semipr0

The entire reason this is a key point of debate today is due to Reddit exposing the entire server package as "pretty much the same thing as the A2 server package". Reddit isn't exactly an authority on things but tends to be a haven for people that aren't morons that are speaking out of their asses, after reviewing that data and looking over the available information from non-admin players that have photographically documented various hacks that are obvious simply from looking at them what they are...its pretty safe to say that detective skills aren't even necessary in regards to this scenario. Now I'm not saying the situation can't be improved...my point in case is that according to a year and a half of interviews it shouldn't have been a situation in the first place. As I said in another post, I never once expected this team to eliminate hacking forever on day 1 or even day 1000, but I did expect a far more secure client/server relationship than A2's laughable architecture.

You know I totally get this, dirty/elegant hacks are a standard of the business when dealing with non-in house engines....but seriously. You can pull up an entire page of interviews with Dean from over the last year alone where server/client security was a major topic of discussion....the ability to just "forget" to remove superceded architecture if you've actually replaced it simply boggles the mind.

Seriously? You forget? Listen I have my own code base and its got a lot of legacy stuff in it too but that legacy code from 2007 has functional use in 2013, otherwise it would have been outmoded and superceded by better functionality. I don't usually communicate in memes but you're not really giving me alot of choice in the matter. That is single handedly the silliest thing I have ever read from a lead developer. Who forgot? And if they forgot...why? And exactly how do you forget something that is such a key component of how your server and client packages communicate that you just....forget to remove it. What? You can't even just comment out the code...I mean leave it there but just add a couple forward slashes so its not actually read by the process? Thats not that hard. Good god almighty.

Not much to get attached to at the moment. I love the modularity of weapons but you can't really say the options are all that great. Plus given the fact that almost all the military balance is in the exact same corridor of the map and people basically just ghost in and out of server to server at one of those locations..theres never much good left over to get your hands on anyways. Only thing I ever get attached to is a cooking pot, a gas cooker and a canteen...cause one of these days I actually want to cook a meal but I never seem to be able to have all the required components at once.

Well yes, on a private hive. With the hive being back to main hive status this is something thats going to have to be ticketed to the support system. The only way to kill a playerID with these kinds of issues is a manual deletion from the database itself.

Good systems don't let client connections tell the server what reality is.

Most of the military balance seems to be on the west side of the map. There are at least six barracks and three military buildings, all of them high value going up from Kamenka to the NWAF. Theres a military base near Palovo, Zelengorosk has a base as well. Theres a small base east of Vybor about 1.5km from the NWAF itself. The east side of Chernarus seems to be mostly stock Chernarus with residential and a few industrial improvements only. As well as central Chernarus having all its military assets removed. Suffice it to say the military balance of the map is quite weird at this stage of the alpha but we can hope that gets addressed in further updates. The west side of Chernarus used to be pretty barren...I'll agree, but stacking the military balance almost completely on that side of the map is an odd decision for addressing that seeing as the west side always had the NWAF anyways.

Lets see, our options are Private Hives: - 24/7 Daylight - Starting Loadouts - Server admins selling game assets for real life cash to other people stupid enough to buy them. Or Public Hive: - Constant problems with ghosters and combat loggers. - Player entitlement drama where they believe they have a right to do whatever they want on your server and you can't do shit about it because "Rocket sez so". - Server administration control for server admins is anemic and mostly hands off. Leading to an unpredictable server environment which is bad for community building. Yeah I'd say both options have their points of suck. Whereas conversely, the points that suck about each, are strongly countered by their opposite. If only there was something in the middle.

Gateway failure double post FTW. Ignore this.

