@ rocket: Humanity / Sanity issues

[Dr Klunk 11]

We all talk about Arma2 engine's realism, and I would like to elaborate on this, in particular when it comes to Humanity.

I applaud the up-coming removal of the automatic skin change when going below humanity "0", making you a "bandit".

I would suggest that we totally remove the labels "bandits" and "survivors" alltogether and focus on humanity alone. We are all players and we all make decisions, some instinctively, some calculated - and this involves taking a virtual lives.

I would however suggest, in the spirit of realism, that taking someones life, wether in self defence or in cold blood, affect your mental helth. We have already heard the new panic sound.. and I would like to see this sound together with the shakes, such as we expercience when badly injured. These sounds and shakes could appear more often when humanity points drops lower and lower-- making it easier to be heard, and harder to i.e aim your gun.

Back in the late 80ies I was an avid RPG player for a few years, often playing the excellent RPG "Call of Cthulhu", based on the world of the horror novelist H.P Lovecraft. In this game, characters not only possessed skills in %, or characteristics such as strenght, dexterity etc in points. They also had Sanity points (maybe up to 100). As a character encountered/experienced horrors (such as killing people, or encountering horrors), he/she lost sanity points, making it more and more likely that he /she panicked in certain situations, and finally loosing his/hers mind totally when reaching "0" in Sanity, making the character useless. This approach made this RPG one of the most acclaimed and loved RPG ever created.

Now, this Sanity approach is/can be quite similar to the Humanity approach in DayZ.. though in contrast to the Call of Cthulhu RPG, characters here could gain Humanity points, doing good deeds, such as giving blood, bandaging people, applying morfin on others.., painkillers etc etc... in small point increments. Making it possible to gain in humanity when executing medical procedures on others, would also inrease realsim; suggesting that it is important for one's mental health to interact with others.

That said, not distinguishing bandits from survivors, you no longer should be able to gain humanity points when killing a bandit, as such as person no longer exists. You loose Humanity points regardless if the victim is more or less a "good/bad" person. This in my opinion would benefit realism in this game, making it more interesting, removing the boundaries between "good guys" and "bad guys".. just making us humans... with effects that are human as well..

I would even suggest, as with the Sanity points, that characters also loose humanity/Sanity points when encoutering Zs.. though in lesser degrees than when taking a virtual life... but more with big amounts of Z at the same time, just for the argument let's say you loose 1p / Z that discovers you.. maybe 100-200/person you kill. You shouldn't loose the amount of humanity points the victim possess-- but rather a set number.

just my 2 cents...

PS: to make it even more interesting, carrying morphine could be used to dampen the panic effects.. or introduce a new item; "Barbiturates" :) or maybe this is not politically correct :)

[Leechman 8]

The issue with the "realism" of your suggestion is that there is no way you can predict a response that an individual person will have to committing such acts, especially in an extreme scenario such as this.

Basing it completely off humanity imposes a set of rules into the game that direct peoples actions. More importantly it unfairly impairs the players who (whether by choice or not) engage in such a lifestyle.

I'd be happy to see mental effects in game, but base it off supernatural elements, similar to most lovecraft-based games (to use your analogy). For example, players killing X zombies in Y seconds, or a player who is below a certain amount of blood, or have a chance on zombie hit to trigger a traumatic response.

If you're imposing effects on gameplay, do it before the choice is made using the most useful tool in the game, zombies.

[O'Malley 3]

I think it would be alright if people got the shakes or so after their first few kills. But afterwards you become more desensitised to it and it stops impacting your gameplay.

[TeaLeaf 5]

What if you are a sociopath?

[Leechman 8]

It's not just the extreme cases where people would not be affected by such things. It is not inconceivable that 'regular' people would be able to rationalise those courses of action and therefore not feel any adverse affects

[tiri 21]

I always thought that sanity issues in a game were useless except for a few games (hello, Penumbra), because it depends mostly on the player.

Every time i hear flies around a dead corpse, i am stressed for five seconds, scanning the area because someone has been killed here. Same for dead zombies. But that's it.

I don't want a game shouting in my face "YOU SAW SOMEONE DEAD, YOU ARE AFRAID" when i'm not, especially in a game like ArmA where dead bodies are all but gruesome.

