POLL: DayZ and BI experience so far

[ColonelBurton 145]

Well I've been playing DayZ standalone early access for one and a half years now.

 

A lot of great players have packed it in altogether, including a lot of my friends.

 

I am now a lone wolf. My favorite servers, usually packed full from 10.00 am CET till midnight, are now mostly half empty.

 

What happened?

 

Time for a poll on the situation. What is your general view on the DayZ Standalone experience as well as the performance of the Bohemia Interactive developers?

Edited September 21, 2015 by ColonelBurton

[tiadashi 262]

Well I've been playing DayZ standalone early access for one and a half years now.

 

A lot of great players have packed it in altogether, including a lot of my friends.

 

I am now a lone wolf. My favorite servers, usually packed full from 10.00 am CET till midnight, are now mostly half empty.

 

What happened?

 

Time for a poll on the situation. What is your general view on the DayZ Standalone experience as well as the performance of the Bohemia Interactive developers?

 

 

Its what happens with all games that people play for a particular amount of time - allot will come back to it once they have taken a long enough "break" - The only other option would

 

have been for them to wait for a full release at which point the above would still happen over time depending on the person and so forth

 

Edited September 21, 2015 by tiadashi

[Noctoras 409]

So far B.I. cared too little about content apart from guns. An oversized PvP shooter is not what I understand when talking about sandbox and new weapons as work in progress are not exactly the great win these days either.

 

Those who want to PvP quite often will look for a more intense feeling, myself included. If I want a real immersive PvP experience I do NOT gear up for half an hour and look for another lone player somewhere for another half an hour ... now that zombies are gone, this problem has become even more prevalent.

 

Then you have all the canned food, weapons and weapons everywhere. There is simply no challenge once geared and gearing is too quick and easy for a "brutal :rolleyes: " survival simulator. I have called it a WalMart simulator before and stll think it is kind of accurate.

 

However, this is a work in progress, so taking cheap shots and complaining is not the way to go either, we have to wait and see. In the suggestion forum I started a topic on individual player / char skills gained by teaching or reading books. I think stuff like this, if not everyone has the ability to do everything would be a great addition to the game. And just generally, more content, less weapons, less canned food. I mean, we all want a challenge, DayZ doesn't give you a survival challenge at present, apart from bugged hypothermia at times or the odd PvP elements.

 

So for now I think a lack of content is the big bummer here - people don't come back because you have 39 instead of 37 different guns. People do come back, if there are new challenges, new tasks, new discoveries to be made. So my call for now would be to be less weapon centric, more content oriented.

[FrigginTommyNoble 61]

Although I understand your personal frustration, it sounds to me like your main gripe is the current player count on specific servers. I see several servers available with high player counts at peak hours, maybe try one of those?

 

Although I've been a software engineer for 13 years in mostly not gaming (my first job was at Sierra in the late 90's), and I'm working on my own game in unity right now (mostly as a project to learn more about game programming), as such I don't have a lot of knowledge about modern game design in a professional capacity. But I'll share my opinion on DayZ, and specifically BI's progress in an early-access capacity.

 

Most importantly, I have a ton of respect for BI. They are clearly a solid team capable of making a game that tens-to-hundreds of thousands of people play. The big challenge they're facing right now is the engine. Writing a new engine is hard as hell. It takes a long time and highly talented engineers with tons of experience. BI is in a situation a lot of early-access studios find themselves in: They need to swap out the engine of a game that tons of people are currently playing. A lot of indie shops had (and are still having) a really tough time migrating from Unity4 to Unity5.

 

Their new engine is tackling all the core issues I have with the game:

1. netcode is a huge bottleneck. de-sync is rampant and still a huge issue.
2. player controller is clunky, controls are not expressive
3. rendering pipeline/shaders are based on dated tech and need to be swapped out (hence fps problems and general graphical issues)
4. inventory system is very buggy

 

I recently wrote my own inventory system from scratch. Then I re-wrote it cause it was buggy. There are a million edge-cases that happen pretty often. And this is all single-player, so I didn't have to sync those inventory events to a remote server. Here's an example of a bug that seems obvious/easy as a user, but needs some non-trivial logic to handle:

1. open your inventory
2. pull an item from a slot, so you're holding it (this de-references the item from the "backpack" inventory instance, copies it to your "hands" which is actually a simple 1-slot instance of Inventory)
3. close your inventory (still holding item)
4. item seems to disappear because I had some logic in the player controller that only shows item inventory objects when inventoryOpen is true.

