In hopes of future changes to sakhal map i thought i would as sakhal only player and huge sakhal fan to give some feedback on key areas for improvements imo. I got some experience as level designer and at the same time gameplay designer so i can view it from bit different point of view than regular players usually

At first 1,5 years in sakhals life there was 1 huge mistake that made lots of players quit the map and its only partially fixed:

After spawning as freshie, you are forced to make a campfire instantly before looting anything at all or you spend the calories inside your stomach super fast. The amount of food in spawn towns on highly populated servers were nowhere near to compensate the rate at which you lost the food if you didnt make fire. Many people solved this by fishing which takes quite a lot of time if you die a lot. You noticed this problem because you added food to zombies. 2nd part of this problem is the spawn bubble you implemented, everyone who spawned roughly in 10min or so spawned in same area. This was extremely harmful because loot cannot spawn within 100m from player or something, so when first people who spawned were occupying the spawn area already, people who spawned after first ones did not cause any extra loot to spawn into the town because the town had people in it. Normaly you have coded it so that as player approaches loot location, if its empty of loot, he causes "spawn surge" of loot, but that surge didnt happen effectively because there were so many players around. Or perhaps the spawn surge of loot is not big enough on small spawn towns.

And then is the main issue, because sakhal is small map, and because you made people spawn near eachothers, people died A LOT at spawn or within 40minutes. It was such a mayhem that some people played sakhal for the sake of the mayhem hunting freshies with assault rifles, they didnt even try to get out of spawn towns or play normally.

All that combined meant that a lot of people died a lot and often.. getting out of spawn town full of players and people hunting freshies was perhaps 30% chance for average player. As people died they were forced to start the campfire + fishing + 2nd campfire cycle all over again right after they finished it and doing that cycle just 1 time takes maybe even 30 minutes... and often they had to restart not once, twice but multiple times because they died so much within 2 hours. There were ofc other options that i for example learned but many people didnt, instead they returned to chernarus. I dont mind this system, but i believe that most people did. They didnt give this feedback but they gave you feedback such as "freshpawn towns has no loot, everything is vacuumed" but it was not enough to paint the clear whole picture descriped above.

So combination of forced campfire and small spawn bubble pvp mayhem and lack of food would have been ok design except the repetitiveness of it, people had to go through it over and over and over again if server was high pop which made them return to chernarus.

Even now when server population is high, i find it that almost no player at all survives long enough to reach my ambush in shipwreck, and if someone does, he has like freshspawn weapons.

2nd problem is the end game.

Right now once you are geared to at least tier 3 weapons, there is nowhere to go nothing to do... so what people do ? They ambush. When server population gets high in evening, what seems to be happening that nobody is moving anymore in tier 3 area, because why would they ? There is many ambushes and the terrain in there doesnt give any cover, gearfear does not help with this coverlessness. But most importantly why i find myself not moving and looting is that there is no loot, everything has been looted and no matter where i go and loot tier 3-4 there is almost nothing, certainly not enough to make it worth it.

I have noticed that most fun PVP seems to be happening when server is low populated in the morning before midday. Thats when everybody is running around looting and stepping into my butcher shop. Its also the time when its worth looting, there is plenty of loot in tier 3 area and on shipwreck and during this time you meet more players than you meet at evening when server is full and nobody is moving anywhere except the ones who died and are now freshies, but because of the still going spawn bubble that you just made bigger, they die a lot and not so many make it to tier 3-4 areas while tier 1 areas are absolutelu full of people and gunshots because life expectency for players who play sakhal as if it was chernarus is not very long when server is full.

I dont think the bottleneck design of tier 3 and original tier 4 area is what ruined it and made it unpopular. I think its the terrain and environment. If you make only 1 option for people to go for end game, you gotta make very sure its fun area. And the area you made is not fun for PVP. People love the main island environment, there is densier trees to give you cover and move from 1 settlement to another, hide in your gearfear and try to be stealthy when server is full.. while in current tier 3 area you dont have any good cover to travel or to observe or to do anything if you are outside of buildings, its too barren, too empty, too coverless for gearfear players. While pvp in military buildings is ok, all the rest this environment has to offer for PVP sucks, its not fun area. And the issue there is that because it is so empty, while you go there to get assault rifles, the environment actually supports sniper rifles, there is many locations to snipe at while assault rifles are not very good on empty open areas where people can see you from far away or when you spot a person far away.