The same goes with killing a zombie or a player. I'm perfectly fine with both if needed but i know some players who can't resolve themselves to kill someone for different reasons. I don't want the game to express a feeling i don't have.

[slair84@gmail.com 0]

I've been thinking about the value of other people lives in dayz for a while now. Just now, the lives of other people are pretty easy to take. You want something they have, kill them, take it. Lives are worth less than the supplies they carry. Even your very first kill is easy.

For most of us taking a life in the real world would be hard, impossible even. I thought about a mechanic that makes you shake when you aim at other players, like you're nervous, because it isn't hard for the person with the mouse in their hand to shoot someone, make it artifitially hard for them to pull the trigger. "Is it worth it to take the shot and miss and they get lucky?" Over time you would get more and more proficient at killing people, the shakes would happen less and less until life means nothing to you.

This mechanic creates several problems though:

There is no reward for not killing people to boost you proficiency at it.

If someone is trying to shoot you, you would be much less likely to value that persons life in real life, so they'd be easier for you to come to terms with having to kill them. So they game would have to have some sort of fight or flight mechanic when you're under attack from other players that boosts abilities, which creates a whole slew of other problems.

There's probably more.

This is a pretty long winded post to say I want other peoples lives to mean more, but i'm not sure if a game mechanic can replicate that.

[raviool 2]

your reward for being good is whatever others give you for being good. the punishment for being bad is whatever others do to you when they hear of your bad reputation. there should never be any kind of effect forced on you by the game for playing it your way.

[Leechman 8]

Once again, the issue with the "realism" of your suggestion is that there is no way you can predict a response that an individual person will have to committing such acts, especially in an extreme scenario such as this.

Please consider the single-minded thinking you are employing.

Comparing it to real life is poor reasoning. It is 'difficult' to take a life in this current time for 2 reasons:

1. Personal Morality or Needs

2. Social stigma and punishments

Now in this scenario the second point is non-existent. There is no society for there to be stigma or punishments. The only thing making it difficult for a person to commit an act of violence is their personal morality or needs. The funny thing about this is how subjective it is. That is, it changes completely for each person and making gross, sweeping statements about how the majority of people would act is very poor reasoning.

Don't try and make other people's lives worth more, instead make their decisions worth more.

[Cane (DayZ) 0]

here's a thought.

Instead of introducing more mechanics how about introducing the opposite of the bandit - the ranger. You become a ranger by killing bandits this would more accurately model what would happen - some people would, in fact, take it upon themselves to try and redress outlaw balance with law and order. Survivors who see rangers know they can approach them safely and bandits may well target rangers even more making for an interesting new level of game play. Maybe the ranger skin simply becomes available so you are not forced to wear it all the time.

i suppose you could introduce mechanics based on the skin or 'uniform' since this models real life effects of wearing uniforms -bravado for rangers (less panic?) and some form of extra aggression boost for bandits - dunno, sounds a bit like perks from cod though - don't want to go there.

[Leechman 8]

A better option than the OP, but skin have been removed from being affect by humanity, so is not quite relevant anymore.

[skurcey 11]

yeah Cane but they removed bandit skin cause of bugs and coding dead end.

Maybe with custom clothing it could work.

Players could choose clothes from a pannel of their humanity. Or make it a karma system, where bad karma means less luck (but so, more stealing to "honnest"). That could lead to interresting gameplay

[Rickard 2]

Realistic? Maybe. Fun and valuable feature to add to the game? No. If there gonna be cons for a path you choose there needs to be pros for that path or at least cons for the opposite path as well. Who would otherwise choose it? It would destroy the PvP atmosphere.

[sALADIN1 7]

I think there certainly should be a penalty for killing people. There is one in game now, of course, that being the bandit skin, but I agree with its removal because it does seem completely contrived. The only thing stopping someone from taking a life IRL if there was a zombie apocalypse is their own moral code, BUT this is very hard to replicate in a computer game because you know that they will just have to start again with a new character, and not really lose all that much (unless they had NVG/cars/choppers etc). The only way around this would be to implement some sort of morality system, but of course this would be almost as bad as the bandit skin. There definitely should be a penalty for very low humanity, but it would be very hard to implement one, because there isn't a way of knowing how someone would react to possibly seeing their entire family turned into ravening monsters and having to re-kill them. Personally, if that happened to me, I don't think I'd mind headshotting a few other survivors either for their canned beans.

