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

[BL1P]

Pros.

Increased sales for BIS
More beta updates
Massive MP stress tests for beta tests
Great new persistence system
Increase in the awareness of arma series in general
Good PR for modders all over
It has shown BIS how crap the Regular settings are and how they should be removed in arma3 (we dont need wall hack tags or 3rd or magic map markers)


Cons.

Too many kids from COD style games coming over to arma
High publicity attracts Hackers (probly related to the above)
Promotion of Run and Gun kill on sight DM style as it is at 1.7.0

Kinad a con but was fixed with the beta removal of side, global and command chat. I was getting fed up of explaining shit to 12 year olds who thought they knew better than others after 1 or 2 weeks when the others have played this series for about 11 years.

[colossus]

Pros:

• It's a good mod. Made me see Chernarus differently.
• Attracted a large amount of gamers. Even a few talented ones.
• Created a lot of media coverage for DayZ, ArmA 2, ArmA 3, and BI itself. Which hopefully gave the gaming industry a chance to think differently about mod support (even though I guess Skyrim brings the same message)
• Provided BI the chance to fix and improve aspects of MP and bugs which either hadn't been discovered or deemed as a low priority.
• Increased sales.

Cons:

• Not a lot of the new players are interested in other aspects of ArmA other then playing DayZ. This might change over time, though.
• What was DayZ the first couple of weeks, with quite a lot of teamwork (given that most of the players at the time had a background in ArmA), has now mostly turned into a shot-on-sight type of mentality.

So you see, it's not all that bad.

Comments about DayZ in every ArmA related article is a bit annoying but expected. Still, it might give one or two the kick they needed to try out the DayZ mod and then perhaps ArmA itself. There is one other thing I didn't add to cons - because it's more of a general server browser "issue" - and that is: filtering away specific names, mods or missions. Like, if I wanted to see every server aside from DayZ servers. Currently you can only use the filter to find specific names, mods or missions. I hope that this could be resolved in ArmA 3.

[MavericK96]

I certainly don't hate the mod in general, but I will post a few shortcomings that I believe the mod has:

1) The day/night cycle is cool, but IMO it should not be real-time. Even on servers in the same time zone as me it will be night in the middle of the day, so I have to server-hop 2-3 times before I find one with daytime. Fairly annoying. Might help if in the server title it showed what time offset it was using or something. I also understand that night is important in the game but I don't want to have to hop on a 200-ping EU server just to play in daytime when it's daytime in my time zone.

2) Zombie animations/mechanics are fundamentally flawed due to the ArmA 2 engine. Zombies and players are expected to make quick snap movements and be able to quickly dispatch close-quarters zombie threats, but the ArmA 2 engine was never really built for that kind of thing, and thus you get clunky mechanics and difficulty in controlling/aiming at zombies due to the way they move. A lot of this could be solved if the zombies did not move so fast, which leads me to my next point...

3) Zombies should be slower, or at least some of them should be. It's a personal preference thing, but I dislike the fact that they can run just as fast as you and never give up. It makes gameplay extremely frustrating when you accidentally aggro a zombie in a town, since the only way to get them to stop following you is shoot them, which then attracts tons more zombies. Maybe if the game made it so they would just give up chasing you after awhile, it would be better, but currently it's just annoying.

4) I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but the bandit/player-killing mechanic needs to be changed. Right now there is literally no consequence for murdering other players, whether it's for their loot or just for the hell of it. At least before we had bandit skins and could identify these people, but now there is nothing like that and frankly I'm not sure why it was changed in the first place, especially to a system where there is now NO accountability rather than some. I realize it's "realistic" to allow people to do whatever they want, but in a gameplay situation (this is still a game, after all) it's not fun to get arbitrarily killed by some asshole after playing for several hours and collecting loot.

There's probably more, but those are my main issues with the mod.

