Permadeath in the post apocalypse (bit of an essay) *repost from newbie group*

[JerFeelgood 34]

I posted this in the Newbie discussion group when I meant to post it here so....

Yo yo,

I recently discovered the world of DayZ and ArmA, but unfortunately do not have the sys req at the moment to actually play the game. I've watched a lot of videos online re the project and been reading the forum intensively... newayz....

I like what I think Rocket was aiming for when he started this project. To use existing tools (The ArmA engine with which he was familiar) to simulate a post apocalyptic world in which a social experiment regarding which direction humanity would take in such a situation. I believe when I get back to my PC to actually play the game, I would like to play keeping the ideal of the original concept in place.

In looking at the way the game plays now, I believe that their are several problems outside of his control in a F2P open server environment (and that he will never be able to control with ANY update) that limit the viability of the experiment. Players will not give up ingrained tools and concepts to actively participate in the experiment.

The biggest tool/exploit is communication. In a paranoid post apocalyptic world, communication should be extremely difficult. The existence of global chat, where you can assess someones intentions from miles away should be strictly curtailed. All communication should be restricted to within the game. With the existence of TeamSpeak and Ventrillo this will be impossible to enforce. Absolutely impossible. And without this restriction it makes it way too easy for clans and squads to dominate the combat environment. Imagine a group environment where you had to communicate with flashlight or visual codes to transmit outside of ingame audible distance. I think if players were willing to give up their communication tools, it would go a long way to making the game a lot more interesting from a survival point of view. It would be like reinventing the wheel in terms of gameplay. How would you assess someones intentions without these tools? would a community reinvent signals and tools to advertise their friendly intentions?

Imagine your squad of four hunters trying to coordinate an attack without an independent comms tool? Imagine they had to make sounds audible to all in-game to actually communicate and coordinate, you're set up in your sniper position and one of your squad scouts 400m away to your west, and then wants to return, how does he identify himself when returning to the squad to prevent infiltration? After player death, how do you safely relocate your squad? I think this would MASSIVELY increase paranoia levels in the game... and go a long way to increase the seriousness of the permadeath experiment... How would you even relocate your friends after you wake up on the beach? how would you identify yourself to them to come within the security perimeter that would inevitably spring up?

How could one enforce this in the current game environment? It could only be done voluntarily. Players would have to choose to give up the tools on which they rely. And that could be maintained with closed access subscriber based servers or a code of conduct signup in the installation of the mod/EULA. A server where one must sign up to a code of conduct before being allowed in, and being banned for breaches of the code of conduct. It should be fairly easy to determine from admin observer mode whether someone is using illegitimate modes of communication. This code of conduct would only relate to the use of tools external to game and the post apocalyptic world which the devs have not deliberately given you access. Anything in game would be fair game.

PvP vs PvE seems to be a massive argument ongoing in these forums at the moment.... I would argue that it should be possible to make the PvP element part of the PvE so that there is no difference, but this would only be possible if you could limit access to the tools that make PvP play so easy i.e. ease of communication, the abiity to bring equipment from one server to another... I have no real problems with lone nuts on killing sprees, they may well be a reality of the post apocalyptic zombie world. I do have a major problem with players using tools not given (external comm programs) to them to clean up in the game... is the use of ANY external software not an exploit in itself?

anyway, I also think the 3rd person look around corners exploit is a bit broken when a tool (mirror on a bayonnet anyone?) could do the same in a much more immersive and realistic way. I have no problems woth loads of guns lying about but surely in the post apocalypse ammo would get really rare really fast. Readily consummable items should have the highest rareity value (ammo, matches, food, fresh blood, meds, batteries etc) and making them extremely rare woud go a long way to absorbing the PvP element into the PvE one as camping cherno wouldn't allow you to survive. You'd have to get out into the woods to make your own food. Similar to how vehicles are restored with parts, a limited access to lead, saltpetre, fire and relevent casting tools would allow you to make your own ammo and make it a tradeable commodity, It's the ease of access to these resources that makes PvP style of play so easy. it would be so easy to make an ingame specific tool which is a container, into which you place the required elements, then use it at a relevent spot an out pops what you where aiming for. Mouldy fruit + mortar and pestle + distillation equipment + fire = penicillin. Blood extaction kit + container + well hydrated/well fed indiviaual = bloodbag. Thinking along the lines of potion making from oblivion or skyrim. An ability to perform certain tasks could be restricted to certain environments. Imagine a garage building in a couple of towns where you would have to push/tow vehicles to in order to perform certain sorts of repairs, a chemist where one could make meds, and so on for all of the in game essentials.....

