Buying another copy to play by myself, need a walkthrough.

[Ralfnader 0]

So I play DayZ primarily with a friend, but our schedules are hit-and-miss, so often times I want to play, but don't want to lose our shared progress. I'm fully willing to buy another copy (I've heard you only need OA) but the technical jargan for how to do it is too damn high. Need some child-like advice as to how to change CD-keys so I can easily launch one DayZ with my buddy, and another by myself. *NOTE* As of recently I use the rocket launcher, thing to run games. So I don't open it through steam.

*EDIT* I've purchased OA again, created a new steam account/email and found that it obviously has a new CD-key. Now I am needing help figuring out how to swap them.

[fml 29]

Change cd keys? Buy combined operations and uninstall old copy and then reinstall with the new copy, since cd-keys are binded to the actual cd. I think thats the answer.

[Ralfnader 0]

Well, I don't want to re-install dayz every day, I was reading other posts and heard something about changing the registry key, or something. Through using "run" It was just so technical sounding it hurt my brain. :|

[fml 29]

Oh I see, its two people using the same computer, but want individual characters/progress saved. Sorry Im not sure, maybe someone from that thread can help you. Good luck.

[chhopsky 25]

This one's actually really simple to do. You end up exporting two bits of identical registry but with the key changed, then you just run each .reg file to swap between them. My housemate & I do this and it works fine, I forget the exact reg entry but I'll find it tonight when I get home and post.

[chhopsky 25]

Open regedit, navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Bohemia Interactive Studio\ArmA 2 OA

Find the binary value KEY. Write the hex value down. Export the KEY registry entry as a file called Person1.reg

Edit the KEY registry entry and type in your second key's HEX value. Export the KEY registry entry as a file called Person2.reg

Now when you want to switch between players, just double click the reg file and it will ask to install the values. Say yes, now boot up ArmA2 through the launcher. I have seen some funky behaviour after doing this, like the beta patch shows a WRONG CD KEY error but then installs anyway.

When I did this, I was transferring the second key from another computer that was dying, so I had the key's HEX value already. I'm not sure if these are encoded or whether you can do a straight swap or how that caper all works. Can anyone comment on that?