RaysGoodLiquor

http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/56-dayz-stories/

I'm going to go commit suicide now. It was fun while it lasted.

Survivor - Winchester Bandit - FAL

It's a reflection of what's going on in game. The game has nose dived into a gigantic hacking spree of late with multiple releases of public BI by passers, so it gets talked about here. When everyone is pissed off from in game events, you're going to get some anarchy in the forums.

Because the average mentality of the people that play this game is that if you can't be banned for it, it must be acceptable behavior.

What is a "fagget?"

Damn dude, your keyboard flex gave me goosebumps.

What is a man toy twitch? Is that Aussie slang or something?

Yay! More free scripted in trash!

My beans, good sir. I haven't run into this issue yet as I've yet to find a helicopter, but I understand the concern of pilots DCing.

I'm not writing this to cry about hacking. The current state of the game and community has encouraged me to stop playing for a while, and this is just an observation I have made that I think would benefit the future of the game. I don't need to tell you about the hacking problem. If you've played the game for more than a week, and have refrained from using scripts yourself, you already know how bad it is. I've already read everyone public statement Rocket about the game at least twice, so I understand where editing the engine and/or replacing BattleEye with an anti-cheat system that actually works would cost more in labor than what it is worth to the developers. It's a business, I understand, and that's not my beef. With anti-cheat measures about as effective as a 50lb bouncer, there has been a huge influx of "QQ Hacker" threads scattered throughout this site's various forums. This is a natural response from a dissatisfied customer, but I feel that the way the threads are being handled by staff is further contributing to the problem. When an obviously new player hits the forums to let you guys know how unhappy he or she is with the developers efforts to stop scripting, they are met with the standard response, "This has been addressed, we can't and aren't going to do anything about it, we promise that when you pay us for the standalone version we will fix everything, and thread locked. As a prior professional forum moderator and eventually administrator (professional as in I got paid to do it), I completely understand the need to "clean up" the forums to prevent 15 threads on the front page all discussing the same thing, but very few of the threads I'm seeing are open discussions as much as an outright complaint directed towards the development team. Why is this a big deal? 1) Scripting, and the excessive rare loot still circulating in the game's "item economy" has made the game unplayable for a lot of people. If you've been able to be one of the lucky ones that have played for 500 hours and never ran into a hacker (I call bullshit on this one), you must at least agree that loot balance is totally screwed up thanks to AS50 Thermals being about as easy to find as a Lee Enfield. 2) The problem is serious enough that the company, as well as personal pages from developers (like twitter) are getting bombed with feedback about it. When your customer base gets desperate for progress and is met with, "we can't do anything about it," that player quickly loses his faith in the company. With the massively over-hyped blockbuster titles of the last couple years turning out to be taking steps backwards in the realm of game development, creativity, customer support, and game code integrity, customers are getting extremely skittish about throwing their hard earned money at games that don't show support above and beyond the trash gamers have been subjected to by larger companies. Long story short, I believe that the standard response of your hands being tied is making people think that the standalone will be a slightly more polished version of what we have already, and only that. It appears that the biggest priorities for the community is scripting and game breaking bugs (tent/vehicle saving, artifacting, humanity glitches causing skin changes in the middle of a firefight, etc.). These are also the two issues that the devs have dropped the ball on the hardest, with hackers being apparently impossible to minimize, and patches designed to fix bugs that ultimately make them worse. When I got the news that DayZ was going standalone, the first thing I wanted to know was where could I preorder it, but with the way things have been handled as I stated above, I'm going to give the game a long time to be property reviewed by the community before I make the decision to purchase. I'm terrified that this is going to be another Diablo 3. I recognize that this post would be pointless without suggestions on how to fix it, so here we go. 1) Make a sticky post in general discussion for people to bitch about hacking. I recognize this can be a bad business idea, because new players doing research on the game will be immediately greeted with a "we have a hacking problem" billboard, but it's still far better than telling a complaining customer that you can't do anything about it. You can still lock random QQ threads, but your customers will appreciate a link to the appropriate are to post as opposed to telling them to learn how to use the search function and leaving them to their own devices. 2) Take the leash off the server admins and let them do their jobs. They are literally the only thing standing between the legitimate players and scripters, especially when our anti-cheat system feels like armor made out of wet toilet paper. The basis of proof for a Rocket sanctioned ban is rediculous and unwarranted in a game so plagued with cheaters. 3) Encourage private hives. These are the last servers left that have any reasonable control over their servers and what goes down on them. Private hives can utilize more extensive anti-cheat measures and deal with hacking nearly immediately. It seems like a lot of private hives are run by clans as well, and the general in game community problems are much less sporadic. 4) Shut down the public hive, thus forcing players to private hives until the standalone. It ties into #3, and it also eliminates the threat of ghosting, server hopping snipers, server hopping loot/vehicle campers, and gearing up on a totally empty server just to switch to a high pop server with gear you wouldn't have been able to get nearly as easily with other players in the server. This also means that servers that have inactive admin will be plagued with scripted items, but servers that are run by decent admin won't have to worry about someone going on X unmonitored server to spawn all their shit in, and then switch to the monitored server. If you can't move character saves between servers, the hackers on server X won't affect the gameplay of people on server Y, meaning that a handful of hackers can't ruin every server on the queue list at their leisure. 5) If you are going to focus on the standalone, consider shutting down DayZ support all together. This is an alpha, and while you guys use it for game testing, the community uses it to get a good idea of what they are about to spend money on. If you quietly abandon the mod, players are going to get a horrible experience while testing and never consider buying the game (Battlefield 3 anyone?). Don't cut your nose off to spite your face. All of these solutions are far better than any efforts I've seen so far on the dev teams part, but don't take that as me suggesting that you guys aren't concerned. I want to see DayZ succeed, but there is some sort of collapse going on right now. The rewards for cheating right now greatly outnumber the risks, and when the community's complaints are met with a shrug of the shoulders, we either give in and start scripting, or lose faith in your ability to control your game, and just move on to something else. You guys develop PC games, and coming from a guy who starting gaming long before consoles even imagine being connected to the internet, that's a big deal. For that very reason, I have much higher expectations from you than the crooks over at Activision/EA/etc, and I always will for developers that focus on the PC platform. Rethink your approach to dealing with the community to better inspire hope for an awesome standalone, as opposed to making us think that you guys don't care, don't know what you're doing, or have better things to do. Please take my suggestions into consideration, and thank you for your time. RaysGoodLiquor TL;DR: just respond with TL;DR and move on. Edit: It's 3am here and I don't have any juice left to fix my grammatical/spelling errors. If you can't read it, let me know and I'll revise it tomorrow.

