Let's not punish bandits - let's reward teamwork

[Maedis 18]

I see too many threads about people trying to stop bandits from being bandits. Truthfully, being a bandit is fun, and punishing this type of playstyle would lead to the death of DayZ. It would become essentially a huge zombie co-op game and within a few weeks everyone would max out their gear with little threat to their survival.

To lower the amount of bandits people need an incentive to play together with other players if they want to keep their gear. To eliminate excessive banditry, being in a group must be deemed a better option for survival than playing lone wolf.

How can this goal be accomplished? Ask yourself this first: Can you loot gear from towns or even cities without reasonable difficulty by yourself? Of course. For most people then, the following logic applies:

Bandit Logic

1) If I play lone wolf I get 100% of the gear that I find.

2) I am more concealed in forest areas from other players

3) I can kill other players for their gear without much consequence

4) I have no risk of getting backstabbed

Why the hell wouldn't you pick this option over the alternative?

Survivor Logic

1) If I play in a group I must share my loot and supplies

2) I am more visible in forest areas

3) I am at risk of getting shot by bandits first unless I run with a bandit group

4) I may get backstabbed at any time

5) I have someone to watch my back and give me blood transfusions

The solution to eliminate excessive banditry is simple then. The first logic must turn into this:

Proposed Bandit Logic (The Goal)

1) If I play lone wolf it is probable that I will be killed if I enter a town. It is certain that I will be killed if I enter a city. However, I get to keep all the gear I find. (Adding a risk vs reward element)

2) Being visible by players in the forest is the least of my concerns. Roaming zombies and the elements will kill me soon enough if I do not find help.

3) Killing other players will seal my fate once they hear my heartbeat - teamwork is the only way to survive for an extended amount of time

4) Risking getting backstabbed 30-40% of the time is better than playing solo and meeting certain death 100% of the time.

How do we get to our goal?

I propose the following:

1) Dramatically increase the amount of zombies so that going solo is suicide in nine areas: Cherno, Elektro, Balota, Solnichniy, Berezino, Krasnostav, Northwest Airfield, Zelenogorsk, Stary Sobor. Additionally, make raiding towns solo more difficult but not impossible for a determined bandit.

2) Forests cannot be safe zones from zombies. Add the "heavy mist" suggestion (which unfortunately that forum post was lost with the website switch). But to summarize have zombies roam in hordes with this type of fog across the landscape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_41gZx09KVI Staying in tinted fog for an extended period of time without a gasmask can infect you with the zombie virus, at which point you must find medicine to stop the infection from fully killing you.

3) Make food resources more scarce, but have multiple uses. This will allow "sharing" of food within a group.

4) As a side note, I think adding the "power grid" suggestion would also be beneficial to encourage groups to have an objective if they so want one.

5) Allow people with radios to communicate in side chat with one another.

TLDR: Make the game more difficult. Have zombies roam in hordes. Make food more scarce. People will team up more, and less people will choose to be bandits.

[na82008 10]

i think that the main idea is a good one, but the suggestions of how to do it aren't what i think are good for day z, i like the have zombies roam in hords idea

[StickyNote 25]

I've noticed that if you're aiming for survival, there's not all to much of a point go back into the cities once you've collected your survival gear.

That's pretty much the only time you'd benefit from a group too. After you've got your gear, you can just head for the innawoods and occasionally pop into towns just to see what's up.

Once decked out on gear, there's little reason to return to towns except for PVP or you urgently need medical supplies. But this is where all the people who enjoy exploring, cooping, looting, or just starting out are.

In addition, there's very little for a bandit to feel sorry about when they kill someone. They might feel guilty that a person's lost his playtime, or lost his gear, but they know the person they killed can easily respawn.

And while banditry is an integral part of this game, so is working together. And by not balancing out banditry, you are punishing those who want to cooperate.

Thus I propose this. Add zombies in the woods. Make it so that killing players will result in a high percent chance that weapons and high tech loot will be damaged or destroyed. Thus banditry is not punished, but made less for stealing, and more for necessity.

I also propose the idea of creating "squads" or "groups" ingame. People spawn by default with a white shirt, and can engage in creating or joining a "group" when right next to another player. Doing so might add a different colored shirt that can be worn in the particular server you're in. This would support group play, group on group rivalrys, and quicker identification between people in your group. This might even evolve into server communities. As an added bonus to add more gameplay dynamics, people might be able to loot these shirts off people to infiltrate groups and steal from them or mug them.

[Virfortis 111]

Bandits get to play God in this game. Until that is fixed, there is no level of promoting cooperation that will work.

[Shag 90]

agree with certain large towns having more zeds. it seems harder to loot small towns as they have a higher concentration of zeds that cities right now (is it me or does everyone see this?)

small towns are fine, but large towns need double/triple zed levels.

[Meepo (DayZ) 13]

Make it so that killing players will result in a high percent chance that weapons and high tech loot will be damaged or destroyed. Thus banditry is not punished, but made less for stealing, and more for necessity.

But banditry IS being punished because you're trying to break their equipment. We're not trying to punish bandits, we're trying to DISCOURAGE it.

[StickyNote 25]

But banditry IS being punished because you're trying to break their equipment. We're not trying to punish bandits, we're trying to DISCOURAGE it.

That's not punishing as no negative effects are bestowed upon bandits for murder. This equipment wasn't theirs to begin with as they didn't find it, and they were never in posession of it. It's just discouraging murdering purely for loot as most people do. Either that or because they view dayz as arma2 deathmatch edition.

Edited July 11, 2012 by StickyNote

[Bental 10]

Fear not, all banditry scum who read this.

Rocket already made it clear that bandits will not be punished in any way, shape or form.

If you want to play with friendlies, make friends with people in spawn areas to show your friendship. Perhaps they won't shoot you later on down the line?

