EDIT: Please, actually read the post before commenting.
I’ve seen a bunch of KoS posts lately, and was inspired to write up a concept of my own.
The main problem of KoS is… The players’ approach to it!
KoS is the default state of mind in the survival genre. The lack of moral penalty, lack of fear of death and the lack of actual consequences for the killer actually makes KoS an irresistibly good approach to acquiring gear and staying alive.
There is simply no incentive to let a random dude live, because everybody knows that the random is a loot drain and that they would probably murder you in cold blood no matter what you do for them as soon as they obtain a firearm. (Hell, even a melee weapon in some cases!)
You would have to implement some ridiculously limiting features to reduce KoS, features that may lead the game to be more tedious than enjoyable.
I personally think that KoS is here to stay simply because it is the natural order of stuff in such an environment as a survival game. TL;DR KoS is not a problem, it’s just how it is in survival games and does not need fixing.
I Guess Default Post? idk really know what that is. Plus, i don’t even have to read through it to understand what it is. Its a post about Kos, what else can i expect? its been argued a Hundred thousand times already.
Honestly, as controversial as this sounds, there will never be a way of stopping KoS unless there is some sort of penalty, but that just takes away from people’s free will, which makes the game fun for many people. As much as everyone would want a perfect middle ground, this is simply one of those matters that is, as I see it, too subjective for a conventional solution, so I agree that this is the natural order of things. Like it or not, the Unturned experience is simply a series of decisions such as killing people on sight, it’s just what the game is. It’s sad to many people, it turns some away, but then again, RP servers are a thing. Although I have to say, I’ve been the victim of KoSing less and less as I’ve last been playing this game. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I am actually saying that KoS is not a problem and it doesn’t need solving, and even if you attempted to “fix” it, it would be pretty hard if not impossible, and would potentially make the game tedious.
Quite a controversial opinion but I agree entirely. It’s gonna be extremely hard to penalize KOS all the while making other peaceful methods of looting as rewarding as KOS (such as trading or whatever).
Btw, KOS is a problem. A survival game is not a shooter game. The points of survival games are to survive the environment, not survive every player that sees you trying to murder you.
Yes, players killing each other is part of survival, But when it gets to the point where if you so much as spot a player, you kill them out of boredom…
Then it just becomes a pvp game, and not a survival game.
KOS is a problem, and it needs to be fixed. And it CAN be fixed. Kos occurs because players get bored, so they engage in a pvp fight for the adrenaline rush and such. The way to get rid of it is to make the enviroment so dangerous, you dont have the time required to get bored and do that, as well as making it so it would be dangerous spending so much time trying to kill a single player for loot they might not even have.
Once again, PvP is not survival, its PvP. If you like kos so much, go play a game meant for it.
This is only relevant for KoS out of boredom/sport. I myself am the first person who will murder an armed player on sight just because I can’t risk being peaceful and giving him the opportunity to shoot first.
I was first to attack only armed players in Carpat. If I saw that it was some random with just a knife, I would rob him at most, or just even let him pass by.
The endgame of Unturned 3.0 is killing other players. There is no way around that in the current 3.0 because of how the entire game and all maps are structured. You spend 30 minutes making your way up the progression “tree” of loot, killing and worrying about zombies, until you get exercise and cardio, maybe some sharpshooter skills and a gun with a mag or two. At that point there isn’t anything to do other than murder, because you have “solved” all other problems. (hungry/thirsty? just power a vending machine lol, zombies? just run away lol, out of ammo? just do a horde beacon lol) The original dayz (overpoch) had npcs that you could trade with and it also took a handful of hours to get geared, so even after spending 5 hours of gearing up, you could build bases, trade with npcs and horde gold. KOS was not a problem.
Incentives
There should never be any incentive whatsoever for a geared player to go anywhere near starter locations. This is without a doubt the second biggest gripe I have with unturned. On PEI, the military hotspot is right next to a starter town. On washington, the military hotspot is right next to a starter town. On russia, the better deadzone and npc base are right next to starter towns. You get the drift. The fix for this is to have all military locations clustered semi near, but as far as possible from starter/mid tier locations. NPCs and deadzones in whatever form they take should follow suit. NPC bases should be far in the “north” and there should be small towns that are the main areas to get meds and food when you are at the end game. You want to funnel players towards the north, but make it pointless to go back south.
Fear
If progression is lengthy enough, and you are able to dedicate hours into a single “life” and still be making progress, then people will fear death far far more. No one wants to lose 4 hours worth of loot and skills, and this will make fighting more fun because there is more adrenaline, and also more rare and rewarding. If bullets are rareish this would also help, along with a ballistics system that makes it semi hard to hit shots from a ways away, while also being possible to master the system with enough practice to increase the skill ceiling.
How you don’t solve KOS:
Proffesions
If professions are critical to progress, this would just be another buff to clans and cripple solos even further. IMO professions should just be where you start on a PoE esque skill tree, so that you are only really rewarded in working together via professions in the early game. You should be able to min max and become the ultimate jack of all trades, it should just take a while.
Abitrary systems
I am fairly certain that no matter what there will never be a system that can say who killed who. Instead, just have every kill be a hit to rep, but actions giving you positive rep. As an example:
Killed some dude -10
Healed a random +3
Fed a random +2
Killed turned +1
Fixed someones car for them +4
Broke into another players car -1
Publicly visible reputation is actually promoting KoS to a certain extent, for example me and my friends, when we reach the endgame, pretty much just kill randoms as a sport, competing to get the lowest rep out of the whole group, or sometimes the whole server. Despite -rep being supposedly a negative thing, it gives you a title, and there is always somebody willing to work towards that title.
I think KOS is just a part of survival games but with the current PVP system its just whoever gets jump on who and isnt much fun in unturned. I’d rather it be we actually fight and scout out then just boop im dead from 10000000 km away sniper.
It’s also very funny and cinical for me that people in favor of KoS refers to it as the “natural order of things”, as if killing someone were that easy IRL and also ignoring these other facts:
Humans are social beings, meaning that even on the worst situations, they’ll get their way around to cooperate with others in order to survive.
The existing levels of KoS in the game is something that IRL only bandits/thugs or the like would do. Self awareness/fear makes you gunpoint/warning shoot everything on an apocalyptic situation; greed makes you shoot-to-kill everything you see exactly as it happens in Unturned.
Saying that KoS is the “survival of the fittest” when survival itself in the game isn’t a challenge, then you end killing players as sport, isn’t just a heavy sign of selfishness and hipocrisy but is also throwing sh*t to the entire genre, because as Aj said: a survival game isn’t a shooter game.
If in missing anything else, I’ll say it later. I’m not in that mood for arguing either.
