jwiechers

Thank you everyone, I'm trying to find a way to continue to run the servers but it's a bit difficult from here. Personally, I hate to see them go down but since I can't care for them and I'll likely remain ill for quite a while, it's just meh. :-(

Hello everyone, I am very sorry, but unless someone wishes to "take over" the servers (or cover my costs in some fashion). I will have to shut the servers down due to my continuing illness. I've been in hospital for a month now and will likely remain there for almost another month at least. :-( Sorry. The servers will run until the 9th (DE 65,76,77)/11th.(DE 274-9) of October. I'll try to update the MOTDs to indicate this as well as soon as I can get a stable RDP over GPRS :/ Jens

Hello everyone, I'm very sorry this project is in some disarray. I'm very seriously ill and have been in hospital for the last four weeks, with a likely further stay of at least another three weeks. I'm sorry, I've reached out to a couple of people to grant them administrative rights so they can continue the work but so far, nothing much has transpired. :-(

Jay, it has already been tried to rebinarize the files and repack the assets. It's, from what I have been hearing, slightly puzzling why people still have these issues. This is exacerbated by the fact that the people reporting the issues have wildly different systems and no consistent pattern has emerged.

Well, to be more precise, the "dots" are not zeroed at all. Mil-Dot distance calculation and zeroing are two different things, although some people have been establishing rough guesstimates of what distance certain mildots correspond to. Zeroing is the process of modifying the mounted optics in such a way that its aim point (or whatever other targeting aid) corresponds to the approximate location of the bullet at a specified distance. It is possible with almost all optics in real life and even though there are other ways to compensate (and reticules specifically designed to quickly compensate without technical "zeroing" of the central aimpoint) it's a bit grating to people who have any idea about weapons that some weapons have this and some don't in ARMA2/DayZ. Anyway, since this isn't your question, I'm on UMTS, and there are various sources out there, I'll leave it at that. ;-)

Yeah, the rules were clearly intended to make sense for a small population of servers and while the "gearing up" argument still holds true, there are other ways to do that which are about equally effective at the moment. I also think a lot of the stuff isn't, at the moment, enforceable, but at the same time, I'd favor still mentioning this as a rule for the simple reason that if there are ever mechanisms introduced which do make this enforceable, it isn't a new rule, just one that can finally be applied fairly. It's not ideal, but right now, things are as they are.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why private hives and modifications of the client and server files which comes with them are *bad* in an alpha. ;P

The same reason BattlEye has for not publishing their data: if you know what is being identified as a cheat and how it is done, you can easily avoid it. As for the bans: The procedure outlined here is not quite how it works, although there are a few admins that can write directly to the community banlist (mostly those who co-started the project with me, including someone from BIS who has been providing additional info that is simply not available to most people (and wouldn't be useful if it was, without a lot of understanding about the ARMA2 server*)) *all* of the GUIDs reported via the issue system are *not* immediately added to the banlist. They're added to a currently local (I haven't had the time to recode it to run completely online and I'm currently in hospital so it's a bit complicated) database including IP, reporting source, and the salient logs and automatically assigned reputation scores based on the kind of log evidence as well as the "reputation" of the source. Only if there is clear evidence from *multiple* sources (depending on how reputable those themselves are, which is based on the number of corroborated bans**) are people banned. As for the banning of innocents. I've looked through a number of appeals now (not just those on the issue list, also received via PM here) and I have to say that there *are* a number of people who had their CD Key stolen (i.e., to name an example discussed here on the forums yesterday, a guy from Canada whose GUID was used by a cheater with an IP from the Ukraine). We, very obviously, can't help in that situation, but it is not a flaw of our system. * We'll change this, too, even though I do trust every one of them fully. The Community Banlist came from an earlier attempt of mine to organize a number of experienced admins into a coeterie to discuss anti-cheating improvements with BE, BIS and the DayZ team. ** I'm aware this is crude, but it's a start for building upon this later

Nah, as just outlined, *that* would be relatively trivial. If what you want is already an ARMA asset programming this takes around twenty lines of code, and that's generous.