Why are people so absolutely willing to circumvent the dev inspired game concept of permadeath? With a player death, surely all previous knowledge and ties should be lost to you. This includes knowledge of your friends and the surroundings.... It has always been true that the two greatest tools to humanity are knowledge and information. An ability to store and transmit these. In the post apocalyptic world, so much of both should be lost as to make certain specialist equipment both unusable and unmaintainable. In game high end electronics would suffer quickly, and as a result should disappear relatively quickly, and thence their value should be huge. This would imply the game would have to have a skill acquisition system, and massive penalties for those individuals without access to certain skills i.e. PvP bandits.

These simple couple of things would inspire communities to spring up around certain resources, become protective of those resources and thence make those resources tradeable as they would have value...

And with restricted access to bullets, meds and beans, I would not see a player killer surviving very long. With no comms, coordinated raids on burgeoning communities would have a much lower chance of succeeding.

And lastly, the threat element from the zombie apocalypse should be massively strenghtened. If it was bad enough to take out the world in the first place it should should still present a massive threat to all human life. Ideally adding extra senses in game would add to the realism, touch (think wind sense, heat sense), smell and taste via a pc odor plume (and other odour plumes) and wind directions for upwind/downwind combined with a colour code to identify the type of odour. A zombie awareness of these elements would lead to an increased threat factor, a group of people would generate more odour and thence would attract more zombies, staying in a place too long could massively increase risk and should prevent camping....

I really don't know how many of these game devices could realistically be added to the game engine without overwhelming the server and user hardware....

Anyway. Sorry about the essay. I'm all for some PvP play once it's made intrinsic to the game device. I apologise if some of these ideas have been discussed in other threads.... and big up to the devs for the concept. It seems clear that the PC gaming public are fairly homicidal... will that be the result of the DayZ experiment...?

My closing thought... do players want a survival based community game or a modern-day PvP persistent world warfare game with a zombie threat... do zombies in modern culture not just replace the wolves and bears and dragons that represented the horror threat of the medieval and dark ages?

whew. that was almost to much. hope i don't get flamed...

Jer

[lordopeth 274]

SO you actually haven't played the Dayz yet?

[JerFeelgood 34]

SO you actually haven't played the Dayz yet?

no but i get the gist, have plenty of FPS experience.... And I will once I get my games PC back (i'm away from it for a while!)

does this mean i'm not allowed to comment on what i've observed? Am I not allowed to the discuss the game before I invest time in playing it?

:)

[Alixtheone (DayZ) 40]

TL; DR

[tsandrey 379]

You do know that by pressing CAPS you can talk into VOIP? That's good communication with other survivors

[JerFeelgood 34]

You do know that by pressing CAPS you can talk into VOIP? That's good communication with other survivors

yes, but Isn't that form of communication linked to an audible range/proximity game device? like speech in the real world?

[GodOfGrain 191]

An advanced crafting system / skill system etc will definitly make it in the game over time. Rocket talked about this recently (at least a skill system).

Your main issue is really interesting. The influence of external communication cannot be underestimated. You ve drawn a good picture of how it would look like without external communication.

Regular ARMA players use the modification ACRE quite frequently which offers a very refined communication system ( both radio and direct comm). I am not sure, is it really impossible to enforce the use of TS+ACRE? If it is impossible,we can stop discussing this :)

[MrBrown (DayZ) 26]

As much as I like the idea - people will continue to use TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, and nothing's ever gonna change that. So every gameplay or design decision which relies on players voluntarily giving up their VoIP usage will end up very bad IMHO.

The only possible way I see to stop real-life friends from getting the VoIP advantage is to disallow picking your own server. So they can still voice chat but it would be very unlikely that they'd ever meet on the same server, so it wouldn't give them any advantage. But even then people who meet randomly ingame can still invite each other on Skype to get an advantage again. And looking at how Day Z server hosting currently works (relying on people who want to pay for their own servers and build communities) I don't see this happening anyway.

Edited July 26, 2012 by MrBrown

[Swineflew 480]

I'll maybe read this later, but it's hard for me to read through that on my phone knowing that you haven't played the game at all.

[G650 5]

Guys quit being ignorant. Even though he hasn't played the game, he still has a good grasp of some of the problems with DayZ.

[JerFeelgood 34]

As much as I like the idea - people will continue to use TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, and nothing's ever gonna change that. So every gameplay or design decision which relies on players voluntarily giving up their VoIP usage will end up very bad IMHO.

The only possible way I see to stop real-life friends from getting the VoIP advantage is to disallow picking your own server. So they can still voice chat but it would be very unlikely that they'd ever meet on the same server, so it wouldn't give them any advantage. But even then people who meet randomly ingame can still invite each other on Skype to get an advantage again. And looking at how Day Z server hosting currently works (relying on people who want to pay for their own servers and build communities) I don't see this happening anyway.

