Zyccy the Beast

yeah, sadly not much has changed on the cheat protection front. the fact that the sa has such huge success attracted a crowd which unfortunately contained a lot of cheaters as well... while technically things have improved in theory over the mod the practical situation is worse because people are even more eager to cheat in the sa. i hope this will be adressed in the future as it is just ridiculous, however i believe that for now development is focusing on other stuff. cheating does not seem to a be a priority right now, however i do think that they will continue to add detection and ban people in huge waves (as has already happened in the past). what i would really like to see is private hives, white listing and more tools for admins for another layer of protection. yeah sure some admins might abuse that, but their servers just die out while the ppl who run good servers will attract the right people over time. PS: its ridiculous that BE doesnt even check the file size!

from my personal experience playing the mod and other games before that i completely agree. give more power to the admins, we need everything we can to reduce cheating to tolerable levels.

sorry i was primarily looking for topics on cheats before i created this thread, completely overlooked your topic. well its nice that many people seem to agree on the same thing :), something else i want to say about the empowered admins is this. if an admin really abuses their power its pretty easy to deal with it. just dont play on their server. i remember we had this issue once in the mod, we stole a helicopter. 5 minutes later the server went down. when it came back up everything was reset. after reaching out to the admin it turned out that he wouldnt let us take "his helicopter" no matter what. we just never played on his server again. its a simple question of supply and demand. if you want to play on a decently managed server and avoid servers with abusive admins you will eventually end up in a decent place and the badly managed server just die out.

After encountering an increasing ammount of cheaters lately i have started to read up some things and stumbled over this nice article: http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/30/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-dealers-wallhack-users-and-the-million-dollar-business-of-video-game-cheating/ I take it as somewhat of a confirmation of what i already suspected, that cheats are easy to get, relatively cheap and safe. At this point i must also say if you doubt the presence of cheaters in dayz sa you are completely oblivious on what has been going on in the mod and the sa over the last years. This is not to say that things havent already improved but the core issues remain unadressed. However this is not a pointless rant topic, i personally think that development has ceased focusing on cheats for now to do what they actually should: finish the game. Still cheating will be an ongoing problem in dayz and i would like to bring something to the table that i havent seen properly adressed before. In the Article it is stated that the third line of defence is actually the community and the server admins themselves and i havent seen much progress on that side. In the DayZ mod the only way me and my friends got rid of cheaters was to play on a private hive which had admins that we got to trust with time. i remember talking to them when we had suspicions and by giving them locations and a timeframe they were able to read out some sort of log and detect some of the more annoying cheating. Of course this by definition can not work for most "closet cheaters" as described in the article but it still reduced the problem to a minimum. As far as i know admins right now have zero rights and can not do anything. Are there plans to change this? Should this be changed?

i encountered some strange events lately while playing with my friends so i looked around what the security status is like right now and stumbled over this thread... holy s... being a long time dayz mod player who is now very happy to see dayz sa happening i really hope that we can find a way to deal with these issues. what happened to me was that we got ambushed, which isnt really suspicious in itself, but then the guys who killed my friend talked over ingame voice about me being around while not leaving the house they were in (i had eyes with a long range scope on the barn, they could not see me). luckily my friend didnt hit respawn or we wouldnt have known anything about this. after a minute or so i got really nervous and fled the scene. as soon as i way out of range (like within 20 seconds) one of them immediately said "ok its safe now" and off they went. the fact that we didnt see anybody coming or that they played quite poorly (they shot me but didnt go in to confirm the kill?) wasnt what made suspect that any cheats were involved.however if you have information you cannot possibly have and blatantly yell that over the ingame voice chat things become more than just very suspicious to me. the thing which troubles me the most is that in the old dayz mod admins had some options regarding this. back then we dealt with cheaters by playing on a private hive which was monitored by admins we got to trust with time. in fact i even remember reporting incidents to them by giving them locations and a timeframe, the admin actually checked something (maybe some logs, no idea what he did) and was able to tell if people scripted or acted on things they couldnt have been aware of. i am well aware that empowering admins makes it in turn possible for them to cheat which i actually did encounter in the dayz mod as well, however i still think its a better option than to just hope that there are no cheaters around. most server admins are not the cheating kind and even if they are its very easy to steer clear (you only need to avoid that specific server!). overall this helped greatly and the hive i played on did have some people who probably duped, but no major cheating was going on. whats the status like right now for admins? i have been hoping for private hives but last i looked for them i couldnt see any. i feel like cheaters tend to look for crowded public servers where they can get the most kills.

Since DayZ needs major fixes (server performance upgrades, security issues) before some of the more fancy features (cars, tents) can be implemented i would nonetheless like to propose some relatively minor and hopefully easy to implement changes to improve short term gameplay. I am aware that this is not the purpose of an alpha, however since i believe its quite easy to do this may be something that would still benefit the game long term. 1) Clean up the item spawn table. Right now many items spawn that are literally without any use right now. This eats up server performance and is frustrating for players because you basically spend time sifting through trash. I am speaking of all the cooking stuff (pots, stones, firewood, matches, portable gas stove,....), some medical stuff (injection vial, water cleaning tablets do nothing right now) and unfortunately some meele weapons as well (as they are literally worse than using your fists! crowbar, shovel). This may seem minor, but i think that all in all its just unnecessary to have it ingame right now and as stated server performance is a major issue. 2) Balance the existing loot table. Some of this has already happened(m4 reduction) and im aware that it is an ongoing process, so this is more a suggestion on what i think should be done next. Balance the non military weapons first, I am a bit confused on how frequently (if at all) civilian firearms spawn. while i do find obscene ammounts of ammo (often an excess of 200 7.62mm rounds, also .45 apc) in civilian buildings i never found a mosin, a fnx handgun or even a revolver. Btw I also have about 90 hrs played, so i dont think its just because i am unlucky. I like the spawn rate in the original mod for civilian weapons (not in deer stands however!), after spending a few hours alive and looting you would end up with a makarov a revolver a shotgun or smth like that. Right now in SA it feels like there is simply no chance at all to find a civilian gun. The fact that you find atlas bipods, PU scopes and enough ammo to drown in makes it a bit frustrating. 3) Get some of the more important items ingame. This one is pretty straightforward, just a list of things that i would really like to see/have next. Binoculars. A Shotgun. A small caliber hunting rifle. the cooking system/tents are probably too much to ask for before server performance is where it should be, however i still feel its important to state that this would be a huge metagame changer. 4) Adjust Zombie HP. I know there are from a developement much more important things about zombies going on right now, however i really dislike how easy it is to kill zombies right now. In the mod you had to score headshots with firearms to be somewhat effective and if you didnt you would often need 4-6 shots with a carbine/assault rifle sized weapon, right now its just way too easy. Meele weapons seem okay, even though the axe is very strong, with firearms its just a joke sadly. combine that with the effect that there are very few of them and they cant break bones or knock you out and you get one of the reasons why KoS banditry is on an all time high. Increasing HP on zombies is probably relatively easy to do and may change how the game is played