Easy Solution to Solve Many Problems

[paratus 21]

I'm sure this has been suggested in the past, but I did not see this in the list so I want to hear the community's opinion and make sure we're heard.

One of the largest issues I've seen with the game right now is server hopping. Whether people do it to avoid being killed when under fire, to relog in high loot areas until they find what they're looking for or to break into fortified areas without trouble, one solution could fix it all.

The concept is to save your characters to a specific server. When you change servers, you'll be starting fresh (unless you played there before). This has many benefits:

• Server hopping becomes pointless and will almost cease right away.
  
• Each server will develop community. If you've been lucky enough to play regularly on a server with established players and teams already, you'll know this makes the game infinitely more fun.
  
• With characters still saved on the "hive", from a database management and performance issue it actually becomes easier to handle a large load. Yes, character data storage will be larger due to multiple characters per account, but at the same time it'd be extremely easy to cluster the servers. (Ie: cluster data by server number) which could actually improve server performance with nearly no work.
  
• Best of all it'd be incredibly easy to develop! Attaching another single piece of data (server ID) to characters would be almost no work at all.
  

Opinions?

NOTE: This could be made as a server option so some servers could opt-in to function this way while the default majority would remain as it is. That gives players who crave security over ease of access the option.

Edited July 31, 2012 by Paratus

[alec167 62]

i agree highly with you but think what if you have great stuff but that server goes down and you cant get that stuff back what next?

[BrettHarrenton 29]

SERVER HOPPING??? really? what about hacking, the new graphical glitch, breaking legs while entering a door spawning unconscious, losing items, duplicating items ect?

oh and a persistant character is one of the features of the mod

Edited July 29, 2012 by BrettHarrenton

[paratus 21]

SERVER HOPPING??? really? what about hacking, the new graphical glitch, breaking legs while entering a door spawning unconscious, losing items, duplicating items ect?

oh and a persistant character is one of the features of the mod

Umm, separate issues with separate solutions, completely unrelated.. not sure why I see you bringing them up here. The ranting thread is <-- that way.

As for it being persistent, well it would still be persistant. It's no different than say any MMO where your character is available on certain servers.

[paratus 21]

Surely there must be more opinion on this? I really think it would change the game drastically, and for the better. To me it seems to be just what the game needs.

[ThatGuyCalledReptile 314]

I kill server hoppers at the NW airfeild. People spawn in inside one of the hangars. One shot and they won't do that again.

Also Having persistant characters allows you to help your friends if you have to change servers.

Edited July 29, 2012 by ThatGuyCalledReptile

[Kizoja 11]

I kill server hoppers at the NW airfeild. People spawn in inside one of the hangars. One shot and they won't do that again.

Also Having persistant characters allows you to help your friends if you have to change servers.

I doubt that people get killed once because of server hopping, and then decide that will happen every time. I'm sure most of them continue to do it. Secondly, your friends would eventually be all on your server. If you met them in game then you would have met them on your server that you play the most because your character would be saved per server. If they are a RL friend then hopefully you all decided to start on the same server (kinda like how MMOs work). Sure having a persistant character CURRENTLY allows you to help your friends if you have to change server, but that wouldn't matter after this was implemented and people settled on their servers.

Edited July 29, 2012 by Kizoja

[vision1776 42]

I would like to see characters saved per server. regardless if the server goes down atleast I would not be stuck waiting for my team to join me and it would promote more coop among strangers.

[Kizoja 11]

I don't think the instability of the current servers is really an issue to bring up. Bringing up this issue is like saying they will NEVER be capable of having stable servers, therefore you can never have a good feature like this.

Edited July 29, 2012 by Kizoja

[Traveler (DayZ) 27]

atm at least I have to try and connect to half a dozen servers at least whenever I start...and sometimes I don't even remember which one I joined. Sometimes servers get abandoned...I do not want to start anew time and again....this qould totally wreck the "immersion" some people are talking about....you spawn on the beach...wait, didn't I have a AKM last time? wtf? AND it would lead to constant server population maybe, but these people would mostly have good gear, and the "newcomers" would be shot on the beach, mostly (not that different now, I know).

