Razzmatazz

The changelog indicates that door lock grinding and safe hacking will be introduced in 1.0.4. Assuming the implementation is similar to the mods added on Exile servers currently out in the wild, this is a bad idea. Regarding grinding, there are already two ways to get through locked doors: breaching charges and thermal scanners. With grinders, it won't matter if you went to the trouble of reinforcing your doors to metal or concrete, someone can just grind through the locks. Grinding punishes you for having doors. That encourages players to put solid walls in front of their doors when they're not online, stacking an absurd series of doors, and other such things to guard against grinding attacks. The most common reason for adding safe hacking is that "breaching bases doesn't get you anything because everyone keeps their gear securely in safes." But that completely ignores the fact that thermal scanners are a thing. If you have the patience to stake out your target and collect some codes, it's actually quite easy to rob someone blind. However, none of that patience is necessary with the combination of grinders and safe hacking. One very important aspect of thermal scanners is that the target and the thief must be online at or near the same time. With lock grinding and safe hacking, it's not necessary for the breaching party to know whose base they're breaching or for the victim(s) to have been online at any point recently. That's a pretty important distinction, and helps keep the power imbalance from becoming too pronounced for groups that spend a ton of time in the game and groups that play less frequently.

I get that prices based on how many of an item are available is a feature lots of people want, but it sounds like that's really complicated. I'd be more than happy with a trader system that simply limits the items for sale to those sold by players without dynamically adjusting price based on how many of that item are available.

Thanks for the info, monkeynutz. Maybe we're operating from different definitions, but I'd say that players explaining why they view a feature as detrimental to the game counts as constructive criticism. It'd be one thing if people just said "this sucks, I hate it." But it's another thing entirely when people provide detailed reasons for their positions. Or so I thought.

I've played on servers with lock grinding and safe hacking, used those features more than they were used against me, and still found it to be overall detrimental to the experience. Pardon me for posting some constructive criticism in the "Constructive Criticism" forum. I didn't realize that was frowned upon.

Useful to know, thanks!

Well that's a relief to hear! I was under the impression that it was on by default based on previous replies.

If something is on by default, most servers will keep it on. There's no reason something should be imbalanced by default.

A dismissive "it can be turned off" doesn't really address the imbalance issues I raised. I wished you didn't have grinding when I was playing on your Malden server. Since it was part of a group of servers which all had grinding, I didn't see the point in requesting that it be removed. So consider this whole thread a retroactive complaint.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't thermal scanners lootable-only by default (I know it's different on your servers)? By default, that makes the "price" of a thermal scanner hard to pin down, but the semi-scarcity requires players to be judicious in their use of thermal scanners. Because each scanner has limited uses, and there are a limited number of scanners, you have to target which doors you want to scan based on knowing when the base owner is around. That's HUGELY different than if players can just buy as many batteries as they need to get through doors without any regard to who the base owner is or if they've used the base in the last fifteen minutes (or five hours for that matter). If thermal scanners will remain loot-only by default, adding in grinding is a huge, and very unbalanced, departure.

As currently implemented, the can opener requirements for canned food are nonsensical. A can can have two states, opened or sealed. However, you need a can opener to do ALL of the following: (1) eat raw food; (2) cook raw food; and (3) eat cooked food. The first one makes sense, but the second two don't. If you've already opened the can to cook it, why do you need a can opener to eat the cooked food? The inventory image for cooked canned food items clearly show the can as open, so why is a can opener required again to eat it?

I think we're saying the same thing here? The fact that the base owner had to be online and use the base within the last 15 minutes is critical. That makes it impractical to just go around scanning doors with reckless abandon (which is what grinding essentially allows).

The fact that thermal scanner use is tied to a window during which the base owner is online and using the base is a pretty critical distinction.

If lock grinding takes longer than breaching charges but costs less, then it will still be embraced by groups with an excess of time. If it takes longer and costs more, then what's the point of adding it? Also, in the implementations I've seen, grinding can be sped up be having multiple people grind at the same time. A similar implementation would greatly favor large groups who play frequently. BaroN, yes, thanks for that clarification. Since most servers go with the default Exile settings, how about making lock grinding and safe hacking off by default? That way, they can easily be turned on by the servers that want to, but it's not part of the game by default.

Wow, looks like I'm a dummy. I've been playing this mod for over two years, and I somehow thought a can opener was required to cook canned food. Sort of weird that a sealed can requires a cooking pot to heat up, though.

Sounds pretty awesome!

That sounds like an impressive amount of work, maybe even more work than just limiting inventory to the number of items sold. Seems more straight forward for actual scarcity to create scarcity rather than prices creating scarcity.

