Make survival a challenge

[Wokky 13]

I'm of the opinion that a lot of gameplay issues I see being complained about stem primarily from survival being too easy, and death becoming relatively inconsequential. Right now, the only thing standing between you and survival in Chernarus... is the threat of death by other players. If you were to take them out of the equation, the likes of Elektrozavodsk and Chernogorsk would simply be risk-free safe havens where food and water are plentiful.

Even ignoring the use of tents and vehicle storage, gearing up as a freshly spawned survivor is pretty easy as things stand. Run to Cherno or Elektro, sprint through all the high yield buildings, then head for the hills. Zombies are trivial to escape from, and if you get shot by another survivor you can just try again - it's not terribly difficult to make it out alive, and there's not much at stake by this point. Once you're out of the city, you've basically survived. More food and water is obtained without difficulty, avoiding players becomes easy when you avoid the player hotspots, there is pretty much no challenge to survival at this point. So we create our own challenge by seeking out PvP combat, looking for items that we don't really need but want for the sake of having them, hunting for hoarded vehicles to joyride, and so on. It gets worse when persistent storage is considered - not only is there no challenge to surviving, there's also little consequence to death when you can run back to your/somebody else's camp and rearm yourself with high-end gear.

It seems peculiar to me that zombies and survival have become something of an irrelevance in DayZ. I would like to see a considerable increase in the difficulty of dealing with zombies: it should be hard to avoid detection, but it should be even harder to deal with. Currently I can gear up pretty well in Cherno without having to so much as attack a single zombie, so there's not a massive incentive to check out other, lower-yield locations. I'd love to see a scenario where newly spawned players are generally forced to raid smaller villages where lower zombie counts make it easier to avoid aggro, due to the big cities being utter deathtraps unless you're in a group or seriously well-armed.

I'd suggest increasing zombie numbers, improving their eyesight and hearing further, reducing the ease of losing aggro, and maybe giving them the ability to hit you while you're sprinting away. Surviving by hunting animals would need to be made harder to avoid being an easy route to survival, this could perhaps be achieved by having random zombie spawns in forests (which would also make travelling between locations more interesting). Admittedly, the awful pathfinding of the zombies as things stand could make dealing with them frustrating for the wrong reasons under those circumstances, but I genuinely think something needs to be done. Right now zombies are only useful for locating other players, and as a replacement for the Respawn button. How human civilisation fell apart as a result of such harmless creatures is beyond me!

Hopefully the effect of such changes would make supplies much harder to come by, thereby having an impact on the way people play. I'd love to see players murdering each other out of desperation for supplies, forming fragile alliances to loot cities out of necessity, and working hard for every hour of survival. Right now I generally only kill for the thrill of combat, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it shouldn't be the primary driver of conflict. Kills are more exciting when they have meaning.

In keeping with the theme of making DayZ survival more difficult, I would also suggest removing tents and persistent vehicle storage.

I know that suggestion will probably lead to a lot of angry responses, but ask yourself, what are they being used for? What purpose do your own tents serve during your character's life? If you ignore duplication exploits, then their only useful purpose is storing excess food/water that you don't want to carry around everywhere, and items such as vehicle parts that you don't need in your backpack until you find one. Finding food and water is so easy that you don't really need a tent for storing them currently, and I believe it should become so hard that you're unlikely to have a surplus. When tent hunting I very rarely find them containing vehicle parts, so what are they being used for?

Let's face it, their primary use comes into play after your character has died. Tents are used to enable a new player to acquire high-end gear rapidly, either as a result of their work in a previous life, or somebody else's. In my opinion this runs counter to the premise of DayZ, and goes some way to removing the excitement and tension experienced in dangerous situations. If we want DayZ to be a real challenge to players, and for there to be consequences to our actions, then persistent storage simply needs to be removed. It doesn't add much to gameplay, and so long as it exists players will find a way of using it to dodge the consequences of death.

Not only that, it would also drastically reduce the ability to duplicate items and have huge numbers of high-end items proliferate across the player base (I come across so many tents with numerous AS50s now), and might even help discourage vehicle hoarding and get people actually using them.

tl;dr: DayZ is too easy, make it brutally unforgiving. This is the apocalypse after all.

Edited August 4, 2012 by Wokky

[Fraggle (DayZ) 15720]

I'm all up for making the game harder. Duping is the main problem that is making high-end gear far too common.