What i find lots better for PVP is shipwreck and shantar island, only the best players end up there and its so satisfying to outsmart the best ones. They know how to sneak, and how to track others so staying hidden from them is a game of different sorts. There is dense forests to travel around the island, observe shipwreck, decide whether or not to risk going across the ice there or wait for blizzard to do it etc, many gunfights have happened so that 2 other people start killing eachothers right next to me which i didnt know about at all. If someone steppes on a mine or tripwire grenade, whole island starts rushing there and situations that follow are fun. This happens because it is possible to have so many people near eachothers without them spotting eachothers... tier 3 area doesnt offer this so well, there is so much emptyness and barren design.

So suggestions for future possible update of sakhal:

To fix the main issue which made sakhal less popular, give people big heatbuff at start or full stomach of food, and get rid of the spawn bubble for sakhal, map is small already, you dont need to make friends spawn closer using the bubbles because wherever they spawn, they spawn pretty close due to map being small. So get rid of people forcing to repeat the campfire + fishing + 2nd campfire cycle everytime they die, like explained above its ok if you dont die often, but lots of people did die often and they got enough of campfires and lack of food because of it.

Ideas for endgame improvement:

To teach people that you can indeed cross the ice and that they dont have to use the mainroad or even then 2nd route through that island with high tower or a boat, you could add chains of small islands between mainisland and tier 3 peninsula, very small islands but with very dense forests to hide your campfires in them or for example build playermade sniper tower. For some reason i dont see traces of people crossing the ice almost at all and i have never ever spotted anyone on ice sheets even i have camped the island with that big tower a lot. I know i can walk and swim to almost all islands apart from furthest ones but most people dont know it and they still havent learned that. Even walking to shipwreck as freshie is super fast and easy thing to do.

Redesign the environment in tier 3 peninsula completely, wipe it clean and add densier forests, hideouts to cook (or to ambush), perhaps add more buildings and areas so that the peninsula wont run out of loot when server population is high.

Shantar and shipwreck are really fun, but i would like to see the island enlarged, perhaps add some industrial facility where you can loot things like NBC gear and ofc do PVP too

And then the big idea. I know you added NBC gear to sakhal because you planned to add content where you need it. I would like that content to be this:

In some half isolated location such as ketoy island, you could enlarge the island by a lot (to a size of current shantar), and add dense forests on it. Then make underground massive bunker complex that reminds labyrint kind of design with doors always open so you dont need any quest to get in there but it would be pitch black, completely dark. And there would be weak pox cloud in there where you can stay forever if you have NBC gear. This means you cant have nightvision goggles on you because you have NBC gear, this would force people to actually use things like torches, flares, flashlights, pistol flashlights and other light sources. This bunker would have some nice loot as a carrot and an event, every now and then event triggers, spawning loads and loads of zombies inside the pitch black bunker, then players in there would have to shoot the hordes of zombies with assault rifles with sound attracting even more zombies and using flashlights/torches etc in order to see them and run away from them.... imagine the fun of doing this with your friend, PVE against zombies in pitch black bunker with other people seeing your lightsources and hearing your gun sounds. So this would be like the end of your journey, place where highly geared people go to die and to have a total blast of PVP and PVE. The bunker would have to have multiple entrances and be big, perhaps multi levels too. So people will get lost in there and might run out of batteries on their flashlight/run out of rags for torches etc. I would not add that many zombies there apart from the event, and not super lots of loot but some carrots on a stick type of loot is needed. Perhaps make the event trigger at random interwalls, so you cannot know if they are gonna spawn when you enter and therefore are always in panic whether or not you gonna have hordes of zombies surround you and all exits all of a sudden. And whether or not you have time to fight them before you run out of lightsources or NBC mask filter. Environment around this underground labyrint would have to be dense forest so that multiple players can gather close to eachothers without knowing about eachothers and then the PVP encounters can become very interesting (hiding this bit in middle of big text so wrong people dont read it: Thanks for the anti cheat mechanics, havent met single cheater whole summer, its working whatever you did, perhaps you implemented my north korean methods)

Just by filming trailer from bunker like this makes people buy the game and makes more people buy sakhal. You have the models already so making it is not that difficult, i know i have made gamelevels on sandbox type of game.

feedback