How did you discover DayZ?

[boneboys 7988]

I had been following Rockets topic on the BI Forums with interest but nothing more when one of my boys asked me (much to my surprise) to buy him a copy of ArmA II.
What forZ says I, zombies sayZ he.
That was in late April, the 20th or so when there were only a handful of servers and "waiting for server to respond" became an excuse to walk teh dog or burn bacon  ;)

Joined the Forums shortly after they went live (27th April iirc) to ask in a hot topic why I was "waiting for server to respond".
01 May 2012.

Hi people, my first post is not a happy one.
I am unable to join any server, getting stuck on "waiting for server to respond" screen.
I can access the menu and re-spawn/abort, I can see the player list using the 'I' key, so the game is functioning.
I have given it 10/15 mins or so befoe disconnecting. This is my first install of the mod, all taken from the download section of these very forums and launching using a modified ArmAII/CO launch "-mod=@dogz".Thanks...

 

Rocket posted and replied with :

"The reason you are experiencing this will be because of the data in there.

60% of the time, it is because people are using an outdated or corrupt dayz_v1.2.2, and there will be or something similar in there.

30% of the time is because of the server being overloaded.

10% of the time is due to some random weird issues with ArmA2 initializing differently on different computers."

 
Several posts later another member wrote :
16 May 2012

The dev who made the mod (it's an interesting article, well worth reading), points out that he expected maybe 150 players on 3 servers. They had, at the time of the writing, 4,000 players and 90 servers.

 

Mid/late May 2012 I was made moderator in view of my basic knowledge of how ArmA modifications work and exceptional diplomatic and negotiating skills  :D

[pilgrim* 3513]

"Hey bro, check out this game.  You spend a crapton of time gearing up and when you die, you lose everything!"

 

Online I'm a one-game player.. did Anarchy Online 2 years , then moved to EVE..(but .. well .. EVE,what can you say?  Half the players were serving brit airforce fighter teams on their evenings off.. ) went back to Anarchy.

Read a report somewhere about DayZ written by a girl scared witless to be in that game and shown around by an old hand  "hey look a tent in the middle of a field" - "don't go out there its a trap set by some guy hiding in the forest" "shit I broke a leg" - "sorry have to leave the zombies are coming, want me to shoot you?"

OK- Checked the web - wow = no points, no leveling, no nothing, no win, ya CANT win - all you can do is see how long you can stay alive.. that's all, nothing else... stay alive till you die.. ok-that's got to be cool...

I - (me) - got ADSL for the village area, the exchange had put us on a 2 year waiting list. (hey - walking into a telephone exchange is a terrorist act here, but what the hell). I caught the guy leaving the door - kinda steel bombproof door - bought him a beer said <kindly> "if you wont plug in the damn card into the rack, i'm an engineer, give it, I'll plug it myself" Bought him another beer. 10 days later we were on.

 We were maybe 3 PC users on that exchange card, total, and back then a ping of 120-170 still about worked in the Mod.. so from France I played even 1 Japanese server. I fought in Spain, I died in Moscow, joined a bandit group in the Ukraine, fought door to door in France and UK (brits into TS and squad movement a lot - made a different game), teamed in Saudi Arabia. Around half the world. Had some 100% incredible experiences.

My main servers were Saudi (after midnight) and Romania. Came to have good regular friends, and some mad-crazy friends too, with good people in both those places.

After the fighting I took to living in the woods and boiling my water in an old tin can. I've heard that happens to people.

Shot out some tyres to warn tourists off, just once in a while  - but If chopper rotors came, they were messing with my meditation, I'd most probably get a flight line, see if it came back, work an idea of where it was going or coming (pilots fly landmarks, usually) get out the Dragunov from the stash and some grenades and set to track it - with the North the way it was then, you could spend whole days. Maybe weeks.

