Please make this game stream friendly.
to put this in perspective - In the last 48hours I have livestreamed 18hrs of ARMA3 to 17,000 unique visitors totalling over 35,000 hours of ARMA3 content viewed on my livestream. Today during a 9hr livestream I had a player follow me across 11 servers, continually driving vehicles into my line of sight, shooting at me and giving away my position and telling the entire server that I am playing which encourages more players to begin streamsniping.- this kind of behaviour happens every single livestream, for hours.
A massive part of DayZ's (and therefor Bohemias) success, and ARMA3's future success comes from people watching livestreams of the game and being convinced to play. It is a form of free marketing and streamers put a lot of time into promoting great games.
The problem with livestreaming is that popular livestreamers are constantly being followed by other players who simply watch the livestream and kill the streamer constantly by using the stream to monitor the streamers position in realtime. The primary way a stream-sniper will do this is by looking for clues as to which server the streamer is on, this often comes from simply finding the streamers ingame name and then using online websites which contact the arma master server and literally tell them which server the streamer is on.
Dean is addressing this issue in DayZ SA by removing the players username from common windows such as the inventory screen where it is simply pointless information, but requires a streamer to cover. This means a streamer will have to cover the inventory nametag area with their stream overlay which greatly detracts from the gameplay.
The streamers in game name is also visible on the map view, so streamers must place overlay pieces to cover the areas of the map which display the name.
Another way of identifying the server is for a livestream viewer to simply read the chatbox in the corner of the screen. The chat box in ARMA games has always been an issue for livestreamers because server MOTD and error exceptions often stretch BEYOND 50% of the width of the screen (at 1920*1080) meaning a streamer must overlay the bottom third of their screen to avoid streamsnipers using this method to find the server.
Finally, the fact that servers display a list of the players inside is a major issue for livestreamers, once a viewer knows your name (or a name of anyone on the server) they can simply use mouse up/down through the server browse looking through the list of players on the server until they find you. Alternatively they can simply use websites to search ARMA servers for individual names.
Please, let livestreamers promote your game without suffering constant abuse my streamsnipers. We just want to promote your game for free, and being killed by streamsnipers once you get a decent weapon/squad etc is completely demoralising and causes a lot of negativity on the livestream.
player nameplates are also an issue for livestreamers, even if chat, inventory and map screens are covered by stream-overlay images, if we face an enemy or teammate some servers display the targets name in the centre of the screen - please allow streamers to toggle between name plates and a generic [friendly][enemy] tag.
To summarise, the below features should be easy enough to acheive before the game goes live, before the beta or maybe even during the alpha with a patch.
- remove player name from inventory
- remove player name from map
- make sure chatbox cannot overflow - or make a toggle chat button
- allow players to OPT OUT of public server listing
- add option to replace friendly/enemy nametags with [enemy] [friendly]
Livestreaming has generated significant amounts of revenue for Bohemia in the last 9 months, please show livestreamers some respect by changing a few minor UI elements to allow us to show the engine in its true beauty, without having to cover 30% of the screen with images to cover names and chat boxes.
for an example of how much screen needs to be covered (and this is still not enough, I am still streamsniped) please see this video (bottom left chat, has to cover 50% of the width of screen, middle of screen black bar blocks inventory name, top right black bar blocks the server name from the map screen....)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwlY-nOymXk
Kind regards,
Sacriel