Funkmaster Rick

@tandwanRespectfully, just because someone can walk away from a problem doesn't mean it was never a problem. The hackers on official servers set a terrible example and assuredly deter new players.

So, 8 is enough. 8 will work. But I promise that 16 will feel better.

Get 16 gigs of RAM instead of 8 if you can reasonably do so.

I don't think Bohemia considers this an important revenue stream at this point. After all, they released the game unfinished and made their intent clear to have server-side modding finish the game. They pushed out Livonia to split the community. Hacking has been a significant problem the entirety of the time with BattlEye failing to secure servers in any meaningful way. I don't think they believe that their success depends on stopping hacks. At least, not in DayZ. No doubt they have other products that they prioritize, and I believe the DayZ release was an effort to relieve the pressure in the quickest way possible.

Sir, you are sorely mistaken if you think the community servers count by any reasonable definition as 'properly administered.' They're there and that's it. The administration is non-existent.

@DayzDayzFanboyDid... did you not notice the sarcasm?

The game's not finished and likely never will be, base building included. I feel pretty bad about all you free-weekend players who basically walked in expecting a completed game.

There is no word. From what I can see on the forums, BattlEye doesn't do that great a job for DayZ.

This is currently a well known issue on the forums with no solution in sight. I recommend finding a private server and hoping they're not full of admin drama.

The Risk vs. Reward matrix for DayZ is something like this: 1. You don't shoot, they don't shoot. You win. 2. You don't shoot and they shoot. You lose. 3. They don't shoot and you shoot. You win. 4. You both shoot. 50/50 chance you win/lose (not accounting for skill). In cases where you don't shoot, your survival depends on the magnanimity of your counterpart. Assuming an exceptionally generous 50/50 chance that your counterpart is cooperative, that means a 50/50 chance of survival. In cases where you do shoot first, your survival increases to something like 75/25 in your favour since them not shooting is a win for you and them shooting back is, more or less, a second 50/50 chance resulting in a net 3/4 chance of survival. The thing is, the math always tilts in favour of shooting first. Even if you drop it to a 10% chance of your counterpart shooting on sight, you shooting first will still increase your survival odds. No matter what, your survival will always be more likely if you shoot first because then you're still benefiting from your enemy not shooting on sight, and when he does shoot on sight the fact that you did the same makes it an even fight, more or less. If you're just running the numbers and interested in your own personal survival, the math suggests you should shoot first. Bohemia still hasn't bothered putting real end-game content in, none of the cooperative stuff they'd been considering early on, things that were supposed to give people real opportunities to group up with strangers and accomplish things. Unless you know and recognize the person in your cross-hairs, you really ought to just shoot them. Chances are they're some scared kid who lost their stuff to a bandit last life and figured out that safety in this game is achieved through quick, decisive, and utterly merciless action. We all tried to be friendly at some point but the math just doesn't work out.

This problem hasn't changed in 6+ years, the game going temporarily free to advertise just made the problem very, very obvious. I do find myself wondering, did Bohemia make more money on follow-up purchases, or did the people selling hacks make more money from the free period?

Pepsi? Don't you mean Pipsi? Or perhaps you're talking about Spite, Nota-Cola, or a nice, cold can of Kvass?

If your stashes are gone, either the server reset persistence causing everything to despawn and the world to start fresh, or you got robbed. Probably the second. I hear that ESP for tracking down stashes is a pretty popular cheat.

Since I started playing this game three days after standalone release, there has never been any real effort made to catch and ban cheaters. There are many games that use BattleEye as their anti-cheat solution and it on all the games I've played that use it, there are hackers. It is an ineffective solution but the only one that will be used, because anything else is too expensive. DayZ brought a lot of money in early based on the success of the ArmA 2 mod, but poor project management since then has soured the community: I suspect they've already blown through that money (leading to their decision to release it early), and there won't be enough money in the future to swap from what they already have to something more effective. Don't play on public servers, they're pits of hacking and toxic twelve-year-olds. Your best bet is to pick a server with a high entrance threshold - whitelist applications that involve more than checkboxes is a good place to start. The higher you can raise the barrier to entry, the lower the chance you'll find hackers or poor sports.

Exxoduss, I'm extremely confused by your response to me. Are... are we talking about the same thing? It doesn't look like it.

Short answer: who's going to moderate the moderators? This is the internet and the official DayZ servers are a new user's first introduction into the game. If a user gets banned by a mod for killing that mod's friend in a firefight, they'll tap Steam for a refund and never look back. I've seen the moderation shenanigans that occur on some of the more stable private servers. It would be a bad mood to put people with even less oversight in a position where they could ruin someone's $60 purchase.