And stop with the changing numbers of zombies thing. I swear that comes up in every 5th thread! There's nothing wrong with the numbers. If you discharge a rifle in a town or city, you'll know very quickly how many zombies are around you.

The answer is: a lot

[StickyNote 25]

I'm still not sure what all this opposition towards not punishing bandits is about. What constitutes punishment? Any sort of change that makes banditry more difficult?

Yet when changes are made that make playing cooperatively or survivally more difficult, people don't act in outrage that those players are being punished.

I personally don't believe bandits should be punished; in the sense that for murdering a person, or murdering an x amount of people, they aquire some negative effect.

However I do believe in making banditry less rewarding and more difficult. People are being driven to banditry, myself included, because we keep getting murdered by bandits.

Thus the only way to survive is to kill other bandits and loot them. But too often you end up in a firefight with some other legitimate survivors.

Eventually, when the influx of new players dies down, the mod will devolve into pure deathmatch with zombie obsticles, and a few survivors camping out in the woods with banditry so rampant.

[scoffield77@gmail.com 192]

those are my idea's =p

I also made a post about increasing group play a long time ago... see. http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/5922-the-team-work-philosophy-shoot-on-sight-group-play/

[vesmo 21]

I've noticed that if you're aiming for survival, there's not all to much of a point go back into the cities once you've collected your survival gear.

That's pretty much the only time you'd benefit from a group too. After you've got your gear, you can just head for the innawoods and occasionally pop into towns just to see what's up.

Once decked out on gear, there's little reason to return to towns except for PVP or you urgently need medical supplies. But this is where all the people who enjoy exploring, cooping, looting, or just starting out are.

In addition, there's very little for a bandit to feel sorry about when they kill someone. They might feel guilty that a person's lost his playtime, or lost his gear, but they know the person they killed can easily respawn.

And while banditry is an integral part of this game, so is working together. And by not balancing out banditry, you are punishing those who want to cooperate.

Thus I propose this. Add zombies in the woods. Make it so that killing players will result in a high percent chance that weapons and high tech loot will be damaged or destroyed. Thus banditry is not punished, but made less for stealing, and more for necessity.

I also propose the idea of creating "squads" or "groups" ingame. People spawn by default with a white shirt, and can engage in creating or joining a "group" when right next to another player. Doing so might add a different colored shirt that can be worn in the particular server you're in. This would support group play, group on group rivalrys, and quicker identification between people in your group. This might even evolve into server communities. As an added bonus to add more gameplay dynamics, people might be able to loot these shirts off people to infiltrate groups and steal from them or mug them.

I have tried proposing this items getting destroyed by shooting idea, I think it would be a great feature. Also, as you said, people rarely need to go into towns once they have their basic gear together. Maybe add features such as matches having a chance to be destroyed in rain (a small one, but one that would most likely happen at least once to a long-living character), cooked meat spoiling over time (2-3 meals out of a boar and the rest will spoil, should be quite fast as your metabolism is also faster than irl). Also making animals rarer (not sure but seems to be the case as of 1.7.2) and hunting more difficult (wild animals run away when they spot you) would force people to scavenge for beans (which obviously don't spoil while unopened). Also, limiting the spawns of soda cans greatly and putting emphasis on water bottles and having to search for places to fill them (currently you pretty much find a soda can every time you are thirsty, carrying around those four water bottles as dead weight).

[hellboy1697@gmail.com 0]

Really like this idea, teamwork should play a bigger part in this game. The only thing I think though is that servers should be able to decide whether they want to promote teamwork. Because some people just may want to play alone, so that would have to be taken into consideration,

[StickyNote 25]

After putting more thought into this, I believe the problem isn't so much that teamwork isn't promoted. It's that zombies right now serve as an annoyance rather than a challenge.

They stay on your heels but they can't hit you. They'll follow you indefinitely if you let them.

Combat against them's no fun. They move erratically and rarely directly at you and at high speeds, thus limiting combat to inside of buildings, when they're right on top of you, or the few occasions that they're running straight at you.

Even still, it's just a better idea to simply sprint off as soon as you acquire zombie aggro than to face them in combat.

Thus survival is still easy, but groups get separated due to lack of interest in banding for combat, and sneaking is awkward and more difficult in a group combined with the easier choice of just sprinting off when you're detected.

Because zombie survival is easy, and groups are easily disrupted and rather pointless, and zombie combat is also not a good idea, all the excitement goes to PVP.

IMO Zombie behavior needs to be completely redone first

[Scrugz 1]

I definitely agree with some of this. Zombies, as I've already said many times, need to be harder. I posted in detail about it here http://dayzmod.com/f...es/#entry266943. Something else that I've said in other threads, zombies in this game should behave more like the zombies from Left 4 Dead. They should swarm players and hitting players should slow them down, allowing for more zombies to swarm. Another thing to increase difficulty, blood should only be quickly regenerated by blood bags. At best, food should only help slowly regenerate blood. This would definitely encourage team cooperation.

As a side note, bleeding from zombies should be lessened, but zombies should do more direct damage. Getting punched doesn't make you bleed everywhere. Unless their fists are blades or something and I just happened to miss it.

Edited July 11, 2012 by Scrugz

[CrazyGit 0]

For Teamwork incentive:

How about a fortified room that requires at least 2 people working together to enter and exit.

It should contain better than average loot.

Located in the middle of a city, to prevent any major sniping.

Any fighting near the room is sure to bring lots of zombies.

thoughts?

[Lukio (DayZ) 24]

I hate to point out the (possibly) obvious - but who says that bandits are always solo? They group up as well. Actually its even worse, once you are playing with several others, it gets way to simple to gather stuff and do shit and after a while you get bored and start shooting people just for fun.