What's the reason behind the "hive" model?

[dfo 0]

I've been playing DayZ over the past 3 days or so and have both enjoyed it and gotten really frustrated with it. I realize it's in an alpha state, so I'm not going to sit here and make a whine thread.

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind using the "hive" model. Other than allowing players to continue playing their game in the event that their "normal" server gets shut down, I don't see any real advantages. It seems to be susceptible to abuse and limits administration, such as the following:

a. Players are able to log off in areas where high-value items can be found, such as barracks, and then hop from quiet server to quiet server in hopes of finding nice items without much of a chance of getting killed

b. It allows players to set up with extremely powerful equipment in hard-to-find locations on quiet servers, and then log into high-population servers without risking their equipment (due to travel), then go to town killing people

c. It prevents server administrators from being able to roll-back changes in the event of a hacker joining the game and causing serious issues such as teleporting everyone to their death

With the ability for servers to have private databases (and still be supported by the DayZ community) I see it working out much nicer. Those that want to play on high-population servers can do so without worrying as much about 1 hacker ruining the server for everyone. Those that want to play in quiet, low-population servers can do just that in servers with population caps of 10 players or so that can easily be found on the server browser.

I guess I just don't see many advantages to the hive. Now, I will admit that I haven't spent any time looking for private-hive servers. As I understand these servers are out there for people to join, and that may very well solve many of my frustrations. But, that's a topic for another time and place.

If the hive model is going to be kept in use, is there much that can be done to stop the abuse/issues currently exist?

Edited August 6, 2012 by dfo

[random51 172]

You've listed all the negative and none of the advantages.

The advantage is that your character is persistent across all hive servers.

The advantage is that if you're on what turns out to be a crappy server you don't lose the time you spent gearing up that character.

The advantage is that if a server goes offline you can still play your main character.

The disadvantages you've listed? They can all be summed as, "poor sporstsmanship makes for a bad competition." The hive model isn't the problem, the class of people you're playing with is. Knowing and experiencing that, I'm sure the dev team wants to fix many/most of those issues. Their hands are tied with anything that is part of Arma II, though, and almost every mechanic in the game is.

Standalone is the holy grail that lets them hopefully address most of these issues.

In the meantime play on private hive servers if you don't want the disadvantages of the public hive and don't care about the advantages.

[suspense 210]

The problems with the hive right now, is due to ArmA 2. Day Z is as a standalone game, supposed to be a sort of MMO persistent world(with hive obviously) but as standalone, much more polished and with issues mentioned above. Right now, its there in order for the staff to gather information through the database, about player behaviour, but also to spend some time on trial and error, in order to better their skills in these sort of systems, so that with a standalone version, they are more experienced with that sort of model