Future of public hive servers

[Baty Alquawen 3688]

Hello guys,

We started to think about the future of public hive servers.

We are considering the idea to discontinue the possibility to rent public servers. Admins have very limited options to moderate public hives and servers are frequently used as loot/dupe farms, which ruins the DayZ experience. According to community, public servers are more often targeted by hackers. That is however not confirmed by our data which indicates that they are rather aiming at higher population servers with streamers present.

So, we need your opinion guys. What do you think about public servers hive? If you are renting public server, why did you choose a public and not private hive?

 

 

EDIT:  This isn't about ending public hive, but not allowing people to rent a server on the public hive. We will still have a bunch of official servers offering intended experience.

[EdStaffordZombie 63]

From my humble opinion, public servers do not make any sense in dayz... The main target of Dayz is inmersion, and I think that server hopping ruins all the experience,
there were several topics before disscussing this topic.

In addition to the new upcoming changes to the server browser where you can see the characters you've played on different servers -> No sense to have public hives.

I do not know pro and cons but for me...Server hopping makes no sense from my understanding about dayz experience.

Best regards,

[kopo79 426]

when i started to play dayz(maybe mod or early standalone)i played on public hives...but now never play those.i guess that i was so noob that it was easier to play and change the server.
im not sure but i think that theres more players on public servers thatn private and if you look playercounts in this time,im not sure if its wise to go only with private.
then when you have game that lure more people to play...private servers only.

[Gobbokirk 546]

Personally I prefer private hives, but I do see the benefit of public.
The current server you're on empties out, woosh find a new one and continue where you left off.
That advantage ofc comes with similar disadvantages.

No matter what the conclusion though, if you decide to keep renting out public servers, I would really like to see is a better policing of the servers.
Without that you'd probably be better of just keeping official servers public and leaving the rented once to private hives.
The private loot farm "Join-Kick" servers will eventually have to go, if nothing else to improve new players first impressions.

Why rent public? My guess, it's a cost question more than anything, still pretty steep to rent servers so I guess that plays the major role unless you got a pre-built community.

[Espa 711]

Wow, I've been thinking on this lately, as well. 

IMHO, The Public Hives are the reason for a lot of unfair advantages that can ruin experiences and lessen the playing field.

For what was mentioned above, the 'secret' private hives that people can use to loot up gives the owners a chance to be fully kitted with no resistance. 

Privates, for being their own server and world, feels and breathes like DayZ should. No way around it and I've experienced SO MUCH LESS hacking that it is no question as to where I play. 

Removing Public Servers is a step in the right direction, I feel. -- The Server Landscape will certainly change as some servers will fall and die, while others will grow. But in general, having less places to go and having only the option to play on ONE world, will grant numbers to a lot more Privates in need. 

[IMT 3190]

Hmm, it's hard to give a definite opinion on this one.

The public hive let us play with a character on the server and you can join another server the next day and your character is still there. You might have not your stuff which is tied to the server itself (vehicles, tents, etc.) but your character persists. Should the home server where you play on go dark then you still have your character on another public hive server.

With the private hive you have only one character across that hive which means if the server goes dark and you put a lot of effort and time in that character, all that went to waste. At that point you're basically homeless or in this case, serverless. However, the private hive makes it more personal. It will have more regulars and the community is very different and plays very differently compared to the public hive. I also believe that private hive servers are more actively monitored and the admins are closer to its community because it has more regulars. And of course there is the fact that the private hive is less vulnerable for dupers and gear-up servers. Although people can rent 2 servers which are connected to the same hive, one where the admins gear up and the other one where they play so that still will be a thing.

Personally I don't rent a server and never have but I understand why someone would pick a public hive over a private hive. At this moment DayZ servers are already very expensive and private hive servers are even more expensive.

Now, if I need to weigh the pro's against the con's, I would say yes, get rid of the public hive. Lately I have been only playing on private hives and I very much enjoy it. I also like the fact that I can directly contact the admins and they really want to put an effort into their server to keep it alive.

[bingo_fuel 205]

2 hours ago, Baty Alquawen said:

Hello guys,

We started to think about the future of public hive servers.

