I'm looking for Proponents and Opponents of the DAYZ mod.

[Shagulon]

stupid black and white debates and fanboism.

if you don't like dayz ignore it and be thankful that it makes BIS go from strength to strength. now they have the funds to really polish arma 3. all those die hard arma fans be thankful your favourite studio is doing really great sales before they even release their latest game.

dayz only fans, ignore arma...

those with a normal balancd outlook on such matters, enjoy both games and enjoy the cross polination of ideas/features. two games for the price of one.

[Simon C]

Agreed as well. If anything I see less ArmA 2 servers now that DayZ is around (presumably because many have been converted to DayZ), but there are still plenty. Honestly, I prefer playing with a closer group of people on a private server most of the time, anyway.

I've seen way too much of that "ArmA 2 was crap/dead before DayZ" and "BIS never made any good games before this" coming out of the DayZ community, and I think that's the main reason why some people here detest that community. Also, there seems to be this attitude where if the game mechanics are cool, it's a DayZ thing, but if there's a bug it's a "shitty ArmA 2 engine" thing.

This. So sick of the ungrateful crap that comes from some members of that community, if it weren't for BIS then they wouldn't even be playing Day Z. I'll be glad if it becomes a separate game, honestly - BIS has already made a tonne of money from it, so Day Z moving away, uncluttering our server lists and letting us go back to being a happy little niche community wouldn't be a bad thing. Being a niche community is by no means a bad thing, rather the opposite - it keeps the more undesirable sort away.

stupid black and white debates and fanboism.

if you don't like dayz ignore it and be thankful that it makes BIS go from strength to strength. now they have the funds to really polish arma 3. all those die hard arma fans be thankful your favourite studio is doing really great sales before they even release their latest game.

dayz only fans, ignore arma...

those with a normal balancd outlook on such matters, enjoy both games and enjoy the cross polination of ideas/features. two games for the price of one.

I also agree with this. Whilst it does get irritating putting up with the ungrateful types, the rest of Day Z's community is fairly decent. And if you don't like it, you can just ignore it, it's not like you're forced to play either.

[Cards525]

I think the general influx of players into the ARMA community has resulted in an exodus of the general feeling of the game. Multiple large-brand servers such as City Life have received a general drop in quality due to new players coming in and breaking rules constantly. I'm not saying the DayZ Players in general do it, but there has been a larger amount since its creation. Other servers, those pertaining to Ultra-Realism; thrive on the other hand because the players who go there KNOW what they are doing. There's a fine line to be drawn in the community and that has yet to take shape, we could always see the eventuality that DayZ turns into a community of its own, perhaps its own game with its own updated engine, and I congratulate Mr. Hall on all hes done, but until that line is drawn, and as far as I'm concerned, the community has went down the drain.

[dannyb]

Old ARMA/ARMA 2 player, new DayZ player, and new to forums.

I think nearly everything about DayZ is awesome, frankly. It's brought me back to Chernarus, ARMA, and a lot of things that I love. I admire its goals to create a better survival game, and so on. And let's be honest: we've always had crappy players and servers in the community. Nothing new there.

Where I blame DayZ and Rocket is in their effort to fully centralize the persistence model. If you're unfamiliar, while the community runs individual servers (and these try and persist elements of the world itself), players and their gear get saved to a centralized DayZ database. No admin can run such a server, which means nobody can play DayZ without using the official DayZ servers.

I understand the motivation for this approach: The DayZ team wants to build something that feels like an MMO, and exercise control over cheating, and so on. They want a massive, centralized system, and an eventual standalone game to actually make money. However, this part of the DayZ experiment is deeply flawed. Community servers are still in the mix, and they will always be susceptible to some degree of exploits. The limitations of the ARMA 2 engine will make it always so, and persistence of things on each server break the idea that control can still be centralized. However, community servers cannot be passworded, by the terms of running the mod itself. The model encourages (and rewards) players for jumping between servers as a game in and of itself, something Rocket aims to remedy by punishing frequent disconnects with death. Do you see where this is headed? A project founder desires control over something that is not in his control, or even in many players' control, and introduces artificial mechanics to try and reward those who stick to a role-playing approach. It's a HUGE warning sign of a bad design when people feel a need for technical solutions to people problems. You can't just kill a player because they disconnect a lot. No way.

Unfortunately, this all punishes the people who actually *want* to role-play, which is an interesting paradox. Because the folks who want to play DayZ with the sense of dire urgency that Rocket seeks to create are the same ones who would want to run their own server IN ORDER to password it and let the community itself govern who is serious (even if they are bandits, killing other players) and who is simply a griever or a cheater. You can't enforce that differentiation in any other way; okay, maybe Blizzard can try, but DayZ's dev team certainly doesn't have the resources to do so. The project team choses to see people who are critical of the model as people who don't like being killed by other players, which is totally untrue. Of course bandits are an important part of the game, and always should be.

