Just a quick suggestion for UII that I nabbed off of Rust. To discourage players from abusing the suicide and bed system for unlimited stats, I suggest that players spawn with a randomized value of health, food, and water, somewhere between 50% and 75%.
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So would it be at least 50% to 60% in all?
No, 50 to 60%
Wouldn’t that encouraged people to kill themselves until they got the “best result”?
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Not if randomizing parameters are made accurate enough and/or we include even harsher values, like 40% to 65% or less, for example. Also, if suicide cooldown is applied, that’d rather be real lazy and dumb from anyone.
I think if there’s a longer suicide respawn timer it would help to improve that. Ithink it’s weird that someone wastes his time respawning every 40 seconds
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I actually agree with this suggestion and a personal story to go with it as well.
As an active player a year back, whenever me and my friends set up a base we disregarded food water and meds ENTIRELY and exploited the infinite respawning of the beds in our bases. Whenever someone was hungry we would just say “Okay, just die then.”
This exploit needs extra attention because abusing this will remove a lot of the survival aspect from the game, drawing focus and urgency away from needing to gather food and water as we’ve seen with 3.x
My views on this however is to lock the spawn values at a specific number everytime.
When respawning natrually (On the shore and map spawnpoints), 66% in all stats (These stats being Health, Hunger and Thirst). This is to ensure that starting off isn’t as brutal on the player.
However, when respawning at a bed reduce this number to 33% in all stats in order to discourage the bed respawn exploit we all know and have a love-hate relationship with.
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And lose all skills (if the mechanic of loses skill when dying continues).
“Time to build bases next to spawn points!”
I don’t think that’s the most effective deterrent.
In U3 food/water isn’t really an issue to begin with, so I’m unsure as to why anyone would even bother suicide for them. Given U4’s proposed system revamp, this will a more concerning issue. Regardless, incentives make more sense than penalizing people.
Death already punishes people with things like losing skills/experience (something which I don’t believe has been covered in any of the “skill revamp” posts all that much, unfortunately). There’s no need for penalties on how you choose to respawn. People don’t need to be camping spawn points and using that as an excuse to farm fresh-spawns.
Add incentives for not dying instead. People aren’t going to off themselves if they get more out of actually surviving in a survival game. Making death punishing on future lives would discourage dying too, naturally, but there should still actually be a reason people want to survive.
This hasn’t been mentioned yet. It may just be due to wanting to keep this discussion relevant to the original post, but I think the original post’s mindset isn’t optimal. Limiting stats to punish suicide shouldn’t be the reason people want to survive in a survival game. Similar features can be implemented, but imo they’d be better under a mindset of “how do we incentivize survival?”
“Time to build bases next to spawn points!”
Bases next to spawn points are already a thing, purely off of people wanting to shoot the fresh spawns. This isn’t exactly a counterpoint.
I think that this is an effective deterrent due to the fact that the incentive of basing elsewhere other than a spawnpoint is still relevant, for loot and resources.
While I do admire your whole approach of
“how do we incentivize survival?”
I don’t believe Unturned II should be as forgiving as Unturned was.
Adding more penalties is a sure fire way to encourage people not to die.
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There’s far better ways to improve survival-centricism than “let’s just penalize this for the sake of annoyance”
Name me some then.
Its not easy is it?
Its easy to say “put in more incentives”.
Molton just tried to make that point, but what more is there to add?
Good penalties will highlight the incentives.
The respawn penalty of the bedroll will say “Guess I can’t skip out on food runs anymore because I’ll starve before I get anywhere.”
(The reason why me and my group suicided by the way, to optimize route times and loot runs.)
It will also say
“Guess I can’t just throw myself endlessly at the raiders attacking me. I should try and not die then.”
The incentive to not suicide spam in 3.0 is that you lose xp.
First and easiest incentive is to do the same thing in U2, but have a far more extensive skill tree that is not only fun to use but also fairly powerful. There are not that many other incentives you can add, without changing/removing respawning in your house completely, as the incentive would have to be something that doesn’t carry over across lives, if molton or anyone wanted to elaborate on how one would “incentivize” survival further, that would be nice because so far I cant really think of anything else.
Penalties arent a fun way to deal with this though.
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That’s not really the best way to phrase it either. Players shouldn’t be rewarded for just being alive, they should actually have to train their skills and gather resources. The skill system in Unturned II should offer far more progression than that of 3.X. Instead of storing excess progress in libraries, players should have to choose to spend resources to backup a portion of their current progress.
He was referring to survival-centricism (relative to the PvP-centricism of 3.0) as opposed to the mere task of survival.
It’s actually very easy for me, since survival-centric suggestions are the bulk of my contributions here.
Some major examples:
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my Skill System Overhaul which includes several heavily complex mechanics working in tandem
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Sectionalized Clothing, which encourages properly establishing a shelter rather than carrying craptons of gear everywhere you go, as well as rebalancing clothing as a whole (not just making them statistically worse)
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adding a proper calorie intake and consumption system instead of percent bars, to accurately reflect the struggle in real-world survival situations to maintain calorie reserves (which promotes conservation of calories like real survival too. See also: The Long Dark)
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more in-depth medical system including various illnesses and afflictions, as well as both ambient and body temperature (most prominent zombie survival games have this down better than Unturned, even DayZ)
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general immersive details such as being unable to properly identify wild flora without the necessary botanical knowledge (imagine accidentally eating a toxic mushroom that looks identical to an edible one), or being unable to identify unlabeled medication (both of these a la NEO Scavenger)
While these can be seen as penalties technically, they actually serve a purpose outside of just being annoying. Not only are these survival-centric in their entirety, but they actually properly provide the aforementioned “incentives” as well as enhancing immersion and the overall gameplay experience. Some of these can even be seen as beneficial (for example, stocking up on high calorie diets instead of being restrained to a bar with a hard limit)
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Well I be damned mister GreatHero, alright alright.
Just discovered your sectionalized clothing post, and I really liked it. Also it saves me a lot of work since I was covering that in my next post, lol. Anyway, I have some extra side notes and suggestions to add, so stay tuned.
#NoPocketsMeansNoStorage!
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How would being ill incentivise staying alive over committing suicide? Or did you completely forget the topic at hand?
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What if either we make it so if someone suicides too much, their speed starts decreasing. (as in player movement speed.
And PERMANENTLY. )
Or we could just make it so they keep their old stats, with maybe 1 or 2 percent added. (unless if they suicide right after that.)
I fail to see how sectionalized and the calorie and medical systems would stop people from killing them selves. Sectionalized clothing just seems completely unrelated, and the calorie and medical systems would just add more of an incentive to suicide, especially if you get harsher debuffs from being crippled or on the brink of starvation. Yes they all make the game better gameplay wise but how do they prevent people from killing themselves? I would not be suprised if someone just busted their leg or couldnt find food and just killed them selves as they didnt want to deal with the long struggle ahead.
This is waaaaayyyyy to punishing, 1% stacks up too, 10 suicides is fairly obtainable if you play on a server for a week or so and get stuck in dumb places. Maybe a slight speed debuff once you spawn after suiciding but not a permanent one.
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