This made me re-think how I manage state across the many inventory instances in general. Then I re-wrote inventory again, and added a message bus to marshall item objects between inventories. That took way longer than I had expected. But this is the normal exploratory process of programming. You can try to think through everything beforehand, but once you get to coding, it all goes out the window, and you have to just rapidly iterate as you learn new things you didn't (and could never have) known in advance. This is probably the phase BI is in right now with the new engine. It's a process of discovery and solving new problems every day. Just when you think you're close you hit another design flaw and need to take some steps back. To get a game as complex as this one to a state where it's reliable enough to push out to production and have thousands of people play is a monumental effort.

 

All that said, I can't help but think it's time for us to get our hands on the new engine. I'm a little worried about BI's migration path, namely this idea that both engines will live concurrently in the same game files. Although I think it's probably the best option to "sneak" the engine in in parallel with the old engine, that can really draw out the process sometimes, vs. just getting all hands on deck for the new engine, and doing a hard swap.

 

If the new renderer isn't out by the end of 2015, that will be a sign that they're having some serious difficulties, because I just don't think it should take more than a year for a well-funded dev shop with top talent. But, I've never written shaders or a rendering engine myself before, so I'd be interested to hear people's opinions on that.

Edited September 21, 2015 by FrigginTommyNoble

[S3V3N 1402]

The polls show how faithful people on the forum are to the game. My votes were in the middle, too. They didn't screw up, the game is not a scam, but there are some decisions I don't agree with and that worry me. 

 

Gamers aren't developers, so they have no clue about the complexity of a game development. The Real Virtuality or soon Enfusion Engine is probably the only one that can pull this game off the way it is. I once looked for custom AI for a racing game and prices for good AI started at around 50 000$. Something like that is comparably (very) simple to the pathfinding of an AI and decision making in a sandbox game. Arma's AI was complete crap and probably still is. They couldn't even get into houses. What I saw in the AI implementation after the Navmesh was updated was pretty impressive. These zombies don't just have a vision cone and head straight toward you. They influence each other, know their way through and around houses and are very aware of their terrain. And that on such a giant scale. Baking a Navmesh for the game must take a week at least, so you don't want to do it unless you wanna test it or know it's going to work. We need a little patience, but when zombies are back in the game they will be the most convincing ones we've ever seen in a video game. 

 

I think a lot of players left the game, because there are other, more complete games to play. And lots still play the mods, because they offer easier access and more acade-style fun. Overall, I am quite pleased with this development and noticed significant changes since I bought the game last year. I always criticised the way how the transition from Experimental to Stable builds was handled. Basically we were getting the least buggy experimental build as stable every 1-2 weeks, instead of working on a truly stable version and updating when ready. The decision to change that to how it is now, may have cost some players too, because they don't get to test new bugs every week any more. But in the long run it will pay out for the devs to stand the ground, because I feel we are clearly getting a more concerted and coherent development than even half a year ago. Maybe they got some more help and resources now, too. I'm not 100% happy with the development, but I think it's going into the right direction and will deliver a pretty sweet game in only a few months. 

 

I do agree on finishing the render soon. It's high time to free those resources for more important systems, like the AI. 

Edited September 21, 2015 by S3V3N

[Noctoras 409]

The polls show how faithful people on the forum are to the game. 

 

I respectfully disagree. Those, who were disppointed most likely don't follow these boards anymore.

 

Edit: sorry, I misread what you have written or read too quickly, my bad, of course you're right in what you say ;)

Edited September 21, 2015 by Noctoras

[IgnobleBasterd 161]

The only thing that has changed about Early Access is that it should be forbidden because of everyone who whines and refuses to understand that THE FUCKING GAME HASN'T BEEN RELEASED YET.

[S3V3N 1402]

I respectfully disagree. Those, who were disppointed most likely don't follow these boards anymore.

 

That's why I said "people on the forum" and not "people who left the forum" ;)

[ColonelBurton 145]

I am having a hard time tagging where to put this myself.

 

The progress within the past 12 months was extremely frustrating for me. As was said, adding new guns didn't make the game a better game in my opinion neither did a new house model here and there.. Instead, more and improved mechanics would have been great, and I don't mean things like fixing the problematic bugs so much, also not so much "features" such as indoor fireplaces or burning buildings etc. But basic things the game really needs, like a proper inventory system (one where you can not stuff a cooking pot in your jacket pockets but a decent amount of magazines in an assault vest) as well as a proper melee system (a DayZ mass brawl with melee weapons is perfect to dub the Benny Hill theme over it)

 

Clearly, this poll can not be considered in any way to be representative, as was said, few who would vote the bottom two replies will be coming here regularly.