Later I gave up the sniper and kept a Mod 0 in the stash instead (heh) if you've collected enough ammo you can do CHAOS with that mo..; had a bicycle to move distances, silent, easy-hid, and I liked the way you can run over a tent 4 or 5 times with a bicycle to waste it.   

then the hackers really started coming back .. was around the third/fourth big wave I guess? .. for me the last wave.

One serious thing :-  I found out most of what I now understand about the eastern areas of Europe starting from that Romanian server, plenty of Romanian english speakers (impressive), and I learned enough to follow a part of the Romanian cross talk.. that is one lovely language, love it... Before then I thought I knew about "Eastern Europe" but until DayZ Mod I didn't know shit. Most I'd heard previous was a mess of old propaganda, half-baked info, and stupid mixed up badly informed crap. Apart from the game-game itself, that DayZ also changed the shape of the world for me.  

so .. yeah... sometime a year or so later (the icon was in front of me every time I turned on the screen) I remembered I was still paying monthly for Anarchy Online, and my tune was still sitting wherever I left him like 14 or 17 months ago..

 

xx     

 

Edited October 5, 2015 by pilgrim

[WilliamTheConqueror 81]

I discovered it in the very early days, in 2012. Found it on a random video on YouTube by a person called The Zemaf. He was a Russian guy, and I was hooked. I was 12 then, and my parents would never have let me buy it, so I passionately followed everything about the game on YouTube and on the forums. I didn't get it until I bought the standalone, the version that included Arma Complete. Been playing both the mod and SA ever since.

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

Console whore. Played COD competitively, loved COD Zombies.

 

Read this article about DayZ: http://www.pcgamer.com/now-playing-arma-2-mod-dayz/

 

YouTubed DayZ and watched some Frankie videos.

 

Instantly addicted...

 

Played public hive for a week or two...got hacked to shit, rented a shared hive server then eventually switched to private hive.

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

I discovered DayZ from a few hilarious articles on Kotaku about not being able to find can openers (over a year ago back when that was the only thing that could open cans and there was no food to forage yet) or about taking two guys hostage and then making them fight each other to the death to see who's worthy of living. The entire concept seemed hilarious so I decided to give it a shot.

[ColdAtrophy 1850]

Once upon a time I was a console scrub. Then I built a shiny new PC. I asked my buddy, " What should I buy so we have something other than BF4 to play?" He sayeth unto me, "DayZ". After a small amount of research and my very first forum topic, (https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/221826-considering-purchasing-the-game/) I did purchase DayZ SA and my world was never the same again.

 

Then there was this little gem, entitled "Noob on a Rescue Mission": https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/222069-noob-on-a-rescue-mission/

 

It almost brings a tear to my eye, seeing the problems I was struggling with, things I do now without even thinking about. I once drove a truck from Kamenka to Severograd (or something like that) after 9 or 10 shots of rum, so drunk I couldn't even see straight, to pick up Biohaze who had fallen off a roof and respawned and I didn't wreck once. Here I was, such a green little noob, worried about zombies in Krasnostav! LMAO!

 

I was playing the new-er-ish Tomb Raider game that was on sale last week on Steam and there's a part where Lara stumbles across a bunch of wreckage and a makeshift camp. She walks away from two giant PET bottles of clean water! She throws away a perfectly good pack! In the very next scene, she's bitching about how she's hungry and thirsty. WTF dumbass. The whole time I was screaming at the cutscene.

 

DayZ has changed the way I play games and the scope I use to examine games. I can't believe I already put 1000 hours into this game. I still feel like I have barely played it.

Edited October 6, 2015 by ColdAtrophy

[byrgesen 1340]

The year is 2012, Baker has just wrapped Zombi U. Baker looks for another zombie game as Baker loves zombies. Baker see's warz on steam, Baker googles youtube reviews of warz. You tube says that warz is a horrible ripoff of DayZ, so Baker downloads DayZ (just the mod) from steam, Baker tries to launch DayZ, it wont launch (no arma of course). Baker gives up, Baker wraps fallout 3 again, Baker comes back to DayZ after meeting some dudes that play it. Baker then becomes all consumed with dayz, logs 1000's of hours playing it 14-16 hours a day. Baker gets divorced. Baker waits for the standalone, Baker buys it on launch day, Baker dies a little inside, Baker comes back to play every patch and dies a little more everytime. The End

 

This was both one of the most amazing gaming stories and also one of the most horrifc, did not see that twist at the end mate!!

