strange dip in playercount

[KA-74USER 42]

ever since about February I noticed daily lows of about 20,000 players, as well as a sharper increase and decrease during evening and late night hours. For a long time before this the player counts never dipped below 30,000 and the daily ups and downs of playercount numbers were much smoother and less dramatic. 

this is a link to the dayz steamcharts

https://steamcharts.com/app/221100#7d

my question is what could have happened in February 2023 to cause such an abrupt shift in playerbase trends? 

 

I started playing again on pc recently and for a whole year before i took a break 3 months ago I never encountered one cheater. but in the last two weeks being back on the game i have encountered 3 obvious cheaters, My theory is that dayz has seen a surge in cheating recently. One of the largest threads on the dayz steam discussions right now has almost 3000 replies and is a user complaining about experiencing more cheating in the game than usual

this is a link to that post

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221100/discussions/0/3192492886087735382/

 

Edited April 22 by KA-74USER

[Kyiara 789]

On 4/22/2024 at 7:00 AM, KA-74USER said:

ever since about February I noticed daily lows of about 20,000 players, as well as a sharper increase and decrease during evening and late night hours. For a long time before this the player counts never dipped below 30,000 and the daily ups and downs of playercount numbers were much smoother and less dramatic. 

this is a link to the dayz steamcharts

https://steamcharts.com/app/221100#7d

my question is what could have happened in February 2023 to cause such an abrupt shift in playerbase trends? 

 

I started playing again on pc recently and for a whole year before i took a break 3 months ago I never encountered one cheater. but in the last two weeks being back on the game i have encountered 3 obvious cheaters, My theory is that dayz has seen a surge in cheating recently. One of the largest threads on the dayz steam discussions right now has almost 3000 replies and is a user complaining about experiencing more cheating in the game than usual

this is a link to that post

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221100/discussions/0/3192492886087735382/

 

Sorry, I don't really see anything unusual in the Steam chart. The numbers are looking great, even better on average than last year when comparing the same months.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no cheaters in the game, even though BattlEye is working strongly against them. But we've checked multiple "obvious" cases in the past, and most of them turned out to be legitimate kills. People often tend to label anything they can't explain themselves as a cheating issue. "I was killed, don't know how, cheater killed me," but as I already mentioned above, those are often legit kills.

[damca 12]

On 4/24/2024 at 12:45 PM, Kyiara said:

Sorry, I don't really see anything unusual in the Steam chart. The numbers are looking great, even better on average than last year when comparing the same months.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no cheaters in the game, even though BattlEye is working strongly against them. But we've checked multiple "obvious" cases in the past, and most of them turned out to be legitimate kills. People often tend to label anything they can't explain themselves as a cheating issue. "I was killed, don't know how, cheater killed me," but as I already mentioned above, those are often legit kills.

Could you perhaps suggest to the developers making the audio cutoff after death a bit longer, so players can actually hear the gunshot that killed them? It should make the false cheater accusations less frequent.

[Salem's Cave 2]

Hey Kyiara , I hope you are well.

What can players do if they encounter a blatant cheater on official servers ?
Would someone at the Dev team consider creating a form to report said blatant cheaters  with the required information to investigate if possible ?

TThanks.