Yeah I'd kind of like to know about this as well. I haven't played DayZ since much earlier this year so I've missed a lot of the updates. When I recently booted it up though, it put me on the beach. I thought "whatever...character wiped. Welcome to Alpha." But then when I started up again on a different server later, I still had all my original gear from when I stopped playing in January. Then when I played again the next day, it started me as a bambi again so I had to server hop until I could find one that still had my original character. And yes, they were all non-hardcore servers. It seems like most of the 1st person servers are gone now... =(