This is the biggest load of garbage I've ever heard Andrey. VAC/PB and BE all together are nothing more than after the fact solutions, generally far after the fact. I'm not lauding any of them as better than the others, BattlEye's biggest failure isn't the fact that its BattlEye its the fact that the VBS engine base was designed to allow this kind of crap in the first place for legitimate means and they had a Sisyphean task even trying to be an after the fact measure. Even Hangender's PBO based antihack was not always 100% effective but I generally had an update within minutes of a script getting past it which kept server disruptions to a minimum. And to you sir. Google doesn't really require me to do any deep hunting for your acknowledgements on this issue. I don't expect a response to this because you have far more important things to do. But this was a key tenant of the stand alone's server to client design. And none of us that know anything about game design ever expected you to abolish all hacking forever on day one or even day one thousand....thats not going to happen and we're more than realistic about the fact that any software system is open to exploitation. The problem is we've waited a year and a half for you to come to the table with this and while some people just paid 30 dollars, I've spent at least a thousand dollars or more over the last two years hosting servers that supported the mod, my immediate response the minute the standalone was released was to once again support the game by not just buying it but hosting a server for it. I've spent an inordinate amount of time, just like any other DayZ server admin having to deal with the arcane server management of detecting and eliminating hackers from a server environment, on the old main hive...where I was barely allowed to ban anyone without a huge fight, to the private hive where regardless of my ability to ban people as I saw fit, it was still a huge task simply to properly ensure I was providing a relatively fair environment for the players on my servers. Effectively dealing with the insecurity of the Arma engine was a second job..that I was paying to do because I believed in your ideas and felt they were worth supporting, for me, my friends and thousands of other people I didn't even know. The entire key selling point of the SA for me has not just been your rather interesting re-envisioning of DayZ as the most realistic action survival simulation that you can make, but the fact that you acknowledged, multiple times over the period of transition from mod to stand alone game, that the server to client relationship between A2 servers and A2 clients was the major hurdle that the SA had to overcome to provide a better experience for players. And I patiently waited for a year and a half for this to be the case. The fact that its not the case and the entire relationship between the client and server is very much the same as any other VBS based engine variant is frankly appalling. I'm not some famous Youtuber or blogger or review columnist so its hardly like my opinion is ever going to matter outside of this post, I'm just a guy thats spent a lot of money supporting your vision. And while I totally get that you're working this project with a small team and a lot of the things you have achieved have been a great leap forwards in what the DayZ experience is...the simple facts are is that it doesn't matter how much I enjoy that or how much work you and your team have done, if the server doesn't ignore illegitimate client executions and calls...then all that work and money and time was for nothing, on your side, and on mine. So in conclusion...don't get me wrong I completely understand that there are some things that are never going to be managable from the server side, but for gods sake...client position, and game assets aren't something that the server should ever be accepting the clients calls for. We'll see how this goes with the "Critical security features" re-enabled but simple facts are the server to client architecture was a key tenant of the SA's development for me and probably quite a few other people though I won't assume to speak for anyone but myself. So yeah....you know this guy.

Issue is, one of the largest selling points of the SA was the change in server to client relations that were largely geared towards not allowing clients to tell a server data that it knows is incorrect. Arma 2 worked like this: [12:00]Client: I am at <1.234567, 765432.1, 987.6> [12:00]Server: You are at <1.234567, 765432.1, 987.6> [12:01]Client: Now I am at <3613561.2, 6351531.6, 362.2> [12:01]Server: Of course you are. Enjoy your day. Thats basically a verbal demonstration of how a teleport happens between client and server in the A2 system. Now the SA was constantly hammered on as "the fix" for these problems because the server architecture would not accept any input from the client that was not concurrently accurate with server data. And...they've failed to deliver that. Thats not just "oh the anti-hack isn't enabled yet"...thats a flat out lie about the capabilities of their server package, that they've told over and over, every time the validity of BattlEye and/or BIS multiplayer experiences are questioned (largely due to BIS using BattlEye). "Its alpha" doesn't cut it on something like this....this isn't something you patch in later, it should have been built into the SA from the ground up because it was a core concept of trying to make the DayZ game a superior experience to the DayZ mod...if some hackass can Thunderdome an SA server in the next few days, then the SA has failed on a core feature that a lot of long term fans were convinced it was supposed to address.

