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This isn't the first time a 7thCav member or admin "friend" has shut their server down because they died and lost their stuff. http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3798 A few people got banned for killing the admin, with the reason given being "ghosting on TS". I was actually on the Teamspeak at the time it happened and was banned for backing up the folks that posted that thread. We're actually friends now, and they're pretty cool dudes that don't like admin clans ruining servers with their BS. Wonder why! 7thCav seems to have issues with people outplaying them and stealing their things~

How to prevent Ghosting: Whenever a player logs out/disconnects from a server, the server saves their location info for a specified amount of time (15-30 minutes perhaps). If that player logs back in within that time frame, the server puts them at their previous location, overriding any change in their location that may have occurred via server-hopping.

Hey guys, I've been playing this mod now for a couple of weeks and it is without a doubt one of the most unique and compelling ideas I have ever seen. When I first saw the "average life expectacy: 32 minutes" on the page I thought "Pfft, noobs" and then proceeded to die in about 32 seconds on my first avatar. Hearing gunshots in the distance has never been so electrifying in any other game, nor has the scope of the world ever been approached in a game like this. With all that positive stuff being said, however, my friends and I have been compiling a list of suggestions that we feel would make the game more interesting and hopefully address what we perceive as some issues. I have read some of these ideas in other posts or talking in passing with other players about them but decided to compile them here to 5 main points. Several of these ideas relate to one another and I'll try to point these out. 1.) Ammo Scarcity As it stands, there is no ammo scarcity. Go into any barn and find a Winchester with 15-30 rounds. Paw through Cherno or Electro and you'll wind up passing up so many bits of ammo because your inventory is completely full. At one point I had just respawned a new character and had a Lee Enfield with 50 rounds within 30 minutes. This problem I believe stems from two things. First, I don't believe that currently ammo can spawn in any capacity other than full. Continuing with the Winchester example, if I see one on the ground with 2 sets of shells near it, I am guaranteed 30 rounds. Ideally, each "drop" should contain an extremely low amount of ammo. If I see a Winchester with 2 sets of ammo next to it, I should realistically get 2-4 rounds. Secondly, not enough targets. Even if ammo was made really scarce, all that you're changing is to make it take longer to stockpile, not truly making it scarce. More zombies, zombies that take more shots, heavy zombie concentrations around better loot areas, etc. could all have a bearing on this. The ideal scenario is that you would be almost forced to expend ammo to have a chance to gain it. Obviously stealth should still have a role, especially in smaller towns where new people who don't have weapons need to get started, but it shouldn't negate the need to engage zombies completely. Different types of zombies could be tied in here as well, so zombies in military grade gear areas could be a lot more aggressive / intelligent / stealth detecting. 2.) Military Grade Gear I very strongly feel that most of the military gear has no place in the current game, especially things like the DMR or L85. Why? Several reasons. First, it focuses player activity around certain areas. Rather than organically running into people and utilizing the full world, almost all of the players are centered around one of about four places. This encourages what has been referred to as "DeathMatching" in several other threads which, I think we can all agree, is not the point of the mod. Killing for no reason than "lulz I have a sniper rifle and I'm bored" is overall bad for the game because it discourages new people. This could partly be resolved by making gear spawning less deterministic in location. There are plenty of towns that have no military gear spawn chance that are completely ignored. A guy who lives down the street from me in real life has a working AK47, so I don't think it is too far a stretch to think that gear should be more randomized. This could be further enhanced by having a diminishing returns on gear spawn rate - if there's a 10% chance of something spawning originally, it goes down by 1% per hour where a player is in the area and back up by 1% when there is not. The goal is to encourage whole map usage and multiple locations. Secondly, it enters MMO style "gear rushing". Things such as the L85 or Night Vision Goggles are simply better in every respect than their alternatives. There is no reason to find a clever use for road flares or chem lights or flashlights or anything like that - just rush the NVG spawn until you find some and you're set forever. Which is truly a shame, because night time play without them is an experience I haven't found anywhere else. For contrast, a Makarov has common ammunition but poor damage compared to a 1911. A Lee Enfield has proper iron sights for better long range shooting, but a Winchester is quieter and has a larger magazine size. These are weapons with tradeoffs. Thirdly, things such as the DMR or L85 don't promote what I believe the game is about - realistic survival. A semi automatic sniper rifle one hit kill / thermal optics assault rifle is not an anti zombie weapon or a self defense weapon or even a hunting weapon - it's a player killing weapon. And not even a "kill you for your beans" type of weapon since you will likely be killing someone far away that you won't even bother looting. This problem is related to #1 (ammo scarcity) and could in theory be alleviated by it. A DMR would be fine if you really had to think about pulling the trigger instead of just spraying down an area with 7.62 rounds knowing you have 20 more clips in your tent. Making military grade ammo ultra rare could be the balancing factor. 