I definitely like the fact that a lot of long-term bugs are getting addressed/fixed due to increased popularity with DayZ, but frankly I just want to see those things fixed for ArmA 2 / OA in general and don't really care that much about DayZ.

On that same note, I am getting tired of hearing noobs complain about how "shitty and buggy" ArmA 2 and the engine are because of DayZ, which is an ALPHA and does not necessarily represent the quality of ArmA 2 / OA as a whole.

[NoRailgunner]

Simple concept without any long-term objectives/mission goals. Most players see & play DayZ just as "DM with Zombies" or "Zombie skirmish". It is highly unlikely that so many new DayZ players will care about the military/sim origin of Armaverse.

[DMarkwick]

Simple concept without any long-term objectives/mission goals. Most players see & play DayZ just as "DM with Zombies" or "Zombie skirmish". It is highly unlikely that so many new DayZ players will care about the military/sim origin of Armaverse.

I'd guess that this game mode represents an experiment, to see what gameplay emerges from it. As on it's own, the DayZ world represents a rather dull game (as evidenced by me after playing Kronzky's SP version anyway), the emergent gameplay comes in via the MP interactions.

Rather like the most successful zombie films (i.e. Romero's early ones) where the zombies are only the background noise, and the real monsters are the people

[-Coulum-]

The thing is, its kind of hard to be against the dayz mod, or any mod for that matter. If you don't like it you are by no means forced to play it. Even though it overshadows arma and, to most of the new players, misrepresents it, it also brings in tons of cash. The money far outweighs the annoyance anyone has about people saying arma is nothing without dayz. Besides many people say/used to say similar things about ace and nobody seemed to mind.

As a mod, there really isn't anything wrong with dayz. Now if it were to be the new vanilla, then I am sure many people would have a problem with it...

[Iroquois Pliskin]

As a mod, there really isn't anything wrong with dayz. Now if it were to be the new vanilla, then I am sure many people would have a problem with it...

It's already vanilla, at least 1 Dev is directly working on it, and patches are being tailored for it. If PVP/Co-op folk can expect the same mission support in ArmA III, then I'll shut my trap, until then, this game is officially a free zombie MMORPG.

[Smurf]

It's already vanilla, at least 1 Dev is directly working on it, and patches are being tailored for it. If PVP/Co-op folk can expect the same mission support in ArmA III, then I'll shut my trap, until then, this game is officially a free zombie MMORPG.

Wanna a tissue for those tears?

This single mod made more (free) PR than anything else ever released for the series. Why not show some service to the newcomers and try to not only hook they into the game\series, but also into the BIS train?

In the end, money talks. Might sound harsh to speak this for a company that is in the "Axis of Good Companies" for a long time, but it's true.

[DMarkwick]

There's some interesting stories coming out over on the DayZ forums. From them, some (perhaps) unforeseen emergent gameplay seems to me to be rather interesting:

One guy tells how when in a firefight with one guy, the guy disappears and the player assumes he's disconnected. He then runs to a different location so the guy cannot log onto another server, move behind the player's "old" position, then re-log back onto his server. That reveals an interesting game spin that I've never seen before anywhere else

Same story, the guy tells how his buddy goes "server-hopping" to gather loot from other servers before returning back to the first one.

While these two behaviors might be seen as exploits, I think they're very interesting indeed

[Nicholas]

Pros:
1. More money for Bohemia Interactive.
2. More publicity for Bohemia Interactive.
3. Much needed multiplayer fixes are finally getting done.
4. More people may try out vanilla ArmA, which means more potential community members and modders.

Cons:
1. Server list is flooded with DayZ servers.
2. Most people aren't buying ArmA because it's a military simulator, they are buying it for a zombie survival mod.
3. People think that ArmA is all about DayZ. If there is any news about ArmA, it will most likely also include something about DayZ.
4. Not many of the new people have very nice attitudes. They don't respect one another.
5. The DayZ playerbase currently overshadows the ArmA playerbase.


It's all I can think of for now.