Do the Dev's Ever Respond?

[pa1n 2]

we know they're too busy...but we still need help

[zild1221 1]

Hopelessly trying to get their attention!

[mattlightfoot 2463]

Guys I'll try and address as many things as I can.

Firstly e-mails, one of the biggest problems is people emailing us and emailing the wrong address. Please send the first contact through the contact form on the main page. Once someone gets in touch that is when you can start emailing.

Secondly we apologise for the delay but we are on thin ice where we want to try and respond to everyone but bringing more people on only increases the amount of people with access to your details.

Bringing new people on is difficult, due to having to get the right person for the right job and then being able to trust them from the start.

We are working on methods to try and automate server administration which then eases up the pressure for emails.

Again it is a very very steep learning curve and expansion for us and we are just trying to keep up with it.

The best thing you can do is check out the basic guidelines of a server before you buy on the FAQ thread;http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=15&pid=44#pid44

Make sure you have arma 2 CO patched up to 1.60 and the mod files downloaded and where everything is clearly so our guys don't have to spend time looking for them.

Once all this is done then get in touch through the contact form and stick in where your server is located, who you want it to be listed as hosted by and the RDP details.

Then one of our guys will be in touch asap.

There is a chance I have missed something out here, if so I am hoping one of the really nice mods or other admins can edit my post and correct me.

[demine0 43]

It sounds like the Development team is overloaded with all of the work that's been requested.

I've been involved in a few server setups, and have helped countless people troubleshoot their servers, and from what I can see, 95% of the issues are common issues that I was able to either research and fix, or get the answers from someone who has fixed them before (Mojo).

No offence to the development team, but the Devs have only fixed one issue for me in the past. This issue involved my server not being able to connect to the SQL database. 4 Developers looked at the issue. 3 of them spent over an hour on the box troubleshooting. Finally Vipeax looked at it, and withen 5 minutes of doing something on DAYZ's end (He only ran ipconfig on my server. I watched him through a hidden VNC session), everything was working. It took 3 days for this to get fixed.

I also had a similar experience trying to launch the beta server of armaII. It was crashing with a windows Exception. One dev logged in, rebooted my server, and started JUST hive.exe. Thats all he did.

He then sent me an e-mail saying it's Jay2ArmaLib's fault and that I was using the wrong version. He said he fixed it. I logged in, everything was now shut down, and my Hive wasn't even functioning correctly. So the dev left everything even more broken then before.

Another dev logged in later that night, and said the same thing about the JayArma2lib. Neither dev bothered to link me to the correct version, even though I know I allready had the correct version.

This problem was finally resolved when I picked Mojo's brain about this issue. It turned out that for some reason, the Beta installer puts a dsound.dll file in the expansions/beta directory. This needed to be deleted and everything started working. I e-mailed the devteam e-mail back saying that I resolved it. About 20 minutes later I noticed that someone logged on the server again with the dayz account, and stopped the server and hive services again, and attempted to relaunch them. They launched the hive and hiveauth, but not the server. At this point, I changed all my server passwords, as I don't trust the dayz dev team to not come back on unauthorized and screw something up... again.

We've even had a developer who gave the host an excuse saying that the server wouldn't run because the host was running "Windows Server 2007". The developer looked at the copyright date of the operating system and thought that was the name of the OS? This is a perfect example of why you need professional Engineers on the team.

I have several hosts (All of which account for a large majority of the DayZ Servers on the internet) which all claim to have similar stories.

What I'm getting at here, is there is a group of people who have made it publicly known (Look at the Volunteer Server Admin group thread) that we're interested in helping get the server community sorted, and we're available to help troubleshoot.

Judging by the amount of time it takes for the Development team to fix something, vs the mount of time it takes for us to fix something, I think we could burn through the troubleshooting e-mails, much quicker than the dev team can. Any issues we can't handle, we can escalate to the dev team. This should be a HUGE selling point on the idea, because time is important to everyone involved here. The developers really don't have the time to be troubleshooting these issues, AND developing a game at the same time, and players don't have time to be waiting a week for their server to be up. Every day that a players server is down, that's a day wasted in their monthly server bill. As DayZ gets more popular, this is only going to become a much bigger issue.

We're all engineers by trade, so this is what we do for a living.

We also don't need any type of secure access to do this type of work. Most of the server community allready trusts us and gives us access to their servers. All we would need to make our jobs easier is better documentation, and better communication with the development team. When a new hive is released, we should know about it right away. We shouldn't have to go hunting for a link to it.

When a developer fixes something on the server, the developer should e-mail us exactly what they did to fix it. This proves to me that the developer actually did something. I've seen for myself, via hidden VNC that the devs will log in and do either very little or nothing, and then say they've fixed the issue, when nothings been fixed. I'm sure the developer just got sidetracked, and forgot, but this causes issues. Sending notes on what was done will avoid those issues, as well as help us create a knowledge base, so that the next time I setup a server (I do almost 7 setups a week now), I don't need to bother a dev to fix an issue that they've most likely fixed 100 times in the past.

A new google group also ISN'T an answer to the fragmentation issue thats going on in the server community. Introducing a new group, instead of just fixing the current issue (I mean.. how hard is it to add people to a forum group? It's not very hard at all!), is just going to make more places for information to get spread out on and eventually lost. The google group has been up for about 2 or 3 days now I think, and it hasn't done anything to help us centralize documentation, downloads and any other resources. It's just become another website that I have to check now to make sure I don't miss anything.