3.) Gear Degradation Without going into a lot of detail, basically Fallout or FarCry2 style gear degradation. The more you use something, the more wear it suffers and eventually needs to be repaired using similar things, leading to jams, misfires, reduced accuracy, etc. This would help make common guns like a Makarov more interesting (easier to maintain) and help to reel in some of the higher end weapons by making them harder to maintain as you would need to visit more dangerous areas to find similar components. It also makes looting more interesting because you might find a rusty shotgun which is unreliable and eventually loot your way up to a shiny new one. Also, being outside in inclement weather or being hit by zombies could degrade the weapon. 4.) Reasons to Work Together This is perhaps the toughest one on the list, but it is related to all the other points. Right now I will shoot anyone on sight that is near me or that I think sees me. Why? There's no reason not to. Right now the game exists in a sort of "Prisoner's Dilemma" state - since there is nothing to be gained from working together with a stranger, if I let him live the outcomes are either "I keep living, which I would have done anyway" or "I die and he takes my beans." That's an obvious choice. To be clear, this is not a "take away PvP" suggestion. Player killing is an integral part of the game and not one I want to see go away. All I want to see is a reason for me to consider not shooting on sight. Making ammunition more scarce makes this more interesting. I might need to bluff with my empty shotgun. We might decide that we each have a few rounds and we can therefore loot a better place. We might find that since we lack the means to shoot eachother in the first milliseconds, we have a chance at interaction. I might find him chasing me with a crowbar as I take off running into the woods, trying to loose him over a hill top or something rather than turning a corner and getting 2 slugs in the chest and a respawn screen. I'm not sure if the ArmA engine allows for it, but imagine having a friend help you over a wall you couldn't get over normally. Or even just small things like that might nudge you in the peace direction: - having another player bandage you restoring some blood. - limiting the amount of gadgets you can carry at one time so finding a guy with a compass or a hunting knife is useful alive rather than as loot. - being able to share resources, such as if I select a can of beans I can "eat beans" or "share beans with Joe". If I eat them it works like today where I get 100% food restored, but if I share it we each get 50% food restored. It's not often that I consume resources at 0% so this could let groups be a bit more rewarding. You could even go full bore with this and have a class that you choose at rollup. Are you going to be a medic (faster and more healing bandages / transfusions, maybe can set broken bones without morphine)? A huntsman (more and better animal meat)? A gunsmith (better / more efficient gun maintenance)? Having people being able to bring different skillsets to the table provides a lot more in the way of making interactions more interesting. 5.) Cheap Stuff Some of this is bugs, some of it is just what we consider non-ideal design decisions. A lot of this has been hashed already so just a quick summary. This is the sort of stuff where I die and question whether I actually want to keep playing. I have had friends quit over some of this as well. Dying is not a problem as its the core of the mod - dying to stupid things or things completely outside your control is what is frustrating. - Zombie speed. wtf. Combined with extremely poor hit registration / death registration, every encounter with zombies right now is a wait until they're running straight at you or run inside and kill them as they come through the door. - Being knocked out. My most recent character died because he was knocked out on the first hit from one zombie from 9300 blood. The hourglass timer must have been set to a minute or something because that one zombie killed me before I could get back up. I don't dislike the idea of being knocked out, but lets make the durations and trigger zones reasonable. - Zombie ghosting. Zombies moving through walls and their frankly atrocious pathing in and around buildings is a touch infuriating. This might be an ArmA AI issue, but even still. - Standing up when crossing a threshold. I have absolutely no idea what causes this or what if anything I can do to prevent it, but I have died several times when stealthing among zombies and my avatar decides he's going to stand up. - Ammo refilling. From what I have read it sounds like this is being addressed but wanted to throw it up anyway. I noticed this when I found a suppressed M9 and was using it to loot a small village at the end of a play session. When I came back the next day it had full ammo again. I did a bit of googling and it sounds like there are quite a few people abusing this with some weapons. - Instant logout. I hear this is being addressed as well but wanted to put my support behind it. 5-10 minutes from your last being hit (or almost being hit) or shot fired would be fine. Thoughts and responses welcome.