[bazbake 456]

Hm. Beans to you, OP.

Although you should have started with removing tents and vehicle storage in the first place. That's the best idea on making survival a challenge I've seen yet. It would also help curb banditry, to be honest, as no one takes death seriously anymore and they now use tents and vehicles as what amounts to an "extra life". If every time you died your teammates had to sit next to your corpse to make sure no one steals from it or abandon all of your equipment to escape with their lives, I think the dynamics would change significantly for the better.

I know that tents were originally designed to hold all of the extra stuff you couldn't carry, but at this point they've become an exploit (in so many ways). Removing them and forcing players to constantly keep moving in order to survive would keep things fresher.

[im123 2]

How about removing most guns from the big 3 cities? Place all the military guns at the airfields and deer stands (I never did believe that they were deer stands - I see them as small military outposts). Don't forget to make guns and ammo spawn far less frequently. Keep civillian guns in small villages and towns. In order to balance this out increase the amount and frequency of the spawns of everything other than guns and ammo in the large cities (ex GPS can only be found in the large cities, NVG in military locations). If you do leave military guns and ammo in the large cities, put them on roofs of the building in the city.

The most likely tactic to be used by any military would be to place sniper teams on roofs and cover them with small heavily armed units (snipers most of the infected, while the defense teams secure access points). You shouldn't be able to find any guns in a city as, in Chernarus, it would be pointless. Military locations should only have military gear (GPS, maps, flares and chemlights are NOT in this category). Villages and small towns could have in RL (real life) guns, because hunting could be a form of recreation and suppliment one's income. There would be no need for guns in cities (outside of emergency military deployments, as indicated above) as, generally, larger cities are safer, have better jobs and various forms of recreation (bars, theaters, movie theaters etc.).

Go ahead, headshot me...

[Vincibel 0]

I agree very much. Right now surviving is just about remembering to eat and drink while looking for vehicles and camps with your group. Last three lives now I´ve managed to have high-end gear the same day I started the life. All my deaths excluding the re-spawn suiciding by gang rape were because I got a bullet in my head. Right now I have everything I need and I have no interest in going into cities or towns.

In my opinion tents and vehicle storage should be removed until duping ends. My group raided a 10 plus tent camp that had ridiculous amount of very rare high-end weaponry and equipment. I mean there were around 8 Mk48 mod 0, 4 BAF AS50 antimaterial rifles, 4 M4A1 CCO SDs, 3 rangefinders, more ammunition to any weapon than I have used in my entire DayZ history and the list goes on and on...

It is just ridiculous how easy it is to get the "rarest of rare" weapons. AS50s to me are just as plentifull as revolvers and M1911s. It´s a pity this game is so easy. At first I thought to myself that this is awesome. I had never played a game so exciting. But then I got the hang of it. Just ignore the zeds a get your loot. Right now the zeds are not a threat in any given way. Loosing them is very easy when you know the tricks.

This game has to be made more challenging and surviving oriented or I´ll lose interest.

More surviving, less just looting.

[Wokky 13]

I know that tents were originally designed to hold all of the extra stuff you couldn't carry, but at this point they've become an exploit (in so many ways). Removing them and forcing players to constantly keep moving in order to survive would keep things fresher.

Precisely. I think tents have become such a well-entrenched part of DayZ that nobody thinks to take a step back and consider what they actually bring to the experience versus what they take away from it. I believe that it's better when you're limited to what you can carry on your person, and forced to make difficult choices about what to take with you. Even if item duplication gets fixed, I still don't think tents offer anything worthwhile to the DayZ experience as persistent storage. It'd be interesting to see them perhaps reworked to fulfil a different role that encourages formation of camps without being centred around storage or vehicle hoarding, although I don't really have any particularly good ideas on how to achieve that.

How about removing most guns from the big 3 cities?

I'm in favour of reducing the number of military grade weaponry in most locations, and introducing more civilian guns. It's a little hard to judge lately given how rampant duplication is, but I suspect that even without it, there are too many high-end weapons around. I think it detracts from the post-apocalyptic atmosphere when over 50% of survivors are running around with military gear and plenty of ammo. Doesn't help that the design of the loot system means rare items are likely to become more prolific as time goes by as a result of loot farming and banditry. Makes me wonder if it'd be worth tracking certain gear via the Hive, and only allowing a set number of each to exist across all servers at any one time.

