WTF is happening to the server community.

[Goldenkrow 0]

2000 fucking zombies and at least 500 of them in the woods.

Where you are going to pitch a tent or how your group is going to take over some town or even deciding to shoot or not to shoot when you meet another player' date=' all of that means shit when you have a real zombie apocalypse on your hands. Think about it.

[/quote']

Im with this dude. I just want more zombies spread around, and if Irecal something you had planned, with diffrent paced zombies would be awesome too

[AzzAzeL 0]

Sorry didn't read all the pages, but I feel like people are tired of carefully collecting gear for days only to be sniped out of nowhere or die in a bug. So many just aren't as exited about careful play. At the end of the day zombies are not a real challenge in the game, other players are.

[Hesher (DayZ) 2]

I think we are finally getting somewhere with last posts, it only took 30+ plus pages of mostly useless whining of butthurt people who come to forums after getting shot and basically asking to punish the guy who did it.

I think the main point here is that at this point due to overall alpha state of the game, lack of persistency, no server attachments, amount of bugs, death being just a nuisance etc., a lot of people don't really care about staying alive or work towards a goal simply because currently - THERE IS NO POINT, NO INCENTIVE, AND NO FUN to play otherwise. I mean if you can get killed by a door after a week of carefull survivng, sneaking around, after you respawn you're likely just run to nearest city and try to shoot someone in the face and take all their shit, if it doesnt work - hit respawn and try again.

To people coming here suggesting awkward highly arbitrary or plain retarded game mechanics to force players to play as they see is a "correct way of playing" - stop wasting forum space with your butthurt whining.

To people saying that this game isn't forcing any playstyle at all, it's just what you make of it, imho you're missing the point, the game already forces you to play a certain way due to how it is currently BALANCED, if death(no matter how you die) will carry more drawbacks than it is now, this imho alone will change a lot and shift priorities, there isn't much to loose atm when you just respawn, you might just as well go gun-ho and see how it's turns out and try again if doesn't turn out well e.g you get killed, just try again.

Why don't we brainstorm ideas/mechanics that might change the priorities by simply changing the enviroment without coming up with ideas how to punish players who "play unfair"?

[oooii3gg 0]

If we didn't have laws and concequences in real life everyone would butcher eataother and eat your children, i know i would. thats whats happening to dayz.

But the statistics says that bandits are just about 11% of all players amount.

[Sminky 5]

Main problems arise from the lack of being able to comunicate easily, unless you do it via outside sources. The game would also benifit greatly i feel if it was easier to meet up with friends. Or having alt characters that you could use when playing with mates and one for when alone so you can keep comming back to the same spawn location with a party.

This would increase team play, and a good team will take down the death matchers, not that there is curently any incentive to do so.

Assuming this Mod as Rocket mentioned is intended to be a product rather then jsut a social experiment, a lot of these issues will have to be addressed.

[Calgon (DayZ) 0]

"Main problems arise from the lack of being able to comunicate easily, unless you do it via outside sources."

If you would install the Beta patch, direct comm should be fine. Thats enough for communication.

[Herr Robert 28]

Just as an idea

A nice way to stop server hoppers would be to have 1 character per server per player

I don't think that would be a good idea. Many of the players would probably be deterred from investing time into getting anything better than the low tier gear, because all of their progress could be lost at the whim of a server owner deciding that he doesn't want to continue hosting anymore.

[Sminky 5]

"Main problems arise from the lack of being able to comunicate easily' date=' unless you do it via outside sources."

If you would install the Beta patch, direct comm should be fine. Thats enough for communication.

[/quote']

AS far as i was aware most servers dont surport the beta patch, i did wonder what hapend to the touted localised chat as that was a very appealing feature.

[Malaclypse 3]

Add real permadeath next patch. You only get one life, then you can never play again without buying a new cd-key lolol.

In reality, I would like to see some kind of respawn timer. It could be anywhere from 1 hour to 1 day. Something that would make people play with more caution. Of course... having to wait for a respawn timer because the server you were on had HIVE connection issues or got hacked or whatever would be pretty lame.

[eskodas 1]

You can NOT have more zombies, its simply too much for the servers, stop asking for it and think of ways to better use the zombies as is.

Also respawn timers simply drive away players, im a huge fan of hardcore but i hate time outs, give me a handicap but let me play.

---

-snip-

1) That would force a certain playstyle on players. Why would killing zombies be forced? Rather avoid them and kill people' date=' they have the good gear.

2) I think the amount of loot is good right now. I rarely see people with awesome weapons, most have the basics, so it seems pretty good right now.

3) Starting gear is already at minimum. If you remove the basics, everyone would be forced to head to the nearest city right away, increasing the amount of people shooting each other with makarovs in an elektro deathmatch. Would do nothing good.

