How Hacking Costs Rocket (Bohemia) Money, AND WHY THAT DOESN'T MATTER (includes reply from Rocket)

[Michaelvoodoo25 3120]

Ill be paying for the SA after the release, yes I'll buy it ASAP but i won't play it unless I know it's stable. I think many people will do the same. When (If) the game hits the Consoles then you'll see the lost income it makes then.

We know were gonna buy an alpha game even with the SA, I'm going in eyes wide open, are you?

[Jex =TE= (DayZ) 218]

Personally I think they should have scrapped the arma engine all together and started on a dedicated zombie engine for this. They made a shit ton of money already from additional sales and with a much better engine, better character models and animations with the same kind of premise and a decent marketing campaign this game could become a huge seller selling tens of millions of copies.

Buggy shitty software and clunky controls do not an epic game make.

[aoshi 32]

What do you suggest they do about it? It need to be fixed in the engine, not in the mod. That is why we are all waiting for the standalone.

http://dayzmod.com/f...940#entry418736

a lot of bugs are fixed in private, a lot more of hacks are detected in privates or good hosts um good scripts.. food bug is fixed em some privates, alt f4 and abort can be disabled by script as respawn button etc... a lot of fixs

[jaws4096 77]

Personally I think they should have scrapped the arma engine all together and started on a dedicated zombie engine for this. They made a shit ton of money already from additional sales and with a much better engine, better character models and animations with the same kind of premise and a decent marketing campaign this game could become a huge seller selling tens of millions of copies.

Buggy shitty software and clunky controls do not an epic game make.

Have to disagree here. It's only by getting a minimum viable product out there that Rocket was able to convince a major studio to put more resources behind the game. The point of my post is that supporting the minimum product, while developing the final product in parallel, is something that ultimately leads to a better final product and higher sales.

[pvtjace 37]

I personally stopped playing months ago, not because I died, im sitting in the woods with a as50 and a l85 and gillie suit, I just know there is no point, because im going to lose all that hard work eventually due to some ungratefully hacking fuck. So I have stopped playing, I will buy the standalone, however I vouch not to play until it is released.

If you strive for a goal and dont do anything once youve earnt it then theirs a problem their thats bigger then hackers.

[Leeu 38]

A lot of players have moved to private servers, they don't factor into your numbers.

Edited September 20, 2012 by Leeu

[hawc 63]

@OP

1. I'm sure rocket has already got everything he needs to make the standalone.

3. Normal people understand the reason so much hacking exists(arma engine, dayz being a mod) and will buy the standalone regardless.

Personally I think they should have scrapped the arma engine all together and started on a dedicated zombie engine for this.

Actually, that is exactly what they are doing. Completely changing the engine to make it safe for children.

[Max Planck 7174]

I personally knew upwards of 100 people playing DayZ. Of those, I know of 2 who still play. I don't think I'm an isolated case either, so you can shove your head in the sand if you want, but the 250k -> 70k stat is the only hard # you have. Even a casual glance at the lobby will show utterly vacant servers.

I'm not shoving my head in the sand, I'm pointing out that those numbers need to be adjusted for the players who have moved to private hives. No matter your bias or what stories you invent about me, I have never denied that hacking is a serious problem. I'm only trying to explain that it won't be solved by spamming the forum with whines, it is not as easy to solve as pressing a button.

There is a certain tinfoil hat wearing segment of the player base who actually think the devs are holding back a fix just to annoy them/break the game.

Nice picture. Is he trying to explain how hacking can easily be fixed if only Rocket didn't prevent it?

[Dankine 377]

But hey! Who could have known a single beautiful mod like DayZ, would also appeal to people with dolphine IQs?

Possibly one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet (bar us) and you choose them for your comparison?

Wow...

[jaws4096 77]

@OP

1. I'm sure rocket has already got everything he needs to make the standalone.

3. Normal people understand the reason so much hacking exists(arma engine, dayz being a mod) and will buy the standalone regardless.

Actually, that is exactly what they are doing. Completely changing the engine to make it safe for children.

For #1... no one ever has enough user case data. If the creators of WoW are still constantly analyzing user behavior to tweak their game (which they are) then it's safe to say that there's no such thing as too much user experience information and analysis.

Regarding #3, that's a fine perspective, if you only want to sell games to "normal" people. If you're going to make a game that adheres strictly to your (somewhat unconventional) design principles, you certainly want to capture the full market of folks who like what you've done.

[crockett (DayZ) 41]

I still play, because I like the concept of the game, but I've drastically changed my play-style because the hackers & sheer amount of duped/scripted weapons. I no longer play the game of survival PVPer where I attempted to gear my char up well and was very careful about my PVP encounters. (yes I was a bandit but I was much more careful than I am now)

At this point, I pretty much just play what I call Cherno Champion.. I play much more reckless & pretty much go to high populated/ high value loot areas on the coast like Cherno, Baltoa Air field, Elektro and just randomly kill whom ever I come across with what ever weapon I can find. Even doing this I get frustrated by the all to often complete server kills by hackers or by the obvious "I duped" every weapon in my inventory" AS50 nerds that have entire loot kits soon as they run to their tents after a death.