Well, it's a bit complicated with the current engine, but should be doable in a fashion, even though it slightly breaks immersion. You could allow people to "transform" vehicles, like the hilux, into a "technical" if they hold the gun that is mounted on the technical model. You would walk up to the car with an RPK (which isn't currently in game but that could change) and the context menu would say something like "Attach RPK" at which point the hilux would despawn and be replaced by a matching technical with an RPK mounted onto it. In a similar fashion you could actually build detachable optics etc., just remove the current weapon and replace it with the other one. In the same way, you could add other parts to vehicles, even though it does mean having to model all the different models and spawn/despawn them with the respective parts given constraints of the engine (unless I'm mistaken). Still, it should be a bit of a tedium, but well worth the result. :D

I don't think it would be sensible to remove them, although I would favour lowering the spawn rates of many weapons in order to increase the time you spent without any effective medium range weapon. This isn't something the ARMA-Engine is designed for, and given the issues with getting infected it is also not something you'd generally want to do in a zombie apocalypse, but it would feel much more authentic. Right now, the amount of guns found in Chernarus rivals the US, which is quite unrealistic. In most places, the amount of weapons you tend to find is fairly low and would be ever decreasing. I would add a couple of military caches, though, more or less like the heli crash sites already implemented, which contain MREs, weapons, ammunition and other stuff lugged into the combat zone when there was still an organized effort to fight the zombies. These would be much more "realistic" sources of mil-spec hardware and make it correspondingly rarer. The rare AKM and Makarov, as well as a wide range of other low-tier weapons should turn up every now and then in civilian houses, businesses and airports, but not at the current rate. I would convert the barracks to a regular spawn and have a random weapons cache spawn point nearby that would sometimes spawn or not. The only sniper rifles that should be semi-common should be hunting rifles and other "civilian" rifles appropriate with optics.

I think this is a misunderstanding perpetuated by DayZ Wiki. They used to say (haven't checked recently and my registration mail for a user account never arrived) that the flashlights on many weapons were broken -- which is complete bunk. Flashlights, just as other lights, only work when the game thinks its "dark." I have no idea why it was implemented this way and consider it pretty daft, but there it is.

Uhm... why? The SVD does not need zeroing over its effective range in ARMA2 because the PSO-1 Optics accurately provide an efficient and fast rangefinding mechanism that does not rely on relatively complex calculation á la Mil-Dot. Why would you need zeroing if you can just use one of the lower chevrons? Those are effectively "zeroed" to the distance you want to engage at. I see that you do know this, so I'm just curious. :-) As an aside, the "real" Dragunov obviously does have zeroing capability and unless you want to take quick shots, you would generally use this, falling back on the lower chevrons only if you want to engage at more than one kilometer where each additional chevron neatly corresponds to another 100 meters. The in-game PSO scope, just as the Dragunov itself, is fairly accurate as these things go, especially compared to some of the more heinous errors in either ARMA2 or DayZ (the Winchester... argh), but there are a few more features I'd love it to have in common with the real deal.

As already stated in my reply: your CD key has likely been stolen as the IP associated with detections of your GUID originate from the Ukraine whereas you are in Canada. I can only suggest running a current anti virus program on your system and notifying Steam/Bohemia Interactive and see if they can help. We're looking into it, I've flagged it for review by the person who added the ban; the same is true for the other ban appeals as far as I've spotted them. One ban was removed even though our confidence is relatively high because there is the slightest of chances that it was caused by a cheater bypassing remoteexecute. As previously stated, we *will* remove bans if appealed and there is even the slightest room for doubt (and usually, not even add them) -- but for the vast majority of the bans on this list, this simply does not hold true. It is regretable that some people have their CD Keys stolen (terrex isn't the first by a l~~~~~ong way, many CD Keys used by cheaters have been stolen from what we have been told by reliable sources), but we really cannot help with that other than pointing this out if it seems likely. In the case of terrex, we have several detections on various servers that clearly show that his GUID was hacking, but with an IP from the Ukraine. :/

This is not a fix, quite the contrary. You are using an outdated hive extension and while there is a problem with using the current one that appears fixed by doing what you did, you are potentially corrupting your database and producing errors our database team has to deal with -- which they won't be happy about.