Very true, but this post doesn't have much to do with that. It recognizes what I see as a problem, lists potential problems this can cause for the future, and some suggestions to temporarily deal with the issues until something more permanent can be done.

They have to fix the duping/scripting first, otherwise we will be back to where we were within days.

Wow, I'm so used to getting responses like "GTFO shitheel, Rocket said it's ok for me to use a thermal AS50 as long as I wasn't the one who scripted it in!" I should have addressed this in the post as well, because the mentality that using scripted items is acceptable simply because it isn't a bannable offense is a cancer to this community. This mentality leads to one scripter providing items for an entire group/clan, and although none of the recipients can be globally banned, the exact same negative effects are felt in game. @Grez, I completely agree with your critiques, as I only meant for those suggestions to be potential short term solutions until a more organized solution can be presented. I see the current state of the game to be, well, in distress. Sometimes you have to stick your thumb in the bullet hole until the corpsman has time to come see you. It's not going to magically heal your wound, but it will keep you alive long enough to receive real medical attention.

I'm very excited to hear that the mod will eventually be, more or less, handed over to the mod community as a whole. I agree that understaffing contributes to the lack of developer feedback, but I would be willing to bet that anyone that has played this game and knows anything about coding would be willing to contribute to make the mod better. Without a dedicated dev team, this may be the only route to keep it alive, especially beyond standalone release.