Now dayz I just run around and find a random AK, lee Enfield or what ever I can scrap together that can kill someone and I see how long I can live in the cities expecting be get hacker killed at any point. This is really the only challenge I have left in this game as trying to gear up & survive long term is a wasted effort, with so many snotty nosed script kiddies running around

Edited September 20, 2012 by crockett

[rocket 16567]

Some questions:

• Will I be a better developer if I have 300,000,000 dollars?
  
  • So far the main change in my life is that now I can buy as many brand new DC sneakers as I want. There is only so many DC sneakers a man can have.
    
  • Additionally, I no longer eat pringles or drink pepsi, as I am more health conscious, so there is that reduced expense.
    

  [*]Why does it matter to you how many people play it?

  • This mod was made for 5 people... my friends... and me to play
    
  • When I made it I always thought that we would end up with 2 or 3 fifty slot servers running, ideally one in the US, one in europe, and one in Australasia
    

Do you guys really want me to start making decisions, and reacting based on what is needed to make lots of people play? Do you really think those decisions will lead to a better game? I don't, which is why I don't care about the statistics now... the point has been proven. I must stay the course and be the one person who no matter what happens, does not get distracted and keep that original vision in front of us. If I don't do that, then nobody will. If I loose sight of that and start going off and chasing money or ego... I could quite likely get them in the current situation - but the end result will be yet another disappointment.

This started as an experiment and me saying "to hell with the rulebook" on game development and just being myself, being honest, and letting people see what happens - the ups and the downs. There have been plenty of fuckups and I have said and done things that I shouldn't, but I'm not pretending to be anything I am simply just being myself, a human being, and trying to make a good game by following my own judgement. That judgement has got me this far, so I figure I am going to keep doing that.

My focus is to develop the standalone, and let the community be involved completely in the development of the mod - use the mod as a fusion between community and me until the standalone is available (maybe even after it) and the fusion can happen there (uber synergy™). Sure, I'd love to be uber rich, with a yellow lambo, sitting on "the daily show" crackin' jokes with my man Jon Stewart but...

I'm in this position now, to make a damn game!

So, please! Enough with the statistics! Enough trying to do my strategy, to solve the unsolvable. The game is pissing you off, don't play it. Or better yet - check out the ArmA2 campaign. I don't like the campaign, but I hardly ever play single player games so what the fuck would I know. Download the ACE mod, buy KSP, buy FTL, fap for a while... What. Ever. But if you're going to be here on the forums I'd rather that we focus on the achievable and not on how popular the mod is or could be. Because I don't think popular necessarily equals awesome, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

[Max Planck 7174]

According to my calculations there's a 67% chance that 37% of the forum users will disagree with 46% of that post. How many is that??

Well, there is a 33% chance of it being more than 54% of all of us. And that's a fact.

Edited September 20, 2012 by Max Planck

[HowardTheDuck 27]

Too much win to quote.

That is why DayZ standalone will be awesome. A developer with the freedom to develope his idea of a game without some publishers ideas of what a good, fast selling game should be, and neither the influence of whiney little kids moaning about how it's too hard (or whatever they'll whine about.)

[Michaelvoodoo25 3120]

Rocket, don't hold back, tell it like it is.

[jaws4096 77]

Rocket, I totally agree that you should make the game that you envision, and as I've said in other posts, I'm amazed by what you've done and will certainly buy the standalone. I'm not sure if your rant about statistics is a direct reply to my OP, or a more general reply to everyone that is asking you to make this game (including the free alpha version of it) more playable.

You aren't making games for the money, and you aren't making them for you and 50 friends (which you don't need Bohemia to do). Okay. It's probably worth pointing out that money aside, making a blockbuster game buys you the freedom to continue making exactly the software you want to make, with minimal oversight, but maybe that doesn't do it for you, either.

I don't know what rings your bell, then. Maybe, hopefully, it is the joy you get from watching people enjoying something that you created. If that's the case, I think that doing what you can to fix the game-breaking problems with the alpha would be a good use of time.

Don't get me wrong. It would be totally understandable for you to say, "Fuck the mod, you guys are on your own! I'm going to concentrate on the standalone." This would, I think, indicate that player input is no longer wanted or needed, and that issues I brought up like play balancing are irrelevant to the finished game. it would also say, "Not only does money mean nothing to me, but the enjoyment of all the people who are so committed to the alpha doesn't mean much, either. The diehard fans will stick around, regardless."

That's a reasonable position to take, and I don't think anyone would hold it against you if you did.

The fact that you're still supporting the alpha, however, and continue to release new versions, seems to indicate that you do care about the experience of all these fans TODAY, and not just the diehard ones like me who will forgive anything and buy the standalone no matter what. If that's true, and I hope that it is, I'm guessing that we'll see some major fixes, particularly with regard to scripting, long before the standalone is released.

[Professional N00b 347]

While the hackers are horrible there isn't a whole lot the devs can do with the current engine.

