Thadius (DayZ)

I hate to say this, but I told you so. Players can only take so much of the slow development pace without leaving for greener pastures. I remember when this forum was so busy a thread would drop off the front page within an hour. Now, it takes days. I told you all almost 2 years ago when I speculated on this very forum that we would see nothing but slow progress on this game until it quietly fell out of the public eye. And I was jeered at and slandered. But who has the last laugh? Me, regretfully so. I wish I had been proven wrong. Below is one of the posts I had then about the subject 18-19 months ago, back when DayZ had sold 'only' 2 million units instead of 3 million. Rereading it made me feel vindicated and a bit sad as it came to pass. I think what has some people angry is that DayZ has over 2 million sold copies and the game is progressing at a perceived rate that would be normal for a medium sized mod team, tinkering on their spare time. People are forgetting that this is not a kickstarter. The money earned is not guaranteed to be reinvested into the game. Actually (as I have mentioned in previous posts) it is my belief that the great sales success of DayZ SA is actively working against further investments. Why would I, as the man recieving the profits, want to invest money I already have in the bank on a product that has thoroughly saturated its market and any further monetary investment will yield little to no extra profit in the long run? Better to keep the costs low. I think it will hold the same pace of development through out, no matter if you are in the "its to slow" or the "its doing fine" camp. The team will not be expanded unless there are other beneficial factors that come into play such as aquiring assets for future projects or to prevent bad publicity if people become to loud.

Development is not dead. Its just people have this strange concept that more early access sales equals more development investment. It does not. If anything, the more early access sales fully saturate the market, the less incentive a company driven for financial gain has to increase investments. So I theorize that I dont think we will ever see an upramp in development speed. But on the flipside, the amount of bad PR a downsizing would cause atleast keeps the team the same size. I would like to think that the even pace of development so far supports my theory.

You people are being hysterical. If a public server set their respawn at 12 hours, whats to stop you from joining an "instant spawn" public server, generate your character there, then (if you now MUST play on the old server) switch back. This is really just a setting that has impact on private servers in my eyes.

You guys are overcomplicating this. All you need is a piece cloth you can tie around one or both arms with an option to custom color it with RGB values (until such time DayZ has a plethora of ingame coloring items). Right click on a stack of rags, set color to "hot pink" and give the colored rags to the rest of the crew. Tie to one or both arms. Bam. Easy group identification for up to 100m. There. It doesnt have to get more complex then that. Would I like a HUD and ingame chat and all the other amenities that other games offer? In regards to combat the widespread Hacker and Exploiter menace, i would say yes, DayZ's immersion and realism has to be sacrificed until such time their security becomes so strong, hacking is almost impossible and we, the players, no longer have to self-police. But such security measures are most likely impossible and Hackers will keep peeing all over this game for the foreseeable future. I just wish they would give us players the tools to do their job for them and make life hard for hackers in the ways we can in other games.

If you want to go with the full "immersive" schtick, why not the way some irregularly equipped groups have identified themselves for the last thousand years? A colored piece of cloth you tie to your arm. Maybe faction based clothing is an option. Only certain factions may craft certain clothing. This way people could identify what faction you are in without HUD elements, with Bandits and the like still being able to impersonate a faction by looting the clothes. Be wary trusting a guy wearing bloody Traders clothes riddled with bullet holes.

Sometimes you have to have a less immersive game for a more fun experience overall. You could force players to go through an animation of taking off their backpack and putting things in/taking things out every time you interact with loot, even when sorting through your inventory. The same with items stored in your clothes. Immersive? Yes. Annoying and not conducive to fun gameplay for the majority of people? Yes. Some may of course find this amazing, but to the majority, it would be a major hassle. Immersion has to be balanced. For example, I would argue that its because of this focus on immersion and "realism" making DayZ SA the hackers paradise it is. Not just bad security. What do I mean you say? Well, the game offers us (almost) no way to self-police against hackers and exploiters. We are unable to notify admins via ingame messages, we can't identify possible hackers by name, we can't tell the difference if our knees violently exploded spontaneously in those stairs or if we got hit through a wall, and we are not able to see the names of the group of five guys you witnessed duping all their gear and no way to quickly get an admin on site (via ingame means). Thus, hackers and exploiters have almost perfect anonymity to commit their acts with negligible consequences because normal players just can't identify them or get admins to respond fast enough. The above I think is killing the game more then all the phasing zombies, killer stairs or wobbly ladders combined.

Is it just me or does the V3S slightly pull to the right while driving?

Ah, an interesting release valve for the individual that has been stepped on emotionally since childhood, but still retains that supreme ego of the true narcissist. You can see in how he speaks of other people in ways that indicate he does not even see them as real people anymore. Just small voices on the internet that he can hurt. Voices he can use to aggrandize himself and temporarily supress the failed impotency that is his real life. Or you know, just some guy who want to stir crap up on a game discussion board for shits-and-giggles. Occam's Razor gentlemen.

This shoe outrage thing is just one item in a long line of topics that could have been avoided if the developers just made solid attempts to communicate their intents with the playerbase. If they do not come out and say that they intend to only stress test the shoe degradation, people are going to assume that its working as intended, and be upset at what they see as a terrible design decision. Two thirds of the uproars on this forum could be avoided by the developers implementing new and better lines of communications that did not require the average Joe Schmoe Bambi to sift through several sources of obscure information outlets (yes, that includes this forum). On startup, just plaster the patch notes across the screen after a patch with a comment on the intent/purpose of the patch. There, bam, I just solved most of the forum drama that gets generated over patches.

