The title more or less says it, but I’ll explain it anyways:
Whenever you enter combat near a Safehouse, you don’t need to worry about dying at all, since you can simply respawn at the Safehouse and continue fighting. Because of this, I generally do not use any medkits or adrenaline shots during said fights. Because the Safehouse is so close, you can still loot the robots you destroyed and continue the fight even though you get an in-between-battles moment where you “failed” combat and receive the xp you earned so far.
So what I suggest is as followed:
Whenever a player dies, do not let them respawn in a Safehouse that is within a radius of 1km. Because then you will be too far away to continue combat reliably, but do NOT just “block the nearest 3 safehouses”, since that can TOO heavily Punish newer players or exploring players that went further away from their unlocked safehouses.
With this, death should be punishing enough to force people to bring adrenaline and medkits to keep themselves alive in a fight to get all the loot. Some locations currently are too easy to beat right now because of this cheesy tactic.
(F23 air base for example can have multiple tanks, packs of hunters and more, but since you can respawn it’s never an issue as long as you have ammo)
This should not really affect people that already play “fair” since they don’t die as often due to their use of medkits and adrenaline either.
I would rather suggest blocking the last safehouse you spawned in for a set period of time, like 15 or 30 minutes for example (there could even be a perk to reduce cooldown while you are at it). This way you would make sure players who genuinely died of bad luck near a safehouse are not punished too harshly, while you would still be able to lock out the safehouse scummers.
You could still choose to spawn at a distant safehouse, travel all the way up to F23 and respawn there upon your first death of course but only once, which would add an additional layer of strategy at the cost of preparation time.
I think that majority of players just play this game for fun, and not for hardcore survival experience.
Restricting safehouses respawns could lead to many of the players to abandon G.Z. (there are plenty of complains about difficulty as it is).
I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve. People who think that just respawning near the fight is somehow morally bad can already punish themselves by choosing to respawn further away. So this would only affect people who don’t feel that way, and force your way of playing on them for no reason, i.e. it would allocate precious developer time with the sole goal of making others unhappy when not even all the obvious bugs are fixed. (They’ve come a long way on the bug fixing front though, and naturally, I cherish that.)
I’m not sure that “safehouse respawns” in particular is the hill I wish to die on, it’s just that we’ve heard so many complaints of the form, “It’s too easy, there’s far too much ammo to loot!” which keep reminding me of an old joke (“Doctor, my arm hurts when I bend it like this!” “Well, then don’t bend it that way? Next!” - i.e., if you don’t want that much ammo, have you tried picking up less ammo?).
One, you intentionally brought the fight to yourself. In that case, the embarrassment of dying like a fool after picking a fight you were ill-equipped to win seems punishment enough?
Two, you spawned into the game or fast-traveled, and instead of getting to go about your business, you have to fight 3 tanks and 8 hunters that the game chose to spawn there. You didn’t pick that fight. You didn’t want it. And while much of GZ seems to revolve around picking your fights wisely, this one’s forced on you.
If you fast-traveled, any time you may have saved not walking is now lost.
If you spawned into that situation after just starting the game, you’re disproportionately punished if you’re a player that plays many short sessions rather than few long ones.
Either version of “I spawned at a location where my only option is to fight I battle I don’t want” is annoying enough in itself that any extra “punishment” would just add insult to injury.
When I spawn at an infested safehouse I just fast travel somewhere else. Problem fixed. Of course I get to enjoy a 30 minute yomp through a Swedish forest to where I want to be but there’s nothing wrong with that - I have stumbled across some cool things while just trying to get from A to B, one of the delights of the game.
I most certainly agree that this is a gorgeous game, and just scouting is one of my greatest joys in it. Enjoy and learn the landscape, avoid fights, even missions. My counter says 43,271 km which seems an absurd distance to walk (fast travel doesn’t seem to increase the counter). I have no idea whether that’s high or low or middling as the playerbase goes.
That said, when I just have one hour and I’d like to run a mission in that hour, it’d be nice not to spend half of it fighting off a couple of tanks spawncamping the safehouse, or traversing a region I already know. That of course is an ancillary point, anyway; it’s a minor nuisance rather than a huge problem for me as I allegedly have over 400 safe houses unlocked (again that seems far more than expected; it’s what Log->Stats reports, let’s settle on “many” ) and the running skills, so I usually get to where I need to go. I only mentioned it in the context of my larger point (which could have been a comment on a number of postings, but ended up on this), which was, “I’m puzzled by people requesting things as a feature that can already be done in the game.”, this thread’s example obviously being, “If you feel respawning right into a fight’s not enough hassle to make you fear death, you already have to option to spawn elsewhere, or to spend adrenaline regardless. It is not obvious to me where the need for additional code / a ‘feature’ is.”
I spawn at safehouses because I don’t have enough adrenaline shots to do otherwise - I’ve 5 or 6 at any one time and I have to guard them like rubies. I have no idea where people find 19 or 20! I save them for when I am screwed without them, but you only get 20% or something so have to use all the medkits as well and in a bitch-fight I’m often dead again before I can get to a medkit. Leave it alone!
And anyway, what chummy is proposing you can get around by dropping a radio and fast-travelling back to the fight. Given the storage you can load up with two or three radios and it wouldn’t matter where you had to spawn!
Rather than implement limiters such as spawn counters, how about a scoring system? I’ve also floated the idea of hardcore mode/permadeath to address this.