 

Hope to read more good replies in the next few days though.

[HeXedMinD (DayZ) 39]

I am now a lone wolf. My favorite servers, usually packed full from 10.00 am CET till midnight, are now mostly half empty.

 

I have the same problem, absolutely no point in my playing anymore.

 

I am overall happy with the time i have gotten out of the game but i am frustrated with the lack of players in my region(most quit because of desync and performance issues) i hope it will change now the development focus shifts.

Edited September 21, 2015 by HeXedMinD

[ColdAtrophy 1850]

I voted that I am less likely to buy an Early Access game even though I also voted that I am quite impressed with BI's work. I feel the need to explain where I'm coming from.

 

I love DayZ. It's an extremely unique and amazing experience. I tell everyone who is willing to listen that they should check it out. And I've gotten far, far more than my money's worth out of the $30 I spent. I've paid twice as much money for games that I barely played in comparison.

 

That said, it's been an experience that I don't want to go through as a consumer again. I realize that the task of maintaining a playable build and continuing development simultaneously has surely been a monumental undertaking for BI and I give them props for having the balls to do it. However, as Hicks is fond of saying, they have tread into completely unknown territory and, as a consumer, I'm not sure that I really ever want to see this particular patch of grass again. It's flat out demoralizing and exponentially more disappointing when your favorite game has been randomly rendered unplayable due to the state of a build. For example, I think I played less than 5 hours of 0.57 Stable. There just wasn't anything to do but PvP. The current build, while better, lacks one of my favorite components of the game: zombies. I find myself disappointed with a patch, wait 6 weeks for the next one, only to be a bit disappointed again. 

 

Allow me to reiterate that I am in no way complaining. I fully understand why things have gone the way they have. It's just a tough thing to deal with as a gamer in love with the game. I'm a pretty picky player and I play only or two games at a time and get heavily invested in them. So when the game I am currently laser focused on is suddenly missing large chunks of what makes me enjoy it, it sucks big time. BI is doing a great job, DayZ is fantastic, and I do not regret my purchase in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes I feel like I should have paid more money for this game. I'm just not going to put myself through this again. The next EA game that catches my eye will not be a purchase for me. I will just wait until the game hits beta or full release. I can't handle being hooked on a product that can change drastically and at the drop of a dime.

Edited September 21, 2015 by ColdAtrophy

[Mookie (original) 799]

I voted that I am less likely to buy an Early Access game even though I also voted that I am quite impressed with BI's work. I feel the need to explain where I'm coming from.

 

I love DayZ. It's an extremely unique and amazing experience. I tell everyone who is willing to listen that they should check it out. And I've gotten far, far more than my money's worth out of the $30 I spent. I've paid twice as much money for games that I barely played in comparison.

 

That said, it's been an experience that I don't want to go through as a consumer again. I realize that the task of maintaining a playable build and continuing development simultaneously has surely been a monumental undertaking for BI and I give them props for having the balls to do it. However, as Hicks is fond of saying, they have tread into completely unknown territory and, as a consumer, I'm not sure that I really ever want to see this particular patch of grass again. It's flat out demoralizing and exponentially more disappointing when your favorite game has been randomly rendered unplayable due to the state of a build. For example, I think I played less than 5 hours of 0.57 Stable. There just wasn't anything to do but PvP. The current build, while better, lacks one of my favorite components of the game: zombies. I find myself disappointed with a patch, wait 6 weeks for the next one, only to be a bit disappointed again. 

 

Allow me to reiterate that I am in no way complaining. I fully understand why things have gone the way they have. It's just a tough thing to deal with as a gamer in love with the game. I'm a pretty picky player and I play only or two games at a time and get heavily invested in them. So when the game I am currently laser focused on is suddenly missing large chunks of what makes me enjoy it, it sucks big time. BI is doing a great job, DayZ is fantastic, and I do not regret my purchase in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes I feel like I should have paid more money for this game. I'm just not going to put myself through this again. The next EA game that catches my eye will not be a purchase for me. I will just wait until the game hits beta or full release. I can't handle being hooked on a product that can change drastically and at the drop of a dime.

