RomanZ (DayZ)

Dear DayZ community, Dear DayZ Mod dev team, this is to express my deepest concerns about the recent shutdown of the public hive for the good old vanilla DayZ mod. Playing on the public hive has been the most intense and fun gaming experience I've had in years, but since a few days, it's all gone. Please, if you definitely can, do answer the following questions. 1. What happened? Rumor has it that the public hive was hosted on HFB Servers, which appears to have gone out of business. This is a bit hard to believe for me. What about backups? There must be somebody who has/had direct access to the database... 2. Is there ANY way how I can continue playing my 30k humanity hero again? :( 3. If the public hive as we knew it really has gone forever, can't you/we just start off with a new one hosted somewhere else? I really really miss playing DayZ. I don't want to play the standalone as long as it doesn't have a humanity/vehicle/loot system like the mod does. I don't want to play the "300+ vehicles" crap that totally kills the intense DayZ feel. I've hesitated to play on private servers because I'm a lone wolf ranging the woods, fearing that he will get lost in clan wars among people who stick to a single server. I would like to build up humanity and keep it, not lose it again as soon as the server admin decides to wipe their private hive... :( -RomanZ

My vote goes to make it have less impact than now. I'm really worried about loosing even more casual players due to the ever-increasing difficulty level. The sheer mass of players & bambis back when the mod was big used to greatly enrich the playing experience for me. Nothing better than interacting with less experienced strangers who tend to get themselves into trouble and need rescue. :) This isn't the first time I see a public gaming project conducted by a few hardcore gamers/enthousiasts getting more and more complex and difficult, to make it more challenging for the pros. The downside is that you loose everybody but the pros, which would be the final death blow for the mod. Personally, I would like the temperature to have a noticable negative effect only when the player exposes himself to like an hour if playing in the rain, camping, or at night. It's great that it CAN have an effect, but moving around in daylight shouldn't let the temp drop to a level where any counter measure is needed. All players are fully dressed, right? Summer in Chernarus can't be THAT cold, can it? Having to make a fire every half an hour or so just to warm up is definitely too much to ask from the average player (of which DayZ needs so many), given how much items are needed and how scarce carrying space has become. Also, I would really like to avoid the in-house-camping plague the standalone suffers from, so I'm not sure if making everyone spend much more time indoors is a good idea, at least during daytime. EDIT: typos

I fully second this.

Fantastic news! Looking forward to playing as soon as I have time. :)

Sounds great! Very much looking forward to it. :thumbsup:

What I meant is the following: Before the blood types were introduced, there used to be how many blood bags in medical boxes? 6? 8? Can't remember exactly, but it was a few. All of them were compatible with everyone. (That's unrealistic, but that's a different story.) Nothing else was needed. Basically it meant that a few players could typically equip with blood bags from a single medbox. Now, there are four transfusion kits (a single self-transfusion, which is now also possible, takes two of them away!) and one blood bag of four types each, in one of two medbox types. I'm completely with you on the liking of long-term consequences. What I'm trying to say is that it's much too hard to gain humanity now. To put it bluntly, the game currently tells you that you are acting very humanly only if you keep patching up clan mates (except for like ten players who are lucky enough to be able to spend all day playing DayZ), of which the vast majority of players don't have/want any. So, here's an idea that just came to my mind from our discussion here. Why not store the player ids of the last, say, 5 or 8 players you have administered medical help to, and let humanity increase only if the receiver is not among them. This way, you cannot just keep transfusing your team mates over and over again to farm humanity. Helping out different strangers is then what matters. At the same time, since that would make humanity gain even more difficult, add more ways to gain small amounts of humanity, like the aggroed zed kills mentioned earlier, increase the humanity gain per medical help, increase the number of available blood bags/transfusion kits etc. I understand that there are concerns about farming humanity by killing zeds, but I'm convinced that this problem is solved if the humanity increases only if the zed is aggroed at somebody else (perhaps somebody else than a bandit to again diminish the clan farming problem). You wanted to make zombies a threat again, right? Then provide incentives for players to engage with them! Making them stronger will just lead to everyone trying to avoid them even more. Imagine just +1 humanity for each. You'll usually need to kill more than a thousand of them to make up for a, possibly accidental, survivor kill. During all that work, you'll have to resist killing another survivor. I'm convinved that almost all bandits won't do that.

