Does DayZ create situations of scarcity?

[miket 92]

Does DayZ create situations of scarcity?

If all 50 players on a server were to work together, would they have any issues finding enough food and water for everyone?

My answer is probably no. 50 water bottles and everyone can drink from the same pond indefinitely.

And with animals and canned food combined, I don't think those 50 people would find themselves running out of food ever. Things seem to respawn faster than people can eat them.

The question then is, should DayZ create a situation of scarcity? Should food/water be so short in supply that, even when working together, people will eventually start to die of hunger or thirst?

[Grey Warden 90]

What your asking is if it should be a game about survival and not a PvP match?

[Scerun 227]

Scarcity should be a greater factor. I think the most fun I've ever had on this game is way back a few patches ago, when food and water wasn't spawning. I was pretty well geared, and for the hours a stranger and I played together, we never spent our time trying to hunt down other players, or finding awesome guns. We just roamed looking for animals, and water bottles from dead zombies.

We were always so close to starvation and dehydration, and the odd firefights we had felt like a true struggle, because we'd put a lot of effort into trying to survive the environment, and now we had some bullets to exchange, too.

Really, it was fun having an objective other than "Okay, I guess we should kill other people, now."

Edited July 31, 2012 by Scerun

[Flambo (DayZ) 50]

What your asking is if it should be a game about survival and not a PvP match?

What he's asking is clearly more than that. He didn't just ask if DayZ should make food and water arbitrarily rarer; he asked if they should be so rare that there is not enough to go around, even when an entire server is working in full cooperation. Rather than making the game less about pvp, this would turn pvp in DayZ into an integral part of survival, ie. if you're not the one killing people for their beans, it's because you're scavenging more than your "fair" share, and can be assured that someone WILL kill you for your beans.

Right now, everyone says they'll kill people for their beans, but this idea would make it actually so. I don't personally enjoy the idea that it would be literally impossible for an entire server to survive cooperatively, but I think it would be cool to see the game altered to make fully cooperative survival at least somewhat challenging.

[miket 92]

What your asking is if it should be a game about survival and not a PvP match?

Well either way it's a PvP match. The scarcer food is the more likely someone is to shoot you and take your food. Even if there was 'just enough' food, people would still kill each other, because its easier to find a handful of bullets and kill someone with a bag full of food, than it is to go and collect that bag full of food yourself.

[[email protected] 131]

yes, im running low on SVD ammo.

[Sticker704 121]

I think you're on to something there. That's a fair point. At the moment surviving is just a matter of finding an animal and finding a water source every few days.

[a_casual_banana 38]

Not now, no.

I have a feeling that in 1.7.2.5, we're gonna see a much larger factor of scaricity.

[semipr0 402]

There can't really be a situation of scarcity since every time a server resets all the contents of tents and vehicles tend to revert to some last known good save state from the Hive which usually means anything taken out of them over the period between restarts is usually back in their inventory.

Even if you're not trying to dupe things, the current Hive to server situation tends to create duping situations without you even intending to do it.

Far as scarcity of spawns....it wouldn't be too much trouble to add percentile chance modifiers to food spawns, but, water is harder to deal with as a lot of the water spawns are static areas or wells. You'd need to create an entirely new database table which managed all water sources on each server on the Hive and randomly assigned a "stagnate" or "non-potable" state to the water sources and wells around the map.

But even with controlling the percentile chance of food spawns, its not too hard to hunt wild life for food. So that would require another table to manage wild life spawn chances and setting different states of wild life health to manage a changing scale, based on animal health, in regards to how much usable meat it had.

[miket 92]

What he's asking is clearly more than that. He didn't just ask if DayZ should make food and water arbitrarily rarer; he asked if they should be so rare that there is not enough to go around, even when an entire server is working in full cooperation. Rather than making the game less about pvp, this would turn pvp in DayZ into an integral part of survival, ie. if you're not the one killing people for their beans, it's because you're scavenging more than your "fair" share, and can be assured that someone WILL kill you for your beans.

Right now, everyone says they'll kill people for their beans, but this idea would make it actually so. I don't personally enjoy the idea that it would be literally impossible for an entire server to survive cooperatively, but I think it would be cool to see the game altered to make fully cooperative survival at least somewhat challenging.

You hit the nail on the head.

Perhaps it should be that the entire server can ONLY survive through co-operation. Like, the server can support a population of 40 players if everyone's out for themselves, but can support up to 60 if 40 people work together. I don't know how this could possibly be implemented though. Farming perhaps?

[miket 92]

There can't really be a situation of scarcity since every time a server resets all the contents of tents and vehicles tend to revert to some last known good save state from the Hive which usually means anything taken out of them over the period between restarts is usually back in their inventory.

Even if you're not trying to dupe things, the current Hive to server situation tends to create duping situations without you even intending to do it.

Far as scarcity of spawns....it wouldn't be too much trouble to add percentile chance modifiers to food spawns, but, water is harder to deal with as a lot of the water spawns are static areas or wells. You'd need to create an entirely new database table which managed all water sources on each server on the Hive and randomly assigned a "stagnate" or "non-potable" state to the water sources and wells around the map.

But even with controlling the percentile chance of food spawns, its not too hard to hunt wild life for food. So that would require another table to manage wild life spawn chances and setting different states of wild life health to manage a changing scale, based on animal health, in regards to how much usable meat it had.

Well obviously duping is a thing which needs to be fixed and eventually will be.

Even with food/drink items respawning on server restart, it's still possible to create this scarcity situation.

Firstly, the spawn rate of items should depend on how many players are currently on the server. Secondly, the total amount of resource x spawned on a day would have an absolute maximum of the server capacity times the amount of food needed to sustain that amount of players, less an amount needed to create the scarcity situation.

So if you need to eat once per hour (I don't know exactly how often you need to eat), and the server supports 50 players and is up for 23 hours a day, the server would spawn a maximum of 23 hours x 50 players = 1150 food times. Maybe take 150 food items away and then you have a situation of scarcity.

Obviously most servers aren't full 24/7, so the server might check how many players are online at a given time, then spawn the number of players times 0.90 food items. So if there's 50 players on the server, it would only spawn 45 food items in an hour.

[jonahcutter 51]

No.

I have never been close to dying from hunger, thirst, exposure or disease.

Once you've played a few hours, you'll find yourself walking away from food and drink because you can't carry it all.