Encourage teamwork in DST (Survival)

[PsychedelicJello]

So what's so special about Don't Starve Together? 

In my mind it's teamwork. Being able to build, explore, and fight monsters with other players adds whole new elements to the game. The only problem is NO ONE WORKS TOGETHER. 

 

Right now the mentality is something like "run around and build a base and sometimes there's these random people wandering around in my world". While it's true that some parts of the game have been made harder, e.g., monsters have more hp, but this just makes it a harder solo game. Sharing bases is great, but it adds new difficulties as well as making some things easier. On top of that, griefers are everywhere. 

 

On the plus side, there are a lot of ways to fix this. Here are a few which I've put together:

 

    - Anti-griefing measures. Griefing is the single greatest obstacle to cooperative play. I cannot stress this enough. Cooperative bases are pointless if someone is stealing your resources/setting things on fire/haunting everything. I won't go into details about everything that needs to be done to fix this in this post, but these measures need to be taken. They should at least be an option when creating servers.

 

    - Sanity/Hp regen when nearby other players. This by itself would give players a solid reason to work together when exploring, monster fighting, or whatever.​ It would probably be combined with a slight increase in passive sanity loss, to maintain game balance.

 

    - Sharing information (maps). When people find each other, they can drop maps for each other which add the areas the map-giver has already explored to the in game map of the map-receiver. Another way to go about this would be whenever someone explores any location, the information in all players' maps is updated (although I don't like this solution as much because it would end exploration pretty quickly).

 

    - New items which require multiple players. For example a build which requires two players to craft. Or an item which works better the more players are operating it. There's a lot of ways this could happen. Of course, overused, it would ruin the game, but for just a few things it could be interesting.

 

    - Built in voice chat. Proper communication is essential to a good team. Chat can only show short comments, and forces players to expose themselves to type a message. A lot of times, such as when kiting, this is a huge pain. This is also a good way to help new players learn the ropes.

 

All of this would help build an "us vs world" feel for DST, something that is sorely lacking right now. I'd love to hear what you guys think.

[Pyr0mrcow]

Maybe give the ability to link a sign to your map. It'd give another use for them.

 

Voice chat would be really nice. Nearly-died quite a few times just from stopping to reply to someone, usually in a swamp...

 

Rather than regen, I'd suggest adding a small sanity boost to healing others, like when you revive a player.

 

As far as the griefing goes...there're a lot of mods out there that do the job well. Particularly, the one that guards from new players setting fires, accessing chests, ect. Usually you can tell who's a griefer/dead weight within a few in-game days, and vote-kick them in that time; the mod also makes anyone who quits drop their stuff if they're new.

 

 

One of the big things hindering gameplay is having people who actually want to work together. Game features are one thing, and some form of protection (via mod currently) is pretty much required, but if the people already on the server still aren't willing to take a risk with the bad apples after that, it won't go anywhere. Leadership's nessecary too, giving people tasks when they ask for them. Basically, a community.

Get a server protected, put some of the balancing/world regenerating mods on so new players actually have a chance, and stick around, welcome and advise people, and you can do pretty well.

[PeteTheLich]

What I dont like about DST is how bosses (deerclops will be used in this example) can 360 no scope you if you try to team work bring it down but that doesnt stop bosses from having a massive amount of extra health

so unless you have several seasoned pros fighting and know EXACTLY when to back off and rengage (he also targets the last person that attacked him instead of randomly in a raid situation)
I was playing with my friends/sister teaching them the game and my sister kept trying to attack him scream and run away being the last one to attack chases her she would scream and run away panicking so I couldnt continue attacking but with the extra health its very likely terrorbeaks start to attack you and at that point the fight becomes 10x harder