I think once it was written into the rules/code ofconduct/EULA, it would legitimise Admins kicking people for ungamesmanship behaviour. I perceive the thrill of the game being the paranoia/tension. In gaming i regard the use of any parallel external software to be an exploit and should be regarded as such. How can can you subscribe to the concept of simulating an apocalypse scenario without first casting off pre apocalypse tools....

maybe putting a NO TS a la NO 3DP header in the server listing to show that external comms are not allowed on that server? I Know there would be know actual way to control this directly form the Software itself, but it should be very very observable in game from player actions from an admin point of view whether or not a group is using TS/Mumble/Ventrillo...

[Huuwap 25]

I live in mumble with several groups of friends playing several different games. Mumble dictates our game play.

If you want to take the fun out of playing with friends, sure, restrict external VOIP...but it would be a bad move.

[JerFeelgood 34]

I live in mumble with several groups of friends playing several different games. Mumble dictates our game play.

If you want to take the fun out of playing with friends, sure, restrict external VOIP...but it would be a bad move.

And therein lies the entire crux of my argument. Mumble dictates your gameplay. Which means, very simply that the concept of permadeath and apocalypse are entirely abhorrent to you. In order to experience these concepts for which the mod was conceived. you must be willing to give up your Mumble and learn to communicate IN GAME. Parallel software comms can only be perceived as a deliberate exploit to the entire concept?

*edit* I think restricting external VOIP would be the single greatest achievement this game could possibly make. The biggest threat to the concept is the ease of communication. If interplayer communication to build trust were extremely difficult, then the value of an ingame community would be incredibly increased and would lead to a massive increase in the paranoia factor.

and again.... rocket has stated that he never intended for the concept to be *fun* to play... that there was already enough of that style of game out there....

Edited July 26, 2012 by JerFeelgood

[Swineflew 480]

Guys quit being ignorant. Even though he hasn't played the game, he still has a good grasp of some of the problems with DayZ.

I went back and read it and I don't really think he does.

Edit: restricting external VoIP is going to discourage group play and increase lone wolf gameplay, it will make people who want to play in groups weaker for the shoot on sight players.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Swineflew

[Huuwap 25]

And therein lies the entire crux of my argument. Mumble dictates your gameplay. Which means, very simply that the concept of permadeath and apocalypse are entirely abhorrent to you. In order to experience these concepts for which the mod was conceived. you must be willing to give up your Mumble and learn to communicate IN GAME. Parallel software comms can only be perceived as a deliberate exploit to the entire concept?

I think you misunderstand. We play as a group, we're always in close proximity, and the concepts are clearly communicated every time we need to regroup. If in-game comms didn't suck total ass (which you'd understand if you played), and if we were able to flag as group members and use a group channel in-game we'd use the in-game comms. Hand-held radios capable of a five mile range are not rare in the real world, and it's silly to think we wouldn't have a form of communication across a distance.

*edit* I think restricting external VOIP would be the single greatest achievement this game could possibly make. The biggest threat to the concept is the ease of communication. If interplayer communication to build trust were extremely difficult, then the value of an ingame community would be incredibly increased and would lead to a massive increase in the paranoia factor.

It would lead to more KoS, guaranteed. People KoS because communication blows. If you can hit caps lock and scream "FRIENDLY FRIENDLY I DON'T EVEN HAVE A GUN FRIENDLY" while hiding behind a structure, your soon to be murderer may have heard a friendly, or they could have just heard gibberish. Generally, if you can't establish intent through words, you die...and when somebody tells you to go prone or they'll shoot you in the head and you can't understand that they said to go prone, you fucking die. WTB a better in-game audio codec.

and again.... rocket has stated that he never intended for the concept to be *fun* to play... that there was already enough of that style of game out there....

"It's not supposed to be fun so let's make it a single player horror game." is fucking stupid, in my opinion. I mean, that may be exactly what you're looking for in a game, but I need meaningful multiplayer, which means good communication systems, to enjoy a game.

[JerFeelgood 34]

I went back and read it and I don't really think he does.

Edit: restricting external VoIP is going to discourage group play and increase lone wolf gameplay, it will make people who want to play in groups weaker for the shoot on sight players.

but it will also massively affect cooperative hunter bandit groups. And once players adapt they will develop their own system of communication. Verbal, audible, communication in the zombie post apocalyptic world should incur massive penalties. in the same way that shooting a gun draws in the zombie hoard. Players should have a massive incentive for paranoid silence. Allowing/encouraging external tools is contraindicated to my perception of what the game is trying to achieve... as it is not controllable in the game environment. If the devs decide to extend radio voice communication internally to the game then so be it. But using a radio for audible communication in game should still generate an audio detection footprint. Using external VOIP is conferring a telepathic communication ability to your ingame PC. Surely that is an exploit?

