DayZ - ArmaII zombie mod

I imagine they may, but if they were friendlier, you'd probably have a GWJish server in the next day or two. I can't help but think that they must be chasing off others as well. I see lots of complaints about how hard it is to find a server, and I suspect this may be why. (2TB/mo is also obviously a problem... I haven't run the numbers, but I could give a server 50Mbit if needed.)

I don't even understand what the point IS of all this hyper-control-freakishness. Why not, you know, let people play how they want?

As far as I can see, it's a problem completely of their own manufacture, exactly like all the Diablo 3 issues. There's no reason this needs to be difficult, but they're insisting on making it that way.

Malor wrote:

I imagine they may, but if they were friendlier, you'd probably have a GWJish server in the next day or two. I can't help but think that they must be chasing off others as well. I see lots of complaints about how hard it is to find a server, and I suspect this may be why. (2TB/mo is also obviously a problem... I haven't run the numbers, but I could give a server 50Mbit if needed.)

I don't even understand what the point IS of all this hyper-control-freakishness. Why not, you know, let people play how they want?

There is no hyper-control-freakishness. Can you explain where you're getting this from?

Do you want to allow people to farm weapons and ammo on their private, locked servers so they can go and gank other players? Or providing perfect safe havens so people can travel wherever they want without any chance of hostile action?

That's putting aside server admins who were either accidentally or deliberately trying to corrupt the central database, hack the mod itself (no zombies, instantly respawning loot piles), or loading their servers with various hacking scripts to allow teleportation and item spawning.

Malor wrote:

I don't even understand what the point IS of all this hyper-control-freakishness. Why not, you know, let people play how they want?

Because of exactly what Caddrel said.

If you're thinking about it like normal FPS shooter servers, you're not understanding the game. There is one persistent game, and each server is a 50-man instance of that game.

A private server where people can run around gobbling up loot, free of the threat of unknown players, would be a significant, no, game-breaking advantage. Because what happens in one server is not limited to that one server. It becomes persistent and recorded in the game, and carries over to all servers.

Imagine an MMO where you have a constant threat of PvP permadeath. That's what Day Z is.

^^^
This.

Also, there's a pretty rare glitch where you can get weapons that have no graphic for them in the inventory. These are weapons which are not available in the game normally. Do not pick them up, do not use them, you will get banned. There is rogue inventory floating around from hackers on some servers.

TheWanderer wrote:

^^^
This.

Also, there's a pretty rare glitch where you can get weapons that have no graphic for them in the inventory. These are weapons which are not available in the game normally. Do not pick them up, do not use them, you will get banned. There is rogue inventory floating around from hackers on some servers.

Last I heard, all of the rogue inventory from the last breech was cleaned up. Doesn't mean that there won't be more in the future, of course...

central database

That. Right there. That is the problem. That is a fundamentally stupid idea.

Everything else you mention as being problems are only problems because of that stupid idea.

The whole point of mods is to let people play how they want to play. Trying to impose centralized control is lame. What should be happening is that anyone can put up a server, freely, and anyone can play on that server, freely. And then if they want to offer a central database service, then that should be some kind of optional extra, for trusted servers, not something required to even run the mod.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea. There's no point in 'progression' in a survival game. Either you're alive or you're not. You shouldn't be able to take weapons to different servers anyway, and you shouldn't get any bonuses for having played before. If the idea is to be realistic, which appears to be the case, then real people get only one life, and they do not get buffs in later attempts.

Malor wrote:
central database

That. Right there. That is the problem. That is a fundamentally stupid idea.

Everything else you mention as being problems are only problems because of that stupid idea.

The whole point of mods is to let people play how they want to play. Trying to impose centralize control is lame. What should be happening is that anyone can put up a server, freely, and anyone can play on that server, freely. And then if they want to offer a central database service, then that should be some kind of optional extra, not something required to even run the mod.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea.

While I can understand where you're coming from, the central database server is kind of the point of the whole thing. DayZ is more of an MMO than it is an FPS mod. Or, better, it's closer to something like Realm of the Mad God.

They really should listen to what everyone wants, I mean since we are paying for it.

El-Producto wrote:

They really should listen to what everyone wants, I mean since we are paying for it. ;)

People who run servers are paying for it.

I understand the desire to keep things locked down for cross-server fairness, but what I'd really like to see is the ability to flag a character to be allowed on one server only. That's all it would take to let people have private servers and play how they liked.

Well, if I liked it, I almost certainly would have paid them for it.

