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[Day Z] Like a Japanese game show, where the prize is breaking your legs.
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That won't last if the dev actually wants the mod to grow beyond where it is now. It's one thing for ass-banditry to be a viable way to play (which is fine); it's another thing for it to basically be completely preferable since because there's zero penalty for acting like a dick and just stealing from other people. If people don't get labeled as assholes for being assholes, then the zombies may as well all get normal human skins too; letting griefers do whatever they want just penalizes people who don't want to play that way. It's shitty design.
Also, latest version seems to break the ever-loving shit out of the game. I spawned in some completely random part of the map with the shakes, then keep trying to kill myself and respawn... except I keep respawning in the place where I died with about 2k blood and the shakes. Or, even worse, get stuck unconscious for several minutes. Rolling back to the last version now because this one is just unplayable.
EDIT: Even rolling back and playing on servers using the old version doesn't help. Something is way screwed with the whole game.
Living characters are still fine, just don't die.
Basically anything in DayZ related to character saving and spawning/respawning is handled by a central database server. Doesn't matter what version or server you're on, if the database is fucked, everyone is fucked.
If anything ( I haven't play this mod, BTW), they should take away the bandit skin. Make death be something 'if you die you can't log back into the server until x amount of time' or someting.
But this looks absolutely amazing.
I'll wait, though, because the author basically admits in an interview I read that the mod will become stand alone in a few months.
The bandit skin is already going away in the next patch. A timeout on logging in after death would be horrific and would probably kill the mod. Bandits aren't the people who die, they're the people who kill. Tell some poor noob who just walked out of the water and got munched on in 5 minutes flat that he can't log in for even 60 seconds and he's just not going to log in ever again.
What the game needs is objective that require a group of people to complete. It sorta does this with vehicles, but they're kinda bugged and don't always spawn. I don't know what else there would be to come up with.
The death penalty is already pretty severe in this game. You lose everything and are forced to make a new character. Don't think it needs to be more harsh than that
Rocket has said that he's completely willing to see the whole thing tank out if that's the case. He has some very specific things he wants to do with the mod, and artificial limits on player behavior is something he is dead set against.
Besides, if you really want to play the mod with no PvP, then all it takes is to rent a server and put a password on it.
It's not about knowing better. He calls the mod an "experiment". He wants to do very specific things and wants to see how it works out.
He really doesn't care whether or not the userbase is happy, cause he is not making it to be successful.
But not labeling the murdering types as such is a majorly crippling thing to do to the people who don't play that way. That'll encourage way more random PvP violence than having people be marked for their actions. Internet anonymity just makes it far too easy to screw people over for no other reason than some arbritrary and opinionated notion of what a "real" zombie apocalypse would be like. And with that in mind, how real is it that you can fix a gushing arterial wound with a bit of bandaging or fix a broken leg with morphine? It's all relative. The problem is that only a few people will find excessively pointless realism fun and tons of people can enjoy something just a little more unrealistic.
EDIT: Heck, why not just make it a server choice instead of just forcing everyone to play exactly the way the dev wants them too? Then he could have exactly the game he wants and people can still have the fun they want. It doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive situation unless the dev is pointlessly close-minded.
it doesn't even show humanity anymore and yet there I am, with a bandit skin.
This character has never shot anyone or even SEEN another survivor. Yet I look like a bandit.
So does that mean I am now free to be shot at? Just because of my looks?
But clearly, your issue would be a technical problem rather than a design issue. You shouldn't be labeled a bandit if you haven't been doing bandit things. Though now that you are a bandit, you may as well make the most of it and be a bastard about it.
Neither should survivors be able to prey endlessly on bandits without becoming bandits themselves. Are bandits less than human? Certainly. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be penalties for picking on them as well.
Welp, thats pretty much what happens already. With the state of the servers sometimes I've ended up waiting 15 minutes to get a new character. A timer isn't really any worse than losing X hours of gameplay because you tripped over a gentle slope and somehow exploded, or decided to crouch while going through a doorway, or got ganked by some asshat that leads hordes of zombies into you. All that removing the skin does is require me to shoot everyone I come across.
DayZ with less hardcore gameplay is still different than L4D2. But, OMG BANDIT SKINZ R CAREBARE.
There's no elegant way to work it, and the inelegant way only causes more problems for the none psychos. So you'll just have to lump it.
Oh:
HOTFIX : 24 MAY 2012
Affected addons:
* dayz_code 1.5.8.4
Changelog:
* [NEW] Support for more than 1,000,000 characters
I don't see this tanking any time soon...
Though to be fair, having over a million characters doesn't mean anything in terms of popularity of the game. Fifty thousand people simply learning the game could quite rapidly approach that number of characters as everybody dies repeatedly; you'd need far less people than that to reach the million-character marker when the game is running for weeks.
Will it be something that a lot of people enjoy? Or is it going to be a balanced game experience? Probably not, and honestly I don't want a balanced game system out of it.
Most of the people in bandit skins, aren't fucking bandits.
Did no one ever tell you, it's what's on the inside that counts.
Maybe its server dependent, but players with bandit skins have almost always shot at me first.
If a guy shoots at you and misses, and you shoot him back and hit, you become a bandit.
Now you're a "bandit", any asshole can kill you without humanity penalty, so most people will shoot first.
Now you're a "bandit", most people think you're going to shoot them, so they shoot first.
So, now you're a bandit, you might as well play like one since pretty much everyone will be gunning for you anyway.
Hurrah, system is working! Except it isn't, hence its removal. The end.
They aren't allowing any passworded servers. Due to the nature of the central database, they're being very careful about letting servers setup unfair rules that would make them overly advantageous to play on.
Sooooo... issues less resolved than I would've hoped for. Oh well, it's an alpha build. Guess I'll try later when things might be more stable.
And ditching the current bandit skin system because it's just broken is something I'm fine with. It's an alpha, you get lots of issues, so just shelve it to work on other problems. There's a better solution than just giving jerks a free pass to murder everybody without suspicion, but it could take a while for it to work right.
Deal with it. It's a zombie survival game. It's not zombie teamwork.
Shitting your pants every time you meet another survivor is part of the experience. There has never been a game that makes the player feel the kinds of emotions that DayZ does.