulitimatum of pain, now, you would be able to like, actually make choices with absolutely ZERO influencing factors other than the world around you itself (i know that could similar to how it is now, but in practice actually ON the game, its totally different). 

Maybe that could be detrimental in ways, like spawning right next to NW airfield. And yeah, the smart choice would be to make spawn points revolve around NW airfield. 

 

 

But the even SMARTER choice, is to have spawns EVERYWHERE, and the ONLY REASON THAT IS WORKS, is because it would go hand in hand with the ABOLITION OF THE TIER SYSTEM.

 

Imagine ZERO tiers, just places and military areas. Select places like roadblocks and coastal military tents, or smaller police stations and tiny villages would have worse loot, but it wouldnt be based on general location as much as would be around common sense. It would be perfect to be able to spawn somewhere, and 2 minutes later end up with a AKM, 40 bullets, a cowboy hat and a dream.

 

Would it though?

 

The Third and Final tweak to wrap this all up in a nice little bow, is to greatly lower the spawn rate of weapons, and bring the rest of the weapons in the lootpool back to the populace to everyone unlucky enough to never see a heli crash in their run 

(like seriously, why is like 45% of all the guns in the game, and 100% of all the fun weapons like the svd, lar, and m4 have to be locked behind bogus gatekeeps like toxic zones and heli crashes?)

 

For example, Make it so that there are only around 7 ak74s on the floor of the map at one time. There would be 5-6 ak101s, 3 akms

(75 and 60 rounders are super rare, but not as annoying as toxic zones in the slightest)

1-2 m4s, 2-3 lars, 3 famases, 6 m16s, 12 bk43s, 5 sks's, 7bk12s, and so on, you get the idea. People would on average find guns a LOT Later (as opposed to the first 15 minutes), but they would find greater varieties of weapons without discrimination. 

And to wrap it ALL up, make ammo, clothes, food, and such things much rarer, but again, without the tier system. Make knives a tiny bit rarer, but also make knife and clothing durability 2-3x better, and make shoes durability 5-6x higher.

In this ideal world of Dayz (A VERY feasible one, essentially just a little tweak in the loot system and maybe 20 minutes worth of dev time arranging spawns [they literally did a loot tweak like 3 weeks ago])

 

Oh yeah, i forgot to mention that the glue to all of this is to increase server count, perhaps to 70, 80, 90 (90 is a good one) 100, or even more. With these three actually not even exaggerated tiny tiny changes, The KOS rates would go down, players would be more friendly, groups would be more inclined to speak to people outside the group and go into party chat, adventures would happen more often, immersion would stay fluid, tactics would need to be more sound, survival would actually be challenging, geared guys would be anything from full gorka plate carrier with a bk-133, to a guy in a pink dress with a half loaded KAM. (from least to most extreme: the typical player would be somewhere in the middle),

AAANDddd.... coast cities and towns would actually be viable (people would go there to fish or for coastal loot), the gameplay wouldnt feel like a 100mph at spawn and 5-10mph anywhere else, feel would be fluid, emergent gameplay more often, going to places would have intention, players would be incentivized to stick together (they probably gonna die if they dont), players talk more, and BEST OF ALL, GEARED PLAYERS WOULD ACTUALLY TALK TO YOU. sometimes, at least more often like somewhere between 10-50% of the time depending on situation and your charisma and people skills.

 

Either way, making the vanilla experience (i play console please dont tell me to play community there are only like 4 good? ones, 22 okay ones that arent below 15 population) 

 

 

*ahem, Either way, making the vanilla experience so much more authentic and gritty, and giving us the game that EVERYBODY involved wants (except the 12 years olds that play exclusively NW airfield PvP servers, like, huh?) that beckons inmersive and most importantly, difficult survival experience. 

Right now it kinda feels like minecraft.

But i CRAVE the Dark Souls version of minecraft RAAAAAHHHH! 🦅🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🔊🔊🔊🗣️🗣️

 

(bonus points if you guys [dev team] expand the map a little more so theres stuff [not miilitary] above tisy pweaaaaaseee 🥺

 

 

Edited January 18 by Habibabob

[Habibabob 12]

How delete comment

Edited January 19 by Habibabob

[Parazight 1606]

There's a ton of drastic changes proposed here.   I'm not sure your ideas will work to change player behavior.  You're simply not going to be able to change player behavior at all unless there's some sort of karma system implemented, which won't happen in vanilla.