[Blackhammer18 8]

I agree completly on this.

I think a good idea would be to implement some kind of fatigue/stamina system so it would be impossible

to sprint for long periods any more. This would make players more cautious because if they aggro

they'd have to kill all the zeds, no more running a marathon to lose them. Like I said I also agree with other suggestions in this thread so

running into a building and exiting through the other exit shouldn't work either.

You can still escape zeds using alt-f4 but I have an obvious solution - make zombies apply shock when they hit a player !

This would drastically reduce alt-f4 usage against zombies.

Hmm what else.

More zombies is probably impossible to do because servers can't handle their current numbers.

Improving their AI so they can run inside of buildings and be harder to lose is far easier to implement I think.

I have another idea, nerf canned foods! Can with baked beans contains no more than 300 calories yet it can

save your character from starving to death. How about making them restore only 20 % of player's food bar and

meat for example 80 % ?

Also AI of animals is extremaly retarted and bugged, they usually just stand still while I shoot them they should run

for their life, killing an animal should be challenging.

There is way more to improve obviously.

[ivan keska 39]

Survival is a something you should be constantly working at like in reality, so making it closer to reality I support.

[tom_gr7 20]

+1 for getting rid of tents!

[TarantulaFudge 0]

I agree with all of this maybe there should be a harder setting for Day-Z! The zombies do need a 15 min timer or something because after killing 100s of zombies they just keep instantly respawning. At least in Resident Evil you could go back and collect your loot and you know that you did because it was scarce.

[HellSnake 26]

I was actually thinking of starting a thread about removing tents and storage capacity from vehicles. Thank you for sparing me the rage and death threats. You're my hero.

I will also add that a player should not be able to loot his/her own body. This may be pointless and not worth the effort, though, because if the player is in a group, his friends can loot the body for him and then throw his gear in the ground for him to take, but still. This, coupled with the storage in tents and vehicles, make death meaningless.

I totally agree with the idea of making the game harder, too. Zeds are not a threat. Their only goal is to make players more visible to other players (which is saying a lot, but they should be dangerous on their own). Food, drink, and temperature are not a threat either. Surviving after the first hour of gameplay is only a matter of not finding any players. Making matches an item with limited uses should help.

Edited August 5, 2012 by HellSnake

[wolfstriked 143]

Just played for 4 hours at 3K blood and cannot for shit find animals bigger than rabbits to get my health back.I posted that I wanted this in past and now that I am experiencing this shit I find that I absolutely love it. :D Four freaking hours searching my ass off trying to find M249 ammo and animals bigger than rabbits(while avoidng infected and killing bandits) but I can't complain because if I had stumbled upon the multitude of cows I usually do I would of been at full health after 10 minutes and logged off from boredom.The game,now that I am frustrated,feels more real to me.IMO survival is awesome for game play but I just think Rocket is afraid to go forth with this since many people will complain and rage on these boards to no end.

The problem of tweaking food drops(reason IMO Rocket does not mess with it)is that many people will die just to starvation and the players will revolt.When I am at low health(but fully fed)and searching for large animals to hunt I feel immersed into the world and I feel that this is due to no time constraint on me.When I am starving to death though.....if food is very scarce,and yes I have died from starvation,then its super annoying and I start to hate this survival aspect of Dayz.Its supposed to be immersion enhancing not game breaking.

So how to fix this is the question.I think a fix would be to remove starvation leading to death while keeping dehydration leading to death.Why....because food is health and if your starving and food is scarce you now have to tweak two issues.One is that as you scavenge for food your blood will be dropping at same time because food/animals are so scarce and when you do finally find food it will just give you back what you lost.That is hard as hell to tweak since you do not know where players will search and you WILL lose alot of players from frustration.Keeping the death from dehydration though is different because you have watering holes and wells placed around the maps.Forces players to keep good notes on their location relative to the water spots.Whats great is players will still have the survival feel since you will be searching out watering holes(always stationary on map) say every 4 hours but will not die from food that is very scarce and most important hard to find on map.

So food is just to increase health and fluids are just to prevent death

We probably need to start a poll so maybe Rocket sees that many players want a harsher world to survive in.

Edited August 5, 2012 by wolfstriked

[generationvii 6]

If Rocket sticks to his guns we have nothing to worry about. He stated he wants the game to be much more

unforgiving and make it harder to survive.