 

Very good post - difficult things, subtly put. There have been builds in the past where I thought we were really getting close to a combination of persistence and other features (animals, trucks, crashsites, etc) that were my ideal of the game. But the need to solve the conundrum of persistence (while it's almost certainly the right thing to do) seems to constantly subvert that.

 

As my recent overbearing whine about a wipe will have demonstrated, I'm not sure I'd be ready for EA games again. My expectations (right or wrong) about some degree of consistency inevitably can't be satisfied - and the tension that sets up with how hooked on the game I've become is very serious.

[ColdAtrophy 1850]

Very good post - difficult things, subtly put. There have been builds in the past where I thought we were really getting close to a combination of persistence and other features (animals, trucks, crashsites, etc) that were my ideal of the game. But the need to solve the conundrum of persistence (while it's almost certainly the right thing to do) seems to constantly subvert that.

 

As my recent overbearing whine about a wipe will have demonstrated, I'm not sure I'd be ready for EA games again. My expectations (right or wrong) about some degree of consistency inevitably can't be satisfied - and the tension that sets up with how hooked on the game I've become is very serious.

 

Exactly right. Consistency. That's what a project like this lacks by its very nature. 

 

Case in point: I'd be happy as a pig in shit if I could run a 10 player server with 0.55 Stable on it until beta. Obviously, there are many reasons why they could not facilitate multiple build versions out there on joinable servers, but my point is that build provided the baseline experience that I require to be satisfied while they work. At the end of the day, it's my own impatience and the fact that I am emotionally invested in the game's development. Fortunately, I don't feel the need to lash out like many do because I am quite capable of seeing the whole picture. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me play DayZ with zombies right now this very second damn it!  :D

[IgnobleBasterd 161]

How hard is it to understand that bug fixing isn't the main purpose of an alpha? My jimmies are rustled.

[ColdAtrophy 1850]

How hard is it to understand that bug fixing isn't the main purpose of an alpha? My jimmies are rustled.

 

To whom are you speaking?

[Funkmaster Rick 373]

I've gotta say, S3V3N, ColdAtrophy: I'm glad to see people putting this shit in proper English, with thought behind it. Right on, mates. It's much more interesting and useful to see well-considered posts than it is to see people crying that they're incapable of understanding the Early Access cycle.

 

I'm actually quite happy with how BI have handled things thus far. There have been definite steps backwards, steps around, really just a lot of dancing in general. I support that. It's a necessity. I've got no illusions about BI, and I don't fanboy, but I acknowledge they've taken certain risks with DayZ. Developing the SA was not one of them, as ArmA 2 sales and usage statistics almost certainly pointed out, quite clearly, that there was a robust market for the game. No, their real risk was Early Access. I think it was also a necessary decision to keep the community from fracturing and running off to play lesser games like H1Z1. But here's my real point:

 

So far, BI are the second studio to run a truly successful EA program. The first real EA game that I can recall was Minecraft. That game was sold cheaply at first, with prices going up as new things were added. Same model as DayZ SA, basically. I've seen a lot of EA games fail hard, and I've seen plenty of pure cashgrabs where the developers were basically just scamming communities with huge promises and little delivery. We've all seen a bunch of these. The fact that DayZ is still going strong and BI didn't drop off the map as soon as they'd raked in that 30 million or so USD, is kind of amazing in the present gaming economy, where quick-buck F2P, 'failed' Early Access, and stagnant AAA releases seem to be the norm. BI gives me hope.

[FrigginTommyNoble 61]

Very good post - difficult things, subtly put. There have been builds in the past where I thought we were really getting close to a combination of persistence and other features (animals, trucks, crashsites, etc) that were my ideal of the game. But the need to solve the conundrum of persistence (while it's almost certainly the right thing to do) seems to constantly subvert that.

 

As my recent overbearing whine about a wipe will have demonstrated, I'm not sure I'd be ready for EA games again. My expectations (right or wrong) about some degree of consistency inevitably can't be satisfied - and the tension that sets up with how hooked on the game I've become is very serious.

 

This is something I'm really passionate about. I think game developers tend to be "code cowboys," which is a term us "Enterprise" engineers use to describe developers who are like "lol just pushed to prod bro, no unit tests. yolo."

 

Although this surely isn't fair to BI, the reason I bolded part of your post is is because I got real hot about the most recent persistence wipe. Hicks even replied to the thread, which I was really happy about, because although I didn't love his answer, it means they're reading it, which says they care.

