Future of public hive servers

[Tabbykatze 23]

*The ground shakes and glows green and one word is spoken softly but as strong as a shout*

Necrothread

I was brought here by 

 

 

Bit of a long one, bare with me as I have a bit to say

Background: I do not rent a server, I recently started playing with a couple of friends on 0.62 again after buying as soon as it was released as Alpha way back when, no idea how far but basically did not play since Deans employment and original launch of DayZSA until recently. I did heavily play the mod back when there were only about 5 or 6 western servers running and finding an M16 was a big thing that put you in god status. Macaroni pistols used to be the staple weapon of the west...

To me, Public hives are the heart and soul of what Dayz was all about. Communities able to grow within the confines of their chosen server but have the opportunity to meet other communities on theirs. By having a Public hive that synchronises across the community you have the opportunity to join friends, other groups and other communities wherever you went on other servers. Here's a scenario:

• Friend 1: Hey Tabby, wanna play Dayz?
• Me: Sure, I'll log onto the server
• Friend 2: Which server? I'm playing on XYZ and am at north west military base
• Me: the server I am playing on, I'm at NW Airfield
• *argument who should join the others server to start as a new spawn on the shore, not meeting each other for well over an hour if not the entire evening while we meet up to then have a bare minimum gametime together to potentially muck around with light looting before we go to bed*

In the situation above, I would honestly say I cba, I have become attached to my character with his gleaming bald head, squirky eyes and a face made of playdough and do not want to start from scratch and go through the exhaustive looting process all over again. I don't mind doing it when I die because I messed up, i deserve the loot run.

So what else can happen, in the mod our clan would regularly have fights with another clan on another server. This would be organised, we'd pop onto their forums, chat a bit of brass ass and say ready get for a showdown at your base at XYZ time and day, game on. They would do the same to us  and was flipping fantabulous and this was possible because their big community rented their own server and their own sizable regular community on their server and so did we. This would absolutely not be possible on private shards only and would be damn near unlikely on a community shard server.

The reason for this is because the community cannot control who goes onto a community shard so you have 20 members of your own community, you have to find a server, all the main community servers are near full/full. What do you do? Do you split up the group across the remaining slots available on the community server or do you find an empty unused community server to jump on and not have the chance of meeting anyone but your group for an unknown amount of time? Or do you jump to another regions server and grin and bear the high ping/lag?

Or do you have your own public shard server for your community that your group supplants and pursues making it a positive part of the greater community?

Here's another story about how the community worked together in the mod and that was the cross server medics (can't remember their name but Bonnie Tyler used to play in my head when I thought of them). They had a sub reddit (can't seem to find) and if you were injured and dying with a tiny non-existant chance at survival, you could put a plea for help in this reddit. They would contact you, ask you where you were and what you needed and they would arrive at your spot and save your sorry behind. THAT WAS THEIR SOLE PURPOSE IN THE MOD, that was how they played the game and they loved it. They always had the high positivity skins (tartan lumberjack IIRC, I never had it because I was panicky around players, shoot first ask later, bandit skin time). This could not exist on Private Shards.

Why am I bringing this up, "that's the minority of players, get over it", I hear some say.

If you are saying what is just above, then you did not understand what the original vision by Dean was about:

For players to join into a survival game where you have to work together (or against) other survivors in a wasteland where resources are limited. You played it your way and it was a sandbox. A sandbox, by its very nature, is to allow players to play the game how they want to play it.

If you take that away and try to artificially restrict a Sandbox to a singular vision, you kill that Sandbox, it is no longer a system for players and the game to grow naturally. A garden grows best without boundaries or limits, a couple of prunes and deweeding here and there will allow it to flourish.

The other elephant in the room that only server renters have mentioned is how expensive it is to host servers, that's to the public by GSPs which seem to have insane overheads and are milking it for everything that it is worth. Granted they build a lot of tools to assist the backend but I can rent a 6C16GB Xeon Server 2016 for £20 a month and run any gameserver i please off of it which would be more than capable of running a 60 slot and some room to spare.

BI make no more money from the game after the initial sale, once the sale of the game is made there is no further operational/monthly income from the playerbase. So that means the community servers are totally reliant on the community using them and players buying the game. As the community dips and wanes, BI may throttle back or lighten the server load/numbers which means players could lose everything. Servers aren't just magic, there is a massive infrastructure behind a cluster that has to be supported, maintained and operated which has substantial costs.

So from this, I am insinuating if Bohemia Interactive kill Public shards, they are in no way obligated, or even as a desirable, to increase the slot count or number of Dayz Community servers. It's just not economical, it's a resource drain and if they do this and more people move to community servers, there would be an expectation of administration, so that's another cost for server monitoring. If they don't apply a form of administration then people will complain about the servers and taints the vision of the game.