Edited July 26, 2012 by JerFeelgood

[Tsyn 215]

Your view on the game isn't bad, but there are a few things I disagree with. While yes, this mod was built on a military simulator, the use of Teamspeak isn't that unrealistic. The real ArmA game has a radio in which players can use different frequencies to communicate with players. This would be an enjoyable implementation to DayZ.

This is a game no matter which way you look at it, and that concept should still be kept in mind. It will need unrealistic aspects to keep it interesting. The difference between a good game and a bad game, are what type of game and just how unrealistic something gets. DayZ is an original idea and it will soon be much more successful than it already is.

Hope to see you in-game soon.

[Huuwap 25]

If communicating in the game alerted zeds to your presence, I would agree that external VOIP is bypassing an integral function of the game. However, that isn't the case and as a result should not be counted an exploit.

In fact, here is a link for you:

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4227-request-allow-bans-for-death-dodgers/#entry62024

Edited July 26, 2012 by Huuwap

[JerFeelgood 34]

If communicating in the game alerted zeds to your presence, I would agree that external VOIP is bypassing an integral function of the game. However, that isn't the case and as a result should not be counted an exploit.

In fact, here is a link for you:

http://dayzmod.com/f...ers/#entry62024

....which returns me to the argumentof my original post re the value of communication being controlled from within the game, and an escalation of the zombie threat level... from what I can see, zombies aren't all that threatening. If you lie on your belly and shut up, a zombie won't agro on you... why I was arguing in favour of increasing the ways that zombies can detect you.... That these things aren't currently *in* the game doesn't mean we can't discuss their usefulness to the concept...

[Huuwap 25]

As long as I can talk to my teammates and only my teammates over a distance I'm cool with it. If there's a radio, maybe make a 2 or 3 meter audible range while sending/receiving audio, that would be realistic if that's what you're going for.

Chances are I'll just use mumble anyway though because it won't be restricted - Rocket seems to be all for meta gaming.

[Swineflew 480]

There are aspects of video games that can't be changed. It's the nature of the beast if you will.

Bosses respawning, characters respawning after death, are just the ingame ones I can think of off my head. Compromises must be made in some cases.

Imagine if you only had 1 life.

Nobody would have bought arma 2 to play dayz for 20 minutes before they died.

This brings me to my point, you can't control external factors to a game unless you provide a better ingame option.

I don't think that any game currently has a better communication system than vent or mumble or TS.

Now I know you're saying "I don't want better communication" but the point is this is something that Rocket can't control.

This is the "nature of the beast" that I was talking about.

Zombies aren't really supposed to be a threat exactly, more like motivation. If you watch a zombie movie they rarely die by zombies outwitting them or anything like that. It's human error or fear or another human driven event that led to peoples deaths. Just watch a decent zombie movie and you'll notice it.

I forget your points on pvp, but as I said already humans are the real threat. They always have been.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Swineflew

[chickenfeed 17]

If communicating in the game alerted zeds to your presence, I would agree that external VOIP is bypassing an integral function of the game. However, that isn't the case and as a result should not be counted an exploit.

Actually, using VOIP ingame DOES attract zombies towards you. So it is technically bypassing a feature of DayZ.

I completely agree with the use of external VOIP damaging the experiance. You can't silently kill a sniper to prevent him giving overwatch, because he will just scream out "Guys I just got killed, log out or hide." Completely no point playing this way. I know it's impossible to block external VOIP, but it would make the game much more interesting.

Project Reality, the mod for BF2, has a custom Mumble setup which automatically connects to the server's Mumble when the player connects to the game, and Mumbe is used for proximity based chat. Perhaps something along these lines could be added? A DayZ specific Mumble/Teamspeak application which is required for some servers, which automatically connects to that server's chat. Obviously this would not stop people using Skype or their own Mumble, but perhaps it would encourage more communication ingame.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Chickenfeed

[Huuwap 25]

Actually, using VOIP ingame DOES attract zombies towards you. So it is bypassing a feature of DayZ.

3:33 - Direct comms don't aggro zombies.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Huuwap

[dillon (DayZ) 3]

Agree that in game VOIP and possibly groups/friends additions are a must if you expect people to begin to trust and team with ANY players who are not on you external TS.

As is now the in game VOIP is seemingly only used to bait kills with "friendly" and to scare people before backstabbing with the hatchet.

[chickenfeed 17]

3:33 - Direct comms don't aggro zombies.

Considering how badly some of those myths were tested, I wouldn't use that as evidence.

Using VOIP doesn't alert zombies, it makes them walk towards you. Similiarly to eating/drinking or using other items.

Evidence:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/22/day-z-arma-3-interview-on-left-4-dead-skyrim-player-emotion-and-in-game-disease/

"Hall: There’ll still be guys running around, guaranteed, there’ll be guys running around saying, “Anyone in Cherno?” It’s never going to stop. And what a lot of people don’t realize, at the moment, if you use VON, it actually attracts zombies."