4) Yeah. It's dangerous to prone in doorways or stairs, and sometimes rocks have dangerously sharp edges.

5) Too much desync and lag for leaping zombie. Would just increase random knockdowns. Before making the zombies faster and harder to hit the problems with warping zombies and zombies attacking and walking through walls should be fixed.

6) That would be cool :D

7) I want zombie sheep!

8) This would be great. Instead of the body disappearing it could turn in to a zombie. Might stress the server though, if there's like a hundred zombies with player loot to keep track of. The loot could be removed, but it would be nice if the zombie kept the player model :)

[/quote']

1) Its not forcing anything if you implement multiple ways of reducing it and it gives death a bigger penalty.

2) Weapons are fine, they are rareish but food is everywhere and very easy to find. I suggest making people hungry alot faster if they are carrying more gear, this means that geared players are forced to find food more and doesn't make it so easy once you have good gear.

3) You can run across the map in starter gear(well, you'll need a water refill), its plentiful.

4) Zombie attacks have an annoying large chance to knock you down, when your under attack from 20 and first swing you get knocked then feasted on by all those zombies is extremely annoying, reduce knockdown time or reduce its chance.

5)Not a factor, Zombies are computed on Client side(i believe, correct me if im wrong) and it solves how players can easily keep them at bay.

8) the point of this is to keep loot rare.

[rocket 16567]

Look, I really want to clarify something. And I hope this doesn't get lost in a whole bunch of endless posts. It's not my intention to be a dick, my intention is to engage in a real dialog, real discussions, with people rather than go through some plastic process and appoint a community manager.

Personally, in game development. I have never, ever, seen this work. The game developers don't really listen to the community manager, because he's not in the development team. The community manager is generally there to feed out updates.

Now, there's been some real good discussion here. I've got angry, you've got angry - that's good. Points were made. Now if I wanted to avoid the "rocket is a dick" or "rocket is an arrogant prick" comments I could just as easily not come into the forums, or lock all the things I don't like, or appoint someone to be a "community manager" and then just ignore everything. But I haven't, and I've also chosen to let you all see the real me, flawed, with my tendency to sarcasm and swearing and all.

I can change that, and turn on my super-professional non-swearing, non-sarcastic, ignore-everything-I-don't like mode. But what I really want to do is to try and develop something where the community is deeply engaged with it. That can only happen where I can be me, and that people let me make mistakes, let me say the wrong thing sometimes. I don't expect anyone to be perfect, I think it's only fair that people don't expect me to be perfect either. But I think it is fair to expect me to be able to grow and learn from situations.

So I am going to focus the attention of the next update on some mechanics to provide more expansion for group play. It's clear to me from the discussion here that this is an area we all agree if improved will help steer things away from being a total deathmatch.

What I ask, is that you don't hang on every single minute detail of everything I say and then bash me over the head with it every second, so that I become so scared to post what I am thinking lest someone on reddit thinks I'm a bad person. I would say about 90% of the ideas I ever have are absolutely terrible. The only way I have found to escape this, is by talking to other people about the ideas and then using their feedback to find the 10% that have some merit. If this is how the forums end up, where I'm scared to be myself (resplendent in all my humor) then I will loose the ability to do that.

[eskodas 1]

I found your sarcastic remarks extremely amusing, its nice to see a Dev so emotionally tied to his work. This is an Alpha after all and its all just testing the waters with mechanics :)

[perestain 33]

I don't know man. Group play should come from the people themselves not from some mechanic.

The deathmatch is not there because there is a lack of opportunities for group play (which there isn't) but because death is not a problem for bandits, since they just respawn, grab cz and reload.

This playstyle more or less prevents you from any big frustrations. If survival is to play a role in this game, you shouldn't allow people to cheat death so easily by playing deathmatch and simply not caring about it...

[Ygdrad 0]

What I ask' date=' is that you don't hang on every single minute detail of everything I say and then bash me over the head with it every second, so that I become so scared to post what I am thinking lest someone on reddit thinks I'm a bad person. I would say about 90% of the ideas I ever have are absolutely terrible. The only way I have found to escape this, is by talking to other people about the ideas and then using their feedback to find the 10% that have some merit. If this is how the forums end up, where I'm scared to be myself (resplendent in all my humor) then I will loose the ability to do that.

[/quote']

Keep sharing those ideas, a wise developer once said something along the lines of: You shouldn't be scared of bad ideas, let others know about them, it doesn't matter if people tell you they're stupid, sometimes you just need to get the bad ideas out to get to the good ones.

[rocket 16567]

I was thinking more along the lines of "something to do". I already have the models for generators, so we can add some stuff to that. Like maybe light towers as someone suggested. I'll focus on the vehicles more this update too, and add in that when you kill someone it has a chance to destroy some of their gear.