cute btw i've screen n posted like 13 of =DRN= disconnecting and ghosting n still failing to defend their NWAF... this is another exploit 2 of us versus 13 =DRN= lol FAIL 5 down rest DC'd never came back

In your opinion, is it acceptable to disconnect and reconnect to enter a building that has had the entrance blocked off by barbed wire or some other obstacle? For example, I was looting some medical tents yesterday and saw some ammo for my gun inside a tent, however, the entrance had been blocked off by barbed wire. I had no qualms ghosting inside to get the loot, however, I was wondering if others felt the same about situations like these.

Guys, this is alpha, it is meant to test how the game system works and what exploits need to be wiped out its the most early stage of a game, and people shouldn't be expecting to have fair gameplay or even balanced one, since this is beyond pure functionality and goes into balancing, which is most of the time made in beta or even after game release however, i totally agree that this needs primary attention right now: 1) Server hopping (also known as ghosting) People disconnect, when confronted with a camp thats surrounded with fences for example, and jus log in where they want to I know rocket has done much to make the game a persistent world, but with so many servers and the game type, it just doesnt fit well together 2)DC'ing in mids combat Annoying, yet not gamebreaking, maybe give people a 10 minute ban from the master game server when they log out in cities or near any building whatsoever, maybe even let people spawn nowhere except in forrests... i dont know, i have no solution to this All in all, at the moment, i really feel like server-side saved characters would be way better, you start new on every server on the beach... however this could be annoying with servers thatare always full, or clan servers with too many members etc. sry for doubleposting, but

You deserved to die when you are ghosting . I hope all the server admins read this and ban you since you want to exploit.

OK im sure i havnt thought fully through the potential negatives of this, but i couldnt find any thread directly related to this suggestion (im sure theyre there) Does anyone think it would be a good idea for say a player to be refrained from entering a server until all other survivors were at least 40m away (whatever distance), this is to avoid exploits such as ghosting, meeting up via meta gaming (teamspeak, skype) and generally reduce server hoping. A note on teamspeak, i do use it myself in DayZ, i wasnt really intending on diminishing its use, but more those very lucky situations where peeps have been able to meet up precisely and log in at the same place on the same server via team speak. The only problem i can see with this is potentially friends just logging out for the night in the same safe place, having troubles getting back into the same safe location together. LIke i say im sure there would be more negatives to this. Any suggestions or similiar threads?

It seems to be a problem' date=' maybe less these days but I don't know, anyway that part of the timers is very,very benign compared to the "do not leave the fight" timers, and the first level that annoys clean players can be brought down even more by increasing the exponent part (say 10s->30s->90s ...) I guess if the anti-ghosting measure can be implemented quickly we'll see if the "DC epidemic" goes down or not. As far as getting punished due to software issues, I believe that my end of the argument would be cleared up on a couple of levels if the following where to happen: 1) The game required a more stable build of Arma II. a lot of the good features and preventative measures lately have required the beta build however it wasn't until this latest build that I started having problems. 2)Servers ran the latest version. Also something which propped up, since a lot of servers were still running 1.60.0 of the Arma client but they required a later beta version. I am beginning to suspect my issues are a combination of these things, as certain servers I will not crash on despite 12 hours of gameplay. This might make disconnect timers more tolerable, however certainly not for more than a minute. There are two levels of disconnecting to avoid consequences: 1) Zombie clearing: I wonder how hard it would be for the server to store how many zombies are on aggro with you when you disconnect. Understanding of course that the more the server has to keep track of, the less performance you are going to get out of the system... 2) Escaping pvp: The hardest to justify - it does happen, on both ends of the scale(Pvpers disconnecting to avoid retribution, people in general disconnecting to avoid death.) If there was something simple to keep track of outside of just a flat penalty, this would be a lot cleaner.

