How often are characters saved exactly?

[Rich (DayZ) 18]

Since my cat learned that jumping on my face early in the morning resulted in earlier breakfast, I've started playing for the occasional hour before I leave for work. The servers are quieter, it's a good way to wake up and the solitude of the game fits the quiet of early morning.

Unfortunately I had that hour of my life deleted today. The server I was happily creeping around on, EU404, either crashed or rebooted after an hour's play and, when I reconnected, it was like nothing had happened.

I don't really mind the lost gear. Gear comes and goes. What I really mind is that all my new stories never happened.

I can't tell anyone about how, in a hut in Novy Sobor, panicked by the howling of zombies outside, I accidentally wiped my backpack inventory by picking up a new ALICE pack before dropping my old Coyote patrol pack.

I can't tell anyone about how, sneaking into the Stary Sobor encampment, a former USMC mixed martial arts instructor (I can only assume) saw me and smashed my knee with a single blow before I could dispatch him.

I can't tell anyone how I dragged my shattered leg around the camp, on my belly, to find an M4A1 and G17 among the trash and dead bodies.

i can't tell anyone how I crawled forlornly into town in a vain attempt to find medical help.

I can't tell anyone of the elation I felt when, 15 minutes and 8 zombies later, I spotted that hallowed, thin tube of morphine lying inside a hut.

I can't tell anyone, because none of this ever happened. 10 minutes later, crossing a field under a rising moon, the server stopped responding. And when I logged back into another server, none of my progress had been saved. Even logging back into EU404 when it came back up saw me back in Guglovo, cold and hungry, clutching my Lee Enfield as though it had all been a bad dream.

So, TL;DR -

How often do servers sync your character with the central database? How come I lost a whole hour? Is there something wrong with that server? Should I avoid playing on it again?

[avarsetarve 0]

Content removed, Flagged as SPAM.

Boneboys.

Edited July 13, 2012 by Boneboys

[BlaBlaSoldier 16]

I found a can of beans yesterday inside a zombie while my eating icon was blinking. I have looted it and eaten and i saw my eating icon was green. I had to abort and went playing again after 5 mins and i saw my food blinking again and i died on hunger :( .

[Testificate 7]

I cannot decode what avarsetarve said so I will say something to it myself.

It depends on many things: Your movement, the server, Hive and bugs.

If you move (especially in a bike or car) the chances of saving are really low (some people weren't saved for over 5 minutes). But on normal circumstances, once every 5-60 seconds.

Edited July 13, 2012 by Testificate

[bad_mojo (DayZ) 1204]

You can't tell anyone that you don't bother looking for morphine until you're crawling around?

That makes me sad :(

[domistyle 221]

If you are in a car and the server crashes while you drive you will be back where you got into the car and the car will be where you left it.

So if you drive with a car from Elektro to Cherno and the server crashes when you are in Cherno, you will be in Elektro and the car in Cherno.

Your character location doesn't save properly if you are in a car so get out from time to time while driving.

If you have no car it is most likely just Hive fucking up.

It happens alot since the recent update, our locations get moved around very often too since 1.7.2.

Usually it should save every few minutes but sometimes the saves just don't happen for some reason.

[Rich (DayZ) 18]

You can't tell anyone that you don't bother looking for morphine until you're crawling around?

That makes me sad :(

FYI, I used my last one on a friend who had a disagreement with a door he opened!

And I wasn't driving a car. I don't have one. I spent an hour running, crouching and crawling across Chernarus dodging Zeds in fear of my life. And it turns out it was all a dream!

[nacrom 82]

All servers are having this issue with the patch. Servers are not saving progress properly and are once again teleporting people to the debug forest with or without gear. The only way to play the game now is run around cherno like a madman because any progress you make stands a great chance of being lost and/or your character may just randomly lose ALL gear.

This really needs to be fixed. I would suggest rolling back to the more stable version of the game prior to the latest dayz update and arma beta patch. It really seems like there is absolutely no testing done before this patches and "updates" are rolled out to us.

[Lukio (DayZ) 24]

And I wasn't driving a car. I don't have one. I spent an hour running, crouching and crawling across Chernarus dodging Zeds in fear of my life. And it turns out it was all a dream!

The server maybe wasn't connected to the hive? There are some server admins who think its cool to not have the server connect to the hive to prevent server hopping / ghosting etc. While these user exploits ( as defined by Rocket) are deterred by this, your character does not get saved onto the official hive. Probably after restarting the server lost all player data from its local character database.

My 2 cents (a bit OT):

Personally I am pretty annoyed about all the fragmentation going on just with this mod itself for 100 servers found there are 30 different flavours with different settings, versions, beta versions and own modifications (side chat, vehicles etc.). This is typical for ARMA 2 servers and has always annoyed me that almost every server has its own strange mod settings, mod-modifications and versions running. To top that off the integrated Gamespy server browser is a piece of shit.and external server browsers are very slow when refreshing / updating.