So just for a moment lets visualize a little hypothetical scenario. For years Bohemia Interactive has kept BattlEye on contract to police their games and keep the Arma franchise a fair multiplayer experience and regardless of how much money they're paying BattlEye and how many people actually work at BattlEye to achieve the goal they're being paid to achieve they have actually failed rather massively at controlling hacks...which...in turn, forced A2 DayZ server admins to turn to other alternatives, like Hangender's server pbo based antihack which was....in almost all cases 100% better at stopping hackers than BattlEye ever was. Now lets look at the scenario and realize that the DayZ Standalone has a very small team of developers actually working on it and BIS is mostly hands off on this project, whats more the stand alone has no current anti-hack enabled...and somehow amongst all the other rough edges and bug stomping and feature development...this very small dev team is somehow taking the time to intentionally allow people to attack their server package so they can make said attacks impossible in the future? Seems to me it would have just been more efficient to turn on VAC from day one, or even BattlEye (cause as crappy as it is it does at least eventually catch hackers and ban them, if not prevent them) cause in this hypothetical scenario I cannot think of anyone on this very small development team that is going to have the time to deal with this situation amongst their other high priority responsibilities.

The key words here are "once VAC is online". I just spoke with Hangender on Skype, the SA is already hacked and yes quite a lot of the things that work in A2 and A3 are adaptable. If you don't know who Hangender is...then you don't know enough about this subject to tell me I'm wrong.

I've seen rabbits as well. They're bullet proof..and the make zombie sounds on occasion.

Which means that anything scripted to work for anything from Arma 2 on will potentially work with the SA. It just needs adaptation. This is really sad to find out. It was kind of hilarious though earlier tonight cause I had some dillhole that was somehow keyed up on Global or Side VON talking to his friend...who had just teleported him from Skalisty Island to Balota and he was all like "Wow man that was a really convenient teleport..someone must be hacking on this server."....yeah duh brah...it was your buddy. My biggest complaint about the Arma 2 system has consistently been that the client should NEVER be able to dictate anything to the server and Dwarden himself slapped me down on the Arma 3 Steam forums telling me that if I had a problem with BattlEye and/or the A2/A3 system to wait for the DayZ Standalone because of the server to client architecture changes would make client side script execution impossible. WAY TO FAIL GUYS! GG DWARDEN.

Perhaps that only applies to cooked food. I did try the old DayZ mod standard of woofing down as many cans of food as my stomach could hold and didn't get anything out of them really. Also I'm not entirely sure if time logged off counts towards natural blood recovery as I'd logged off on the top of a castle tower for a few hours and then logged back in and everything was still black and white for me. Then later as I said I logged back in after the update and the character was gone. Natural recovery makes total sense biologically, but I'm not sure its actually working.

If he means "over time" as in....several days, then perhaps. Yesterday I spent the better part of about 10 hours viewing the world in black and white, not because it was night time either, but simply because my blood volume was so low I was literally unable to see color any more. I ate regularly and stayed hydrated and even stayed out of major areas where I'd get injured again and not once did I ever begin to see colors again. After logging off to have dinner and logging back in...the update went through and that character was lost, but I didn't much care it was nice to be able to see again.

