Humanity Tweaks Needed

[Komplex]

I'm sure most friendly players have noticed, but I think the humanity system probably needs some huge tweaks. The current issues I have with the system are:

-There is no way to identify bandits/heros

-If you kill a bandit you get negative humanity

-If you knocksome out or disable anyone so you can get away you get negative humanity

-If you do any damage to anyone at all you get negative humanity

-If you get shot at and hit, then kill that person, you get negative humanity

 

This makes playing as a friendly/hero nearly impossible. I play as a very friendly player and only shoot when shot at, however if you want to be a hero you just have to stand there and let people kill you, or run away and hide if you can. This removes a HUGE aspect from the game. Who just wants to run around and kill zombies and aviod all other players? You might as well play single player at that point.

 

I do think it's a neat idea that you don't know who the bandits are just from their skins, but it's pretty stupid that you can fireback at someone shotting at you, or kill a huge bandit without ruining your humanity. Once you've been forced to kill a few people it's damn near impossible to claw your way back to postive humanity without exploits.

 

My suggested fixes are a bit obvious from my outlined issues, however Im curious to see what the community can come up with.

[Ephox]

There is hero/bandit skins if you get high/low enough humanity, but i have noticed that the only way for me to stay hero is to kill zombies and bloodbag/bandage/morphine my friend, i cant protect myself incase somone steps in our base without becoming a survivor agian.

[Eegore]

I'm sure most friendly players have noticed, but I think the humanity system probably needs some huge tweaks. The current issues I have with the system are:

-There is no way to identify bandits/heros

-If you kill a bandit you get negative humanity

-If you knocksome out or disable anyone so you can get away you get negative humanity

-If you do any damage to anyone at all you get negative humanity

-If you get shot at and hit, then kill that person, you get negative humanity

 

This makes playing as a friendly/hero nearly impossible. I play as a very friendly player and only shoot when shot at, however if you want to be a hero you just have to stand there and let people kill you, or run away and hide if you can. This removes a HUGE aspect from the game. Who just wants to run around and kill zombies and aviod all other players? You might as well play single player at that point.

 

I do think it's a neat idea that you don't know who the bandits are just from their skins, but it's pretty stupid that you can fireback at someone shotting at you, or kill a huge bandit without ruining your humanity. Once you've been forced to kill a few people it's damn near impossible to claw your way back to postive humanity without exploits.

 

My suggested fixes are a bit obvious from my outlined issues, however Im curious to see what the community can come up with.

 

 

  You point out problems, what are your suggested fixes?

[Komplex]

@Survivor King I don't think there is anymore. We are friendly with one of the groups that has the 2rd biggest bandit on the server at -75k and he respawns with just a survivor skin on. My buddy is also a 6k hero and has yet to get a skin. I know you can find bandit skins. So you might have seen someone wearing one of those that they found.

 

 

@Eegore Well for starters a reverse of the issues listed above will go along way. However here are my suggestions spelled out:

-Minor skin change. Maybe a red armband for bandits, and a blue one for heros, added to the survivor skin.

-Postive humanity from bandit kills (scaled to what their humanity level was at).

-ONLY negative humanity for killing, if you are trying to disable or knock someone out you shouldn't lose anything.

-Along with my last one, damage dealt to other players shouldn't effect your humanity unless that player dies.

-If a player hits you, you should be able to shoot back and kill them without any loss if they are a survivor.

-You should start gaining humanity the longer you're alive with no murders. After maybe 3 hours with no murders you should slow start to gain humanity.

 

-Another neat suggestion my squad mate thought of would be suited for preventing camping. If a bandit gets within 50-100 meters of a friendly trader the npc will start to grumble or mutter that can heard 50-100 meters away. This will prevent bandits from camping friendly/hero traders and vise versa.

 

 

 

 

Note: After we engauged bandits last night one of our squad claimed to have gained humanity from his bandit kill, but another member lost humanity. Yet only has a "bandit kill" listed in his debug monitor. So we'll have to do some addtional testing or maybe someone from Epoch dev team can chime in and explain.

[Gimmic]

 

-Another neat suggestion my squad mate thought of would be suited for preventing camping. If a bandit gets within 50-100 meters of a friendly trader the npc will start to grumble or mutter that can heard 50-100 meters away. This will prevent bandits from camping friendly/hero traders and vise versa.

 

 

Or if a bandit is within 200m (realistically, camping is happening at ~100 m out, visible LOS to traders) the AI could bring their guns up to shoulder in a 'ready to fire' stance. It could simply be a more aggressive look to alert players they should be 'prepared'. If you wanted to get real tricky, the AI could point their weapons in the general direction of the player who has the lowest humanity. 

 

It would be a cosmetic look nothing functional. 

 

I also really like the armband idea, but that would probably require custom player models for every skin. 

[itsatrap]

any progress in fixed the humanity bug ?

[Komplex]

We did some additional testing and killed our buddy who is a huge bandit a few times. If we just shoot him we lose humanity, if we kill him we gain a tiny bit of humanity. However a neutral member of our party lost rather then gain humanity from killing him. So my previous analysis might have been warped as I was neutral at -1000 when I noticed the issues.

 

However in my opinion its beyond stupid that I can defend myself against people who have shot me or who are bandits. Being a hero must be boring as hell, always running and hiding from everyone.

[Armifer]

There is NO humanity bug. VBawols code works as intended. The player needs to have murders, and quite a few of them to get any humanity gain from them. You cannot gain any humanity from a bandit with zero murders. I worked out his formula in a massive excel spread sheet back when I was working on my own system, and realized that there is a certain point of really low negative humanity, that if they get 1 kill, you can get positive humanity for it. On our testing, a bandit with -500k with 1 murder gave us around 3k humanity, but if he had no kills it was -2k plus the damage per shot. That's the problem, no reward for killing a bandit. I think the idea is that the act of shooting anyone cold blooded, or killing them, bandit or not, is immoral. Only in self defense there is no penalty.

 

The new system I was working on, but haven't had time to finish, has a reward for killing bandits that scales with how negative their humanity is, just like vbawals code. The difference is that you get a minimum bonus for killing the bandits depending on their humanity level, and there is a maximum amount of humanity you can get to cap it so there is no ridiculous instant hero farming on really low humanity players. I also changed the damage per shot to a 10th of what it was, and prevented a loss from shooting bandits, the reason for this is players can farm humanity by going full auto on a player at close range, and get around -8k per kill if using a high damage weapon.

 

So long story short, there is no bonus for killing a bandit with zero murders, that's your problem.

[Gimmic]

Armifer: I really think that view conflicts with persistent humanity. As it stands, when people engage *someone* is going to lose humanity. It's likely that both parties will lose humanity. 

 

Over time, everyone who has any violent interaction with any other group loses humanity. The general server population quickly slides into negative humanity because of this.

 

The positive humanity ratio is only based on current life murders, while the overall humanity is persistent across deaths. There seems to be a break there.

 

 

If anything, humanity should be an average of the actions across the server, somehow taking into account the balance of actions between all players. In a server where everyone kills everyone- the person who kills the least would be the 'hero'.

[itsatrap]

Hmm this sucks, over 80% of my players a bandits just be defending them self....

Is there a way make kills follow the player ?