What IS annoying is the sheer number of bugs that will cause you to lose hours of looting just because you logged into the game. The kinds of bugs that even private hive servers have fixed themselves yet still remains a problem in the base game.

Those things could be fixed. Not doing so and treating the people who have been flocking to DayZ simply as free loaders is going to end up badly I fear.

Edited September 20, 2012 by Professional N00b

[rocket 16567]

What i'm saying, is not that I don't care at all. I'm also not saying that I don't care about money. I'm not some game development hippy or anything. But what I am saying is that I'm not going to tell people what they want to hear - which is that it's going to be fixed, and that it's going to be fixed fast. It's not. I think the standalone is going to be orders of magnitude better, but the standalone is a few months off. Until then, people are just going to have to deal-with-it.jpg. I can put any number of words around that but that is just the truth, if that means I "loose some customers" or "loose some money", well shit, that's just the way it is and I can put some wanky PR speel around that but it won't change anything.

And my second point is that even if that is the case, does it really matter to you OR me? When i look at games sales, I see that any game with hype sells at least a few game, because we (me included) can be really retarded about the games we buy. So that means that no matter what, DayZ will sell okay. I could make the largest pile of steaming crap in the history of gaming, and a number of people will buy it. Probably not many, but some. Now that doesn't mean I should be lazy, far from it - it should be motivation to make a great game. But what it does mean is I should stop worrying about money (delicious money) and ego and just do what I did when I made the mod, except now I have the source... oh hai 3 amazing programmers! oh hai big artist teams! oh hai industry experts helping me, advice, support at every corner (thanks valve! ccp! notch! + many more).

I started out trying to make something that I wanted to play. That is why I only really make open-world games, if I made a story game. I'd play it and know everything. With and open world game I go in there and I'm like "fuck yes". That's why DayZ has no admin tools at all, no nothing. Hell, I can't even access the central server properly. That means the game is as much mine as it is yours. I see a good idea here and I'm like, "yeah maybe that will work" and we try it on. Sometimes those ideas are terrible, but maybe we get some more ideas out of it. That's how it all works.

So, in summary - I don't think you need to worry about me getting enough money. I'm pretty sure I am going to be totally fine, in all honestly I pretty much am anyway. And if I ever feel ripped off I'll do the usual dicky thing of doing some stupid expose story about how hard it is not getting more rich when you're already rich.

Contrary to popular belief, it would seem. I am not superman. Anyone familiar with game development (or development at all) would know what I am doing is completely insane. I am pushing out a completed product in a few months. This. Is. Madness. I cannot do that if I focus all my efforts trying to fix something that is fundamentally broken but that kind of works. I am at the limit of what I can commit too, in terms of time, so a "zero fucks given" approach from me is being taken to the integration of the mod-game development team. I will continue to release some updates for the mod, but it is really up to you guys to take the mod forward because i would break my back if I carried that burden any further.

We're doing that, everyone is doing what they can.

So, if it were me, i would rename this thread:

How Hacking Costs Rocket (i.e. Bohemia) Money, and why that doesn't matter

[lvg 1690]

@Rocket

[joeoblong@yahoo.com 614]

Damn it lmao LVG i just deleted my post because of the slow clap!!

@ Rocket man if I ever see you in a pub I am buying you a few beers! Never been a fanboi to anyone except Richard Garriott, but now your name is on that list. A gamer game designer, who made a niche game a top seller!? Yeah no worries about money my friend it'll come naturally!

As for those telling you who, what, and how to make your game, toss a dirty sock at them and never ever please for the love of all that is unholy and dirty in the world listen to the players! They have a bad habit of fucking up good games with the feces they think up!

Signed Fanboi,

Pendragon

[jaws4096 77]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Rocket. I continue to be really excited to see how things develop.

This may not be possible to answer publicly, but do you feel that Bohemia would agree with / stand behind what you've said?

[rocket 16567]

This may not be possible to answer publicly, but do you feel that Bohemia would agree with / stand behind what you've said?

*shrug*

They just want me to make a good game.

If I were them, I would prefer that I wasn't such a cowboy - but I'm kinda a package deal.

[jackcrow 129]

Dang Rocket!

Its nice for you to try and reason with posts like this. But the fact is these posters dont even know why hacking is such a problem. They seem to think you have a magic switch or that your mod is the root cause. Cheers to you for trying though. But I think/hope that your true loyal fans of the game understand the design of the Arma2 engine and that fact that its extremely generous with scripts and many of us also understand we wouldn't even have DayZ if it wasn't for this engines generosity, the double edge sword no doubt.

Edited September 20, 2012 by jackcrow

[Delta Smoke 01 765]

According to my calculations there's a 67% chance that 37% of the forum users will disagree with 46% of that post. How many is that??

Well, there is a 33% chance of it being more than 54% of all of us. And that's a fact.

Works 67 percent of the time. EVERY TIME !

[merrfack 90]

Well I bought arma2:oa because I have been playing ARMA for years. So the game was free to me in a way. But either way, I'm looking forward to stand alone, super excited.