Ideas and suggestion to improve/balance noob killings, territory, and other game mechanics (semi-long read)

[Magnum1978 3]

Hi guys,

First post here, loving the game, the concept and the potential this mod has going forward. As a long time gamer (25+ years) I thought I’d put to use some of my years of playing games and understanding of game mechanics to put forward some ideas out there for consideration by the DayZ community. You never know, some of these may even be considered by the game developers… Note some of these wishes may not be capable/feasible using the current game engine, I’m not sure.

Currently as good as the game experience is, there is a key issue that many are experiencing, with griefers or trolls simply killing other players indiscriminately.

Not to loot, not because they are a threat, but just to kill. And yeah I’m sure almost all of us, at least once, have killed another player where we didn’t truly ‘need’ to, for whatever reason, however as time has gone on, it’s more epidemic, and there is less and less a focus on co-operation, and due to this sense of mistrust/being burned, the game is becoming more about killing first, asking questions later, or worse, players simply focusing on killing other players and not doing much else. Players are killed without repercussion, making it a troll’s paradise. It becomes less about a zombie apocalypse survival game, and more a deathmatch game with zombies.

At this point, the reward for co-operation is minimal, and the punishment for non-co-operation equally minimal. And whilst I don’t think the game should necessarily encourage a certain ‘type’ of play, I think a few tweaks to the mechanics can minimise the ‘rage’ players experience from being a noob with nothing being indiscriminately killed, whereas teaming up with randoms is more appealing and possible more getting back to the essence of what the game (I think) should be about.

These tweaks would also not really impact the style of play for players, lone wolfs could still go by themselves and if so troll kill other players if they choose to.

As we’ve seen in the 1.7.2.5 patch, there is now a ‘humanity’ count in the debug menu. This is a key concept in some of my ideas, Anyway here are my thoughts:

1. The debug menu would show nothing but “time survived” and ‘humanity’. Fewer ‘scores’ such as number of X killed for players to focus on. The score is surviving and this should be the objective.

2. The humanity count goes up and down depending on interaction with other players. Say it starts at a certain level, your humanity goes up and down by co-operating with or conversely killing other players. An increase in your humanity can happen by creating a ‘friend’ with another player via an in game request. Conversely killing another player loses humanity, worse still, killing a ‘friend’ loses even more humanity (i.e. double crossing them).

A player with too little humanity has some counter effects, which would be akin to what might happen in real life - 'going mad' so to speak. My idea would be that a player with little humanity would start to not be able to tell the difference between other players and zombies, although movement patterns might look different, to a player with no humanity, a crawling, walking or running human would look just like a zombie doing the same. This might mean the trollish noob killer after a while just sees everything that moved as a zombie, making it more difficult to notice potential targets, which in the end might cost them. Potentially at the lowest humanity levels, the player might also see Zombies as other players? Or this effect could randomly fluctuate. Not sure, but you get the idea. I also would not have different skins for bandits/noob killers. Each person should be approached given the benefit of the doubt IMO. This should be a game as much about trust as it is survival.

There would be no drop in humanity for killing people who attacked/shot at you first, or for ‘revenge’ attacks, see later.

3. Part of the creating ‘friends’ also extends to a new concept of ‘territory’ I’d introduce where having friends directly impacts your ‘territory’ in the game, and whereby clans or groups can carve out a ‘territory’ in-game. As players move, so does their territory. This is persistent and whilst not shown on maps, directly impacts gameplay. Territory would be the total area you and your friends encompass and would allow one ‘camp’ which would be part of your territory and persist until it was taken or moved.

Territory could also be taken from other players or lost when you or your friends die.

Part of the concept of territory is the allowing of re-spawning within your current territory locations, but only once. This would only be the case IF you were killed by other players, not zombies. Players killed by other players would be able to spawn within 500m of their existing territory however would need to re-friend with their players before gaining this luxury again.

The concept of this would be to minimize the rage of losing your friends and the need to traipse 10+ kilometres back to your friends after you die, but also allow easier ‘revenge’ if you die via a noob killer, as often you are with your friends, you can get back and hunt them.

4. When you get killed by a fellow player, you get to find out their name. When you get within 10 metres of another player, you also get to see their name above or on their character. This is a revenge mechanic, plain and simple.

These are my bigger ‘gameplay’ oriented suggestions, other ideas are niceties:

• More items to find, trade, loot, many more ‘classes’ of each type of item. An example would be, poor binoculars, good binoculars, excellent binoculars, then range finder, etc. This for most classes of weapon, as appropriate
  
• You should also be able to find many more ‘everyday’ useful items, and things you can use to defend yourself with, starting with a lump of wood, pipe, not just the limited set we have now, cooler to store food, or even bigger things to bit by bit setup large and functional camps, storage containers, with the ability to ‘build’ things using standard ‘commodity’ items that can be found or harvested (brick/wire/metal/wood/etc), such as (for example) a chicken pen for finding and collecting chickens which would supply food with daily eggs, etc. There could also be ‘instructions’ for building lots of different things.
  
• Health of player is visible and indicated by their skin (blood stains, damage to player, face busted up, etc)
  

By all means critique or comment on my ideas!

Cheers, -Mag

Edited August 14, 2012 by Magnum1978

[Magnum1978 3]

TTT give me some love!

Edited August 14, 2012 by Magnum1978

[bazbake 456]

The bandit skin is pretty good AFAIK. And once they get rid of tents and duping and scripting, the ghillie suits will probably be harder to come by.

[Wyatt Johnson 9]

The concept is good but I doubt they will ever put all of these features into the game. I like it though beans to you.

[nev2k 16]

Well as i share some of this ideas, i give my beans to you, but i think the territory should be fixed to a place on the map, not allowing you to spawn there once(it would give possibilities of abusing it to spawn behind non noob killers) but giving you the random chance to spawn in a village near to it (so you spawn where a survivor would start his journey, at his own door).

It also should forbit other players(which aren't your ingame made friends/clanmembers) to spawn in your fixed territory as long as they didn't already walked to the place they'd login again

[Magnum1978 3]

Fair point. I think the way I looked at 'territory', it was a mechanism which also encouraged growing your friends, thus increasing your territory and the potential of spawning nearer to friends.

I think though, the group territory would be 'fixed' in as much as each group of friends would be entitled to one 'camp' (i.e. a tent/tents) which is a fixed location (unless taken/overun by others, then it disappears). Where you'd have a choice to re-spawn and re-arm at. However I would argue that you should only be able to respawn there once before requiring to 'refriend' with your buddies before gaining access to the greater group's territory again.

the other choice would be spawning randomly within 500m of your friends who are on the server, as each player would have their own 'local territory'. This mechanic would be in place of where a group of you are travelling together but one is killed by a bandit/camper/troll. This would enable the player killed to get back to that location quickly and perhaps exact revenge on the killer (the killed player would also learn the name of who killed them). The killer would know this is a potential outcome of killing others indiscriminately (as well impacting their humanity level, see the other mechanic), and therefore *perhaps* they would be less encouraged to troll. This is the theory anyway.

Thanks for the reply