An idea regarding Humanity (Notoriety)

[-PL- 0]

I've been playing the game the past few days and having a blast. One of the things that irked me the most, however, was that a person's appearance would change based on their humanity. I felt that it was unrealistic and removed a lot of tension from the game regarding who you should trust and not trust. I am very glad that issue has been addressed, although some people may disagree with me.

Now, as the update stated, the humanity meter isn't really being used anymore. Which makes sense, because, do people have a "humanity meter" in real life? There are a lot of shades of gray when trying to put a numeric value on how humane a person is.

My idea is replacing the "humanity" meter with a "notoriety" meter. You can have positive notoriety (famous, or revered), and negative notoriety (infamous, or reviled). Obviously, people who are good and do good things will gain positive notoriety points, while people who are evil and do bad things will gain negative notoriety points.

Now, how would this affect gameplay?

Well, first of all, I think nameplates should be enabled for everybody, but only allow you to see them from a somewhat close distance. This would be used as a simulation of facial recognition in real life--when I get close to someone, I can get a good look at their face and see who they are.

Second, there should be some type of "wanted poster" or something like that, that is basically a list of known criminals, or people with negative notoriety points currently logged onto the server. When you get close enough to people to see their nameplate (i.e. recognize their face), you can determine if that person is a criminal/bandit or not, because that person's name is or isn't on the wanted poster.

People could have the ability to hide their nameplate by hiding their face with a mask (looted from somewhere). This way, other people couldn't see their name regardless of how close they were, but the person would be wearing a mask, which may lead people to believe that the person is a bandit. This would naturally give bandits a reason to "look" like a bandit, because they would essentially want to hide their name, or their face, from other people so they are not recognized as a bandit.

A few other ideas about the notoriety system... you could make it so points aren't immediately added or subtracted from their score when they do something good/bad, put a timed delay on it, like 24 hours, to simulate the time it takes for news to travel. If someone five miles away kills someone, I'm not going to know immediately, but I may hear about it eventually.

The "wanted poster" could be a physically looted item, or maybe something built into the GUI. I think the GUI would be a little unrealistic and disadvantageous for bandits. Having it as a physical item would give bandits (by behavior, not by ingame label) the opportunity to not need to cover their face, since people may not have seen them on the wanted poster.

That's pretty much the basic idea. Perhaps give people with high positive notoriety a good reason to wear a mask too, like maybe to keep bandits or other people from seeing their name and wanting to kill them because they have a lot of stuff. I dunno.

Great game though, keep up the good work!

[nicowaves 24]

I really like this idea. This would add a great way of interacting with other players, so you don't have to randomly ask in the chat who is standing there in front of you.

[-PL- 0]

Thanks, I was at work all day thinking about Day Z, lol.

Oooh, you could make people gain less negative notoriety points when murdering someone while wearing a mask.

[ayser 8]

This is well thought out! I really like the ideas, but i'm sure this will require a good amount of coding, and time consuming as the dev's are most likely getting "DIS MOD IZ BUGGEH" e-Mails from people, and currently releasing new stuff