I prefer someone's (who was it again?) recent suggestion of +1 humanity for killing a zombie that is aggroed at somebody else. In a zombie apocalypse, isn't that one of the most human things you could possibly do, saving somebody from being attacked? It also shouldn't be too hard to program (unlike the self-defense thing). I'm one of those who call it "broken", and yes, obviously I don't like the way the system is currently working, but no, it's not that I can't deal with it. I've got >=2500 humanity on all servers (which is why I'd say I can deal with it), but I'm struggling with becoming the hero I used to be on the hive. Why? Three reasons: 1. Increasing humanity has become much more difficult than it used to be (many more items needed, medical items much less common, blood types don't match often, less space to carry items because more food/drinks needed, less backpack spawns, blood transfusions bugged, etc.) 2. Humanity is far easier to gain for clan players than for loners. Three bandits, one hero who's patching them up. All team mates pass their medical gear to the hero. Certainly that cannot be the way it's meant to be. Lone wolves who try to help strangers wherever they can are far inferior. 3. No more public hive. Humanity is persistent only among servers with shared database (just a single one usually, except the FR34/129 and US434/435 servers). Only if you play many hours per day over many weeks on a single server you can currently become a hero. That's just not possible for many of us. For point 3 there's nobody to blame here, although I think that the humanity system should be adapted to the fact that the hive has gone for good. But points 1 & 2 make the humanity system seem very imbalanced to me. Perhaps not "broken" (whatever that is supposed to mean), but imbalanced. At this moment there aren't more than a handful heroes globally. The Europa server for instance has five heroes out of 18k unique players. Many others obviously play "hero-style", as they have a humanity of well above 2500, but the game doesn't let them become one. That's what I'd call imbalanced.

Using the join button the your homepage seemed to work, I just player for a couple of hours without problems. Thanks!

vinyljunkie, since 1.8.3 I keep losing the connection ("no message received fror X seconds") every ~15 minutes or so...

The question is when this is going to be implemented. The humanity system has been broken for so long now (at least since the introduction of blood types in May and since the shutdown of the hive). Since then player counts have plummeted. So far there is no official statement or discussion on how the new humanity system is going to work or when it is going to be built in. Is it even in the planning phase at least? Nobody knows...

I second the doubling of calories + halving the food spawns.

I've been having the same problem with DayZCommander since yesterday. Only ~1000 servers (out of ~3000 IIRC) are found. When I close and reopen it, suddently, only 700 servers are there, and so on. It seems to fluctuate randomly.

I think what Elegantly meant was "each time you start a new life". However, I don't think that the bloodtype should be tied to the ID, because that would be unfair. Some players would have bloodtypes that are harder to deal with than others. Well, is it actually being tweaked then? I totally agree with the OP in that the current amount of food/drinks required is nuts. It also takes away a lot of inventory room, which has become very scarce anyway. In my opinion, it would be much better to lower the number of food spawns significantly and return to a far higher hunger/thirst restoration for each item consumed. The difficulty level could be almost unaffected, but it would feel much less unrealistic/annoying. The current way significantly impairs the immersion for me. It's just annoying when you feel super thirsty again only minutes after you emptied that last pond you came across. Or need like ten cans of pasta to be full. Also, I would like to ask the devs a related question: Is the way transfusing blood works right now how you intend it to be? I'm asking because ever since the bloodtypes have been introduced, blood transfusions are de facto out of the game. It's just waaaay too tedious and needs too many items. If anybody, only group players can really do it in 1.8. I used to offer stranger survivors/heroes (hell, even bandits!) a blood transfusion a lot before the change, but now if I manage to carry around all required items for a change, all I hear from them is that they'd rather go hide somewhere until their blood restores automatically. Not much fun, frankly.