We had fun on a freshly-restarted server, 5 guys talking over VOIP ...on a nighttime-server hosting 35/40 players. But my gear was from another server entirely, where I have my tent etc...I know this gets abused...but having people to need to restart anew every time I log onto a new server? Bitch please ^^ ;-)

[The True Nova 22]

Yea, it would be rather difficult to find a single server to play on all the time. This would stop server hopping altogether but at a great cost. I won't be able to play and find daytime servers at night:( if this were to be implemented.

[Kizoja 11]

Finally some people give some legitimate feedback. I can see where the two previous posts are coming from, but I also feel like if they polished the mod up a bit and some core issues the idea could work. It might be worth the effort though. It would suck for streamers to. Someone finds out where some streamers play on regularly and stream snipe.

Edited July 29, 2012 by Kizoja

[Frozen (DayZ) 144]

for me such change wont bet a gamechenging at all, so i voted "yes". and yes it will solve many problems that current system has and improve performance(less or even none data to send to hive), but this is not going to happen, because if Rocket wanted character bound to server, he would`ve done it from the start of the mod, but he wants characters to be persistent trough servers.

[The True Nova 22]

If this were to be implemented, how about introducing 100% permanent servers that would not be dropped. In other words, specified servers that generate a single separate character for everyone. Then you can also have servers that work the way it is now.

[ollox 38]

Wouldn't it be better to move towards a single server system? Is there not a way that multiple servers could share the load to host everyone on the same map? That would be amazing.

[chhopsky 25]

I definitely don't want my character and gear locked to a server. There aren't many usable ANZ servers, and they're full basically 100% of the time. You never know what you'll have to play on next, plus bandwidth is expensive so sometimes they go down. I'm still waiting for ANZ2 to come back because I left a car with all my gear in it, and it's out of bandwidth until the 1st of August. I understand why you want what you want, but the persistence is really a good portion of the point of it.

[Frozen (DayZ) 144]

Wouldn't it be better to move towards a single server system? Is there not a way that multiple servers could share the load to host everyone on the same map? That would be amazing.

well, usually server is running 50 player. if we combine two we get 100( a bit rough calculation, but anyway). in this case i dont see any reason to combine more then 3-5 server. or we get massive overpopulation, and a lot gunfire. its technically wont change anything, but just increase quantity of slots per server.

[paratus 21]

Given the feedback, what do you all think about this being a server option? So by default characters would be hive-wide but some could opt in to have characters on that server be local to that server only.

[ielisuk@gmail.com 4]

Voted no for the following reasons:

• Having your character locked to a single server means that you will have to wait for a slot to become available on that server in order to play, for people who can only play at certain times due to other irl commitments that could be a long wait
  
• Relating to the above, if you play with a group of, for example, 3 friends you would have to wait for a total of 4 server slots to become available which can take hours.
  
• Servers don't update/go down, and in that event it means you can't play.
  
• If you lock your character to a server the day/night cycle becomes a problem as I tend to play when it's night time irl so I'd have to have lock myself to a server that is daytime at night, if I ever wanted to play at night I would literally have to stay up until the early hours of the morning to experience it if it was a server that was GMT-8 or something.
  
• Having it be optional, and having both a locked and hive character doesn't really make any sense either, as you may as well just keep your hive character and limit yourself to playing on one server. I don't see the point of having two characters in that scenario.
  

DayZ is already a waiting simulator, having character locked to a server, as far as I can see, will just aggravate the problem.

