Mike Tyson Zombies

[DEOVONTAY MCSLANGA 149]

Let me get this out of the way first:

I don't believe zombies should be weaker. Zombies should be a major threat, more than player versus player.

That said, zombies are incredibly INCONSISTENT right now. Last night I'm driving my bus around like a boss, doing bus things, and I hit a rock outside cherno. Two tires popped, and although I had two on the bus one of them simply vanished when I used it for the repair and the tire wasn't fixed. 'No problem' I figure, 'I'll just go get one from one of the many industrial buildings in town!' So I'm sneaking around in town, in the dead of night, and the two things that piss me off about zombies most almost killed me.

1. Zombie aggro range is extremely inconsistent. Sometimes in the middle of the day I can walk up to a zombie and tickle him and walk away without him being any wiser to my presence. Sometimes (as last night) my noise and vision bar are 0, it's midnight on a new moon, and a zombie three blocks down the road gets a telephone call from Poseidon letting him know I haven't sacrificed enough goats and that I need to be punished. Again, zombies SHOULD BE HARD. They should be a thing you need to plan around. But therein lies the current problem, you can only plan around the zombies if their actions are CONSISTENT. It's impossible to make a strategy for dealing with them when their behavior changes so drastically.

2. Zombie strength is variable, and the RNG on status effects like broken legs and unconscious is poorly done at best. The same zombie who sprinted three city blocks around four buildings and a bunch of cars to get to me turned out to be Mike Tyson fucking reborn to cause me pain. He runs straight up to me (at 12k blood) and punches me right in the jaw. I'm immediately unconscious. He proceeds to feast on my innards and I barely come back at about 3k blood to put a pistol mag in him and abandon town. Even after the leg breaking nerf, I've found it happens far more than it should that the very first time a zombie hits you your legs break. This again goes back to inconsistency. I think zombies should be powerful, but they should ALWAYS behave in a similar manner. Some zombies can claw at my face while I loot a building and do nothing but slowly chip me down to 10k. Other times Mike Tyson busts through a wall like the god damn Kool-aid man, screams "OH YEAH!" and punches me in the gut so hard I have an abortion. All I'm asking for is that zombies be more consistent. Perhaps make it so that you can ONLY break your legs from zombie attacks under 9k blood and only be knocked out under 6k blood, but have zombies hit for 500-750 instead of 200. The threat is still high, but at least you can plan around how much health you have. Right now I feel like it doesn't matter if I'm at 12k blood or 6k, a zombie could one shot me at any moment regardless.

Again, this isn't about nerfing zombies. It's about keeping their behavior consistent so that it is POSSIBLE to create a strategy and execute it. This would make gameplay much more satisfying. It's one thing to die to zombies because you did something stupid and got murdered, but it's another to sneak around like Sam Fisher and still get murdered because some zombies are just magical and some aren't. I know it's an alpha and there's going to be bugs, but this really needs attention. It's a core mechanic of the game, and at present the RNG is very poorly done from a design perspective.

[Bushmaster14 51]

LOL creative.All true. You haz meh beanz.

[Bobcomss 189]

Mike Tyson busts through a wall like the god damn Kool-aid man, screams "OH YEAH!" and punches me in the gut so hard I have an abortion.

Fuck me dude this made me laugh out loud at work and spill my drink everywhere! you have made my day with that sentence!!

But to the point of the post, I agree they need to be much harder but in alpha the "inconstancy will be here"

Stand-a-lone just announced so check it out!!! :D

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1525866/dayz_mod_going_standalone_will_follow_minecraft_development_model.html

Edited August 7, 2012 by Bobcomss

[Jetlaw 1]

I agree. Sometimes we have Kirby zombies that are literally mentally retarded. You can sprint up in high noon and tickle their nutsack without them so much as batting a mottled, maggoty eyelid.

Other times you get Captain Falcon zombies that see you from the other side of Chernarus in midnight, during a rainstorm, when you're silent and metaphorically invisible, jump into their racers, hurtle towards you and hit you so hard that not only do you have a miscarriage - Your miscarried son's alternate-reality future wife's egg suffers a miscarriage.