It seems to be a problem' date=' maybe less these days but I don't know, anyway that part of the timers is very,very benign compared to the "do not leave the fight" timers, and the first level that annoys clean players can be brought down even more by increasing the exponent part (say 10s->30s->90s ...) I guess if the anti-ghosting measure can be implemented quickly we'll see if the "DC epidemic" goes down or not.

On "the other thread" (http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=26504, warning foaming at the mouth from the get go...) someone had actually a pretty smart idea to prevent "ghosting" (defined as disconnecting, then using another server to flank and reconnecting to the original server), have a timer (he suggest 1h) during which you cannot return to the server you came from (I'm not 100% if he meant that this should happen only if you connected to another server in between, probably or it would again be "penalizing" those who just have their connection dropped from underneath them). However it does not solve disconnecting to avoid consequences and does not solve farming (there are plenty of servers to jump around in).

In terms of loot? The NVGs by far, managed to find them at the NW Airfield Barracks on Saturday and playing at night is immensely easier now. Playing by day however seems that much harder as i'm trying not to get killed! In terms of gameplay? Being fired upon by a Sniper and his friend with an AK. Retreating over a road and into a gully with my friend before flanking around and waiting in the very same treeline for the two attackers to return after looting the Berezino tents. We opened fire upon visual contact and took them down rather quickly. The AK went down fast to my friends M1014, the sniper in the ghillie suit took a few shots and took cover in a bush. I crept up to him and nailed him again a couple times. He disconnected. Moments later after an unsuccessful ghosting attempt the sniper reappeared, falling unconscious immediately and received two rounds to the back of the head. Thanks for the M107!

have you though about padlocks that would make doors and cars unenterable to anyone but owner if locked (if unlocked everyone has access), wood planks to baricade windows and some traps. Also it would mark your house as habitated so zombies wont spawn inside but will spawn nearby. If the house had fireplace you could make fire as well to increase your temperature. You could designate two owners, since most padlocks has two keys. Also crowbar can remove padlock, as well as fire arm, but hey - its normal. Also if my idea of login places succeeds, then you could save yourself inhouse without any time restriction and if anyone has this house on other server you will spawn right outside ;) ( to prevent ghosting)

