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.

You won't be getting any tools. Dev team has made it perfectly clear that protecting players from potential admin abuse (since the dev team consistantly fails to ensure only responsible people run dayz servers) is far more important than combating hackers. The last straw for us was when we got an e-mail stating we were no longer in control of server restarting. Download DayZ Radar. Dev team threw a shitfest when they learned that someone had made their own log file phaser because ZOMG admins are going to use it to cheat, so you'll have to google around to find a copy. I'm willing to bet it won't be long before the dev team takes away log file access because you might use it to cheat....... even though you can go download an easy to use script to cheat. Amazing. The dev team has gone as far as removing the ability to reboot our own servers because it "might get abused," yet they do NOTHING about the rampart hacking, then they throw a shitfest and ban left and right when someone tries to get the word out of this great admin tool. I guess they think if they take everything away from the admins the hacking will stop?

Are you fucking kidding me? What is there to steal? Our vehicles are stolen every fucking day by hackers. EVERY FUCKING DAY. And these guys just get a maphack of their own and know exactly where the vehicles are. Your post is exactly what is wrong with the dev team. Yes, there are some shitty admins out there who probably would abuse this tool. But if that's the case, THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE A DAYZ SERVER in the first place. YOUR dev team is responsible for ensuring that responsible people operate DayZ servers. If you have cheaters who would abuse said scripts operating dayZ servers, that is a failure on behalf of THE DEV TEAM. I operate a DayZ server, and I WILL be using this tool. And I sincerenly hope you're just a forum mod and have no say in the development of this mod, because if this mod is being developed with the "oh wait server admins might use this to cheat, can't let them read the logs or restart the server!" mindset, i might go and download some scripts because there's no way any admin can ever ban anyone for anything.

holy shit, they posted your name, IP address, and GUID? every day I see entitled gaming clans do stupid shit, but that kind of high school level gossiping and "omg guis did u hear this cunt with the GUID ........... combat logs!!!??" has to be the most immature shit I've ever seen. as a general rule of thumb: stay away from any dayz servers operated by clans. They tend to be immature and power hungry.

Why exactly is the program malicious? Honestly the whole shitfest that went down when the guy posted that file is mind-boggling and absolutely hilarious.

How was their super sekret admin camp "reinforced?" With wire fences and tank traps, or did they use their admin powers to spawn in containers, walls, and control towers to make an impenetrable fortress only admins can get into? They said you were banned for "glitching" into their base. Seems kind of odd that admins think they know better than the dev team who makes the game operate the way it does. Maybe I'm just not reading this right.

Did you seriously just register an account here to gloat about how you download easy-to-use scripts off of hackforums and ruin people's fun? Aww, did you get your ego boost? You don't use SethHack by any chance, do you?

Maybe you just don't understand the meaning of the word "private." Private DayZ servers are just like every other multiplayer game server. Someone (or a large gaming clan) pays for the server, and runs it as they see fit. If DayZ did not exist, and you're trying to play ARMA II, or any other PC game for that matter, these are the types of people you might find running some servers. You can't do much except find another server to play on.

Some DayZ servers (and ARMA II servers) foolishly post the full logs of their servers on their clans website. I know of at least 6 major DayZ servers that do this, all servers that have been running since May (they appear to have the logs folders shared on the web server and they are publically accessible..... everything from BELogs to chat logs automatically gets saved there, so you can even read what people say in direct chat). If it's true that people are stealing other players' GUIDs, I'd recommend that you avoid playing on servers that are run by large gaming clans. Just Google search your own GUID or IP address and you'll probably find the servers I'm talking about if you've been playing ARMA II or DayZ since May. At the time they were one of the only decent DayZ servers.

Not all non-hive servers are run by abusive asshole admins. Your suggestion that it should be removed from the ARMA II server browser is just absurd; the developers oif a private mod have no right to pull servers from ARMA II. Once you start joining servers outside of the DayZ hive, you'll find the terrible, abusive, ban-happy admins that you're accustom to seeing in regular ARMA II and in other games. But you'll also find great servers run by friendly and positive people who don't abuse.

Simple solution to the constant "USER WAS KILLED" messages: don't play on "noob" servers that have side chat and kill messages enabled. Judging from your attitude you seem to be a proponent of making DayZ as hard and brutal as possible, so why are you playing on recruit servers? Those are easy mode, and practically cheating. Your second point isn't worth addressing because I don't know too many people who would willingly kill themselves lose all of their gear just to meet up with a friend. New players, yes, but once you get enough loot, it becomes laughable to even think about respawning. And to your third point: I'm assuming you're under the age of 18 here, since demanding that people get better Internet connections demonstrates zero knowledge of how telecommunications companies operate. Live in a rural area? The major ISPs like Comcast and Verizon aren't going to invest in your tiny little town with a population of 300! Why lay out all those expensive fiber optic cables for maybe 10 or 20 new subscribers? People living in rural areas have one choice for Internet, and it's usually slow DSL (if they're lucky) or satellite Internet. Live in Boston? Comcast Internet shitty? Too bad, Mayor Menino blocked Verizon from providing high-speed Internet in Boston because Verizon didn't want to pay to install fiber-optic cable in low-income neighborhoods. Boston isn't the only city that's blocked ISPs from setting up in their cities.