It has happened also on your server, Vinyl Junkie. Remember when I told you that it happened to me over side chat? It was a while ago, back in 1.8.1. At that time I thought it might be an issue related to your database, but since then it has happened to me also on other servers.

I can confirm the humanity resetting issue. It has happened to me a couple of times recently that after doing something that changed my humanity, it got reset at my next login. However, not to 2500, but to the value I had before it changed. I have tried waiting for about five to ten minutes after my last humanity-changing action before logging off, but that didn't help. It seems to me that the humanity changes are not always properly/immediately synched.

Much better than 1.8.1 IMO. Now they don't feel like hitting you through telekinesis anymore.

Hey Vinyl Junkie, just wanted to confirm that it was indeed me a couple of minutes ago. Keep up the good work, the server is running very smootly for me. BeanZ returned. :)

Which is why we need alternative ways to gain humanity so badly. I agree with Bullet_Catcher, the humanity system is key to the DayZ mod experience. In fact it's one of the main reasons why I play the mod instead of the standalone or even other games. And I also think that it should be equally hard to gain humanity for squad/clan players and for loners, which has never been the case at all so far. My suggestion is to add the following to the existing humanity features: 1. Humanity change for killing bandits, negatively proportional to their humanity (proportionality factor of -0.02 maybe?), perhaps with a cap of +250 or so. 2. The same for killing heroes, but with a bigger proportionality factor (-0.2? -0.5?), if that isn't how it works already. 3. A very small humanity gain for killing zeds (say, 0.25?). Need to take out like 10,000 zeds (or even more) to go from 2500 to hero without injuring a good guy in the meantime. This would even drive the game more to PvE rather than KoS-PvP. People might team up to go zed hunting. That could be a lot of fun! 4. Possibility to read journals on dead bodies to see how good the player was. Just for fun. :) Surely, this would all need heavy testing and balancing.

I see your point with the negative bandit label. The frontside of the medal, however, is great in my opinion: A hero could pretty much be counted on not to kill survivors, because they'd fuck up their humanity. It's a trustworthiness guarantee. A survivor who understands this has much less incentive to kill a hero. That being said, I'd like to repeat that with the new blood type system, less loot (less backpacks, less carrying capacity, while more transfusion-related items to carry), and disappearance of the public hive, it has become much too difficult to become a hero. If not impossible, at least for lone wolves. I'd very much welcome more ways to gain humanity, especially now that I know that I fell for an urban legend with the bandit kills. :)

Wait, what? Wasn't it +200 for killing a bandit with negative humanity prior to 1.8.1?

There is still no humanity gain from bandit kills. :(

Yes, I do. When logging in, I see the binoculars texture but no 3d graphics, then both. After hitting , the binoculars are removed and the char takes his primary, which is automatically followed by a switch to the secondary (no buttons pressed!). I then need to hit [1] to get to the state in which I logged out (primary weapon). Nothing serious, agreed, but still a bit annoying.

Has anyone else had the problem that the binoculars are out when logging in? This happends to me like ever other time (not just since 1.8.2, but a few versions back). Also, I would like to ask if the auto-closing of the gear menu can be undone. I don't get the point of it, and I have always found it quite annoying.

I disagree with Bullet_Catcher. I'm not going to go into detail here, just wanted to mention that there are people (e.g., me) who take the opposite position. DayZ has always been a PvP game for me with some PvE hurdles. I don't necessarily mean player vs. player combat, but player interaction in all forms. I wouldn't play a singleplayer DayZ. Zeds should be a threat, that I agree on. But losing hours of gameplay effort just to die on the airfield from one or two zed hits (which can happen due to lags/glitching etc!) is what I would call unnecessary frustration, not motivation to be more careful next time. That's where risk and reward are out of balance in my taste.

I've mentioned it a few times on the forums already, and I'm happy to repeat myself: I too would absolutely love to see a new "public" hive! If money is an issue, I'de be more than happy to contribute an amount of the order of, say, an average server rent, if nee be. But probably, manpower/technical experience are the more important factors. We should get the admins of the FR 34 and FR 129 servers on board of this, as they seem to have the knowledge we need. Those two servers already run a joint private DB.