SPESSMEHREN (DayZ)

Was working fine yesterday but now I'm getting stuck at "waiting for host" on every server I join. Earlier if I waited like 5 minutes it'd eventually go through but now it's not doing anything. Been sitting on this screen for over 10 minutes.

Honestly doing this wouldn't even be necessary if I could find a single server that is daytime, since it is supposed to be daytime right now.

Except staying on the server until the server haults increases the liklihood of corrupting player data. (at least in my experience)

I always have the "Do you want to end 'arma2oa.exe'?" dialog opened and have the "End Process" button selected so that if a hacker comes on, all I have to do is hit Alt+Tab then Space to abort the process. Takes 3 seconds.

So what happens when hacks come out that automatically engage the "combat mode" on every player before teleporting them into the air or mass slaying everyone? I haven't played DayZ in over a month, but when I did, my playstyle involved avoiding combat as much as possible. I can count on one hand the amount of times someone has Alt+F4'd on me. However, I can't even count the amount of times I've been teleported into the air, mass slayed, thunderdome'd, died at the hands of a player with an AS50 TWS who inexplicably appears in front of me, shoots, and vanishes, etc etc. The rampart hacking problem is far more widespread and detrimental to the gameplay experience than combat logging. It seems to me that the ones who have problems with combat logging are the deathmatchers, bandits, and realism combat sim players. I don't have a problem with people choosing to play the game differently, but hacking is so widespread that it affects EVERYONE, regardless of their playstyle. This combat logging fix only benefits those whose playstyle involves a lot of combat, while harming everyone else. I can no longer keep Task Manager open and press Alt+Tab+Shift to abort the process in the event of a hacker attack. Now, if a hacker gets to me, I get to choose: die at the hands of the hacker, or let the game kill me because it thinks I'm cheating (oh the irony there). I've been trying to get back into DayZ, but whenever I begin to make any progress, I always die due to hackers. Just last week I loaded up DayZ for the first time in weeks and tried out a new private hive server. I spent hours searching for a vehicle, and finally found one. When I went to scavange parts, the entire server was teleported to the ocean. I then spent 30 minutes trying to get the "Respawn" button to appear (a great feature to remove when people are getting teleported outside the map, eh?), and another 50 minutes running back to the vehicle. Got it repaired, then got mass slay'd. At this point I had invested about 6 hours of time into the game, and got nothing.

So these base building tools... do they allow players to make 100% impenetrable fortresses where they can store their 200 cars without worrying about someone stealing them? I mostly play DayZ as a lone scavenger (I never repair vehicles myself or collect loot; I always steal from others since it's so easy to find other players' camps), and if that's true, I fear I won't be able to make much progress.

Official BIS announcement: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?138736-Introducing-Server-side-Event-Logging-Blocking

Our old server had vehicles for about a week after it came online, but vehicles started vanishing (not stolen, not blown up, they just, vanished on a server restart). Sometimes they'd vanish altogether, other times they'd turn into other vehicles. After seven days none of the vehicles that vanished respawned. After 14 days none respawned. There were only 3 vehicles serverwide by that time. None of them were stored off-map. Is this a part of that bug?

You can thank the mod team for sticking that thread in the other subforum encouraging players to report servers that they see locked to its host with no evidence or knowledge of the situation. Absolutely absurd, reporting servers because one person sees it locked for 2 minutes is no different from admins banning players for "suspected" hacking/disconnecting to avoid PVP etc. Oh wait there is a difference: admins that ban on "hunches" with no evidence get blacklisted, while players who report servers based on "hunches" with no evidence get praised! I'm glad we don't have our public server anymore. The first time we made the mistake of updating our server to the latest version of DayZ, so many people connected the second the server came up that we tripped our server host's DDoS protection system. It's very disheartening to know that if we ever had a situation like that now, we'd be blacklisted for locking the server, even if the only other option is getting our service terminated due to high bandwidth consumption/DDoS.

That's happening due to database corruption. When we used to have a hive-connected server I had a UAZ for 2 weeks until it vanished. I found a GAZ not even 500 feet away, kept that for a few days until it vanished and I found a minivan in its place (at first I thought someone had driven up in the van and stolen the GAZ, but that didn't make any sense since I had it parked in the wilderness, and you can run faster than the GAZ offroad, while the minivan has a decent offroad speed) Unfortunatly when vehicles disappear altogether, they don't respawn. When we got rid of our hive-connected server we were down to 3 working vehicles; none had spawned in over seven days. This has been a problem for over a month, and since nothing was getting done about it we shut down our public server in favor of a private server that doesn't have database corruption issues.

There are serious problems with the way the database syncing works that cause vehicles to become corrupted after they spawn. The problem is (at least this is how I think it works) when a vehicle's database entry is corrupted, it despawns, but never spawns again. So once your server is running for a while and all of the vehicles on your server become corrupted (and it will become corrupted) none spawn anymore. Private servers do not have this problem since it uses a local database and better syncing code, so if you really want vehicles to spawn, I'd suggest abandoning the "official" hive and setting up a private server. You can add as many vehicle spawns as you want if you go that route. Private servers still suffer from tent problems though. But at least vehicles don't vanish forever.

Before yesterday you could have opened up the RPT file and checked who spawned in items. But the DayZ Dev team decided to remove RPT logging because admins might use that to cheat, and elliminating potential admin abuse > elliminating hackers. There is nothing you can do. The DayZ Dev team has made sure of that.

Did they do that within the past day? Oh wow, I called it. I so called it. In my post yesterday I said RPT data would be removed because the dev team cares more about the potential for admin abuse than they do about stopping hackers. The fact is, the DayZ staff believe that, because of their failure to ensure competent, trustworthy people operate DayZ servers, they must take away every single thing that sever admins could potentially abuse. When I said this in another thread, a forum mod responded by saying "oh yeah what are you gonna do when a server admin uses the radar tool to find your vehicle camp, steal them, and gun you down?" I think this is the sentiment shared by the community. Granted, there is no vehicle to steal because hackers keep teleporting them and stealing them, but the DayZ dev team is far more concerned about admin abuse to give a shit.

BattlEye will never improve its security, and if I use a BattlEye bypass, I'm as good as invisible. I actually enjoy playing ARMA II, so I'd never risk my CD key and use hacks. The reason there are so many hackers out there is because people bought ARMA II and Combined Ops just to play DayZ and got bored of it for one reason or another (its too hard, too unforgiving, not Call of Duty, too many bugs, hackers, etc), tried regular ARMA II and didn't like it, so they downloaded hacks to have "fun" in DayZ since it doesn't matter to them if they get globally banned.

There used to be serious problems with vehicle spawning. On some servers, vehicles wouldn't spawn at all. On other servers, vehicles would spawn, but their database entries would become corrupted within days and they would despawn but not delete. When enough vehicles become corrupt, it breaks the respawn system so no more vehicles spawn (I think the server still sees the corrupted vehicles as existing even though they can't spawn). I'm not sure if that was ever fixed.