I know this is a very old topic, but I was coming to post a virtually identical suggestion. So instead of posting the same thing, I'll just necropost. This idea struck me when I tried out the 1.0 release of Epoch. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed the forced scarcity involved where traders only sell items players have sold to them. Unfortunately, the trader interfaces, base building, base maintenance, and interaction (who asked for a wheel menu interface?) systems are all vastly inferior to Exile. If there were an option to apply the same "traders only sell what's been sold to them" concept to vehicles as well, that would also be great. It could be trader-specific as well. Traders are assigned a "trader camp" number such that anything sold to a trader that's a member of that "camp" would show up in the wares of the appropriate trader. That way, you don't have to worry about going to sell to a specific trader, and each trader still sells consistent wares. Selling items to the "waste" trader of a camp would push all the items to the appropriate traders' inventories in that camp. That way, players are encouraged to travel around the map to check the stock of different traders. Alternatively, if server owners wanted all their trading zones to share the same inventory, all traders could just be assigned the same camp number. This system would make looting a valuable activity, increase the value of mission rewards, encourage player movement around the map, and make virtually all items more valuable.

Wasn't this fixed in the 1.0.3 update anyway?

I know with the latest Arma update, shipping containers are no longer destructable. However, harvesting them with a sledgehammer technically still works. When you hit them enough times, the junk metal still spawns underneath the container. Sometimes you can still reach it if the container is on uneven ground. Why not just make the metal spawn at the player's feet rather than under the container? Would be consistent with how chopping wood works.

Yes, the community modded those things in because Arma 3 is a very general platform, as I said above.

The thinking "mod Exile into Game X because Game X is really popular right now" isn't really viable. PUBG is a round-based last man standing arena shooter, not a survival game. A survival game involves scavenging basic supplies (food, water, etc.) that you need in order to survive. The environment itself (and not only other players) poses a threat to the player. A survival game usually is slower-paced than most FPS games. They can involve long stretches of scavenging for supplies when not a lot of exciting action happens. PVP may not even be necessary in a survival game. Last man standing arena shooters have become popular recently because they distill many survival game elements into a streamlined package. Yes, you loot for weapons and gear. Yes, you encounter other players and attempt to kill each other. But those elements are focused on in a different way than in survival games. The environment itself isn't really a danger to the player (to the extent it is a danger, it's only a means to the end of forcing players together to drive the PVP action). The goal is to kill other players, not overcome the adversity of the environment. Their round-based nature ensures that looted gear is temporary, and both victories and losses are fleeting. Because everything is reset after the end of the current round, there are no long-term goals. There is only the current match. The essence of last man standing arena shooters is the narrowing down of players until only the victor remains, and then everything is reset. That type of game is fundamentally incompatible with the base building and permanence required for Exile. As such, PUBG is not a suitable platform for an Exile-style mod. Expect PUBG mods to focus on tweaking and refining the round-based nature of that game as that's its core competency. The fact that PUBG is popular doesn't make any difference. Overwatch is popular and developing an Exile mod for Overwatch (once modding support is added) would be absurd. If you're going to mod a vehicle into a race car, you wouldn't choose to start with a lawn mower. You start with an already fast car (or at least a normal car) and make it faster. Some games are a more general platform than others. Arma is a very general platform, like a mainstream car. You can mod it in lots of ways that can make it perform many different roles. PUBG is a more specialized game, like a lawnmower. Sure, will likely be able to mod it in many different ways, but the platform is inherently more limited than if you were modding a car. Of course, someone could spend tons of time modding it so that it's not even recognizable as a lawn mower; but why would anyone spend the time doing that when they could expend less effort by starting with a more suitable platform at the beginning?

I've noticed this since the concrete window shutters came out as well. There's definitely still something "there" even when the window is open. If you try to place a 3d marker through an open concrete window shutter, it gets placed where the shutter would be if it were closed. You also can't vault through an open-shutter concrete window. And it may just be something with my graphics settings, but the focal point seems off when I'm looking through an open concrete window. Far away items look a little out of focus. It's a similar effect to if you're prone and grass is popping up nearby messing with your view, so far away stuff goes out of focus. Because of all these issues, I just use regular concrete windows without the metal shutter.

PUBG might seem more buggy and would run less smoothly if servers were meant to be up for hours at a time and people built large, persistent bases all around the map. Consider for a moment that the things you love about Exile would cause a strain on almost any game engine.

The Epoch mod has a somewhat modified stamina system, so it's possible. I don't care for that system, though.

No worries! I didn't think we actually had a disagreement and just wanted to be sure.