Off-topic, I really do like the idea of finding different skins around the world.

[slair84@gmail.com 0]

Once again' date=' the issue with the "realism" of your suggestion is that there is no way you can predict a response that an individual person will have to committing such acts, especially in an extreme scenario such as this.

Please consider the single-minded thinking you are employing.

Comparing it to real life is poor reasoning. It is 'difficult' to take a life in this current time for 2 reasons:

1. Personal Morality or Needs

2. Social stigma and punishments

Now in this scenario the second point is non-existent. There is no society for there to be stigma or punishments. The only thing making it difficult for a person to commit an act of violence is their personal morality or needs. The funny thing about this is how subjective it is. That is, it changes completely for each person and making gross, sweeping statements about how the majority of people would act is very poor reasoning.

Don't try and make other people's lives worth more, instead make their decisions worth more.

[/quote']

I did say that having a mechanic in place to emulate this would probably be impossible and not work.

I wouldn't quite say i had single minded thinking either.

Everyones moral compass is certainly different and without laws some peoples morals will wane. This is a game though and peoples morals dont apply. There is no transition of morals from real life to game. If DayZ was to come to pass in real life, everyone wouldn't suddenly have no issue killing people. It'll get easier for some and disturbingly easy for others. But for people who had lived in the world before it ended, taking their first life would not be easy. Your upbringing defines your morality and the laws act as an artificial boundry for those without morals. Taking away the laws doesn't take away your morality. As life becomes more desperate the choice to kill would be an easier one. Sure some are morally bankrupt, but most people aren't.

As i said, what i suggested wouldn't quite work. There just isn't a foolproof system that could emulate morality when morality cant really be defined through a mechanic in a game.

[dystopeon 46]

imposes a set of rules into the game

it is a GAME, there are RULES. GAME = RULES, otherwise is pure simulation and NOT a GAME. What do you people want it to be? hmmm... a GAME that remains popular (maybe becomes the most popular), recieves updates, great servers etc...? or a wishy washy farmville / sniper fest that goes nowhere? Rocket you are a composer and as a musician I will tell you this, if you remove the bandit/survivor dyad, you will return to it again beacuse it is a BRILLIANT, savant like concept.

Personally I loved it when I became a bandit, it totally sucked and I got ganked heaps but it was MY fault. when I was starting as a surivivor I got lured by others survivors for my AK, one shot me, the both laughed about it over the direct while I was bleeding. however they didn't finish me off properly and I filled both those punks with 2 nana clips before dying. I then spend the next few days as a bandit, getting ganked by survivors. It was fun in every respect. DON'T CHANGE THIS INTO A SIM. I don't wan't to join a clan and teamspeak (that is for noobs only). I want a geniune survivor experience with direct communication and the dyadic skin concept is paramount to that experience. It weeds out the morons, clans, teamspeakers and noobs into a convenient Bandit shaped target.

[skurcey 11]

Well yeah it s a game, it s bound to other rules that in the reality. But still as i state, there s still the frustration factor that occur. Well you can respawn and rebegin, but you ll loose time, and stuff. Virtual stuff, yeah , but there are still TOOLS, usefull tools to advance ingame.

So here we need coded rules that would act like MORALITY is IRL. We need to think of what could lead to less killing, to limit all. We re not supposed to be in a TEAM DEATH MATCH gameplay. What s the point of killing respawning players on beach, retardness or getting a beans can that you could find looting one or two houses. Or if we all agree killing is best and living in constant fear without any chance of having a safe fallback plan, it s just like we play COD, but then why playing on a 225KM² map? We could do the same on a little COD map...

[siddhi 0]

i think there needs to be some thought played to gameplay as well as the obvious attractions of super-sandboxing...