The whole idea of an MMO survival game is just bizarre. What, you log out of Joe's server, and then log into Fred's in the same place, with the same stuff? That's just asking to get exploited.

If they'd made the characters locally persistent, that would have made more sense overall, and integrity would have been far easier. With global characters, everyone has to trust everyone, and any breach anywhere can mess up the whole system. With local-only characters, it doesn't matter what anyone else does, and I don't see that the overall experience would be lessened.

You'd have different characters on different servers, but everyone does just fine with that system right now -- almost all the big players do that. And keep in mind that they don't have to deal with potentially hostile servers, and typically have the money to scale their databases to any size necessary. Even given the much cleaner environment, and the much, MUCH larger budgets, they still go for the 'sharded' approach.

So, this tiny team, probably without much of a budget, is thinking that they can handle a problem that most MMOs can't. I think this is going to bite them in the ass, over and over and over. It's a mistake large enough that may very well prevent them from reaching fiscal success. In exchange for endless scaling and griefing problems, constant headaches and maintenance, they're gaining very little.

It just doesn't make any sense to make survival horror globally persistent.

The ONLY way this makes sense if if they plan to monetize you later, by forcing you to pay monthly fees to play the game. I guess they decided that something like Counterstrike wasn't good enough, they had to have a finger in the MMO money stream.

Malor wrote:

That. Right there. That is the problem. That is a fundamentally stupid idea. Trying to impose centralized control is lame. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea.

Wow, they are colossal dicks.

That's a lot of insults against a small team, working for free, developing a mod the way they want to develop it.

How do you justify all that abuse? Because you can't run a server exactly the way you want to?

It would also be easier to follow your posts if you weren't editing them after several people have replied to them.

I'm not sure if you've bothered to check, but there are several zombie mods available for Arma II that are very similar to Day Z. The difference? They don't require a central server to run.

Even if you had to develop Day Z from scratch, if you left out the central server it wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks work to put in place all the systems rocket has already added.

Elycion wrote:
El-Producto wrote:

They really should listen to what everyone wants, I mean since we are paying for it. ;)

People who run servers are paying for it.

I understand the desire to keep things locked down for cross-server fairness, but what I'd really like to see is the ability to flag a character to be allowed on one server only. That's all it would take to let people have private servers and play how they liked.

I suspect most of this drama will get resolved in the next month or so as the devs get a handle on things. Unlike some people on his forums, Rocket is fairly reasonable. He's not happy with the situation as it stands, either, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a solution to this eventually, one way or the other.

People who run servers are paying for it.

Yeah, their claim of 2TB/mo is about 60 megabits sustained, 24/7. That's very, very expensive for most people to provide. And I can't help but think that, once they start to develop some cashflow from the inevitabie (and unnecessary) subscription fees, they may turn around and demand money to even run a server.

Malor wrote:
People who run servers are paying for it.

Yeah, their claim of 2TB/mo is about 60 megabits sustained, 24/7. That's very, very expensive for most people to provide. And I can't help but think that, once they start to develop some cashflow from the inevitabie (and unnecessary) subscription fees, they may turn around and demand money to even run a server.

Given that Rocket has refused to take any kind of donations, and all of the development is currently happening in the dev's spare time, I'm not really sure where your arguments are coming from.

Caddrel wrote:

Even if you had to develop Day Z from scratch, if you left out the central server it wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks work to put in place all the systems rocket has already added.

There's actually a single-player version of DayZ out there already. Not sure if it's updated to the latest patch, but it's there.

How do you justify all that abuse? Because you can't run a server exactly the way you want to?

Because I'm not one of the people who believe that because you write a program, you get to tell me how I use it, forever. I was willing to be a resource for them -- and the number of people who can just up and devote sixty megabits to a game isn't that high, even in 2012 -- but in exchange, I want to run my hardware and OS and bandwidth my way.

I'd be willing to pay them something, probably (assuming I liked the game), but at that point, their control stops, and mine starts. Any other control-freakishness after that is because they plan to monetize you, and all the design work I'm seeing so far is oriented around charging you a monthly fee to play this game, not just letting you buy it and do whatever you want with it. They are simply refusing to get the hell out of the way and let us play, they need to have their little tentacles in everything, so that they can charge for it later.

Maybe you're okay with that, but I think they're dicks.

Malor wrote:

Any other control-freakishness after that is because they plan to monetize you, and all the design work I'm seeing so far is oriented around charging you a monthly fee to play this game, not just letting you buy it and do whatever you want with it. They are simply refusing to get the hell out of the way and let us play, they need to have their little tentacles in everything, so that they can charge for it later.

