Hello there! My name is Blaine P. and I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself to the forums and explain my role at DayZ.ST I am from the U.S. (Florida to be a bit more specific), I am 25 years old, and I have been working with/for Ersan for about a year now. My role has changed several times but over the past few weeks I've been put in charge of handling DayZ development, updates, and new features. I'm sure most of our customers have noticed the database movement, the short term pains we had with that, and the overall better database performance. That was me trying to do my best to make things better. I also finally caught us up on Namalsk. Now, for why I'm posting this here. Ersan has been out of town the last couple weeks on personal matters and has left me in charge of not only keeping things running, but also keeping us relevant to the DayZ community and our customers. That's where I need your help. I've heard quite a few complaints lately and I'd like to take a moment to attempt to address those complaints. 1. Support is lacking or delayed. Answer: I admit we've been having some trouble keeping up with the Inbox lately. Along with Ersan being out for the last couple weeks, we've also had 2 of our support helpers (paid individuals) unable to commit very much time to support due to their own real life situations. While we understand this is not the customers responsibility to care about, or to know; I want to make sure that you guys understand that we are doing our best and for the most part we've caught up a significant amount thanks to Phil, Allen, and Anthony. To further assist in this effort I'm going to post my Skype, Google Talk, and AIM information below. While I may not be available at all times, or may not always be able to help you immediately, you can at least direct my attention to your issue and I will do my best to help you. tl;dr People are out of town for personal reasons, but we've been catching up and I'm giving you my personal contact info below to assist in this effort. 2. Why don't you support "insert map here" map? Answer: Previously we'd used DayZCommander as a guideline to the maps we would support and the release schedule we would support them on. Usually this meant within 1-3 days of the map or mod appearing on DayZCommander, we would do our best to support it. Unfortunately this has become nearly impossible. With the fall of Bliss and the fracturing of the server community it's become difficult to maintain the several different build systems and specific requirements of the various mods and maps. Add to this the non-uniform nature of the mods, and the requirement to simultaneously deploy support for a mod/map to over 200 servers and you can quickly see how difficult this has become. Some of the new mods supported by DayZCommander also lack publicly available server files, leaving us unable to support that map in any case. What I would like to do is find a way to gauge community interest in a map and based on that information determine which maps we will focus on adding support for. In support of the previous statement I'll be working on updating DayZ 2017, Oring, and adding support for DayZ Epoch today. While I cannot offer a definitive ETA (with DayZ Epoch requiring several backend changes to support), I will be focusing the next few days on this being the next major update to our services. I'm basing this on the number of requests I've had to update 2017 and to support Epoch. Having taken a look at Epoch it does seem quite interesting and it's support for multiple maps adds even more to my excitement to try and get it operational on our services. If you have any thoughts on how we should be deciding on which maps/mods to support, or which metrics we should be looking at to make these determinations please contact me using one of the methods listed at the bottom of this post. tl;dr More maps and more splitting of the server community has made adding maps difficult, we want to know what the majority wants so we can do our best to support it :) 3. Laggggggggg Answer: This is a two sided problem, one side of which I'm happy to have recently addressed with the database upgrades. More specifically I've setup a database in the EU (based out of Amsterdam) on a 10gbit link with a 200GB SSD that is dedicated to operating the databases for our EU customers and provide them and their servers with much faster access. During the upgrade some of our EU customers might have notices slow response times on their maps and/or loadout tools. This has been corrected and the site, primary database, and tools now also run directly from that EU database server as well. This should introduce a noticeable increase in speed and responsiveness from the database. The only remaining issue that I'm aware of is the amount of time it takes to restore a database backup from the control panel. This issue only affects EU customers and there is a solution for this in development (it's related to backups being stored in the US and needing to be relocated to the EU). The second side of this issue is difficult to assess. In most cases the data and metrics we collect indicate no reason for lag with CPU cores rarely or never exceeding 80-90%, memory usage always below 50% of server max, and the network connections (1gbit) barely exceeding 20Mbps at any given point. Unfortunately this is one of the most difficult things about the ArmA2 server, is that it's difficult to diagnose issues. One repeated problem I've seen in a number of clients servers that leads to lag is excessive BattlEye logging. With I've seem some clients who will amass a 500-600 MB log file in an 8 hour period of their server running, usually this is due to BattleEye filters being triggered by a script and/or addition to their PBO and sometime by new behaviors in a map/mod in recently updated maps. If you have any input related to lag on our services and some way we might assist you in solving those issues, please contact me at one of the methods listed near the bottom of this post. P.S. PHPMyAdmin is still running on the US server even when connecting to the EU database, I'll be fixing it shortly so EU customers get re-directed to PHPMyAdmin running on the EU server. tl;dr We have improved database performance by nearly 400%, with new database servers and by splitting database load between locations. 4. Hackers! Answer: To say I empathize with you is to say too little. About 1/4 of the emails we receive (25-50 out of 200-250 emails a day) are related to hackers compromising customer servers in one way or another. The ArmA2 engine was designed to be a very trusting engine, it trust a large portion of what the client tells it. This makes hacking and cheating in the game very easy, and as you've all seen, BattlEye cannot do very much about it. The biggest problem we had previous to the database upgrade was with hackers being able to get the database details from within the game and login to customer databases remotely. While we've locked down that problem with all new customers, Amsterdam customers, and London customers, there are still quite a few legacy US customers that his may be affecting. There will be a script run very shortly after this post which will lock down all remaining affected accounts. Another issue is that there is a script going around that uses remote exec vulnerabilities of the ArmA2 server to retrieve and read the customer's server configuration, thereby providing the nefarious individuals with the rCon password of the server. While I have no way of preventing the remote exec issues, I can make it difficult if not impossible for them to read the server configuration. I will be implementing this fix along with the map updates mentioned above. So when you see that update roll out, know that the fix will be included. P.S. Please understand that when hackers gain access to, or are able to modify your game server database it does not mean that they've gained access to our customer database. To this date, only one known incident of a breach of our customer database has occurred in November, 2012 and we have since taken several precautions to prevent that from happening again. Also, we do not store any customer information on our servers and control panel passwords are hashed and salted. tl;dr Hackers are a pain, but we're trying to make it more difficult for them to mess with your server. 5. My contact information. Answer: Please understand that by providing this contact information I am not providing you with an avenue of guaranteed support and/or answers, but with a way to contact me directly and an offer to help where I can. The information below is the same information I use for personal matters and family, so please mention that whatever you are contacting me about is related to DayZ.ST. THIS IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR EMAILING admin@dayz.st !!!! If you have an issue, attempt to contact me, and are unable to reach me and receive a response then you should still email admin@dayz.st !! If I didn't answer you, don't assume I'll get your message later, please correspond with admin@dayz.st . Now that we have that out of the way, my contact information is as follows. Skype: blaine.palmer Google Talk: blaine.palmer@gmail.com (Please use for GTalk only, I don't check my personal email often at all) AIM: PhatalEffect In conclusion, thank you for reading this wall of text and thank you for being a customer of ours in the past, present, or future. Please let us know how we can continue to serve and stay relevant in the community. overall tl;dr Trying to stay relevant, improving support, improving map/mod support, less lag plz, hackers make me sad, gimme a ring :) Verification: http://www.dayz.st/verification
