sfeldbin@googlemail.com

If you need an experiment this size to figure out that people on the Internet are assholes whenever they can, you probably haven't played many online games yet. Beside that I see a growing "stupidity" amongst players all over the place that partially explain the issues you listed. While in earlier days people actually expected to be challenged by a game and were ready to spend days or even month to understand, learn and master these challenges, people today seem to only want the easy, 15-minute fun with please no obstacles on their way to a guaranteed win. DayZ is only one example that clearly shows how people do not want a challenge at all (even though it can be a lot of fun), others games like ME3, where you can simply buy what you would have to earn otherwise with real money (and boy do they throw their money at BW), show the same trend away from real challenges towards illusionary challenges. What I think is more interesting than the fact that todays gamers are blatantly lazy, is to compare DayZ to Minecraft, which have a lot of similarities if you look a bit behind the graphics and compare the gameplay. The important part is why Minecraft does not have that many issues, and if you think about that for some time, I think that DayZ - in it's essence - can be successful if it is just done right.

I would even go a little further and say Dayz is about to die. 1. The item wipe that occurred recently thanks to the storage bug has brought the fact that we are playing an alpha back to the attention of many people. 2. Cheaters. On my favorite server, which had like 30-40 ppl only 4 weeks ago, you barely see anyone online these days anymore. The main group canceled and went over to GW2 when their entire collected equipment and vehicles were destroyed first by a cheater then by the game bug. Yesterday we had another cheater logging in killing everyone and every vehicle again, but the worst thing is that he dropped this all-you-can-loot box that contains 50x everything. Now everyone and their mom runs around with complete equipment, and if you die, you just re-equip at the box. Survival game has been completely destroyed on this server by a single person. We therefore tried some other servers but had to face reality: at least 50% of the players are cheaters in various degrees. Some do the extreme obvious cheating like invincibility, teleporting and so forth, other just log in, destroy everything they can including vehicles and proceed to the next server, and finally there are those silent cheaters, who secretly press a button once the die to get their entire equipment back. So we currently have two options: play on a locked servers alone, or join a populated server where you get frequently killed by cheaters or worse. Both options are pointless. The logical consequence is that we will not play DayZ anymore until the situation changes noticeably.