I'm not so sure if many players want the game to become harsher though as Dayz has slowly turned into

an open world pvp game instead of a survival game.

I feel that removing endless sprinting would be a small yet very noticable tweak. Not only is it super unrealistic

but it also makes dealing with zombies such a breeze since they can't hit you when you're moving.

[deepfried 95]

Ah, so many things in this mod need overhauling, It hardly seems worth picking on any particular area.

But yes, survival needs to be a challenge, even for experienced players. What we have at the moment is new players complaining that its impossibly hard and veteran players who find survival utterly trivial.

But then, we can talk about tweaking loot spawns or other mechanics until we're blue in the face and none of it will matter so long as duping is so easy and prevalent. Not to mention hacking.

[wolfstriked 143]

Well I just found a cow wandering at the Neast airfield and now am at full health with 10 cans of coke,and my ammo just respawned to full amount and not a worry left,so I logged off.Man this game needs alot of work.:(

[Wokky 13]

Ah, so many things in this mod need overhauling, It hardly seems worth picking on any particular area.

But yes, survival needs to be a challenge, even for experienced players. What we have at the moment is new players complaining that its impossibly hard and veteran players who find survival utterly trivial.

But then, we can talk about tweaking loot spawns or other mechanics until we're blue in the face and none of it will matter so long as duping is so easy and prevalent. Not to mention hacking.

The worst thing for me is that the only reason for the disparity in perceived difficulty between veterans and newcomers is that we've learned to game the zombie mechanics. Imagine if the ability to lose aggro was removed, and zombies were able to attack you even while you're sprinting away. Zombies would largely become as challenging to us as they are to newcomers, gear excluded. For both groups the situation becomes "avoid disturbing zombies, but kill them if you do".

The issues of item duplication would be mostly solved in one fell swoop by just removing all persistent storage. That's before you even consider the other benefits of such a move, such as making permadeath more permanent.

[Vincibel 0]

If the zeds were to have a high chance of infecting players when they attack they would be a bigger threat.

Lets say there could be a 30% chance of infection on hit that would kill the player within 24 hours. You would be forced to find antibiotics to cure it. That would make me nervous of the zeds because a deadly infection would force me to go to city hospitals.

[dvnt (DayZ) 8]

I think a good idea would be to implement some kind of fatigue/stamina system so it would be impossible

to sprint for long periods any more. This would make players more cautious because if they aggro

they'd have to kill all the zeds, no more running a marathon to lose them.

TOTALLY agree, where is the stamina in this game? you can spawn on a beach and then run right across the map without any slow down at all. You should AT LEAST drink more fluids while running, and go through more food as well. How far can someone run without having to take a sip of water? and there is no consequence to running. Maybe you could be slower to react to thinks, you might be noisier due to your "heavy feet". What if you had a pack full of ammo and tins of food...still run as far and fast without breaks? I think not.

...so running into a building and exiting through the other exit shouldn't work either.

I agree that it is a lame way to get around zombies, but to me a zombie is mindless and can be easily escaped from...what I think should happen, is zombies have less AI, less sensory perception (I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out) BUT there should be many more of them...why you ask?

1. you can escape them more easily as they are stupid, but you run into more, so running through a building gets you away from 5 on that side of the building, but you run into more on the other side.

2. have more dumber zombies also help alleviate the "train" effect, stopping one person running laps while the rest of the group loot the building. Dumber zombies would break aggro sooner, and then be free to 'discover' the others trying to loot the building.

3. having dumber zombie uses less CPU cycles so the servers should be able to trade off some smarts for higher numbers of zombies.

4. you should be able to use smarts to escape zombies.

I have another idea, nerf canned foods! Can with baked beans contains no more than 300 calories yet it can

save your character from starving to death. How about making them restore only 20 % of player's food bar and

meat for example 80 % ?

Also AI of animals is extremaly retarted and bugged, they usually just stand still while I shoot them they should run

for their life, killing an animal should be challenging.

Yeah, food is just too simple. You should have to eat more regularly, and hunger should have more side affects. One item of food should not fill your food bar. Maybe 30%, so if you eat "3 times a day" should keep your hunger at close to max.

Doing more vigorous things should require significantly more food and water. And maybe soda cans give you a nice short term fix, but runs out faster.

Basically everything should be harder...and animals are a joke. They just stand there. there's no hunting them, its just finding them.