Server Hopping and Communities, solutions through Server Geography

[Kransthow 1]

Current Situation

Survivors are interdimensional beings, who can effortlessly flit between parallel worlds when and where it pleases them. This brings with it some seriously bad side effects. Escaping danger by warping to a parallel world, performing ambushes by jumping through dimensions, acquring material goods by quickly travelling across planes of existence... none of these behaviours are something that should exist in a zombie survival game. Another problem with the current model is that local communities cannot really develop organically. With the ability to effortlessly move between any arbitary server there exists no real reason to use one server over any other (save for vehicles, but material goods go as easily as they come and once gone the server holds nothing to keep you) so servers constantly see completly different populations from one day to the next, making it impossible for the population to form local relationships among themselves.

It is obvious that something needs to change, heeding this need many private hive servers have popped up to try and solve these issues.

Private Hive solution

This is the only current solution to the server hopping problem where your character is locked on a single server, under this model sever hopping is impossible as your character cannot move between servers, however the greater DayZ community is destroyed and fractured into countless tiny little sub-communitys. While sheltered from the negative effects of server hopping players are completly unable to influence anything outside their nutshell kingdom of a server which is incredibly damaging to the greater game.

While the walls the Private Hive gives help create communities and prevent sever hopping, they also hide your achievements from the outside. Rendering any actions within meaningless. We can do better than that, and one way of achieving this is to give servers geographical relations to each other. I give two soutions utilizing this to the server hopping and community problem below.

Chessboard solution

This solution works with each server acting as a tile on a giant chessboard of all DayZ servers, movement between servers is achieved by travelling to the edge of the map of the server you are currently on at which point you appear on the corresponding edge of the server that shares the edge you just travelled to. With this solution the greater community exists because you are not completly isolated from all other servers, but organic local communities can develop due to "dimensional stability" i.e. people will tend to have a general area they play as you can no longer arbitarily flit between any server and as such can develop relationships with players who they have no association with out of game, but just because they areas they generally play in overlap.

There do exist issues with this solution though. The edges of bordering servers must be of similar type, to just look at the current map chernarus as an example. If you were to walk to the north edge of the map you would then appear in the south sea on the server north of the first server which would not really feel very authentic. The addition of servers to the chessboard can only ever be added to the edge which would either lead to very high populations in the center servers (which can cause problems, for example if you need to travel through one server to get to the server on the other side and the intermediary server is currently full you will have to move around it which is a fairly un-authentic experience that wastes your time.) and very low populations on the outer servers which is an inefficient use of resources or if wrapping around is implemented to lessen this unless the chessboard is a perfect rectangle (which would be impossible to realistically maintain) you would get servers occupying the same geographic area which just gets confusing. Additionally generally one would want servers with similar pings and server times to occupy the same general geographic area but new servers can only be added at the edges which prevents this. There are also problems if you remove a server, you end up with a hole in the chessboard which can't be travelled through which would be annoying to say the least.

Though perhaps the largest problem this solution has is travel itself. There currently exists around ~3000 DayZ servers and assuming they were arranged in a square the square would be ~55 servers wide. If you can wrap around the map the average distance from your current location to any given server is roughly ~30 servers. Given it takes roughly ~20 minutes to cross a server to get to any given server would take roughly 10 hours straight of running in-game at your keyboard (and much longer if you want to get there safely).

That is hell.

The Fallout solution

This solution is the one I feel would best combat server hopping without fracturing the community like the Private Hive solution or having the technical challenges of the Chessboard solution while still allowing organic local communities to form.

For those familiar with the travelling system in the original Fallout this solution functions similarily. Like the Chessboard solution travel between servers works by travelling to the edge of the map, however once reaching the edge instead of transferring to an adjacent server you are taken to a global view. From here you can see individual servers as nodes on the globe and you can set a path to travel to them. Travelling takes both some time to complete and drains your hunger and thirst which limits the maximum range you can travel at once (though upon arrival you can replenish yourself and continue travelling towards your final destination if it is further than your maximum range). Vehicles also consume gas but move much faster, drain your hunger and thirst less and generally have greater max ranges. Upon arrival at a target node you arrive on the edge where it intersects the heading you arrived at (or as close as possible in the case of water borders).

With this solution new servers can be added easily as they can be added anywhere on the globe and as close as possible to any other server (though it would probably be best to enforce a minimum distance between servers. And you don't get the same "hole" problems when servers are removed or at capacity as with the Chessboard solution. Additionally travelling isn't anywhere near as horrowing as it doesn't require you to be at the keyboard and would likely take much less time. The only downside I see to this solution which the Chessboard solution also shares is that combat at the edges of the map would be akward, however the edges of the map are fairly desolate and combat is uncommon there so it should only be a minor issue.

Finally on death players would be able to choose to respawn at any server to allow friends to more easily meet up to start playing together or to allow people to try another area of the Globe.

[boneboys 7988]

I doubt that the two propositions would be applicable but hats off to you for a well composed essay.

Have some :beans:

[Raventhorn 43]

Well written post. I agree that this is problem, and I always tell my friends to not server jump (simply because I think it`s a douchebag thing to do). They simply log out near a factory and log in until they find everything they need on different servers.

Your suggestions seems like something they could do. But how about just giving a new spawn, I.E. if you change server you keep your gear but get a "fresh spawn". This will keep people from jumping to get gear in the same way and it would keep people from ambushing. They could still escape danger, but you can`t really prevent that, you could just log off anyway.

And having more stable and avaliable server is also a good thing. Would be pissed of if I was not able to change servers but the server I am currently on is always down. (what is happening as we speak.)

Great post.

Cheers.

Edited September 4, 2012 by Raventhorn

[flaep 0]

I like your idea plus this extras.

If you log out on an Airfield you can skip more servers but get Para dropped random on your target server.(but never over electro, cherno or any other airfield)

Logout on mapedges let you traffel one server far but will spawn you random on west or north.

On the shore you can travel half ammount of airtravel distance and you spawn random on the coast of your target server.

Second Solution:

If you panic disconnect you alway spawn on a parachute on the next server but same location.

If you want spawn on the ground you have to "sleep". When you go to sleep you have 10 seconds till you despawn and 10 seconds till you can move on the next Server.

You spawn prone and your vision will be blurry like if you have low blood but gets better after a minute or so. This should prevent server hopping and you need to think about where you logout.

Edited September 4, 2012 by flaep

[Johnny_Pfosten 18]

Nice thread and interesting ideas. But I think a system like that wouldn't be stable enough or to complex to be build up.

I also like the (already suggested/existing) idea of characters bound to a specific server (like the private hive or WOW char system) very much. So you create a certain number of characters in general and on specific servers without swapping gear between them. But of course you will have the same problem that some servers would be low populated and some will be overpopulated.

So a solution to stop server hopping is badly needed because it's damaging the game a lot (as well as a couple of other things) by destroying it's cornerstones.