Dayz was originally conceptualized by Hall to be a social experiment.  It failed.  Gamers recognize that killing someone in real life is morally wrong.  In real life, there are actual consequences.  In DayZ, there are no actual consequences, so the social experiment fails.  Normal, otherwise good people, can commit wonton murder without any moral repercussions.  They do that in DayZ because they can't in real life.  It's morally acceptable to kill other people in a sandbox that only has players and ways to kill other players.  This is why no amount of 'playing with the numbers' is going to change how people behave on the servers.   Your proposed changes will only lead to more chaos.

 

Edited January 19 by Parazight

[Habibabob 12]

  On 1/19/2025 at 4:18 PM, Parazight said:

There's a ton of drastic changes proposed here.   I'm not sure your ideas will work to change player behavior.  You're simply not going to be able to change player behavior at all unless there's some sort of karma system implemented, which won't happen in vanilla.

Dayz was originally conceptualized by Hall to be a social experiment.  It failed.  Gamers recognize that killing someone in real life is morally wrong.  In real life, there are actual consequences.  In DayZ, there are no actual consequences, so the social experiment fails.  Normal, otherwise good people, can commit wonton murder without any moral repercussions.  They do that in DayZ because they can't in real life.  It's morally acceptable to kill other people in a sandbox that only has players and ways to kill other players.  This is why no amount of 'playing with the numbers' is going to change how people behave on the servers.   Your proposed changes will only lead to more chaos.

 

fr. I was gonna put a comment on how that is the biggest inherent "problem" with dayz (something that could be better), is the inherent life of a player. I havent fleshed this idea out yet, but i was thinking perhaps you could have a player switch servers upon death, maybe in a hardcore mode?

[Parazight 1606]

  On 1/19/2025 at 10:57 PM, Habibabob said:

fr. I was gonna put a comment on how that is the biggest inherent "problem" with dayz (something that could be better), is the inherent life of a player. I havent fleshed this idea out yet, but i was thinking perhaps you could have a player switch servers upon death, maybe in a hardcore mode?

This isn't an inherent 'problem' it's designed that way.

Just stop.  Forcing a player off of a server when they die is a terrible idea.   The thing that you see as a problem is not actually a problem.   The game isn't broken just because you get bored.  Learn to create your own missions. Create your own goals.  Create interesting social interactions.   Everybody doesn't consider the game to be stale.  Boring people get easily bored.

[nemorus 281]

Spawns all across the map? Seen it years ago. Interesting but for new players its a disaster. My first spawn on a server with such setup was in a vicinity of Troitskoe MB (currently Kamensk MB). No more than 3 minutes later wolves and a bear came to greet me. RNG without much sense considering that starting gear was like... nothing. People need proper environment to learn, otherwise it will just demotivate them. Everyone should at the very least have similar chance. And that's it. Starting from 0, from beginning. Otherwise it won't be fair one way or the other.

No tiers? Nothing new. Its still a grind and murdering each other because the other person "could have something". I was running once with a crew based on that way of thinking. Its another disaster for other people.

Don't want to discourage OP, but it seems i will. Sorry.

[Habibabob 12]

  On 1/21/2025 at 3:20 AM, nemorus said:

Spawns all across the map? Seen it years ago. Interesting but for new players its a disaster. My first spawn on a server with such setup was in a vicinity of Troitskoe MB (currently Kamensk MB). No more than 3 minutes later wolves and a bear came to greet me. RNG without much sense considering that starting gear was like... nothing. People need proper environment to learn, otherwise it will just demotivate them. Everyone should at the very least have similar chance. And that's it. Starting from 0, from beginning. Otherwise it won't be fair one way or the other.

No tiers? Nothing new. Its still a grind and murdering each other because the other person "could have something". I was running once with a crew based on that way of thinking. Its another disaster for other people.

Don't want to discourage OP, but it seems i will. Sorry.

what if you made the loot much rarer? specifically food and high tier weapons

[nemorus 281]

The same as usual - people would cry a river :).