first i want to say thanks upfront for anyone reading and that can help. im not a big gamer and ive never played arma 2/dayz. i downloaded arma to see if i can get the mod to work. figured if it works i will buy it. i have made progress but have yet to play an actual dayz game. i can only play single player arma games. 1. i have the game running in a folder on an internal backup drive, here is a screen shot of the directory. the game is in the folder called "new folder". the other folders were created on their own while trying to play. contents of game folder 2. i am a non steam user and came across this graphic after i installed 6 updater/6 launcer. i followed the graphic as best as possible. (big image, just click link) http://i.imgur.com/n5yuV.jpg 3. here is a shot of my 6 updater...seems legit? (big image) http://i.imgur.com/PmJF8.jpg 4. when i use 6 updater to launch the game, first thing i see is a splash screen of tanks and jeeps and then it just seems like im in the normal arma menus. i get this menu and the options in the bottom right are grayed out. you cant really select any of those options. as i said, i can only play single player games in arma. if i try to play multiplayer arma games it says cd key invalid and boots me. 5. the closest ive come to playing a real dayz game is by using the 6 launcher. it showed me the tanks, i heard ambient sound then saw a field but quickly got this error and was booted. 6. the instructions in the graphic in #2 say to use the 6 updater to launch the game which has never worked for me. 7. i just updated 6 launcher and when i thought i was going to play a game, all i saw was this...and i can still only play single player (no dayz) 8. if i try to use this multiplayer method as seen here... ..it says i have a bad key, invalid cd key. when i installed the arma games, it never asked for a key. i do have a keygen and a .cmd file to change keys but that doesnt seem to work. after updating 6 launcher just now, it seems im having even less success than before. prior to the 6 launcher update i just did, it would act like it was connecting me to a game, id see the tanks, hear ambient sound and then it would just say "youve been kicked off" or something like that. thanks for reading!! also i have seen this error twice now