[Honjura 4]

cbf reading all the post but point is, servers can currently only handle 50-60 players at one time, they cost anywhere between $1000-3000 per month to run and the current ARMA II game does not support such an innovation also map size would be a major issue. Seriously stop asking for stupid shit like this when there are more important things such as hackers, item duping, loss of items on logout due to the servers not updating the Main DayZ server with your inventory. go cry moar for anti-server hoping, it's a legit tactic, don't bitch that you can't do it so no one can because you have a shit net connection or shit hardware and that in general load times are slow, if people have the patience to server hop then they deserve the shit they get for being so patient, sorry you don't have the same patience.

Also:

oh and a persistent character is one of the features of the mod

[paratus 21]

cbf reading all the post but point is, servers can currently only handle 50-60 players at one time, they cost anywhere between $1000-3000 per month to run and the current ARMA II game does not support such an innovation also map size would be a major issue. Seriously stop asking for stupid shit like this when there are more important things such as hackers, item duping, loss of items on logout due to the servers not updating the Main DayZ server with your inventory. go cry moar for anti-server hoping, it's a legit tactic, don't bitch that you can't do it so no one can because you have a shit net connection or shit hardware and that in general load times are slow, if people have the patience to server hop then they deserve the shit they get for being so patient, sorry you don't have the same patience.

Also: oh and a persistent character is one of the features of the mod

First, this idea doesn't change the persistence of the character. You guys should go look up the definition of the word.

My point is, if you don't mind those waits to get on a server, like me, you COULD opt in to play on such a server while the majority are still linked. For me, the current state of the game is quite broken.

Take last night for example: myself and two friends were in the "factory" and a car pulled up with four people. We shot 3 of them and two died right away. The third was bleeding and instantly logged out so we couldn't get him (we see this probably 5+ times a day). The fourth logged out, come into our building on another server, logged back in and shot us in the backs. THAT IS GAME BREAKING.

This is the only way to prevent that. Why fortify a position now? Why have a base, and why defend what you own when someone can teleport inside out of your control.

[kovalhuk 19]

+1

I agree with OP.

But server hopping is being fixed by devs..

Edited July 31, 2012 by kovalhuk

[Duckman404 37]

cbf reading all the post but point is, servers can currently only handle 50-60 players at one time, they cost anywhere between $1000-3000 per month

Uh, what? Renting a private server for ARMA 2 usually costs about $2 to $2.50 per slot, and that's for Australian servers. A 50 slot server would cost less than a tenth of your 'estimate'.

But server hopping is being fixed by devs..

How? I can't see a way to completely stop players from teleporting using server hopping. I just can't, without some sort of 'NO PLAYERS CAN SPAWN HERE' radio tower or something, and even then that would only be used to grief, since it wouldn't allow you to set up a little safe base for you and your friends.

Buildings are a different matter of course; if you log off inside one, then maybe you get teleported outside it when you log back in?

Putting in timers for people logging off or alt+f4ing will have to be very restrictive to combat the more determined server hoppers or combat loggers.

I've been playing on a private hive server for a while now, and it's been pretty damn nice. The only time people log out is when they want to get the fuck out of dodge, which doesn't bother me so much; it just means some wasted ammo. They can't get into a different server to heal, reload, and move to a better position because of the private hive, and that makes combat a lot more... honorable, I suppose?

Same deal with player built 'structures' or 'forts'. Only someone with a toolbox would be able to get through a well built sandbag and barb wire fortress, and those are pretty damn rare. Makes things more secure, and means that you can actually set up proper home bases, without worrying about teleporters cheating their way in.

And y'know what? Rocket said he wants players to build bases and make little civilized spots. At the moment, having a single hive and having bases that are, to a degree, secure, seem to be an incompatible goal.

Edited July 31, 2012 by Duckman404

[CIarkness 1]

Think about this, if it really did work like this, wouldn't the clanies usually hog to one server, resulting in any newbies to switch servers upon death. Then eventually, no one will play on that server anymore.

No.

[spammy@live.de 19]

+1

worth a try.

Edited July 31, 2012 by SamSpam