rekrul

I didn't see this post until now, but you either didn't read my post properly or didn't understand it. The formula to allow you installing the game is pretty straight forward and the game will accept billions and billions of CD-keys to be installed and that's what the cd-key generator does. Once you go online you need the cd-key from an actual game that was sold and entered into BIS's auth server. That odds of that are 1:7 duodecillion which means next to impossible. To say that again so you understand it : There's no way that happened! It will never happend! The protection is incredible strong and there's no reason for BIS to improve it. If they changed their system to username/password that would actually be a lot weaker. I understand that you don't have a great concept of math, but you really don't understand of incredible farfatched this is. It's in the neighbourhood of Megan Fox suddenly materializing in your bed. Horny. For you.

High vantage points are really bullet magnets. I mean, you want to have higher ground on your target, but your siloutte will kill you. Your siloutte is your worst enemy when it comes to being invisible. Also, everyone looks at higher ground. As for visual sweeps, and this might be outdated, make a snake pattern starting close to you and work away from you. Non-moving players are basically impossible to see as the human is a predator and is programmed to pick up on movement, unless their wearing colours that are in contrast to the background. One constant mistake I see my paranoid friend do, is to stop in the middle of open area to sweep. (Not open fields but open areas in forrests etc). Don't do that, get some cover like a tree or rock so you're less likely to stick out. You'll also have some protection if you're caught under fire. Edit: I forgot to add that your goal is relevant here. Are you looking for targets or are you trying to avoid being one? If it's the first, we're down to equipment. Do you have a sniper rifle, or short range weapon. What's your advantage compared to your target? Set yourself up to use that advantage. I.e. if you have a sniper weapon you don't want CQB (and reversed). Same thing with avoiding being a target, but here you're moving and are more visible, so move in forrests with limited firelanes and visibility.

Upvote here if you have a reddit account: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/101m6u/help_free_2_game_developers_falsely_accused_of/ It's a self post so the karma won't count.

I keep experiencing that when I pitch a tent too close to a tree it doesn't respond at all, no gear, save, or pack down. It's physically there - I can't run through it. Anyone else experiencing this?

You just duped your post! Look everyone! A duper!

I've been lurking the BIS forums back from the OFP days and the funny thing about it is that every now and then there would pop up a thread like "Why isn't this game more popular?" and they're quite insightful. And if you were new player then, and I assume now, and ask on the squad forum that you're a noob willing to learn, you'll get plenty of offers. Now, to the funny part, the entire community wants a lot more players to play - but, and they're not saying it - or maybe not even realizing it, they want players like themselves (tactical, hardcore-ish) and certainly not COD/whatever spray'n'pray FPS players. They love to bash people who says the game sucks on their forums, and they always assume they're COD/whatever players, even if it's constructive criticism. So now that the hordes are coming in with Dayz, they fear their worst nightmare is coming alive. Along with the hordes of players there's a horde of cheaters too and that's "all because of Dayz". That being said, some points should be made. Many Arma-players plays/played Dayz but usually stopped because of another relentless wave of hackers. Most public (Arma) servers sucks anyways due to no tactical gaming, TKers and hackers. Find a squad run server instead. They're usually closed with a password and well run. Yes there are douchebags in Arma2 too but far fewer than most communities and the avg. age is way higher than most games.

I agree. My point was merely that they tried and tried but gave up. It was pretty much the same evolution as in Dayz where everyone KOS.now but instead of other players, these ended up TK and blowing up their own base.

Not justifying the admin here, but the "problem" with arma is that (usually) it's very team-oriented. That means if you're on a team that just Willi-nilly runs towards the enemy, crash jets and choppers, etc, your team will have a next to impossible task a head of them just because some dolts wants to operate alone. Yes, everyone's a noob at some point, but the game provides plenty of tools to train yourself before you start shooting at the enemy as the rear guy or run in front of your team's fire line. You have been struggling with hackers for a couple of months - they have for years. Add to the mix TK'ers, rambo players, etc. so they're pretty fed up. Now they see hoards of Dayz players coming and some (many? Don't play A2 any more) categorize you as someone who doesn't grasp what the game's like and not interested in learning. Based on OP's post, based on generalization rather than facts.

Seems like we're split on the view of "fresh start". http://www.battleye.com/index.html That means that with your new copy, you ran the fake hack, it stole your key and has been sold. If you re-install OA you get your original key back, but you're now sharing your Dayz character with someone of equally dubious morals. Ironic, isn't?

There is always the possibility that there's a malicious worker at the German distributor some how copying these keys, but there are usually seals on those packages to prevent it. Another possibility is that there's a production error on the CD-key so they're not registered in the auth-server. Neither are plausible. Finally, it might be that you're infected with a trojan that steals your key, but that's a bit of a weird focus for a bot-network and especially since mainly German ArmA X users are infected. And there is of course a possibility that there's a legit reason that I haven't come up with.

