Alternatives to Tents (and other ideas)

[Ideology 1]

It seems that the general consesus is that this game is simply a slow death-match simulator with a few environmental hazards. Really there are three major avenues of interaction in the game:

Type 1: Interaction with Players (pvp, teamwork, comraderie)

Type 2: Interaction with Environment (looting, zombies, weather)

Type 3: Interaction with Self (health, inventory, survival)

Right now Type 1 is heavily weighted towards pvp, and Type 2 and Type 3 interactions exist almost secondarily. The more emphasis we place on Type 2 and Type 3 interactions, means that people will be less concentrated on Type 1 interactions.

At the moment, tents diminish Type 2 and Type 3 interactions. You find a tent, you loot as much as you need, put it all in a tent, and suddenly your survival is trivial. You can die, and then just respawn, find your tent and you're back in the end-game. You can kill others with no risk. Combine this with the fact that items are really the only thing you lose if you die, and death is suddenly meaningless. Death is a minor inconvenience.

So firstly, let me address the tent issue. There does need to be a way to store items outside of your backpack, but tents are too easy to acquire, too easy to hide in the environment, and require no effort to set up. Instead, we could replace tents with hideouts. Shanty buildings that must be constructed with found materials, similar to how we rebuild cars. This would put more emphasis on Type 2 interactions, in that you would need to make multiple trips to towns to find resources to build up your shack. Once they are built, they would also be immobile (but destroyable) making protection imperative. No longer could you put a tent inbetween a few bushes and spend days up on a roof sniping knowing that your stuff is safe. Your hut would be a precious base to protect, and you would spend hours trying to find a suitable hiding spot for it, especially as it would be easier to spot than a tent. In conclusion, the extra resource gathering puts more emphasis on the Type 2 interactions (looting), and the need to protect your stockpile a bit more pulls the player away from Type 1 (PVPing) and into Type 3 (Survival).

The other issue I touched on is that of the lack of real loss. Yes, permadeath is a great loss, but you honestly don't lose anything if you store items intelligently. There needs to be a player specific element that grows with time, and is worth protecting. At the same time, it can't be something that makes people even more trigger happy to protect, and it can't give 'older' players an unfair advantage. For this I have a few ideas, all of which should be considered seperately:

- Each player has a personal key to access their shanty hut, so that if they die they lose access to their hut, and the player who killed them gets the key with a mark on his map showing him where to find it. Effectively it makes end-game players more of a target, and less likely to take risks such as sitting on a building a sniping new players. At the same time, this may add TOO much frustration to the game, ruining the end-game entirely.

- There could be more of an emphasis placed on time spent alive. Maybe rather than having the server and global leaderboards sorted by 'zombie/player kills' it should be sorted by how long the person has been alive for. Make it so the survivors get the prestige. As secondary stats, there could just be a symbol for -ve/+ve humanity, and also a small zombie kill count, next to each player on the leaderboard.

- Players could have physical changes, which I think Rocket alluded to with his beards. This way it will be obvious whether a player is interacting with someone who is fresh or someone who has survived for a long time. Maybe especially long beards could be collected as trophies, although this would again put emphasis on PVP. I do however enjoy the parallels to the 'Dothraki' ponytails.

- Maybe there should be 'demobilising' shots added to the game. A well aimed shot to the legs may cause a person to become immobile and unable to attack without help. Allowing those who shoot first and ask questions later remove the risk of being killed without killing the other person. It also allows for the scenario of shooting someones legs out, looting them as they lay on the ground bleeding, and then leaving them to bleed out over the next 5 minutes unless they have someone to help them out. Alternatively, you could shoot a fellow player in the legs, knock them down so that you can speak to them without risk, and then heal them once you agree on a friendly disposition. Maybe it doesn't even have to be brutal, there could be non-lethal rounds, or blunt weapons that allow you to demobilise fellow players.

That is all for now, but I may add to this thread in the future if I have any new inspirations.

Thank you for reading.