I want DayZ to succeed, but I fear that the desire for central control over managing exploits, discouraging grievers, and player data itself will severely limit the project. Rocket talks a lot about the kind of experience he wants to create for people, and how he wants the community to be able to basically govern itself, which I admire. However, he doesn't seem to have had the realization yet that such an experience can exist without him controlling every aspect of it, and worse, that the same control could very well keep such an experience from happening. The one part of the game that IMO the community *should* be allowed to govern itself -- the server ecosystem -- will apparently never be so. I hope that changes.

[MavericK96]

I agree, I would LOVE to play DayZ on a private server with just a group of friends. I understand the "MMO" concept but I'm not a fan of it.

[masonkiller]

I have one big fear about DayZ. I really, REALLY hope Bohemia don't get it in their heads to start pointing the ARMA series towards less realistic stuff like DayZ. Nothing wrong with having a mod like this, but considering they're adding support for it in the official patches and whatnot, I just hope they don't see all these new players and then suddenly ARMA4 comes out as another Call of Duty. I always am a little paranoid when in a more "niche" market like MilSim games, which simply will never pull the sort of profits Call of Duty gets, that the company will "sell out" and abandon everything that made them great. Far fetched? Just look at how Ubisoft eviscerated the Rainbow Six series, turning it from a very unique realistic First Person Shooter, into another generic piece of crap. And then the small community of people who wanted to continue the series as it was originally made were screwed over when Ubisoft refused to give them the source code for modding. Makes me cry, makes me cry....

[ProfTournesol]

I have one big fear about DayZ. I really, REALLY hope Bohemia don't get it in their heads to start pointing the ARMA series towards less realistic stuff like DayZ. Nothing wrong with having a mod like this, but considering they're adding support for it in the official patches and whatnot, I just hope they don't see all these new players and then suddenly ARMA4 comes out as another Call of Duty. I always am a little paranoid when in a more "niche" market like MilSim games, which simply will never pull the sort of profits Call of Duty gets, that the company will "sell out" and abandon everything that made them great. Far fetched? Just look at how Ubisoft eviscerated the Rainbow Six series, turning it from a very unique realistic First Person Shooter, into another generic piece of crap. And then the small community of people who wanted to continue the series as it was originally made were screwed over when Ubisoft refused to give them the source code for modding. Makes me cry, makes me cry....

RV engine makes this game a sandbox, since OFP. Despite the rivet counter/ultra realistic crowd in this community, and instead of seing the 1000th uberrealistic boring M16 model, we start to (re-)discover that this game can be played differently, a welcomed breathe of fresh air.

[DMarkwick]

I have one big fear about DayZ. I really, REALLY hope Bohemia don't get it in their heads to start pointing the ARMA series towards less realistic stuff like DayZ. Nothing wrong with having a mod like this, but considering they're adding support for it in the official patches and whatnot, I just hope they don't see all these new players and then suddenly ARMA4 comes out as another Call of Duty. I always am a little paranoid when in a more "niche" market like MilSim games, which simply will never pull the sort of profits Call of Duty gets, that the company will "sell out" and abandon everything that made them great. Far fetched? Just look at how Ubisoft eviscerated the Rainbow Six series, turning it from a very unique realistic First Person Shooter, into another generic piece of crap. And then the small community of people who wanted to continue the series as it was originally made were screwed over when Ubisoft refused to give them the source code for modding. Makes me cry, makes me cry....

It might be a small point, but really the ONLY "unrealistic" part of DayZ is the fact of the zombies. Apart from that, DayZ seems to be all about realism, even more so than ArmA. It's this point that's hopefully going to make other game companies sit up and reassess what they believe players want.

And, if you replace "zombies" with "infected" ala 28 Days Later, then there's hardly anything unrealistic at all really.

[MavericK96]

Well...I wouldn't go that far. It's about survival, but not necessarily more about realism. I mean, it's about as realistic as ArmA 2 in that if you break a limb you can just stick yourself with some morphine and be fine.

[jblackrupert]

DayZ is riding a 15 minute popularity wave right now. The numbers will die down soon enough especially since Rocket seems hellbent on making the the game virtually impossible to "Win" unless you hack or exploit the engine to duplicate loot.

The number of complaints of server admins being involved in the hacking and exploiting is getting very high, higher then I've seen in any other game.