We're all engineers. Troubleshooting applications on Server OS's is what we do for a living. Put a group that lives and breaths server administration in place to help, and you'll have way less issues. The developers are busy with what they do best... Developing applications.

Guys I'll try and address as many things as I can.

Firstly e-mails' date=' one of the biggest problems is people emailing us and emailing the wrong address. Please send the first contact through the contact form on the main page. Once someone gets in touch that is when you can start emailing.

Secondly we apologise for the delay but we are on thin ice where we want to try and respond to everyone but bringing more people on only increases the amount of people with access to your details.

Bringing new people on is difficult, due to having to get the right person for the right job and then being able to trust them from the start.

We are working on methods to try and automate server administration which then eases up the pressure for emails.

Again it is a very very steep learning curve and expansion for us and we are just trying to keep up with it.

The best thing you can do is check out the basic guidelines of a server before you buy on the FAQ thread;http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=15&pid=44#pid44

Make sure you have arma 2 CO patched up to 1.60 and the mod files downloaded and where everything is clearly so our guys don't have to spend time looking for them.

Once all this is done then get in touch through the contact form and stick in where your server is located, who you want it to be listed as hosted by and the RDP details.

Then one of our guys will be in touch asap.

There is a chance I have missed something out here, if so I am hoping one of the really nice mods or other admins can edit my post and correct me.

[/quote']

[mattlightfoot 2463]

Right I have sent you a pm to enquire as to specifics of your proposition as it could have some viability but I'm awaiting your response.

The server admin team are some of the most over worked, un-payed individuals. Their entire existence is based around the mod. They are like me, wake up, answer emails, order takeaway food online and peeing in bottles. So that they can keep up with the amount of emails we get.

I don't know specifics of your previous encounters with them but I have complete faith in their abilities and I will back them to the hilt. All day every day because that is what they do for me in their tireless efforts to deal with the mountains of requests.

I am open to suggests on how to improve the situation if you have anything valuable to contribute please PM me entitled something that makes me know what it is or skype me - magnimatt and I will see if this is something that could be a viable option.

[zild1221 1]

Just used the contact on the main page. Hopefully you guys got that. Can't wait for a response!

[zild1221 1]

Is NOW a better time for the devs to see this. This is getting ridiculous.

[rocket 16567]

Ander has gone through and rolled 40 servers today cleaning up 600 old emails. Has your issue been resolved?

[Moochie 1]

Ander has gone through and rolled 40 servers today cleaning up 600 old emails. Has your issue been resolved?

I have been waiting since May 29th to have 184.107.48.59 white listed.

[rocket 16567]

Done. Sorry for the delay and that it's taken so absurdly long to resolve this.

[Denisio 0]

Waiting since Thursday 24.05.2012 22:59 Whitelisting and MissionFiles :D

[rocket 16567]

Waiting since 24 May Whitelisting and MissionFiles :D

Best advice I can give, resubmit your details to the contact form.

[Denisio 0]

Best advice I can give' date=' resubmit your details to the contact form.

[/quote']

Done :D

[Moochie 1]

Waiting since 24 May Whitelisting and MissionFiles :D

Best advice I can give' date=' resubmit your details to the contact form.

[/quote']

Done (for the 10th time), thanks for replying :D

[mikeambrose3 53]

I have waited well around one month and no reply has been given to one of my multiple e-mails. This is what I mean... how do people that wait 3 days get higher priority then people that requested the stuff over 1 month?

Doesn't make any sense.

[Disgraced 1123]

I have waited well around one month and no reply has been given to one of my multiple e-mails. This is what I mean... how do people that wait 3 days get higher priority then people that requested the stuff over 1 month?

Doesn't make any sense.

Have you ever worked for free or had to deal with myriad issues on the fly, with a disconnected group of volunteers?

Not easy.

[mikeambrose3 53]

I have waited well around one month and no reply has been given to one of my multiple e-mails. This is what I mean... how do people that wait 3 days get higher priority then people that requested the stuff over 1 month?

Doesn't make any sense.

Have you ever worked for free or had to deal with myriad issues on the fly' date=' with a disconnected group of volunteers?

Not easy.

[/quote']

Yes I have. I am a former advanced support rep for a popular GSP company, mostly based around Minecraft. Setting up plugins, servers, managing them, and monitoring them near 24/7 is a hassle but hell, ONE MONTH+ when these people are getting setup after a few days? It pisses me off greatly.

Yes, I DO know how it is to manage this stuff and I do manage a large community of my own.

[zild1221 1]

Great. People in this thread are getting help and not myself who created the thread!

[mikeambrose3 53]

Great. People in this thread are getting help and not myself who created the thread!

Sadly you're going to have to wait like all of us. Good luck.

[Pallidum 33]

We're doing our best to work through the backlog of server requests, but there's still a lot of work to do. Please be patient in the meantime. :)

[mikeambrose3 53]

We're doing our best to work through the backlog of server requests' date=' but there's still a lot of work to do. Please be patient in the meantime. :)

[/quote']

I can't tell if you're a troll or a disguised admin.