septuscap

I gotta say, I was seeing red at first but Lee Vilayer handled this really well imo.

I think it's important to bold the "features" because while DayZ is billed as a sandbox, there is a HUGE distinction between sandbox games and sandbox mentality. I could join a BF2 game and aside from the fact that there is a win condition, it has the same "sandbox" elements as DayZ -- that is to say, none. The persistence + LACK of a win condition ALLOWED players to mess around like they would in a sandbox, but there are no sandbox tools besides those inherent to any game. Take away the win conditions of ANY shooter, and you'd have the same essence as DayZ. I can snipe in BF2, or heal people, or hoard vehicles, or take their kit after I kill them. Compare this to an ACTUAL sandbox like Ultima, EVE, minecraft. Players can take on different roles entirely all within the same game. In order for that to happen, the GAME needs to create environments that FACILITATE players filling these roles. Clearly some games are more suited to certain roles than others, but I just don't see it ever developing in DayZ. It's been 6 months with zero progress, I expect the same pace in standalone.

This game has the shittiest synchronization I've ever seen, keep fanboying.

Or maybe you use your eyes before instinctively hitting reply and posting useless shit?

You keep saying there are no statistics when arma2.swec.se offers them. And the numbers aren't good. What does the industry think about LOSING 1.3 million players in less than 3 months? And really 1.3 million means jack shit when you have hackers cracking your cd keys and giving you a +1 every time they evade their ban. I will always be grateful to DayZ for showing the industry how much people want sandbox games, but I was not impressed with the quality of the game. Except that DayZ crashed mid-summer around July.

You're the guy that had to wait for everyone else to point out Waldo aren't you. "O-o-o-of course I saw him already I was just waiting for the next one" -Muffinman at age 5

http://arma2.swec.se/game/statistics gives real stats (including "unofficial"), and the game has been crashing and burning. DayZ is in alpha, ARMA IS NOT. Game is broken, bugged, and hacked, mod delivers no new features for months on end. Pair that with fundamental flaws in design and you get players moving on. Edit: to your point, yea once everyone bails on the game, hackers will get bored trolling the 20k remaining fanboys.

If you're playing a game of chess and some one comes by and knocks all the pieces over, you don't have to care a lot about chess to be mad at the fucker. He has a problem with HACKING.

Yes we call them fucking morons.

1. You don't just trust randoms, and you SURE AS SHIT don't trust them when you have gear you want to hold onto. Would it have been so hard to put your shit on a tent/vehicle and go meet them with some scrub gear? 2. When some one with a thick Australian accent asks you for no reason if you're an American, the correct answer is 1) NO, or 2) *SHOOT THEM IN THE FACE* 3. You purposely turning your back on some one aiming at your head does not inspire trust. You're a moron. 4. If you don't say something interesting, what do you offer to the group? In other words, you must at all times add more value than the novelty of killing and teabagging your corpse.

There's rarely one cause for anything really, and you listed a few of the factors. A lot of it had to do with DayZ being the only sandbox available. Like early MMO's, when you're the only game on the block you don't have to offer much. Moving to the next game was NOT the chief reason though. Yes Guildwars2 came out, but most people I know play multiple games, and I see many people playing OLDER games instead of DayZ. You can only offer a broken, buggy, hacked game with no actual content besides hunger/thirst for so long before people move on. Boredom, frustration, better alternatives, whatever you want to call it. The PvP was decent but the context rarely changed (I would argue making vehicles rare had a lot to do with this, but that alone would only have added so much). The goals were pretty weak (drop tent, drive vehicle around, that's it?). The features were pretty poorly implemented (server hopping, combat logging, humanity farming, etc). The pace of new content was extremely slow, bordering on non-existent (oh we removed pistols on spawn, we changed cz spawn rates, we removed bandit skins, we added bandit skins -- when the fuck will a new feature ever be implemented? My bet is on never). And the level of polish of ArmA, the underlying game, gave little confidence for the standalone, and made for a hugely frustrating DayZ experience. It's easy to overlook killing a buddy by walking into him, getting killed by trees/rocks/doors/etc, having to work around a shitty interface for loot, doors, doorWAYS, ladders, etc, hacks, etc. But eventually you just say fuck it.

Okay here's "constructive." When random gamers fix your bugs in a private hive before you do it on the official mod, you're going to get shit for it. And people will question your ability to make a proper product at all. When you constantly argue ArmA's niche means you can get away with sloppy coding (re: blatant security flaws, shitty UI, horrible desync with < 50 players, horrible physics bugs killing you, etc), you hurt your future sales. I am in software, and it pisses me off to no end when people use budget as an excuse for shitty code. It wouldn't take you MORE time to have coded it right, you just made the MISTAKE of coding it wrong. And you hiding behind a small company or low budget just makes me think I'm in for more of the same with ArmA3/standalone DayZ. Big surprise, the fanboys' kneejerk reaction of "NO IT'S JUST PRIVATE HIVES" was complete bullshit.

I personally knew upwards of 100 people playing DayZ. Of those, I know of 2 who still play. I don't think I'm an isolated case either, so you can shove your head in the sand if you want, but the 250k -> 70k stat is the only hard # you have. Even a casual glance at the lobby will show utterly vacant servers.

So if some one else loses their gear it's okay but you losing your gear is unacceptable. Typical ArmA idiots.

Venthos, there is a difference between "sanctioned" and sloppily coded. Letting anyone run a script on the SERVER is sloppy. In fact it's not just sloppy, it's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard of. HACKING from the perspective of an untrusted client leaves you a lot less room to exploit (ie. reading incoming data destined for your client to figure out there is another player in the vicinity, etc, versus spawning in weapons, teleporting around the world, implementing god mode, etc). How about auth servers to prevent rampant cd key hacking? I could go on but you're obviously even more retarded than Bohemia. Thanks for linking some pseudo-education which most people use to inform themselves instead of actually knowing what the fuck you're talking about.