We are considering the idea to discontinue the possibility to rent public servers. Admins have very limited options to moderate public hives and servers are frequently used as loot/dupe farms, which ruins the DayZ experience. According to community, public servers are more often targeted by hackers. That is however not confirmed by our data which indicates that they are rather aiming at higher population servers with streamers present.

So, we need your opinion guys. What do you think about public servers hive? If you are renting public server, why did you choose a public and not private hive?

So basically you just want to remove the option to rent a public server but still offer the "official unmodded servers" for players and the public servers are all maintained by BI?

Edited April 10, 2017 by bingo_fuel

[IMT 3190]

By the way, maybe it would be a good thing to replace the "severe weather warning" BattlEye announcement with a link to this topic. I think it's a real big decision for and by the community. By this way you also protect yourself against people who complain afterwards because it has been announced multiple times.

Edited April 10, 2017 by IMT

[Baty Alquawen 3688]

 This isn't about ending public hive, but not allowing people to rent a server on the public hive. We will still have a bunch of official servers offering intended experience.

[EdStaffordZombie 63]

25 minutes ago, Baty Alquawen said:

not allowing people to rent a server on the public hive

Agree, I think that most of the poeple who rents a server is because they want to have a personal server (to play with friends) in a controlled environment (active admins).
So what is the point in paying for a server (like the official ones) if you cannot change almost any parameter?

I do not have numbers but I think that very few people do rent public hives. (If I am paying for a server I want to be able to configure things, at least from my point of view)

[JBURNS489 165]

7 hours ago, Baty Alquawen said:

 This isn't about ending public hive, but not allowing people to rent a server on the public hive. We will still have a bunch of official servers offering intended experience.

By not allowing us to rent public servers, I can think of only a couple of reasons that it would be helpful.  It would cut down on server admins duping and using it as a personal loot farm. I dont know how much of a problem that really is, though. How many servers are rented by players, and out of all of those how many are using dupe glitches? Even if every single player/server admin used his or her own server for easy loot storage, thats what 1 person and their friends per potentially 60 people? Having gear doesnt always mean you know how to use it either. I have personally been fully kitted out only to be killed by a freshie with a 1911, so I dont really see an issue there. If someone wants to pay 50+ dollars a month to host a server, I dont mind if that 1 person has a ton of gear, legit or not. They arent invincible, and their bases can still be raided. The only other benefit of not allowing public hives to be rented out i can think of is it will end the "high loot" servers and the public servers that kick you when you join. I know its just a name and the loot is the same as every other server, but I wonder if that issue may be solved by just enforcing the terms of service. That would also help curb the kicking on a public server for no reason abuse. Going after the server hosting companies themselves is probably easier than tracking down individual customers who rent the servers. What other benefits would there be from not renting out public servers?

Ultimately, I dont think we should have public hives at all. Every server should be its own independent hive in my opinion, even if its "public" or official. I always think of how base building will be affected by public hives. It will be way too easy to break into anyone's base, no matter how intricate or secure it is. Its too easy to jump onto another public server, run to the middle of where you know a base is, and server jump back. Public hives have the potential to ruin base building before that feature is even ready. Also, people use this server hop technique during firefights as well. I honestly can't think of any real benefit to having public hives connected together at all, really. All in all, I think it would be a step in the right direction to not allow public servers for rent, but it's a little like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. It helps a tiny bit, but still leaves the bigger and more common problems of server hopping and server ghosting

 

Edited April 10, 2017 by JBURNS489
Grammar

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

IF you decide to disallow rental of public hive servers this will help a bit with server hopping but definitely not solve it. The only way to help with hopping is to either make each server it's own hive or create successively larger log on time penalties for hopping.

1 hop within 2 hours = 5 minute timer, 2 hops within 2 hours = 15 minute timer, 3 hops within 2 hours 30, and so on.

^With something like this, you lose nearly an entire hour by the 3rd hop. I think this would dissuade a lot of people from hopping.Not everyone, but many.

If you want to REALLY talk about what ruins the DayZ experience, you need to talk about removing, changing, improving, or restricting 3PP, period.

1PP is DayZ, everything else is easy/casual mode.

Most of the player base does not care what the devs want for a DayZ experience and will continue to exploit and abuse aspects of the game for as long as the devs make it possible. Until you FORCE a change in gameplay style with mechanics or drastic changes to bring DayZ closer to it's intended experience people are always going to play outside the intended experience.