When you've just spawned in, the first 2 zombie attacks will with almost unerring certainty force you into bleeding. After that is bandaged up, it's up to the Random Number God whether you're Mike Tyson biting the ears off zombies or whether the zombie is Mike Tyson who uppercuts you so hard your testicles pop, you fall to the floor and start to hemorrhage blood, your leg snaps, your eardrums rupture, all the colour that you're experiencing in the world just drains away and you're nicely greeted to the death screen shortly after.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Jetlaw

[eegore 23]

I agree. Sometimes we have Kirby zombies that are literally mentally retarded. You can sprint up in high noon and tickle their nutsack without them so much as batting a mottled, maggoty eyelid.

Other times you get Captain Falcon zombies that see you from the other side of Chernarus in midnight, during a rainstorm, when you're silent and metaphorically invisible, jump into their racers, hurtle towards you and hit you so hard that not only do you have a miscarriage - Your miscarried son's alternate-reality future wife's egg suffers a miscarriage.

When you've just spawned in, the first 2 zombie attacks will with almost unerring certainty force you into bleeding. After that is bandaged up, it's up to the Random Number God whether you're Mike Tyson biting the ears off zombies or whether the zombie is Mike Tyson who uppercuts you so hard your testicles pop, you fall to the floor and start to hemorrhage blood, your leg snaps, your eardrums rupture, all the colour that you're experiencing in the world just drains away and you're nicely greeted to the death screen shortly after.

Not as funny as original post.

[Jetlaw 1]

Not as funny as original post.

Well at least it was enough for you to warrant reading over say "op is rite i agre zombiz 2 hrd dey kil u in lyk 1 atak n is dificult 2 run awy frm dem".

I understand their movement patterns are unpredictable due to grid based pathfinding (the original ARMA 2 doesn't seem to contain suicide bombers or berserkers and thus exact-coordinate pathfinding was not implemented).

A small amount of random chance is fine, but when used for small mechanics. The issue with random chance for big mechanics is similar to balancing of RPGs (and in a massive case, balancing of e-Sports titles) - A chance for something big to happen can completely wreck a game in the wrong direction.

If the chance for a zombie to break your leg is 10% - On average over an infinite number of zombies technically if every zombie you encountered hit you twice your leg would be broken once every 5 zombies.

So you could technically encounter 10 zombies in a row and the first hit from each zombie could break your leg (AMFG ZOMBIES TOO HARD). Likewise, you could encounter ten zombies in a row and be hit ten times by each and suffer no ill effects at all (AMFG ZOMBIES TOO EASY).

The same is true with bleeding. You could constantly bleed from the first hit of every zombie you encountered, or you could be 12k>0'd by a zombie and not lose a drop of blood. And with being knocked down - And with the knock down timers. Once I got knocked down from 10k blood and had a 15 second timer. I've been knocked down from 3k blood and had a timer that was near enough one second.

Having blood be a modifier for effects seems like a viable balancing choice. If your blood is below, at or above certain thresholds then the effects applied can differ. At >9k blood a "break" could be shock. At 6k < blood > 9k a "break" effect could be a broken leg. At < 6k blood it could be a break and being knocked out.

The same for bleeding. At >9k blood a bleed effect could be mild. Then major. And at low blood it could be a massive hemorrhage that finishes you off.

And for being KO'ed at >9k blood it could force you prone as a knockdown, but with no timer. The a standard short > mid duration knockout. Then a mid > long duration knockout for low blood.

At least if the effects on-hit are done so in a random nature at the whim of the Random Number God the nature of the effect is buffered or amplified by your blood level so you don't get 10k broken legs - At worst you get shock.

[milancz 10]

The fact that they are so random makes them somewhat hard. Making their aggro completely predictable would make zombies boring like enemies in some stupid mmorpg. Zombies should also be able to attack while running without the need to stop and hit way f'king harder. Right now its so easy just to ignore them. It would make pvp in towns way more fun. Now you can usually just ignore them or tank some hits until the other guy is dealt with. When you aggro a zombie it should be primary threat. Increase their hitpoints, make them hit for 1k blood and go a bit slower - fun zombies.

Oh and make altf4-ing when being attacked by zombies outright kill you. Zombies sometimes kill fast, sometimes slow and the c*nt still could survive even though his body would be there for a while.

[rodskin744@aol.com 0]

Hey Guys - I'm new here. But that is one incredibly funny story. If you ever see me on a server - please say hello before shooting me in the back!