Loot rewards and penalties

[frghu 3]

There really are no in-game incentives to murder or let live. Take a look at the three pillars and how they relate to murders:

Loot, Kill, Survive.

The act of killing offers no reward and goes without penalty for enacting upon others indiscriminately. At the "endgame", there is no gameplay need to kill others aside from the simple pleasure of it.

Survival is all about avoiding conflict early on. You could slay TO survive, but not for long. Once you have the means to survive, you are the hunter and everyone else is surviving. There needs to be a reason to either help them survive or leave them alone.

Loot is the driving force of player kill. Take meta gaming and grouping with friends out of the picture here. The core gameplay element is to engage other survivors and fight over it or you hunt others to acquire or prevent them from having it.

If all experiences can be derived from the loot then by modifying how loot is handled in the game to give broad incentives against killing outright. Dynamic loot that is based on kills, murders, and no-killing, could change how players act in the game. Especially if they have to consider that their actions impact their rewards.

This can be done by tweaking the loot with modifiers. These numbers are arbitrary but the idea is: the more an item has a chance to spawn, the less everything else does.

1. For every player murdered: Quality weapon ammunition -10% chance to spawn (sniper rounds especially)

2. For every player killed (zombie or otherwise) : Consumables & Equipment +5% chance to spawn

3. For every hour a player is not killed or murdered: Junk +6% chance to spawn

4. If all zombies on server are alive when spawn: 5% chance of nothing spawn

5. Ratio of zombies killed/alive = % of non-junk loot spawn

6. Longer stretches of no-kill/deaths increase spawns of: heli's, transports, group items

7. Higher murder/kill ratios increase spawns of: personal vehicles, ghillie suits, survival items

In case 1, if a player is murdered and already has a murder count (bandit), the modifier is not applied

In cases 1&2 vs 3: The opposing events would reverse eachothers effects, tipping the scale over time.

In all cases, the effects can accumulate up to a set %

The theme here would be to award high kill pvp with survival/stealth gear and CQC combat. New players get extra survival gear spawns to increase lifespans. On low kill pvp servers, award community efforts and long range transport/weaponry for overwatch and protection geared towards clearing zombies and taking out bandits. On empty servers, it behooves you to hunt others and kill them.

On a complete anarchy server, sniper rounds and top quality weapons would have to be conserved. Seeing someone with a good gun means they're worth killing for their ammo. Seeing someone with lesser weaponry may not be worth killing if it risks your chance of spawning ammo.

On a total pacifist server, while everyone is happy and singing campfire songs and reveling in a post-apocalyptic paradise, they're depleting their resources by flooding the spawns with junk. Killing one another for supplies will be inevitable.

In all situations, killing zombies will benefit everyone. Saving others from zombies is now a bonus.

In the end the rules could be anything, as long as it provided a balance both for and against pvp. To give it meaning within the game mechanic.

Lastly........

To communicate this all to the player? When you log into a server, in addition to the location of and day, there can be a report of “<Hour> since last survivor murder”

“0 Hours since last reported murder” you know things are probably bad.

“4 hours since…” you know things are relatively safe.

“12 hours since….” polish that rifle and kill the first survivor you see cause you aren't going to find anything but junk in stores. (this may dissuade empty servers at night if no on has been murdered in hours and no one is killing zombies...double bonus?)

EDIT: renamed topic

Edited July 24, 2012 by frghu

[Frozen (DayZ) 144]

uhuh.... next.

[Ramp (DayZ) 4]

Here we go...The pvp is not THAT bad. It doesn't need to be fixed in any way(except disconecting). If I die in cherno/elektro (after respawn) it's only because I'm greedy bastard who wants to find more items although I already have everything what I need to head north. I suppose everyone else does too.

But having some mechanism to detect who is bandit and who is survivor would be nice ^_^ ... I hate killing everyone on sight.

[frghu 3]

Sorry, i should have chosen a different title.

The idea is not to fix pvp I guess. I began to write it out as that, but that's probably beaten to a dead horse I imagine. What I'm suggesting here is more towards loot and how it can influence pvp. Force people to fight for survival who normally wouldn't and on the flipside, give the tools required to survive and escape hostile environments.

Ultimately something that is both achievable without changing the gameplay itself to a jarring or noticable effect.

[Ramp (DayZ) 4]

Yeah, I missunderstood you, sorry for that. I can see your point, and the idea is indeed interesting, it would make people kill zombies which is great, now you just lose them in bushes, no one rly fights zombies now...

But this will also bring server hoppers to servers with high loot. At this state, this is not going to happen. But great idea for the standalone.

[Marten (DayZ) 2]

Not so sure about how ur system is meant.

Assuming those modification apply to everyone one the server? ( Correct me if I'm wrong)

In that case it's an intresting idea and no punishment system.

I see how it makes sense in reality:

More people that are alive so less food

More shooting so less ammo.

But not so sure, that this would be enough to solve all that shoot on sight.

But it could be a step in the right direction.

But if it's not for everyone on the server then it's a punishment system and my answer would be "no".