Currently, as much as ever, the players are dictating what constitutes the majority DayZ experience due to the ability to simply CoD in Chernarus. Until Beta brings the balancing of scarcity, the restriction of foot travel distances of the new player controller, plus stamina, weight, and many future gameplay changes, people will CoDayZ forever.

If DayZ takes a drastic turn with a firm hand to make it cerebral, brutal, and nail biting again, so be it, thy will be done.

Good riddance to the ill prepared, they will be replaced with like minded people who want a real challenging game.

 

Edited April 10, 2017 by ☣BioHaze☣

[DannyDog 532]

I agree whole heartedly with disallowing renting public hive servers and even going further to saying remove public hives altogether. However that just means that official servers will need to be 100% reliable when it comes to uptime and data security. Wouldn't want to lose all that progress on your character because the server died or that you can't play that character beause the server is offline.

Edited April 10, 2017 by DannyDog

[klesh 2423]

I like the public hive.  I think it should be run by Bohemia, if it can be run properly with decent support etc.  Its the original vision of the game, and should not be abandoned.  We're all on the same Chernarus+.  

Same goes with persistent zombies, keep trying, don't resort to ranged spawning.

 

I'd rather see the game try to take care of people hopping servers and spawning on top of you.  If you try to spawn in within 500m of a player, it wont let you, pick another sever (or it auto pics one for you with the closest time of day, ping etc).

Edited April 10, 2017 by klesh

[Tazhar 7]

Hi Baty,

 

Thanks for the update - I'm the Owning Founder of Metanix.net Gaming and I currently run one of DayZ's top Public Hive servers (ranked 11th globally and nearly always full) and also approved for monetization. I'd like to give you my opinion:

Public hive is a great way to engage with the DayZ community. Private Hive servers are more often than not whitelisted, and also require applications to join. This means that a player could invest hours of his/her time into a server with signing up and getting started, just to find out that the community itself is not what they were looking for. This means that the player is back to square one and has to look yet again for another community. 

 

Public Hive servers that are run by gaming communities like mine, gives us the opportunity, as a community, to engage with players and give them a small 'taste' as to what our community is about, this means we can emphasise that our server is a friendly one and we can encourage player interaction which is what a lot of people on DayZ seek. Once we have put our message across to the various players that join our server, we can then attract them into our community and encourage them to join our private hive server - which is a lot more convenient for them considering they already have an idea on what the community is about.

 

In my personal opinion, removing community public hive servers and replacing them with official DayZ public hive servers will ruin communities that have established themselves around your game as it completely stops their ability to attract new players. I have gained 650 members in a few months because my community offers a friendly environment and player interaction which is popular across DayZ. Official Public Hive servers will essentially turn DayZ into a free-for-all. Every single public hive server will be a complete battle ground and this will drive away a lot of players who enjoy the roleplay aspect. Any roleplay type activity in DayZ such as hunting and crafting will be completely void on public hive due to the risk of being killed at every corner by a player that treats DayZ as if it were Call of Duty.

 

You have a great game here, a game that can be interpreted in many ways by people and has endless play styles to it. 

 

I believe, personally - and I hope I can speak for most large communities out there, by changing your hosting rules slightly you will make the public experience so much better; here are some suggestions you could use as alternatives which may remove your problem of "loot servers" and "squad servers" for public hive. 

 

Point A)    Allow public hive servers more freedom, allow them to ban for rule breaks that they set in their own community rules. For example, if a community doesn't allow "Kill on Sight" or "Deathmatch" allow them to ban for this particular rule break.

Point B)   Use common sense when it comes to dealing with server reports; If a server has a constant flow of 60/60 or 30/30 etc... and someone reports that server for being banned, that shouldn't indicate a problem with the server, but a problem with the player. Again, this ties in with allowing communities to set their own server rules and ban for them. If you have a server reported to you that is banning anyone that joins and is named "don't join or loot reset" with 0/30 all the time then you can clearly see this is a loot server / dupe server.