 

The reason I got so fired up is that persistence wipes reveal a kind of cavalier attitude towards player data. Yeah, sure, it's alpha. Yeah, sure, there are disclaimers. But in my world, if you lose customer data that took hours to create, you've probably lost customer confidence, and you're definitely fired. Also, I know for a fact that if you make it a priority, data stored in a database does not get "wiped." You write a migration script, and you test it in pre-prod. Then you know that even in the worst case, you don't "lose" persistence data, you just roll back to the database view before your broken migration script started, fix it, and try again.

 

The fact that BI does not take this approach shows that our time investment is not a priority to them. Maybe it shouldn't be. But enough situations like this happen, and you start hemorrhaging players and poisoning your brand. There has to be a middle ground. This is why Early Access is so controversial. NOT because it's a bad idea, but mostly because I don't think game dev culture has much respect for their customers' time.

 

One thing's for sure: if someone pays for your product, no matter how many times you cry alpha or point to a disclaimer, they're still your customers, and nothing about that relationship is black and white.

Edited September 22, 2015 by FrigginTommyNoble

[ColonelBurton 145]

One thing I happen to know frustrated a lot of people off was the new over-the-shoulder cam. The general consensus is that it doesn't prevent wall-trolling anyhows, which can only be prevented by playing first person, which generally hardly anybody does. Thing is it makes third person shooting from the hip much harder and this has annoyed a lot of my friends...

 

Also, with the new loot system and no zombies, all you have for hours is crickets, even on a 30-40 player server.

[xalienax 621]

1. 'It's Alright'. I stopped playing a long time ago. Progress is not the issue, more a matter of i didn't get what i thought i was buying into. I bought the alpha when it first came out on steam when the plan was pretty much to clean up the mod we all already enjoyed, a bit of performance and security improvements and re-release it as a stand alone product.

 

2. Less likely to support early access. I don't feel dayZ is a bad product, but imho its proof of some of the pitfalls of early access.- Early buyers have an idea or expectation of what their supporting and this puts the developer in a bad spot PR wise. I also feel that maintaining a reasonably playable persistent game and infrastructure for it takes some degree of resources from moving the actual finished product forward- and lastly I just dont feel like the majorityof gamers have a grasp of what alpha/beta states really are in a wrold where pre-order culture has dangeled 'beta access' as a treat for early buyers. truth be told these pre-order bonus alpha/betas are really little more then a finished game with only 1 or 2 maps released early to pre-orderers to help drive hype.

 

3. Hasn't really effected my view on BI thus far, More my view on public early access/public alpha.

 

TL;dr - I think BI is a good company with some good games out there, I'll judge dayZ among them when it's fiished. the whole project however has highlighted some of my many concerns with things like Early Access. (Elite dangerous has had even worse fall out as a result of being crowd funded initially)

[Herkyl Puuro 52]

Dayz is a fine game, and Bohemia has kept doing good work since Operation Flashpoint which blew my mind back in 2001, but honestly I don't see myself participating in another early access alpha project as a player and a customer. Why there are generally less players at the moment is anybody's guess. Maybe it's because there are no zombies or some other issue, but as well it can be linked to the fact that summer's over and many people focus on studying & school & work for now, but most likely after a while there will be more people returning to play games. I can only speak for myself. I don't regret buying the game nor I have had much issues understanding that this is an early access alpha project. But what I do when I encounter a dealbreaker? I have a pause and check later if the game works better.

 

I just came back from a four month pause. Initially I needed to focus on other things, but why I didn't rush back was my experience with 0.55. Loot was really hard to find few days after the patch, and after all the effort I put in finding it, I STILL kept dying often just because early access and alpha, like climbing to a watchtower, standing 10 meters away from the edge of a cliff, crouching still in a barn, invisible zombies, bouncing trucks, truck crashing to invisible walls, getting stuck under a floor because happened to be in a wrong hut when server restarted etc. etc. Admittedly I did find new ways to play and further developed survival skills because the loot was so scarce, but I grew tired to this repeating pattern, that after overcoming all the hardships I was then rewarded by some bug killing my character. 

 

Now after a week or so my experience goes like "Okay, so there are no zombies, I can live with that for a while as I acknowledge they needed fixing, but I don't get how one can have a leg injury just by crouching still in a barn?"  Still, I guess it's improvement, I didn't die to it this time. :)