And again to reiterated. Don't expect me to be perfect, I'm never going to be. The sooner people realize this the better.

[Capt Murphy 2]

Oh don't be modest.

We know your words are scripture and any perceived weaknesses are merely a ploy to deceive us of your Grand Design.

Really though, adding some group stuff sounds awesome and will hopefully dent some of this deathmatch bullshit going on.

Hopefully some sort of more challenging Zombie related incidents as well. (Eventually eh?)

[rocketa 6]

We as a community expect you to be perfect, please.. be perfect.

[james2464 3]

Awesome work Rocket, don't lose touch with the community, maybe create something poll based where we can vote on ideas... not sure but you've done an amazing job so far!

[Virfortis 111]

If we didn't have laws and concequences in real life everyone would butcher eataother and eat your children' date=' i know i would. thats whats happening to dayz.[/quote']But the statistics says that bandits are just about 11% of all players amount.

How to lie with statistics:

Count everyone, even if they're not playing.

Whether these statistics do that or not, I don't know, but if we look at the number playing at any given time, I'm sure it will be a much closer ratio.

[perestain 33]

I'm really liking the idea that someone else mentioned that there could be a delay before respawning which is longer if your humanity is low.

The problem with cheating death is something which originiates from outside the gameworld (i.e. because people can play more than once IRL) so it might be a good idea to adress it outside of the gameworld.

That way, you can play a PK without getting punished ingame whatsoever (which is realistic), but death will mean a bit more than it does now.

If you want to go esoteric you could even make it so that you are you are reborn as something else than human (bird, animal) if you were very low on humanity upon your death, and you need to archieve something to be able to respawn as human in your next spawn.

[zalman 1]

@Rocker

we get just as emotionally attached as you do, i think most if not all players really appreciate your work and what your trying to accomplish, and were really thankful for your hard work.

Try to listen less to the criticism (to you personally) that you get from random forum fucktards and more from the people that really know you. Just because we criticism some parts of the game doesn't mean we criticize your work or you personally, we are just trying to have a discussion as you said, the only difference is that its you against 20k people.

Thanks rocket :)

[Virfortis 111]

I would say about 90% of the ideas I ever have are absolutely terrible. The only way I have found to escape this' date=' is by talking to other people about the ideas and then using their feedback to find the 10% that have some merit.

[/quote']

Give us a heading Rocket, let us help with this ship.

...that's a metaphorical way of asking for what of the 10% you've read has some merit.

I've thought about clan tags, different hats, chest emblems and the like, but those would be difficult to work with given the survival setting of the mod. Is there a way to make identifying players selectively? Perhaps players that spend time in proximity would be able to tell one player from their friend?

So, an example would be that I team up with someone, and after some time I can "remember" them. They would show up when aimed at like the softcore tagging we have now (which, I guess would make it redundant, but I kinda wish it wasn't always-on to begin with) but it would only stay for either A) Their lifetime, or B) A couple hours (ish) and would require re-interacting to establish. It would just be a scroll-wheel option really, like the saving tent/vehicle thing.

I'm still working on the idea.

[curiousepic 1]

I think incentivizing this kind of gameplay may require lots of subtle changes, rather than one single mechanic:

Large items - jerry cans, barbed wire, vehicle parts - should take up your primary weapon slot, or backpack slot, or at the least, many more inventory slots. This would encourage even more grouping for protection while (re)building things.

Adding the ability to lower your secondary weapon would help ease tensions when new spawns meet.

Generators for lights are a great idea - both peaceable ones and ones connected to the existing energy grid in Chernarus. Connecting them to radio towers and having lootable radios is another common suggestion which would be amazing.

Randomly spawned abandoned supply trucks that have a huge amount (far more than any one person could carry) of a single type of fairly common loot like food, but also sometimes blood bags, etc. *may* encourage sharing. (dynamically reduces scarcity) - with a radio system the location could be announced, and good guys can keep a watch out, if they have control.

Eating, fire-making and cooking and other processes like this should take more realistic lengths of time - encouraging wanting someone to watch your back.

I'm still trying to think of some way to encourage "rescue missions" of real players in distress.

[rocket 16567]

Much of this "meta-game support stuff" is really complex, and I was only planning it for the later stage of Alpha. But I will have a look at see what I can put in for the next update.

If you have any concrete ideas, please consider ticketing them up at the DayZ section of www.dev-heaven.net as this is the most efficient way to manage requests and bugs.

[curiousepic 1]

If you have any concrete ideas' date=' please consider ticketing them up at the DayZ section of www.dev-heaven.net as this is the most efficient way to manage requests and bugs.

[/quote']

I was wondering about this - is the voting system working? I don't see anything with more than 0.