Point C)   Stop trying to force players to play DayZ how YOU want them to play it. It would be much more effective if you created the base, and allowed communities such as mine to develop our own niche, targeting specific players and creating a community within your community. By this, I mean allow servers to adapt to their own play style. As of right now, my server is globally known as a friendly survival server that encourages player interaction and team work, where as BAMBILAND is globally known as a PvP server commonly based around the coast.

 

Honestly though, I genuinely believe that taking away public servers from communities will kill off many communities that have invested hundreds, if not thousands of pounds/dollars into your development. For communities such as mine, without a public hive server, we have no way of attracting players to the private hive server - it acts as a marketing tool. I think it would be much more efficient to rework your hosting rules, allowing communities more freedom to adapt your amazing game into their own niche. And spend a little more time evaluating reports correctly for servers, and removing the ones that are quite obviously not community servers. 

 

As a side note, maybe you could ask your server providers to request specific information from a buyer before the purchase is complete - to help ensure the server is for community purposes and not just the needs of a few players. Simple things like asking for their website address could determine whether a server is being purchased for private use or for a public community purpose.

 

Thanks for taking your time to read this.

 

Tazhar

Owner of Metanix.net Gaming

[Kerbo 198]

I almost never play on the public hive so don't really have much input. As others have stated, having only official public hive servers should cut down on some abuses. Anything that moves the ball towards an immersive DayZ experience is OK in my book.

[IkaikaKekai 1957]

End it.  They pretty much only get abused by the 'owners' who think they're justified to have their own private lootfarm because they're spending money.  There will still be people loot farming on low pop servers, but they'll never be completely safe or have options such as server restarts in high tier areas.

Question that might be related.  Will private servers be able to 'share' hives?  IE say two clans each have their own server, and decide to have a event/pvp server that's shared between the two, so the 3 servers would all be on the same hive?

*EDIT* It would also remove an arrow from the quiver of the naysayers that say DayZ is just a money grab.

Edited April 10, 2017 by IkaikaKekai

[chambersenator 106]

3 minutes ago, IkaikaKekai said:

Will private servers be able to 'share' hives?

They can, and many do (at least when they are all run by the same people) . Though I don't know if there would be an issue with servers are using different hosting providers. I know in the past, the Gents of Novo had linked their hive to at least two separate, unaffiliated groups.

 

4 minutes ago, IkaikaKekai said:

IE say two clans each have their own server, and decide to have a event/pvp server that's shared between the two, so the 3 servers would all be on the same hive?

The hives would have to be all wiped and then linked beforehand into a new hive, as AFIK, two existing hives can't be merged/combined into a third one. 

[AstrosLegacy 66]

Only once in a blue moon do I play on public servers these days, 90% of the time when I have played on a public hive ive had a bad experience to people glitching, hacking (Not to often but often enough), people who ghost servers (not as much of problem now with the longer spawn in times but still happens) Dupers (from what ive played I would say about every 1 in 6 groups we run into had duped gear) then there is the people who just server hop to gear up or they just wait for official server restarts. So I'm all with the idea to discontinue the possiblilty to rent them. Just having the official Public servers would be great Imo but would have to be managed in some way so people don't expierence the same problems.

[Five_Seven_Clown 88]

To me the public hive part of DayZ has always seemed like a weak implementation of an important design goal. I can see why Dean put it in the mod, it's a survival game you'd want [the possibility] to keep yourself alive for months and if you are saved on a single server that may or may not be there next week, it would stop you from playing for the long game. It's also about having just one life at a time, not many saved games dotted all over the place allowing parallel play, I feel that disassociates you from your character.

I think the current implementation is flawed in that, as Baty said, server hopping and loot farming breaks the game. Private hives are a sticking plaster rather than the cure. I don't think what you are proposing will fix the root issue either. Even though I only play private hive 1PP during Alpha, I would think for the vanilla game it should be exclusively public hive only!. (I'm sure that is not a popular opinion, and perhaps you should just give the people what they want)

Perhaps a better option would be to have one "transferable" character but transfers are limited/restricted unless your last server was unavailable?

Edit maybe a "play with friend transfer" but you have to be at the same location and your friend has to do an owl call before you can join...

 

Edited April 10, 2017 by Five_Seven_Clown

[r4hDex 0]

DayZ without own public server it's no longer my Game. Sorry.