Last I heard, the company with the contract to host the official servers has a 'fire and forget' policy regarding these sorts of deals. They will do nothing. Somebody will have to take on the task of hosting, whitelisting, and moderating a private server. It's either that or quit and wait until the hacker gets bored or moves on to a new game. DayZ has always been a hacker magnet and the tools to fight that are limited, and I don't think that Bohemia is going to introduce any strong solutions in the near future. I did hear though that they're currently focusing on code cleanup so that may inadvertently remove a few exploits or hooks for hacks.

I feel obligated to point out that more than a dozen religions celebrate something on or around this time frame.

Bohemia never should have pushed Rocket out. He had a vision, knew what he wanted. When he left, the DayZ many of us bought into died. When they announced a paid DLC new map to split the community, and decided that modding would solve the problems they didn't want to, it was a pretty clear admission that nobody at Bohemia was both equipped and willing to finish the job. I drop by here every six months or so as a sort of fact-finding mission, to see where the project went, and I was flabbergasted to see the Steam charts for this game rising over the last year. In a few words, I too am interested to know what's happened in 2019.

RIP my faith. December 16th 2013 through December 5th 2018. I don't care about the thirty bucks I spent on this game - that's a pittance. I do wish I hadn't spent so many hours hoping. They certainly could have been used more productively.

This may sound weird but I would prefer if food and water were reasonably simple in the early game and more complex in the mid- and late-game. The freshies need an edge to escape the psychos before they're geared enough to take them on.

Sir, I think you've misinterpreted some of the things I said. Perhaps I was unclear in the communication. It is not detrimental to immersion to meet other players frequently. I never said that and I'm afraid you've read the words into my post. I absolutely love meeting new players in the game, and find it incredibly boring to run around with no interactions. I just don't want that interaction to be six guys surrounding me suddenly, shouting "Allah-u-Akbar" at me over VoiP using shitty microphones that make them sound like feedback at a cheap rock concert. Being challenged by a group of players is hard. I support this. DayZ has always had a significant aspect of teamwork being a huge advantage. This makes sense for a post-apocalyptic world, and is great for how it sometimes drives random player interactions. I was making an entirely different point to the one you challenged when I said that DayZ makes things hard. I was talking about how DayZ does not make things trivially easy like other games does, and how that's part of its charm and allure. You're taking my words out of context and twisting them here. And I definitely will not enjoy DayZ by hiding in the woods. I don't enjoy that. I need to come out of the woods and interact with people, whether violently or peacefully, to enjoy this game. Sorry if this comes off as harsh - it's fairly obvious from reading your posts that English is not your first language, and I suspect that this has caused some confusion. Anyway, I hope this clears things up!

What happened to my anti-game?

Making it easy to meet up with your friends makes it easy for roving clans of 12-year-olds to group up en masse in virtually no time, ensuring that a roving clan of 12-year-olds can effectively beat into submission any other smaller group. They would have no legitimate competition due to their ability to respawn in close proximity. Your average RC12 would be able to apply the same pressure to a location that a zombie horde does, except much deadlier, much louder, and possibly with fewer manners. Now, this is an extreme example and does not represent the average outcome. It deliberately represents one of the worst possible outcomes to show you why it's a bad idea to make it easier for people to meet up. Whenever you make something easier, you have to consider the rippling effects of that from the perspective of the lowest common denominator. As nice as it would be to be able to meet up with your friends, we've already seen a significant amount of evidence over the years that groups of people playing DayZ will focus on the group at the expense of the game. What I mean by this, specifically, is that in the past we've all seen big fights where the first people to die actually return to the fight before its over, loot their own bodies, and resume fighting. To me, DayZ is not a game about survival, not a game about PvP, and certainly not a game about crafting. It's not even a game about exploration! It's a game about immersion, and all the other aspects of the game are there to enable and enhance that immersion. And nothing kills immersion more quickly than some jackass running back to his body in a fight with the mindset of getting revenge for dying. Not to mention that easily locating your friends would give groups an even bigger advantage against solo players than they already have. And as someone who remembers a time when 12-year-olds ran rampant across the game, excited to be like their favourite streamer, killing fresh-spawns for their pitiful loot, moving in great hordes of unskilled but obnoxious players, hand-cuffing travellers and shouting at them in a manner not unlike psychological torture (and not uncuffing or killing them unless they submit in some embarassing way), I've developed the opinion that barriers to ease of access are a very important part of the DayZ experience. This isn't a game that makes it easy to meet up with your friends. This is a game that makes it hard to do things, because those things are hard.

Heh, complete freedom of movement is what leads to people zig-zagging so fast in a fight that you can't shoot them. Being forced to commit to your manoeuvres is much, much closer in realism to an actual fight than being able to back out at the last second when you realize you made a mistake.