Sup Peeps! My clan members just linked this post to me and suggested I clear things up. So this is what really happened. around 8-10 of us logged onto your server after having a hacker spawn bombs on top of us and our tents in our base camp on chicago 15. We decided to quit that server and were going to make your server our new home. The reason for deciding on your servers is an admin presence, discouragement of hacking/hackers and most importantly it looked like from what posts one of our members were reading... lively battling between different groups. anyway our members logged on some of us decided we would start in cherno for the challenge and two other groups of us started and met up in other locations to re-gear and set up a base camp. alaroady, gorechild, tabor & myself... if I remember correctly were the ones that all restarted at cherno. I died twice to snipers. Then finally found a enfield and was creeping through cherno when i saw a guy running down another street with zombies after him. I started running paralleling him on another street and picked up some agro myself as well. He ran out of town north of the apartments with myself right behind him. I heard a bunch of heavy weapons fire and decided not to chase him. turned an ran back towards the backside of the apartments came around the corner tot he front and ran up the stairs into the apartment building top floor with a widow over looking the street. At this time crouched down upstairs at the widow I started looking for where the heavy "Loud" sounding gunfire was coming from. I saw a guy on the roof of the adjacent apartments. So I shot several times till was sure I had dropped him. I saw a death message of Silver Chair was killed. I then dropped down on my belly because there was still other gun fire going on. Few minutes later I saw someone run into the adjacent apartment buildings door. I kept looking for him to come out on a roof but didn't see him again. Meanwhile I was telling Alaroady and the others where I was located. Alaroady was going to clear the other apartments and as he was rolling up saw a truck and grabbed it and took off with it. Apparently whoevers truck it was was chasing after him. I was trying to convince Alaroady to come back and get me but he wanted to go stash the truck somewhere. We were pretty sure it was hacked because he said that it had every best weapon in the game in it. Any way he ends up crashing and blowing the truck and himself up. Meanwhile since Alaroady isn't coming back for me I decided to make a hospital run since the gunfire in the area has died down. I run out of the apartment and towards the hill so i can wrap around the back then over to the back of the hospital. I then ran up the fire escape and stuck myself in the back corner of the roof. I was re-aranging crap in my backpack & person when I see a guy come up onto the roof from the same fire escape. He was looking in the other direction off the roof as I closed my backpack hit enter so i could go into first person and was starting to draw a bead on him. I had my video setting set to high so I was having trouble centering the crosshairs on target because he was crouch walking as he was turning. He saw me and turned to fire on me and got off a 3 round burst just as I aligned and shot once. We both died. I then read who I killed an was killed by... it was Blasty. So, Mr. Blasty... I was crouched on the roof in the back corner the whole time. You just failed to check the roof. I would have killed you right off if I hadn't been preoccupied with other crap. It just sounds like you are using me as a scape goat for not being more situationally aware... and from what I have read... butt hurt about loosing your hacked stuff. So after I was killed I was somewhere outside of east of cherno running for a farm house picked up a bunch of aggro didn't feel like running for 10 minutes trying to dump zombie aggro ran inside a single entrance house and logged out. When I logged back in I was knocked out and had a five minute timer so I alt-tabbed out of the game and started watching a tv show waiting for the timer. When I alt-tab back I saw a message that I was banned for ghosting. That was the first time I had even heard of that term since I have literally only owned the game a week. Also there were a lot of people firing at each other in about a four block radius and apparently it was multiple groups. I'm not quite sure how my name is drawn out of a hat other that I killed Blasty at the same time he killed me and he was pissed and decided to go board warrioring about it and / jump on the band wagon because my name was already thrown out there. I play with a great group of guys. We all belong to a fairly large guild spread across various games. We also have more of our members and friends picking up the game daily. We think it would be fun to play on your server... it would make some kick-ass clan wars. But not if our members are unable to play together because one or more of them is banned from the server especially when they were not cheating. One of our chief concerns is over zealous admins that might be ban happy when things don't play out their way in a fair fight. But it doesn't seem that way. When I was banned last night the feeling was I got banned because an admin got mad because he got headshot and then we made off with their hacked truck full of weapons and destroyed it then shot another admin...(we thought blasty was one as well). So we were going to pick another server today till a couple of our guys saw this post and decided to give the server another chance and suggested I make a post. That is conditional though on removing my ban because like I said we all prefer to play together. So anyway nice to meet you guys look forward to playing with or against you guys in the future if you so decide. Cheers and Kudos if you made it through this lengthy post! Xtinction

PVP is OK. Problem is DC exploits, ghosting and cheaters. Also lack of proper communication channels. Add One identify for one player. Let people communicate(bring back the side channels or add radios). Add logout timer, fix dc exploits, server hopping etc. And PVP will become great. Now it is just broken.

Ghosting is logging to avoid death and waiting till its clear and then logging back in, or logging out, going to a differerent server, changing positions, and then logging back in to fight. And Blasty, you either don't know what you are talking about or are just still butthurt about losing all your stuff and believing what you want because of that. There is no way you could tell us from the third party group who was ghosting because they were in the middle of us the whole time. We could barely tell ourselves at times. Nothing is stopping you from finding a different server to play on if you think the admins are ghosting, but that is not the case, period. Obviously You don't seem to believe me, so do whatever you like. And if you see a helicopter in game, it is probably hacked. I believe only really old servers like maybe the PL ones might still have a few that have still yet to die. We had asked for some clarification on that but never got a response from the admins in the thread I linked.

No, ghosting is when you log off one server, log into another server, and then log back into the 1st server in a diff location, generally to gain a tactical advantage in combat.. like flanking someone... Also, the truck from our camp that someone made off with was one we stole from some guys on this server like 3 days ago and it had most of that gear in it when we stole it...

I'm assuming when you say ghosting, you mean he teleported to you right? I'm not 100% sure of the terminology. most of us only just recently picked up the game within the last week or two. so hacking and scripting isn't something we do. is it possible he just logged out then back in while he was up there. not exactly sure, I wasn't on at the time. again I'm not trying to start anything other trying to get to the bottom of this and hopefully have him unbanned so we can continue to play on this server.