Maybe you're okay with that, but I think they're dicks.

I'm really not sure where you're getting this.

"They didn't deserve to keep their precious beans." That was awesome! Poor Australians.

Hitler reaction clips, will they ever get old?

Spoiler:

No they will not

Might be kind of besides the point. It is what it is. A three page argument about their server structure isn't going to be productive.

I do wish some of the things like interaction would get fixed before they make it harder, like survivor vs. bandit. I don't want to shoot every person I see but I don't want to turn my back and get shot either. I understand it supposed to be realistic but it is also a game with permadeath.

karmajay wrote:

I do wish some of the things like interaction would get fixed before they make it harder, like survivor vs. bandit. I don't want to shoot every person I see but I don't want to turn my back and get shot either. I understand it supposed to be realistic but it is also a game with permadeath.

I agree. It would also be realistic to have some basic form of communication. And a way to show you're not aggressive. If I'm camping a town, and someone new shows up without having spotted me, it would be realistic that I yell at them to freeze, and 'de-aggressify' themselves. If they do not comply, they get a bullet. That's realistic. My impotence of watching someone sneak around, only to get shot by the same person in the head 2 minutes later when they finally spot me, is not realistic.

So how do you drink/eat now out of the inventory if you dont use the mouse wheel?

Thanks... lost 2k of health before giving up and logging off.

I really hope they fix the voice comms soon. Apparently it works intermittently now, which isn't a huge help in such knife edge situations. It may even be completely fixed; has anyone tested it?

I was thinking last night (as I was sneaking towards a town) how great it would be to have more animations, as you guys are saying. Being able to have a simple situation where someone yells "Freeze!" and (seeing they could kill you) you can instead drop your gun on the ground would be great.

In answer to Ranalin:

* TO INTERACT WITH MOST ITEMS: YOU NOW NEED TO OPEN GEAR MENU (G) THEN RIGHT CLICK ON THE ITEM! SUCH AS BANDAGING AND EATING AND

From the patch notes. Make sure all the updated files have been downloaded and installed; all sorts of stuff goes wrong otherwise.

Edit: Quick edit to remove one word from the patch notes

Caddrel wrote:

I really hope they fix the voice comms soon. Apparently it works intermittently now, which isn't a huge help in such knife edge situations. It may even be completely fixed; has anyone tested it?

This is something that's broken in ARMAII itself, not just a DayZ issue. There is a beta patch available for ARMAII that fixes the Direct speech, so it's just a matter of whenever BI wants to officially release it. I heard the intention is likely to disable all text and voice chat within the mod except Direct which I think would change things dramatically. It also opens the door to add some other useful items like radios to allow cross map communication.

Malor, I think you're attributing to evil what can better be explained by a confluence of one man's vision and the technical infrastructure it requires. Would people play a game predicated on locally persistent servers? Sure, for all the reasons you list. Is that technically easier? Seems it might be. Is that this one dude's vision, the vision that motivates him to work on this mod in his spare time? Apparently not.

Every game is merely a pruning of the tree of all possible options. Any game you buy restricts how you play it. That's the entire premise of a game: to present you with arbitrary rules and let you navigate that rulespace. Minecraft is Turing-complete, meaning you can build Minecraft within Minecraft. I doubt the same can be said for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Are you similarly angry at Eidos for this restriction? (At your convenience, replace DXHR with any game you actually liked.)

I totally get the philosophy you espouse. Linus Torvalds has no right to tell me on what hardware and under what conditions I'm allowed to compile and run the Linux kernel. Thing is, that kernel is still a collection of limitations. I may have some issues getting it to compile it for esoteric platforms. Like a punch-card system.

ranalin wrote:

So how do you drink/eat now out of the inventory if you dont use the mouse wheel?

Make sure you're right clicking on the pictures on the right half, not the names on the left half. And, as Caddrel said, make sure you have the very latest patch (1.5.8.2).

Gremlin wrote:

make sure you have the very latest patch (X).

Thats pretty much a given regardless of what you try

I wonder if the plan is to move this over to ARMA 3 whenever mod tools are offered for it?

I'm interested, but it sounds like it still has quite a bit of jank left and I've got a ton of stuff to play right now (more than typical at this time of year). So I'm trying to decide if I get in on the Amazon sale, or just wait until maybe next year when maybe there's a more polished version on ARMA 3.

Definitely an interested concept, and it sounds like it's got some promise. I almost expect them to get bought and this become a paid game or ARMA expansion at some point, kind of Valve style.