Bandages stop bleeding, they don't recover lost blood. Current understanding of the SA mechanics is that the only way to replace blood volume is two very realistic methods of doing so Being administered a IV saline drip to replace lost blood volume (efficiency unknown but believed to be far less efficient than a transfusion) Being administered a whole blood transfusion by another player.Now thats pretty realistic to a certain degree. And as a paramedic I actually applaud the lean towards realism here but its problematic in a game environment because to do either of the above you need An IV Start Kit A bag of Normal Saline Someone else to apply said bag of SalineIn the case of a transfusion you need the following. An IV Start Kit A RbH Blood Testing Kit A syringe. A small pool of individuals willing to be blood tested that don't mind donating a portion of their total overall blood volume. The luck of the irish that one of those individuals has a matching blood type and in the long drawn out process of finding all the supplies needed for this adventure that you or your blood donor haven't been blown away by someone that could give a rats ass about blood transfusions.Oh and theres always the chance of infection from using unsterilized equipment so you need to also potentially have a bottle of disinfectant spray and/or a bottle of isopropyl alcohol on hand to ensure you don't get ill from trying to get well. Which again is completely realistic but just another cherry on the shit sundae at this point. I don't think this medical system should be scrapped, but I do think there need to be homeopathic alternatives and if anything if you have bandaged and taken care to eat regularly and stay hydrated you should regain blood volume over time naturally cause thats how it happens in real biology generally, though generally losing more than 30% of your total blood volume in the real world is a quick trip to unconsciousness and shock, but not so much in DayZ...cause its a game....except when it comes to attempting to recover from severe injury...then its "realistic".

Yeah ghosting is super bad right now. I spent all night on the same server....I moved up the west side of Chernarus hitting all the military spawns all the way up to NWAF and every single building had been looted of everything that could be potentially useful...but there wasn't anyone to be seen for miles.

Actually now that I think about it, as complex as the blood transfusion system is (and again, don't get me wrong, I'm super impressed by the realism of it)...it actually detracts from people attempting to survive at all. Think about it for a moment, the average player base is generally going to approach this from only one direction once they understand that there is no other way to heal effectively. They're just not going to bother. People will simply grab whatever weapon they can, try to kill as many people as they can and then die and respawn and do it again...why? Cause surviving is too hard to do without having people directly on hand to help you. So the focus on player codependence actually reinforces the KOS mentality here.....death is inevitable, even if you have a friend you're playing with they might not have the right blood type, so whats the point in trying to capture people and find someone you can turn into an unwilling blood sack? Its faster and will be generally held to be more fun to simply ruin as many peoples days as you can til you die. I'm all for hardcore survival, but the complexity of the health recovery system has a higher potential to push towards murder because they know they're going to die fairly quickly anyways.

Rocket's always been very big on the dependency angle when it comes to recovery from injury. Its a nice idea in theory but its never going to work with this player community. Especially now given how much more complex the system is even as compared to the original mod system. So don't get me wrong...I really like the thought thats going into the medical system but Rocket continues to believe that if he forces people to need other people to survive, they'll somehow stop killing each other on sight...and its the dumbest idea this side of invading Russia in the winter. Give it up Rocket, I love your medical interactivity with the SA...but making blood bags the only method of healing isn't going to get me to trust a bunch of yahoos I don't know and I'm not going to sit around and wait for three or four friends to be playing at the same time to play the game.

Few days ago I got Arma 2 for my wife so she could play DayZ with me. We played for a whole day with no problems whatsoever. The next day I died in an accidental friendly fire situation, after I died and tried to login to the server, my wife's client suddenly stopped communicating with the server and lost connection, and I was unable to make a full data connection. Now no matter what we do, if I'm on US 155, and she tries to join, my client stops communicating with the server and I eventually time out, and she cannot log on to the server at all til she retries after I'm off. If I try to log in behind her, she gets dropped from the server in the process. And this happens on any server we try to join together. We have two seperate IP's, we have seperate CD keys for our Steam installations of Arma 2 CO, and we can both play just fine as long as we're not on the same server. I've reset our router, updated its firmware, flushed both our DNS caches and the problem continues to persist. Anyone else seen anything like this and know any solutions?