..i would welcome having the ability distinguish between yet-another-PK-kiddie and a regular mature player. at the moment it is quite hard to do so, and the lack of the DIRECT CHAT function, which is being worked on, makes it harder.

my personal play experience was that i pretty quickly went totally survivalist, trusting no-one, and also not having much of a game after 15h with the same character...who was eventually shot by a bandit in ambush. i would have liked to team up with someone but there was a lack of "realistic" way to determine someone "trust ability", as we would all do in real life.

anyway, in brief, the suggestions:

1. i LIKE the "Insane / sane" distinction. Someone who was "Insane" could mutter outload, develop ticks, have a whole range of "bad habits" that would mark him to others. Also, it would provide a basic limitation for NOT going around killing people more in line with "natural law"...humans just do not kill each other the way they do in games, and this needs tp be reflected. SO lets have a "slow descent" into raving, sputtering lunacy! That would be a problem not only maybe for “mass murders” but maybe for someone who spends a lot of time on their own….

2. If we stick with the HUMANITY side, I think there should be away to accumulate lots of bonus points, as it were, and have that reflected in custom skins-...someone suggested "sheriff" skin once, which I like. The reason for this "unrealistic" approach is simply that we do NOT have the option of knowing someone’s "Reputation" very easily - not with 60,000 players - and there needs to be a way to identify them quickly.

3. for the same reason, DIRECT CHAT and TS has to be good to go as quickly as possible - provides with a better chance to make that "self assessment" that is so critical to the game,

I look forward to the idea of introducing weather-induced decision making which means I guess new clothing and similar being introduced…

And let me close with

ALL HAIL ROCKET :)

[jezex90 12]

Why would killing a human being have a direct affect on your mental health? Surely you must have been that way screwed up in the first place in order to perform such a deed.

You don't immediately ferry troops back from tour to the nearest asylum, and survival is war against life itself. Having a sanity meter where after 8 kills your player laughs hysterically and defecates on himself is no more realistic than morphing into a bandit on your first kill.

What exactly is the difference between a horde of zombies and a bandit? Surely such a system 'in the spirit of realism' would inflict an equal amount of mental damage killing the quick just as much as the dead?

(As far as game mechanics go I am all for Cane's proposed 'Ranger' vigilante style class; It detracts from the realism of anyone could be anyone but would remedy the trust and pvp situation just as fast. In my opinion)

[siddhi 0]

the points is that we are at the moment technically unable to have all the "social clues" passed on to us that in RL would indicate friend or foe.

fixing TS and even direct chat would help, but it is unlikely to be enough. i for instance already totally avoid all the Russian server as the amount of PKing is in insane and totally random (btw: this was something Rocket also commented on in an interview, comparing it with the NZ server experience.

It does not matter if we have a "level system", a "class system" (such as ranger or whatever) or a (player assigned) reputation system - something needs to be put in place to allow for the technical limitations for "evaluating trust" be overcome.

on a side: having a lot of Zs helps in this...nothing "encourages" cooperation then the need to deal with a swarm...

ALL HAIL ROCKET :)

[pager187 14]

This is a stupid idea. If you want realism you won't get social cues in real life from murderers who are psychopaths.They won't walk up to you shaking around like Don Knotts with their eyes twitching. They charm and manipulate you to be their friend, then they use you or stab you in the back. Just like DayZ is now. Psychopaths are not the only murderers in reality either. When there are situations involving law and order breaking down otherwise normal folk turn into complete animals. You won't twitch around, you will become an even better killer after the first.

 

If you wanted to make it real it would actually be bambis and do gooder heroes who would have the shakes when they kill someone. To people who find taking someone's life distasteful murder can cause post traumatic stress. To someone who's become accustomed to butchery, killing another human being is nothing more than squishing a cockroach. 

 

Just like in real life you need to use your own judgement based on how the person reacts and talks to you. That mechanic is already in the game (prox chat). I've never been betrayed in the mod or this game. Not once. The reason why is that I don't run around looking to jump in the lap of every human I encounter. I make a few good comrades, and a lot of them I met by sticking a gun in their back. The rest get the bleach or a bullet to the back of the head.

 

Someone above said "Please don't turn this game into a sim". Thought that was pretty funny considering this game has always been a sim, and the entire concept has been based on realism. Why do you think they built it on a military sim engine that they sell to governments to train their troops on. Go play WarZ if you want to dumb this game down.

 

Threads like this are common in full loot open world pvp games. People get laid out doing something retarded like running through the street in the open or trusting the wrong survivor, then they come on the forum and come up with rage concepts. Concepts that protect the weak, and penalize the strong. Get in where you fit in you pathetic bambi.