I lately saw a thread about using server hopping against snipers in cherno or electro, sure those are some of the lowest kind of bandits, sniping newly spawned players without defense, but using ghosting against them makes even a normally friendly survivor being a bigger asshole than the sniper I have read some post from rocket about fixing combat logging and how easy it were to fix, still waiting for that to happen...

You guys had the truck with all the weapons in it??? Looked like a hacked truck to us - too much stuff parked in cherno. Lucky for us one of our guys cant drive for shit and crashed it, exploding him and all the contents. Im pretty sure xtinction wouldnt of been ghosting. We just joined this server because we had our base hack bombed by some idiots last night. It looked like you guys had some well established groups fighting each other, based on this thread, and we wanted to get involved. I'll let him defend himself though.

I can confirm that he did get kicked for ping a few times, but yet you always ended up ghosting in other servers and rejoining ~5 minutes later only to appear behind us. You also did manually quit/disconnect multiple times, and that doesn't explain how scripts weren't being logged, and how your team of players ghosted in on us. And btw, you seem to find a lot of scars... so legit. I banned them for now from the server... if any devs are against this, like I said in the main post, PM me or reply here; I can support this with logs. edit: and awechiit, you're either an idiot or a friend of Machine.Go. I was just adding evidence as to why there were no entries in scripts.log for him. And fyi, I didn't know how to ban at the time, and obviously wasn't going to let suspected hackers 'roam free' on the server. After seeing three of you ghost in, along with the log, I shut the server down.

Plan and simple if there is a server with a good deal of constant DCers--- activate fraps before there is a gun fight so you can document the DC. I'm assuming we will see xyz disconnect in the chat location. This comment is a general one toward any mass DCing or ghosting.

M107 guy was not a baller flank. For the 30 minutes this fight lasted, I basically spent the first 25min running around scared and confused, at the other side of the town, hearing my friends die. Then I started randomly running in a wide circle around the industrial area in a "gotta find them at some point" kind of pattern, and finally landed, in a bush, in the middle of what seemed like an automatic gunfight between the blasty, manny and korbac group, and some unknown entity on the spiral thing. At first I just killed manny, like, nearly meleeing him zeroed at 100m. Either the two left killed the people on the spiral or made them ghost away, I dont know, but then I saw Blasty in the forest, took the shot, then saw korbac running around near where blasty was dead and aimed, but then korbac was behind a tree and i thought he was ghosting. but at some point he started crawling again, and the second Tie Fighter shot got him.

xtinction was def. ghosting.. he logged in behind me on the hospital roof in the midst of it.. i killed someone with an m249 (dunno if that was one of you guys?) and then another guy up on the hill and he almost got me by ghosting behind me... Whoever was up on the spiral staircase, def logged out up there when we started shooting at him.. dunno who that was up there but def ghosting. in any case i got annhilated and my thermal gun is gone.

You are correct in saying that it would "fix" ghosting. However, it places legitimately DC'ing players at too great a disadvantage. Take myself for example: I am (a) part of one of the largest units currently playing Dayz and (b) a father of two young sons. Regarding (a): what if I start playing on one server, then a couple minutes in I find out that a large portion of my unit is playing on another server? Should I then be inconvenienced by a loooooong logout timer while waiting to switch servers? Seems like punishment in the game for something that is outside the game. That would be ridiculous. Same with (b): quite frequently, I play after my children have gone to bed. Quite frequently, I play in-game in areas that are hazardous to my character's existence. Quite frequently, my children wake up and need some small thing. Obviously, I don't want my character to stay in-game while I must deal with the more important real-life situation. However, if your suggestion was implemented, I would have to do just that. Again, I would be punished in-game for something occurring completely outside of the game. Additionally, you point out flaws in your own solution: server side strain, and players getting killed while LOGGED OFF! In other words, your solution, in essence, forces me to render control of my player (in one way, the whole point of the game - control of your character) to the game. It doesn't work. Your solution, I'm afraid, is completely untenable. My solution doesn't punish anyone, especially for circumstances outside of the game, nor does it force you to give up control of your character at any point.