Might as well have thrown this topic down a well. The suggestion box section has less traffic then the inside of the Chernobyl reactor concrete sarcophagus.

Oh... uhm... I am quite at a loss what to say here. I am not used to moderators behaving in a civil and gracious manner, especially not extending an apology. What is the world coming to when you can't even count on game forum moderators to be heartless fascists? Who am I going to demonize as shills and lapdogs of "da Man" if you start behaving with courtesy and tact?! Joking aside, thank you kindly.

I would argue that a discussion thread about how the some of the core concepts of the game may be hindering (and in some cases directly preventing) customer ability to self-regulate from people abusing the system, and possible steps to combat this, does not belong in a general hacker complaint thread. But hey, thats just me.

As the topic may indicate, this thread (I hope) will be a discussion about the problem of hackers in this game, why I see the basic game design being at fault at the growing number of them. Also what may be done to lessen its regularity (as this issue will never be fully solved in any game). Firstly, what do I mean by "encourages hackers"? I mean it in its most literal form, it emboldens cheaters by a lack of accountability. The current game design is one more or less centered around the concept of "realism". As in, we do not have an allchat, we do not see player names, and we get no detailed information why/how we died. These atleast are the more prominent ones. I argue that these same "realism" game concepts are also the contributing factors of making this game (in its current state) the leading game in hacker anonymity. They can operate with almost total impunity, immunity and concealment. Their only concern being the very slight chance the minimal tampering protection this game has detects whatever they are using. Combined with that server admins have clumsy tools to work with. This all becomes a fertile spawning grounds for cheaters of all colors and walks of life, since if there is anything we have learned from the internet, is that complete anonymity breeds a-holes like maggots onna dead elephant in sweltering heat. Now what to do about this? Are there ways to do something about this without compromising Rockets vision of "realism"? Short answer is "no". 1. Chat. Now the easiest answer would be to just enable allchat so players could communicate with the server admin or players in contact with the admin. However, bearing in mind about Rockets vision of "realism", this option is most likely never going to be implemented. But, maybe a compromise would be possible, such as being able to send messages directly to the server admin and/or an announced list of server "helpers". Being able to quickly communicate to an admin that "come here and look at these guys, they are duping right now" would be a most important weapon in the arsenal against cheaters and hackers. 2. Player names. Being able to see the name of the person you may be observing cheating would be valuable to a server admin. However, due to the constraints set from the "realism" vision, displayed player names seem to be off the table. I would argue that this should change, or atleast a compromise reached. For example, you could make it so that player names are only visible if you are within 5-10m of a person. You could make it so that binocs have the magical ability of "seeing" names of observed players. This will of course take away a bit of the "realism" but I feel this compromise would be acceptable to further be able to combat the malignant elements among us. 3. Death. Just knowing if I just got killed by a bullet, or if both my kneecaps spontaneously decided they would rather like life in lower orbit, would be very nice. But it would also be nice to know the name of the twerp that hunted my entire group while teleporting around invisible, meleeing us with what probably was an axe, while taunting us in his prepubescent russian. Point 2 and 3 are about knowing names. Even if the Admin had the Eye of Sauron, the little tricksy hobbitses could still hide or just be overlooked if a name is not produced. Also, see point 4. 4. Server Admin tools. Now for this point I can only go from what I heard others say. And that is that server toolset for admins is lacking and could use a good overhaul or two, or five. I can not stress this point enough. If the admin has a pair of broken legs and is forced to wear a burlap sack over his head, how is he supposed to catch bad guys? I could write a fifth point about better automated cheat detection, but those are almost always circumvented by the hacker community. The only real way of keeping the population of hackers down is by boots on the ground. Passive measures will never be effective. Policing by citizens and admins alike is needed. Constant vigilance. Always. Make it such a hassle to hack that a cheaters inate lazyness says "screw it". That concludes some of my suggestions. Feel free to post your own or argue about mine. Preempt 1. To preempt the "its alpha" crowd from drooling all over the nice carpet in here, remember most of these are fundamental game concepts that most likely will not be changed (even though I would argue that they need it, be it for more game enjoyment or catching bad guys). Preempt 2. Another preempt. If you wish to argue with "I never see cheating" or "It is super rare", please remember a sample size of just you personally is not indicative of a trend. To be brutally honest though the thirty odd souls playing DayZ in the gaming community I hang out with is not a massive sample size either. But we all make observations with what we have to work with I guess. **This post brought to you by a very slow work day**

The whole current setup is a paradise for hackers. They can with almost complete anonymity go rampant as much as their little black hearts desire. There is no ingame chat. So you are not able to communicate with a possible online server administrator. But even if there was a chat, there is no name on the person who killed you. I am all for "realism" but not at the cost of fun or protecting hackers. And even if the above two points were by divine miracle implemented (as in the mod), from what I understand, the admins of servers have terrible tools to work with. They should be making every effort to minimize hackers. Even if this somewhat compromises Rockets "vision" of "realism". And it feels like the hacker problem is growing. When I first started playing this game 6 months ago, I saw a hacker maybe once a month if even that. These last 2 weeks however, I have died 3 times (in a row) to teleporters. One of which who was invisible while teleporting, killing my entire group while insulting us with his prepubescent, russian accented voice. I am done playing for now. For now I guess I will just keep an eye on the patch notes and see if anything of god damn worth is added instead of inane items.

My last three deaths have been to teleporters (and one teleporting while invisible, mocking us with his squeaking prepubescent voice) in just the last 2 weeks (on different servers). I have stopped playing for now.