Well, it is kinda hard to begin because there are so many questions for developers and the community.
I have been playing DayZ since its official release in 2018. Currently, I have something around 2500 hours. I almost play on official servers. And for now, I think this game is dying. Well, let me explain.
I can't really understand what the devs are doing. This game has 3 main problems for now in my opinion.
Anti-cheat system.
Official servers performance.
Bugs that are not going to be fixed from patch to patch.
Let's go step by step.
The first one is my favorite one - cheats.
Oh god, so funny to play now on official servers. Do you see the full server? Ok, you can be 100% sure that you will be killed by a cheater. No matter where are you on the map, no matter what kind of gear you have. You will just get killed by a little kid from China or Korea without any purpose. You can try to pick a temporary one with a Medium or High online, you can just join any constant server from the top of the list, it doesn't matter, be ready to be killed by a cheater. A few times I was lucky enough to communicate with this guys. What did I hear? Nothing articulate. They just were screaming in Chinese or whatever language and that's it.
You can suppose that Battle Eye is a bad anti-cheat system. But I don't think so. I am playing and I was playing before in a couple of games with Battle Eye. These games are much more popular than DayZ if we compare them by the number of players on Steam.
PUBG Battlegrounds, Unturned, Rainbow Six Siege, Destiny 2, and so on. Did I get killed every single evening by a hacker? No. Do I get killed every single game session in DayZ? Yes.
For now, DayZ developers do literally nothing about cheaters. If you want really long story on one server, it is impossible now and you will be lucky enough be not killed in the first game session, but trust me you will. And I don't think that every single person who was able to shoot me is a hacker. I am almost not playing alone. And all the time when I and my teammates get killed we die synchronously. For sure, it is a group of people with the same quantity of players against us and all of them are just able to shoot us in the heads synchronously without any misses in one second. Of course not just a cheater.
I found one private Russian community with cheats for this game. This software is cheap, always updated, and gives you god-like opportunities. Sure I don't want to promote this here, so I downloaded one video from their group and wanna share it here. Just check what you can do with hacks and how Bohemia doesn't care: ***
The second one. Servers performance.
Ok, let's imagine that you are lucky enough to find a car on a full official server. What will happen next? You will ruin it due to the weak performance of the machine where this server is running. Did you meet someone somewhere on the map? My congratulations, you will get kicked due to an unstable connection with a really high chance after your first shots. Did you fall unconscious during a fight with another player and your friend traded you and saved your life? I don't think that you should be happy until you wake up. There is still a high chance to be kicked when you are still unconscious. I believe all of you know what you will see when you will join again. (You will spawn somewhere on the beach, naked for sure. Because disconnect during unconscious means dying)
What's wrong with you, Bohemia? Are you so poor to buy/rent something more powerful or just buy/rent more machines to avoid multiple servers running on one machine? There is no net code issue or something else, it is just a weak performance on machines where official servers are hosted. You can easily find a community server where you will never face with described higher issues. Just because the machine where this community is hosted is powerful enough to handle 60-70 players.
And I am not living somewhere far from servers. I am living in Poland and I am playing on DE servers. My ping is quite low and my internet is great. Bugs, bugs, and again bugs.
I don't want just hate this game. And during four years of playing this game and following all the developer's posts, streams, and reading patch notes I see that a lot of bugs getting fixed. They are doing a big job and I believe they want and try to fix the most annoying issues. For example such as "blank cartridges". (I believe a lot of you remember that issue, when on your screen you holding a gun in your hands, can shoot, scope, and see blood on your enemy but in reality, you holding something else and don't shoot for anyone else on the server)
But did you play the 1.19 patch? My god, the worst patch ever. Cars are totally broken, no matter if is it a new Hammer with an automatic gearbox or an old car with a mechanical gearbox. You can easily ruin your car, just because your gearbox is desynchronized with the server. You can get killed because your hammer can't drive before you restart your engine or re-enter the car.
The building is the cancer of this game too. Wanna build something in the forest? Nope, you can't there is a slope of 5 degrees or a little ambush. Go and find another place. Do you want to build something inside a house? Of course not, you can't place your wall here. It is blocked again by nothing. Just stupid restrictions without any reason. Restriction for a restriction and that's it. And the funniest thing is that Bohemia released a fix for that a few patches ago. For now, you don't need build anywhere mod on your server to make building great again. You just need to change some values in a configuration file. But Bohemia decided not to use their own solution on their own servers. How smart, how smart.
And yes, there are a lot of bugs that I didn't describe because I am talking about the most annoying things. Why not a community server?
I believe a lot of people who read this will just say to me: "Man, stop crying and go to community servers, almost all described by you problems will disappear"
But I will answer, I don't want to play in a community. Because of stupid rules, donations, mods, community, and a bunch of other problems. Official servers give you unique gameplay and a unique story. Official servers give you an opportunity to switch a map with your survivor. Tired of playing on a Chernarus? No problem, just pick any Livonia server with the same perspective and continue your story on a new map with new emotions and goals. So what's the reason for this post?
Every single player, who play this game for a long time knows about this. And I believe developers know about this too. But why is it just normal behavior? Why this game is growing? Why there is always a big quantity of full official servers?
Why does no one care about this situation? Why did developers decide to add new useless guns like SSG 82, Savanna, and so on instead of trying to fix their servers? Why do they trying to redirect you to Battle Eye support when you are reporting a hacker with all the necessary data? Really I am so tired of this. There is nothing new in our game (except the bunker update for Livonia) for experienced players, so for now when I am starting this game I just wanna travel around the map and to live another story. But instead of a new story, I am getting shot by a hacker or getting a bunch of bugs and not working game mechanics.
Hope I am not alone in this vision of the game.
Bohemia please do something, I don't want to drop this game. But I almost did...