Hate to be the douche here but I'm assuming you all saw this: WARNING: Massive cd-key theft going on Their process of stealing cd-keys is quite simple: They advertise a supposedly undetected hack on sites like YouTube and the moment you download and run it (it will probably report that the hack failed to load) your cd-key is already stolen. I already posted this in the other thread so I'll just copy it in here. The context isn't the same though, but the odds of anyone *guessing* your cd-key or randomly creating it is astronomical to say the least.

I call bullshit.BIS has a list of legit cd keys in their auth server which contains all sold physical copies, including what is sold to distributors. I'm guessing they dispatch bulks of keys to electronic versions as well, such as Steam. So lets say there are 2 million valid keys in the auth server. The key-generator only allows you to install the game, once you go online it checks if your key is legit. For each letter in the CD key, you can have A-Z and 0-9, meaning 34 possible combinations. Arma has a 24 digit CD key, meaning there are 7,085,587,176,950,499,380,342,846,631,444,480,000,000 (7 duodecillion) possible combinations. Are you claiming that this is not good enough? Are you really gonna claim that some how some one got your key with the staggering odds of 1:7 duodecillion? Yeah, good luck with that.

You obviously have no idea of what you're talking about. A2:OA was released June 2010 and is still heavily developed, but you don't make it very clear what they're supposed to fix either. Losing (all) their govermental contracts wouldn't make it better as most of the new features are coming from VBS2, like FLIR in OA, tons of vehicles, etc. Also, the A3 team and BIA (doing VBS) teams are the same size now, both counting about 100 heads each. They've also added a lot more than lightning and physx. By the tone of your post I'm guessing you're sitting on a global ban? Rocket has said that with the stand-alone they're able to cherry pick the features they want from the engines (and I believe he mentioned lighting as an example, but that doesn't have to mean much) and code their own modules (like inventory which is one of the first things to be totally revamped and coded from scratch). It's still the same engine at core, its just what modules will be included and what will be made that is going to be different. And of course to close it down to combat hackers.

Bullshit That's sort of how the playing field is. Right now the hacks are bypassing BE. Why would they do that if it was useless? The latest ban-wave was probably one bypass-hack busted. They might be back 2 days later with a shady key that doesn't always work and their current hack doesn't work. And I'm a bit skeptical of your claim. As an admin I'm sure you're not confusing this with the script detection that kicks, but why aren't you running it? Why can only private hives do that? Maybe an external log-inventory-checker? There might be some confusion here. A client cannot run a script on the server that wasn't included in the mission file. One of the hacks overwrote some functions in the missionfile with the publicVariable command (which is retarded, yes) but BE and BIS solved that with the PV detection-file (similar to scripts). BIS didn't want to outright ban it since several mods are depending on it, including the popular Life mod. But the core of your message is correct - The arma2 engine assumes no malicious users/clients and is too trustworthy. They are working on this (finally) though. And the entire engine is depending on scripts being executed on the client-side. As for the auth-servers for CD-key I'm a bit unsure of what you mean, BIS are hosting this and you need an OK for the auth-server to join any server that isn't LAN. Well, almost. If the server has disabled BE, it only checks for duplicate keys on the same server. Edit: Also, and I'm just speculating here, the reason why hacks still works is because the server admins are not adding illegal commands in their scripts-file, such as setDamage, createVehicle, etc. The hackers have a way to bypass BE and then has to send the commands to the server. The server assumes all commands are legit per default, but if there is a script-file, those commands are not allowed and would cause a kick for script restriction. They can't global ban here since a malicious admin might add a legit command to the scripts-file and ban everyone. I know BIS/Dayz isn't doing this easy for the admins, but this will be default in the standalone server-app. Also, there are heaps of ways a hacker might grief so the scripts-file will never be complete.

Great work. What we do/did was to clear up all the loot, dump it on a zombie, then run 200m away and back again to find new loot instead of tons of empty soda cans. That seemed to work without the timer, but I guess it was the timer that did this. I can't really argue against the source code. :) I think you might want to re-read your 1st post. :)

The axe and crowbar is hacked in to game as well as melee. That's why it's so weird.

Just a quick note. The thing that hackers did was to use publicVariable to overwrite some functions in the mission/game. This "injected" clients who were connected with illegal commands. This made BE kick the players (if the admins were running script detection) but BE would never globally ban because of it, which makes sense. A rouge admin could made a legal operation illegal and get everyone who was on his server banned so BE doesn't do that. Scripting is something the admins has to take care of, with the help of BE ofcourse. What BE does is to ban when people are trying to circumvent BE, like manipulating memory or similar. To combat the hacker "injection" thing, BE added a publicVariable file as well where the admins could decide what was allowed and what wasn't. For Dayz I don't think there's any legit reason to use PVs. At the same time, BE said on BIS forums that there's no way to bypass this. And that's when we're comming to the core of things. AFAIK there's a hack that bypasses BE. I believe with the new version (1.170) they found a way to bust the bypass hack but didn't announce it. Then they datamined for a couple of days and bam! hackersbegone. Also, there's no way hackers can steal cd-keys through dayz. Tl;dr: scripting will never get you globally banned, being kicked for script restriction is not why you're banned, hackers running scripts on your client won't get you banned, trying to circumvent BE (which most hacks do) will get you banned, BE doesn't instaban, they ban in waves. Your cd-key is safe unless you run some 3rd party shady software.