It all depends on your muzzle velocity. I have a .357 mag pocket revolver and a suppressor won't do shit for it, namely because revolvers with unsealed cylinders are unable to be suppressed due to gas leaking out the base of the barrel. I know that 180 grain .38 ammunition is naturally subsonic, like 9mm and .45 ACP, but if you are legitimately shooting a supersonic .357 round out of a suppressed rifle and it isn't producing a supersonic crack, you should be awarded the Nobel Prize is physics. There are a lot of factors involved in the process though. Barrel length, chamber pressure, rifling twist ratio, quality of the ammunition, etc. I've never fired a .357 from a rifle, but I imagine that the normally supersonic magnum round is slowed down to subsonic speeds by the additional friction from a longer barrel. Just speculating though without putting your rifle on a chronograph. Edit: Are we talking about .357 magnum or .357 SIG? I'm almost positive that .357 SIG rounds are naturally subsonic.

I think it's just an effect in DayZ. Obviously, a supersonic round traveling down range will reach it's target before the sound does, but "close calls" definitely have an audible "whizz" to them. I don't think the "crack" in the game represents the round breaking the sound barrier, but it hitting a solid object. The SD ammo in game seems to be an attempt at adding subsonic rounds, because shooting SD ammo through a non suppressed weapon has negative effects on the shooter (or is it regular Stanag mags through a suppressed M4?). Either way, using them in the incorrect combination makes your accuracy loose butthole. Not realistic, but it is trying to compensate for the fact that using a suppressor and supersonic ammunition is a bad thing.

I've been playing a relatively short time, and have been thunderdomed 6 times. Must be legit...

Doesn't mean much. Companies like Riot Games started with extremely small staffs and 1 game, and I'll be honest, I haven't seen customer support like that in the gaming industry since Valve got started. If they made another game that I can find some sort of interest in, I would have no problem throwing money at them. When the mod has 1,000,000 unique players, I think it's time to start asking for a team, especially when your parent company has already greenlighted you for a standalone release. Same with Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Gary's Mod, etc. Sorry I only named Valve games, but it's really late and that's all that came to mind immediately, lol.

I seem to remember a time when both could be expected of a game developer, ESPECIALLY on the PC.

Thanks for the fast and constructive response. I agree that Rocket's team has the correct vision for the game, but the duality between a broken, sometimes unplayable mod and a "holy grail" of sorts standalone release is making the team cut their nose off to spite their face. Keeping the alpha on the market with so many issues can be detrimental to the standalone release.

Interesting... One of the guys I play with had zero issues with the game, until he started getting CD key errors 4 or 5 days ago. We did everything we could think of, short of formatting his hard drive. He reinstalled and initiated both games through steam, tried multiple versions of Dayz, and even used DayZ files from multiple download mirrors to ensure there wasn't a file or two being lost in transition. When all else failed, he contacted Bohemia support. The ultimate solution was Bohemia gave him a free digital copy of Operation Arrowhead without an explanation as to what the problem was to begin with. We couldn't think of a scenario where an unbanned CD key would just shit itself, but this seems to make a lot of sense.

Depends how long you have been gone, but from my experience, the problems in the game are progressively getting worse as the weeks go by.

If you're items are getting loose, just lay off them for a couple weeks until they tighten back up. You can always suggest that they start doing kegel exercises.

Did you skip the OP's post? He said that it was stupid to have separate ammunition for a suppressed weapon with the implication that the ballistics of the ammunition are irrelevant to suppression. A suppressor does NOTHING in regards of preventing the supersonic "crack" of a round, which is the main contributor to noise when firing. The OP is correct to an extent, but only when you apply it to the M9 SD in game. 9mm is naturally subsonic, and therefor standard ammunition can be used with a suppressor to achieve the maximum effect. 5.56 NATO is supersonic, so firing a standard 5.56 through a suppressed weapon will do pretty much nothing to reduce noise. To compensate for this, rounds have been specifically designed with a lower powder charge to propel an otherwise supersonic round at subsonic speeds, removing the supersonic "crack", while the suppressor does it's job of allowing excess expanding gas to disperse more rapidly than from an unported barrel. Most gas operated rifles have issues using subsonic ammunition, because it often lacks the extra pressure to cycle the bolt. This is why you rarely see a stock suppressed AK variant, because you have to manually chamber every round after firing due to the pressure lost from using subsonic ammunition. I say again, the OP doesn't know shit about firearms, or at least how weapon suppression works. I also can't seem to find a list of Arma 2 in game muzzle velocities. Would you mind showing me where you found them so I can verify you claims about me not knowing shit?