 

Hmm, im having trouble remembering really. Lets see...

Ive always been a vivid fan of anything zombie related. Books, comics, films and games! Absolutely love the idea of zombies and the true horror it gives me, when i read/watch/play something good :)

I was fooling around with Arma II, because ive been playing Battlefield and Medal Of Honor for years and loved them, so Arma was right down my alley. I then realized the massive amount of usercontent and my true Arma adventure began!

I jumped from mods to mod and had so much fun, with a group of guys, that actually just banded over random things happening in random mods on random servers. We then found DayZ..... And all hell broke loose!

It didnt take us long to realize we needed a server, and we needed one fast. At that time i was living with my x gf and we had 30/30 mb internet, so i had no problems hosting a Arma server and i had the knowledge to get a database going and some basic server editing, so we jumped into it.

Out of this random mess, came something amazing! DayZ @ Byrgesen. That was our community and server name. In fact we where one of the first groups to ever start, what would later become, a breathing, living DayZ mod community, and my old thread is still on these forums :)

 

The server and community grew, we could see my home network and computer had issues dealing with everything and we wanted more. So i got in contact with 2 german guys, who where already renting a server, but had issues getting the popularity it needed. They also had a TS and a website, but it didnt have much traffic.

We ganged up with them, and where now an admin team of 6 people, including some pretty good website programmers and Arma scripters, so we moved out entire database to the hosted server (which i forgot to mention was a box, not just an Arma server) and started branding out new name: Pl@net DayZ.

 

Everything was amazing and we grew into something quite big, had several forum admins play on the server on a regular basis (including the one who should not be mentioned), basicly things couldnt be better. We had a small encounter with Villayer, when they launched theyre own HIVE, called DayZ Planet, which resulted in tons and tons of complaints to us, about villayer and theyre service. Hence the small disclaimer found in the bottom of my old thread hehe, but it was nothing major, just felt abit like they where trying to leach on something good and we did take it kinda personal, for a time.

 

Time passed and DayZ mod died out slowly, we died out aswell and our community disbanded. Some kept in contact, some started new projects (one of the old admins is working on 2017 mod for Arma III) but i will never remember that time and the amount of fun i had, as a DayZ mod admin/player.

 

Fast forward to 2015 and ive got about 70 hours in DayZ SA, waiting patiently for the finished product, so i can have fun again, like old times.

The memories of DayZ will stay with me forever, it has been an amazing journey so far and im sure its not over yet. We just hit a few bumps in the road, but the road is long, so we got plenty left :)

[klesh 2423]

I discovered DayZ while playing Iron Front Liberation 1944 (now apparently a "Digital War Edition", an very flawed Arma-based game that had lots of problems.  I had a few guys that I would play missions with, and one of them mentioned DayZ, which I thought he said Daisy, and thought that name was terrible.   We tried it a few nights later and I fell in love.  This was late summer 2012.

 

SenChi was the guy that made the amazing maps for Iron Front, and I also met Orlok there, as just another poster on their forums.

[Hudson436 1]

It was May 2012, a group of guys I played with at the time told me about the mod. I've owned ArmA for years and lived the game so I was immediately interested. After hours of setting it up and waiting for the server to respond I was in...

I remember my first game session. I had just been mauled by a few zombies but somehow managed to escape. I was running away from Cherno following the power lines. My screen blurry, black and white I couldn't see much. My friends saved me and we continued on.

No game matches the adrenaline rush I get when I see another player. I stopped playing the mod when it got hacked to hell. Bought the SA as soon as I was able. I love the game and I'm excited to see the future updates.