So to round this up:

Dayz is a sandbox, you can't put too many artificial restrictions, limits or difficulties into a community based sandbox or it will rapidly entropy then die. If the servers went up to Planetside 2 levels of slot counts then I would not see this as a problem at all because the individual servers themselves could be sufficiently large enough to have a major consistent community running within them. Because the servers are so small, having the ability to work alongside other servers overcomes this problem, take that away and it becomes tiny islands and the rate of entropy will increase.

 

My opinion as to why this post was made by BI and they are lifting up the skirt of this decision is because they cannot square the circle as to how to deal with dupers, farmers and badmins. With dupers, BI need to just fix the cause of the duplication, it is obvious they know the cause, it needs to be fixed. Dayz mod started to die and the public shards broke up because Dean (and co, was BI at this point) could not resolve the issue of the tent persistence duplication. Anything you put in the tent, regardless if it is taken back out, will magically regenerate at next server restart. In the end, through no action of our 60 nightly, around 120 average regular players minimum at this time, we had 30 bugged tents magically regnerating M107s, NVGs, Ghillies, M4A1SDs every day. The only way we could fix this was to wipe the server every week. Killed the public non clan community because there was no way they could keep their tents. I understand many...Many...months later they fixed this but by then the damage was done.

I get why some people are against Public hive, I have seen those exact problems too in the past in the mod. But again, a few bad eggs shouldn't mean the whole basket has to be chucked. That is a bad anti-community knee jerk reaction and I feel that some of the ways to fix some of these issues are as follows (which are all metrics that either already being tracked by BI or are definitely possible):

• Server hoppers have diminishing returns, if you jump up to 2 servers in 24 hours, 90 second timeout on each join. If you jump between 2-5 in 24 hours, 5-10 minutes per join. If it is over 5 in 24 hours, each attempt increases the diminishing return, make server hopping something that will break your game. Once someone has picked a server, they'll generally stay on it for up a 24 hour window anyway. How many of your jump servers multiple times in a night on community/public shard that are not to do with resets or server crashes? (if server crashes, I always wait for it to return)
• Duplicators: Every item that is picked up by a survivor is serialised (increased load, possible negative) and when a duplicated item is detected by the serialised item being placed in however it is (i don't know how current duplication works) and "duped", then surely the serial would be duped as well. Unless the method of duplication creates a new item in which case, fix the bug. If the serialisation method is possible, it only needs to be checked when an item is picked up and placed on the ground to register the entry and status. If a user is found with a survivor with multiple items with the same serial, you can scrub them from the database and force them to start as a bambi. Multiple offenses can lead to a hive ban.
• Loot farmers and badmins: Never been an easy thing to deal with, not many ways you can deal with except make easier tools to report servers like from within the server browser.
• Hackers target community, public and private shards. If you think Hackers only target Public shards then you do not understand why hackers hack. They do it to grief, they find the server with the biggest player base and toss the table across the room for the biggest return of investment. I have only encountered 1 hacker and that was on a community server. A community server is no safer from a hacker than a public. I used to actively admin our old Mod server, I would have 3 screens, 1 to play the game, the other two to stream the log data which I would actively read while the wrap of 10 20p pieces taped together held my 'W' key down while travelling. I got so involved I could read the XYZ coordinate from the log data and immediately be able to map that to 6x6 digit reference squares onto the map without the calculator. This gave me an unfair advantage so I did not actively admin while actually playing as much as possible. I caught speed hackers by watching these logs multiple times, I caught hacked kit generators just by watching these logs. If I can do this by watching the logs then why on earth can there not be automated tools to check this. I just don't get why a game so server side dependent cannot pick up a speed hacker. In the mod, if you had no stamina it would take exactly 3 minutes to travel 1km. If you can travel 1km (while not in a vehicle)  faster than this then why can an automated system not stop this. It boggles my damn mind. "But it's Battleye" I hear the cry, well maybe it needs to a fork or needs to be brought in house. Otherwise, all other types of hacking like Aimbots etc are picked up by BEye very proficiently.

Killing the Public Hive kills what the original Dayz mod was all about, now Dean Hall might have abandoned it but it doesn't mean we should either. Just because it says "DayZ Standalone" on the front doors now does not mean I will not respect and pursue the traditions of the original Dayz like:

GET DOWN ON THE GROUND, DROP YOUR GUN GIMME YOUR DAMN BEANS OR IMMA POP A CAP IN YOU RIGHT NOW, DROP IT, GET DOWN, RIGHt, HARD WAY IT IS, OPEN FIRE!!!1!!1

Fix the issue with the product, don't break something else to band aid it.