 

[Moscow Matt 9]

I am renting a public 30 slot from Fragnet for the outrageous price of $45 U.S. a month. I rent it because my friends and I love to play the game and we love to have camps that will not be reset until a major update. I haven't encountered many hackers and very few dupers that I am aware of. I wish we had the ban option that private hives have, I would rent private if the prices would go down, I believe for just a 30 slot private you are looking at double the price of public. 

Edited April 10, 2017 by Moscow Matt

[SavageYT 12]

IMO i think this is a great idea there or more benefits to doing this as well. 

Having people not able to rent public servers is a good thing! Private hive servers are by far the best way to grow a community and really connect with the players that frequent your server.

i know people like the ability to have there own servers and maybe switch between the two because you have the same gear. Understandable its nice to have gear on multiple servers without having to gear up another character. That is why there are multi shard servers however. For example, BWAF they have a multi shard server and a website, they really grew a community and a player base and you still feel as if you are playing public hive. Gents of novo, another great community. Multi shard server, so i think if people really want to grow a community this could be a great thing. Also, Private hive servers would have an increase in traffic, public hive is nice, i think it should be under management of Bohemia. It would be a default DayZ experience, and that is what public hive should be, IMO. I'm sure up front this may seem like a really bad idea and even an annoyance to the community but i think that its a better idea, keeping an open mind i think that this may be a huge uplift to the game and i for one am looking forward to this, if it goes through! 

[meuchel 1]

Dear Dayz Team,

as one of the "Tatort Chernarus" server-admins (actually rank 7 overall ranking) I'd like to give my opinion too. I personally play the DayZ SA almost from the beginning of early alpha. Right now, I have 2,7k of playing time. My mates and I we love the game and stuck to it through all the hard times hackers and bugs gave us.  

I had rented three servers by myself and now my mates and I share a 60 slot hive. I have to admit that my first three servers (30 slots) were meant to be base and loot servers, although I never kicked or ever banned a player because I wanted to be secure! I never abused my admin-rights!! Although of course I know there are a lot of servers out there kicking players all the time and misusing their powers.

I rented a 30 slot server cause there is a less high probability to run into other players and of course there is a less high probability that other players find my base. I gave up the servers pretty fast because I made the experience that it is a lot more fun to always have the adrenalin rush you only have if you must fear running into other players. Concerning my bases, I soon understood that it makes no sense to have a base if there is nobody who could find it. I had so much stuff in my tents, I could have never used it and DayZ lost its sense for me. At this point, of course I am still glad if nobody finds my base but after all if anybody does… well, then fun starts right from the beginning!

The reason we decided to rent a public hive server is that we love to join other servers with our characters. I personally love the game so much because you really “identify” (connect) with your character. Thinking about the stuff you guys want to implement (growing beards, skilling and so on) this will even get more intense. It is not me who writes a story in DayZ it is my character who has a story. Another reason is to have clan-fights with for example other server-admins and of course to find some action or even other survivors if there is none on our server! Finally, it maximizes the game-world because it gives the map more dimensions. As simple as that.  

Let’s get to the point. The pain in the ass noobs. HACKERS. We all know there will never be a cure. There is no game without them anymore nowadays. I spent money for the game to have fun! If one of these challenged beings uses hacks to give themselves a benefit or just to destroy other players game experience and not everything possible is done to fight it, it is a breach of contract between the publisher and the customer (player). I know you guys try a lot to fight these criminals (and that’s what they are!) but we all know this is a never-ending fight you will always be lagging behind. Just like it is common practice in other games you need to include the community to fight have a chance to fight it.

There is no work around! If there are rentable public servers there must be powerful admin-rights to fight hackers! Especially a game like DayZ were you loot for hours it is essentially important that the presence of hackers is at a minimum! I will for sure never loot for hours to get a heli flying if the only thing that will happen as soon as it is flying is that it will be shot down by nerd who gets his self-esteem by using a hack.

At this point the game supports the growing hack-industry the way this problem is handled. Even though this is an early alpha this should not be the case!

[CarbonDisguise 2]

I haven't played on a public hive for probably a year now, because of the reasons already brought up. 

Edited April 10, 2017 by CarbonDisguise