Actually that is probably due to an admin not adding script detection to the server. BE bans if you e.g. manipulate your memory or run certain commands that you never ever would as a legit player. However there are other ways around that and that's where the script.txt file comes in (or whatever it's called). That tells the server that this list of commands are not allowed by players. If a hacker then tries to spawn a vehicle, he will get kicked with the script restriction #x message. Also, the admins need to make a PV-file (publicVariable) that stops hackers from overwriting certain functions in the mission and cause legit players to be kicked due to the scripts.txt file. The reason why the admins have to make these files themselves (there are examples for dayz admins, and I'm sure the dayz admins are collaborating on making a more complete one) is because there are many mods out there, and some of them do ugly things so in order to still support all these bugs, the admins themselves has to keep the eye on the ball all the time which is another reason for you guys to be more grateful to the admins. And finally, I'm quite sure that all of this will be included in the standalone as they no longer has to worry about the Arma2-universe and all their mods so it will require less from the admins.BE will certainly be the anti-cheat function in the standalone.

It's a common mistake to believe that an Alpha is for playing a game. Alpha is the stage where you test new functionality to see what works and not. Add new equipment, remove some, add functionality, remove some, etc. Usually Alphas are closed to dedicated *testers*, while some choose the "minecraft path". The Beta stage is where you remove the bugs, however this is of course necessary in the Alpha stage as well so the developer(s) get a real feel for the functionality. Although I agree with your opinions, they're not game breaking or functionality-test-breaking (like the artifacts are). I too would like some of the frustrating bugs gone. For instance, I've never kept a tent or vehicle through a server restart, but that's not what Rocket is focusing on now. If you change your mindset from "I'm a player" to "I'm a tester" your life might get a bit less frustrating. :) Also, you're encouraged to post suggestions/opinions on features/functionality and by all means, bug reports - preferably with in a STR (Steps to Reproduce) format. Finally, I know 99% of us wants to play, not send bug-reports and that's fine, I'm there myself. But please bear in mind that although Rockets fix some bugs as they appear, that's not the goal of this stage in the development. Edit: One more thing - the debug monitor is just that, for debugging. It will be removed anyways so you might as well get used to not seeing it as it doesn't add any value to the game itself. It's just a free lunch now.

Well, he DID want to make the zombies more terrifying. ;)

How certain are you of this? Everyone in the A2-engine has body armour as default but since the engine lacks any penetration value it's merely a damage-reducer. Now, they could've increased the value on the hero but I doubt it. Also note that due to the lack of penetration value, you can explode a tank with enough pistol ammo and patience. From the West soldier class: class HitHead { armor = 0.700000; material = -1; name = 'head_hit'; passThrough = 1; }; class HitBody { armor = 0.800000; material = -1; name = 'body'; passThrough = 1; }; class HitHands { armor = 0.500000; material = -1; name = 'hands'; passThrough = 1; }; class HitLegs { armor = 0.500000; material = -1; name = 'legs'; passThrough = 1; }; It might've been removed for the Dayz surviors (i.e. set to 0) but the A2 engine assumes everyone is wearing standard issue body armour.

Dean has already stated in some interview that he would like to add support for Rift but I'm guessing it won't be the first thing he does.

I like the idea because when your "avatar" dies, the next one you control doesn't know where that tent is so the tent should be gone. The same should go for vehicles as well. The reason why most people protest is because they're running around hoarding stuff (including me) and wouldn't like to lose that since the items are currently stored away "safely". The fact is, death now means "long run". If it actually mean that you would have to run around in Elektro/Cherno and dodge the snipers, while looting, would make death sting more than it does now. And it might make one of the many snipers realize how much of a bitch it is to not only avoid zombies and other looters in addition to the snipers when you try to get stuff in Elektro/Cherno and since they now have to work hard(er) for it - appreciate their equipment better.

Some way to barricade doors and Zombie behaviour should be more of flock behaviour. Like when one or a few zombies run or hit a barricaded door, more zombies gets interested and joins in. Every single zombie-movie has a group of people trapped in a building surrounded by zombies. Then you need to be rescued, or fight yourself out. This could cause more server hopping though...

Add weight to items. The heaveier the weight you carry, the slower you run and the more food and water you need A trading system Add a tow vehicle and more wrecked cars that can be towed (i.e. attachTo). Many wrecked cars can only be repaired with correct items and in the repair buildings that already exist. That would allow players to be mechanics and when holding this building, they can repair cars for items Less fuel, but make some few areas produce e.g. oil. This would require a multitude of items to make. Then you need to bring the crude oil to a refinery to get fuel, which also needs parts. That would make players try to control certain areas and increase both trading and fighting but ultimately player interactions and rewards group cooperations Item and vehicle deterioration Make a mine where you can extract iron which again needs multitude of parts to do. Iron can be used to fabricate spare parts for weapons, cars, etc. Maybe fabrication of pars are limited to a few areas as well? (Gun parts - one place, car parts another, etc)