DannyGB

It's the hackers. That's the whole story. The end. Bye.

It's not opinion, it's fact: The numbers curve plateaued a while ago. New players are coming in and wondering what all the fuss was about. People like me who recruited a dozen folks to play feel kinda dumb that we did so, now that the game is overrun with hackers and cheats. What can I say, success is a bitch! I have the impression that all efforts are now focused on the standalone game. But there is a big problem with this plan: The people who have played DayZ are largely the same audience for the standalone game. Sure, you'll get a lot more folks than the mod got, but by and large they will be turned off by the difficulty, "smartness", and overall design of the game. Unless that game is radically different from this one, in which case my comments are probably irrelevant. The people here, on this forum, are your main contingency. We love what you are trying to do. Trying, and failing. Blame the hackers if you want. Blame non-hive, blame us the players, blame the "alpha" state. I don't care who you blame. The devs have no one to blame but themselves for being unwilling to engage the community on improvements to the server model (which servers we host), allowances for some degree of control on our part (which we deserve), and continuing to pretend that this is all part of a grand experiment, bugs and hackers included. You can believe that, but meanwhile your community is going away. The emperor has no clothes, and I hope you realize it and engage this issue seriously before it is too late. We've seen these projects come and go many times. They don't work on a really successful scale unless they find ways to not bite the hand that feeds, and right now, I'm missing most of my fingers.

Yup, the hive system is broken as broken gets. Hackers cannot be prevented. There is a reason that the number of players per day in DayZ is declining every day as a percentage of the total players, and the player count has started to plateau. My own group of friends hasn't played on hive servers in almost a month now. There's a simple solution. I hope the dev team wakes up to it before it is too late for DayZ. The people who have played DayZ already are most of the same people who will buy standalone. The state of the brand is in jeopardy. Those of you dismissive of the hacker problems or chalking it up to an alpha are ignorant of the underlying problems with DayZ's design model.

DayZ is the only popular game/mod that I'm aware of that has a server model where the community is the backbone, T&Cs which require that community to stay public, but also with a centralized database. It's a recipe for man-in-the-middle attacks, even if BE was able to detect every little exploit. The great admins, servers, and communities around them understand this awesome DayZ experiment. They know letting in only clan mates would result in a game that is not very fun. On a private non-hive server (not run by me), I recently took part in a relatively large (30 players or so), 3-day long DayZ event. It was far and away the most fun I've had playing the game. Half of the players were named bandits, half survivors, and only the admin knew who was given which role. He came up with an arbitrary points scheme for each PK and each zombie kill, so that after 3 days there were clear winners and a team winner. A couple of folks lied to the others about which team they were on and managed to do some infiltration. Seriously, it was a total blast, filled with all of the amazingness of DayZ, the survivor stress, the panicked moments, and more. Oh, and we had no threat of hackers to destroy all that we had worked for with a keystroke. Oh, and we had a real motivation to come to the rescue of teammates. Several times a survivor was left injured with bandits lying in wait to see if we'd come to help the injured teammate. Ambushes were brutal and frequent. I hope this kind of experience becomes available in the game proper at some point. It will happen when the dev team allows passworded servers, in my opinion. And it's inevitable if they want people to keep playing and keep telling their friends to buy the thing, as I have for most of the 30 gamers I mentioned. :) I agree with you Hetstaine about admin rights and tools, but I don't see real indications of that. The refusal to allow passworded servers is like a bare minimum to quality for "admin rights". Honestly, which is worse: A hacker who kills everybody on a server, or an admin who kicks people he doesn't want to play with? I'll take the latter, and I can go find a cool server with cool people. And if we don't trust admins to begin with, why should the dev team trust admins who blacklist certain CD keys? An admin who is going to kick people is just as likely to report them as a hacker if it's an easy process.

Correct. DayZ will be unable to control hacking. It's a permanent part of the game. And the reason I and many I know won't play any longer until the team formally allows passworded servers where admins can let people in based on reputation, either of their own measure of some future measure within the game. Roleplaying (whether survivors or bandits) cannot be enforced by software. We need a social way to govern communities, and that means allowing private servers. The team will come around, eventually.

Rocket, I understand that you will not comment on security issues. Nonetheless, I'm sure you are considering those issues and their impact on gameplay. I too have died multiple times in a week from a teleport hack, and friends and I have taken an indefinite "break" from the alpha test in frustration. We'll be back shortly. The only prevention (other than allowing private servers), is alt-F4 in mid-air. Just saying, please consider the solution in light of the fact that some of us are dying more from hackers than we are from zeds or bandits (the fun ways). Some of us are devoted to the kind of roleplaying you are championing. Don't punish us for being frustrated by hackers, especially where it isn't possible to prevent the hacking with technical means.

Standalone won't help. Bans won't help. BattleEye isn't enough. As long as DayZ prevents passworded servers, AND simultaneously supports a community-run server model, I don't believe hacking for the Arma 2 engine can be prevented. This has nothing to do with being an alpha-state mod. There's a reason that all the other big multiplayer games in the world have one of two models: 1. They control all servers, logging everything, and have resources to combat the problem. 2. They allow private servers where admins can use reputations to grant access. I've been masskilled 3 times in the game. It's easy to forgive bugs and exploits in an alpha. I am an accomplished software developer; I get it. But it's very hard to stick with something when you see a broken model -- not broken code, not exploits waiting to be patched, but a model which simply will not allow the problem to be controlled. I love everything you guys are doing. I know you want to monetize this baby in the best way possible. But increased popularity is only going to lead to increased hacking, especially when players can take their hacked gear with them, anywhere they go. You aren't enabling the community to manage this problem, and you need to. It will scale quickly with the player base, but the solution needs to similarly scale. Hacking breeds more hacking, as frustrated players find how easy it is on the scripting forums. It also breeds people violating your terms by producing their own standlone versions. These things will prevent you from being able to fully monetize, because they won't need your server. There's an easy solution. Allow private servers where admins can control access based on their own community criteria. Make them pay for it, if that helps. Whatever. We want what you want: A hugely challenging, engrossing game experience. We want bandits. We want danger. You have succeeded on this front. We love you.

Yup. Been mass/scriptkilled 3 times. Seen lots of dups. I want private servers. It's because the game is so good, end of story. But the server model is broken.

Hackers. 3 times, masskilled. Okay, that's not really true. Zombies before I learned to play, maybe 20 times. But since I became competent in the game (well, once I got to over 200 zombie kills), I've died mostly from hackers. I can tolerate bugs and dying from bugs in an alpha. But I am not confident DayZ will ever be able to control hacking with the current server model.

Me. Sorry, posted another thread, too. There was a player who died immediately prior to the masskill, who had a goofy looking nick with a clan name I cannot remember. It was not a Renegades ]R[ clanmember. Other thread: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/40659-all-players-killed-on-us-659/

Time: About 5pm ET Server: US 659 All connected players were teleported to the sky and fell to their deaths. You need a distributed server model that lets admins control who can join a server based on reputation. This is the 3rd time I've been mass-killed. If restoring a character is an option yet, please PM me.