I know that sounds like an arbitrary statement but when you really think about it, the alpha is stalled and doing nothing. Right on the website it pretty much tells you what the point of DayZ is, in three pretty easy steps. Problem is, the "Survive" portion of that simple step process has no real purpose whatsoever. And until the game does, all we're doing is spinning our wheels generating largely the same metrics over and over from version to version. I mean you can spend the next six months tweaking Zeds as far as I'm concerned, but until the "Survival" portion of DayZ actually sees some level of exponential development, DayZ isn't going anywhere. My suggestion, of course, revolves around using the tools available within Arma 2 itself, to make survival and the will to survive more engaging and fun than simply going down to Cherno to PK til you die so you can go back to PKing til you die in Cherno....cause thats really sorta where the fun is right now. You can have all the greatest stuff you can find in DayZ but USING it....is pointless, costly, and you're just going to lose it anyways. Why should I spend an evening putting a downed chopper back together just to have it shot out of the sky by an AS50 or god forbid lose our whole team when the server desyncs and our pilot ends up upside down in a tree? Why should I scavenge all this great gear, over and over...simply to sit around with it and "survive"? Its far more fun to pick up a 1866 and just kill as many people as you can til you die, than it is to actually try to survive. So, with that in mind, DayZ needs to port in the Arma 2 base construction system, perhaps using a slightly more interesting method of generating/scavenging resources to afford said emplacements, and use it as a way to give survival some kind of continued appeal. Cause building something in a sandbox is really what sandboxes are all about....building your own reasons and entertainment. Right now, without any movement towards increasing the "Survival" aspect of DayZ, the actual purpose of the game is largely stalled on step 3, and most people prefer to stick with step 1 and 2, as they're currently far more entertaining. This isn't to say that there aren't hundreds of people Bear Gryll's'ing it up out there in the northern forests, but sitting around, staring at trees and hunting animals for food tends to loose its shine and excitement after a day or two for most normal people. Especially since the game isn't all that hard to hunt down, and consuming steaks and canteens of water while avoiding all contact with anyone entirely can't be all that interesting as a game mechanic. So my suggestion here is that you need to stop worrying about the challenge level Zed's present, and spend more time developing additional system features which support the intended point of the game itself. Step 3 is where the game loses itself entirely, because Step 3 hasn't been given any level of development as of yet. Surviving is easy, its also boring, and there is no feeling of accomplishment from having "survived" at all. If your character is a month and a half old, good for you, just means you picked your fights smartly (or picked your way around them), and spent most of your time hiding outside the map borders behind a hill where no one could see you. Congratulations...you have won DayZ.

From BE Server Message: IMPORTANT: DayZ Server Admins are to remove their current Scripts.txt file to avoid kicking until an updated version is available. The New BEServer version fixes a bug in the scripts.txt reading that causes problems with the current file. So....what? Run naked through the woods til theres a new Scripts.txt update? This hardly seems even close to sane or logical.

Maybe. But it didn't stop them from metagaming the situation to their advantage. I'm not fucking here to do a fucking shit job that I have to pay to do. I'm here to enjoy a game a like...and I've liked this game less and less the more I've had to try to keep a server clean so other people could enjoy it. I am not going to support a system that forces server admins to toe a ridiculous line in regards to their actions, but holds the players to a level of ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY for their actions. And when I say zero accountability I'm not talking about BattlEye waking up from a two week nap and banning a few hundred people. I'm talking about the shit that goes on on these fucking forums every fucking day. Servers get targeted and destroyed from one end to the other by butthurt CHILDREN, simply cause they broke the rules and they got banned from a server. Is there any accountability here? Does the Community Support team take any action against people that metagame server data on forums? No they don't, they don't do anything. Why? Cause Rocket said, in an interview that he liked certain aspects of "metagaming" but no one bothers to analyze that and wonder if he ment "metagaming to the point of rendering servers completely unplayable for anyone". No one cares to ask, Rocket doesn't care to clarify. Again, like I said I'm done with these goddamn rules. I'm done having to explain myself every time I ban someone. Simply done. We're wiping the server and I'm going to ban anyone that looks at me cross-eyed from then on, til we get blacklisted and then I'm going to laugh and go spend my monthly payment a month somewhere else where its a more productive investment of MY money. I've tried playing by the rules and all its done is cost me every bit of enjoyment I ever got out of this game. And who gives a fuck? NOBODY. So guess what, I don't give a fuck any more either.