Emulating viral spread of information.

[Brew78 27]

Read through the Fridge Logic thread and it sparked a light bulb. Was gonna post this in that thread but it ended up kind of long, so I'm posting it here.

What I'm thinking of is a way to emulate the person to person communication that might occur between people in a setting where each person doesn't look like a clone of each other and people can tell each other apart.

I'm not looking for anything as complex as Suicide Mouse's Moral Effect thread that essentially comes down to behavior leading to classes. This is merely a way to implement a reputation system that would potentially help to identify the true sociopaths through viral spread of information.

So based on this thread, here you go: http://www.dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=6407

This has been a pretty fascinating thread to read through.

I only started playing recently and haven't encountered much PvP yet, although the entire time I've been logged in I was fairly stressed, assuming I'd take a headshot from somewhere along the tree line while being absurdly careful to avoid zombies and search every nook and cranny for supplies. That kind of experience isn't found elsewhere.

That being said, I was kind of surprised to see no "humanity" counter since it had been mentioned so much. I guess I started just after the last patch that removed it. And there are now no Bandit skins either? Not sure I like that.

I've seen a lot of points on all sides of various arguments here, like the bandit skin being a good thing because it created a player-driven consequence to action. Or that murders/humanity should have an impact but degrade over time. Also seen were comments about reputation and word-of-mouth.

This got me thinking of an MMO first person space sim I used to play called Jumpgate. This game was a bit more hardcore than others of its time because you could literally kill anyone at any time. It allowed true piracy in the unregulated sectors (no consequence for killing). Find a fat tow hauling cargo, offer him the choice of donating some cash to your charitable organization, or the costly maintenance and repairs to your ships that have sadly been forced to the back burner might result in an unfortunate accident such as a weapons discharge.

If you kill someone in regulated space, there is an immediate and severe drop of your "political status" with the faction of the destroyed ship. The political status was on a sliding scale between.. I forget, -150 to +150? There were penalties for going negative but most importantly, there's a bounty on your head from that faction that anyone can cash in on.

Past a threshold (both positive and negative), status would degrade down (or up) until it reached that threshold, unless further action moved it one way or the other.

There's really only one "faction" here (and no missions), but the idea of status/reputation and word of mouth made me think about the viral spread of information that would happen "in real life". If some person were a raving lunatic and killing everyone he sees, you'd probably hear about it eventually. A survivor or witness (or in the context of this game, someone who respawned) would tell you the story of this pure evil sociopath and how you should avoid him. Something about his appearance or posture or facial expression... (all stuff that this game can't reproduce, as has been discussed).

So my idea is this, totally rough draft and off the cuff. Instead of having a "humanity" meter, have each client store a log of who fired on them and who killed them. Being injured while under aggro of a zombie and subsequently getting eaten would count. I don't know the exact implementation, but a date/time log makes sense as I'll explain. You could call it "karma" or "social standing" or "reputation" or whatever.

When you encounter other people and talk in Direct Chat, your logs are traded in the background between clients as if you'd had the time to actually bullshit for awhile and talk about the area and perhaps give warnings of people to avoid, including descriptions of what they look like. Any future interaction with this same player, their new log would overwrite the old one to have more up to date information.

When you come across someone that's in one of these logs, instead of their name/info being the regular green, it would be faded into yellow or orange, or all the way to red. Or if not the info, then some other kind of indicator. Someone who had recently killed you would automatically be full-hostile flagged.

Any point value assigned to an action will be based on how long ago it happened, and as such will start to degrade. If you encounter someone you'd chatted with before and they hadn't seen the guy in a long time, then their replacement log wouldn't change anything. But if they'd been killed again, then your warning against that guy would be refreshed and he'd still show up as potentially hostile.

In this manner, the game client/server could emulate social interaction and word of mouth descriptions and warnings about people who really ARE sociopaths, without directly punishing people who choose to live outside what most of society would call standard morality. If there was an accidental shooting and someone got red-flagged, they could still get with some allies to help escort them around until their reputation recovers.

So.. killing red people? I guess the more hostile someone appears to you, the less of a penalty you'd take in their own log. Would probably be listed as "self defense", or would include a modifier based on your relative color to them. Haven't fleshed this one out exactly yet.

Would probably also be wise to implement a /forgive command in the case of true friendly fire where you wouldn't necessarily give warnings about the guy.

So.. is this too complex? Its some background trading of data between clients under a certain circumstance. This data is used to modify an indicator of some kind when encountering someone. Its hard to say if this would require too much data to be stored, but if "most people are friendly" as suggested then there would actually be relatively few names in this log. Everyone has their own unique ID number in games like this, which is how bans are possible, so its not like there would be any mistaken identities.

I dunno, this seems like a good compromise to me. Allows any playstyle anyone wants, but also emulates viral distribution of information between people that can actually differentiate between two human faces. If you kill someone once it won't haunt you forever but may cause you to go into hiding for awhile. Or, you may wear your red indicator proudly like a badge. Or, maybe the guy you killed is a loner and never actually Direct Chats anyone and it will have no impact on your reputation at all.

This ended up a longer than I intended, but had a lightbulb and had to get it out. *shrug* Maybe a bit ambitious for a first post but reading that thread actually caused me to make an account instead of just lurking on the forum.

I'm open to suggestions and as I said this is just a rough draft. Its the core idea I'm interested in though - a reputation system based on actions and spread through direct contact with other Survivors, the consequences of which are entirely player-driven.

[Defhrone 2]

If some person were a raving lunatic and killing everyone he sees, you'd probably hear about it eventually. A survivor or witness (or in the context of this game, someone who respawned) would tell you the story of this pure evil sociopath and how you should avoid him. Something about his appearance or posture or facial expression... (all stuff that this game can't reproduce, as has been discussed)

This just sounds like meta gaming to me. your newly spawned character doesn't know who murdered his predecessor, so that makes no sense to me.

The voice com info trader could help, but how would it register what you've seen on screen and what your eyes actually saw. It's just not as easy as that. Also it would just lead to people walking up to eachother and pressing the button once.

You can check the body and get some info on the vic, but then you don't know who shot, just what weapon was used. Then what? You could also have an interraction with a person to talk about his past. But he could lie, that could be a system I suppose, roll a dice to detemine if a lie was detected. And if you tell the truth, you give out your zombie/human kills. and it has a chance to register that you are telling the truth (which a random chance to mistake it for a lie) and when a lie is detected, it doesn't show anything, just that the person is lying and you make the call yourself. The interviewed person might or might not know if he has been found out.

Just some random thing that popped in my head. Don't judge.

All I know is that the current system doesn't work. Since people get shot just for wearing the skin (their choice or not). I've seen vids where people litteraly ask eachother what skin the target is wearing. Survivor, talk to him, bandit, *bang*. That is the essense of meta gaming. You should not know a characters history if you see him for the first time.

And tbh, it really pisses me off if I get shot for having the bandit skill, while I got it purely out of selfdefence because some gunho crazy dude unloaded his gun into me and got shot in the head. I would get away with that in court, but I get a skin for god knows how long and judged because of it. It's just plain stupid.