Shenanigans on US 441

[Patient Zer0 39]

Last night at around 11 pm (Central), I (Patient Zero) and a friend (Steaz) were clearing out from a town and heading south when we saw two other players running across a field. We dropped into the grass (wearing ghille suits, and it was night) and just laid there watching the other guys. They ran to one end of the field, stopped, spent some time looking around, then turned around and ran back the other way. They went behind some trees and we lost sight of one of them.

Being paranoid in DayZ now, I was convinced the missing guy was on another server to 'ghost' behind us, so I started crawling eastwards to get under some pine trees. My friend stayed where he was, messing around with getting his CZ550 out and planning to shoot the one other player we could still see. We spend a good few minutes just watching.

Suddenly, we both hear on Direct Communications, 'Die mother fucker!' and automatic weapons fire from right beside my friend. Maybe it was a PDW or MP5, I don't think it was an AK or M16/M4 and definitely nothing larger. I saw no muzzle flash, and the noise could have just been transmitted through the cheater's mic. After what seemed like a LOT of shooting, my friend was killed. I stayed under my tree trying to see where the guy was but no one stepped up to loot my friend or anything. Another 5 minutes pass and suddenly I hear behind me, 'Hey, tell me how hell feels, you fuck.' I turned around, saw no one (just trees - I was deep in trees) and then promptly died. -760,000 blood. That's not a typo. I mention it to my friend and he tells me that he had the same thing.

It was bedtime for me so I just chalked it up to being outsmarted by someone with bad social skills and went to sleep. Woke up this morning with a nagging feeling and went back into the server and sprinted from the coast to where our corpses were. Sure enough, they were completely untouched. AKS-74 Kobra, still there. Ok, that's not a huge prize. M4A3 CCO, still there. That's odd. My friend's NVG. My NVG. The spare NVG in my backpack? All there. No way a legitimate player would leave those behind. My GPS? Not taken? This can't be real.

All around my corpse the trees had been knocked over too. Like a bomb went off, except I heard no explosion, saw nothing. I first suspected that the second player we saw, the one who vanished, was the culprit but I don't have any proof (and have no names). It's possible they had nothing to do with it at all, since it sounded like they'd just moved on down into town and were shooting zombies between when my friend was killed and I was.

I have no real understanding of how the hack was accomplished, but it appeared to have the following abilities:

• An ability to make the cheater invisible.
  
• An ability to locate other players and possibly teleport to their location.
  
• The ability to cause massive amounts of damage to a relatively small area of the map, knocking over trees and killing players in that area.
  

Edited August 1, 2012 by Patient Zer0