Why are life servers receiving so much hate?

[pixelmonkey 10]

Hello everyone,

 

I have been part of the ArmA 3 community for a little over 2 years now, and I'm so glad that I decided to get into ArmA in the first place. I've been an active player on mainly Takistan Life for ArmA 2, until the world of development and modding sucked me in; I haven't had time to play any of the recent mods. I am now interested in exploring the different opinions surrounding the ArmA 3 community about Life mods and servers in general. I am writing a thesis on this subject and I am hoping to receive some feedback from you guys to better understand the mindset and reasoning for some of your opinions. It would help me a lot in my search if you guys could take the time to fill out this survey or post below some of your thoughts on ArmA 3 Life servers/mods. Rant away!

 

Thank you for your time!

 

- Brandon :) 

[war_lord 934]

It basically comes down to the fact that Life servers are constantly being caught stealing content from modders and even other games. That and their tendency to sell in game perks violating the EULA, particularly when combined with the stealing legitimate creator's works. That and the average age of that community is about 16 thanks to Youtube exposure, which tended to be exposure of servers using stolen content, something said youtubers refused to take any responsibility for. Most people on this forum who complain about the Life community aren't doing it as players of those mods. Personally, I have access to the most powerful military sandbox on the civilian market, why would I want to use it to play cops and robbers with teenagers? We complain about it because it's a poisonous element seeping into the larger community.  

Which is why your survey is flawed, I don't play Life mods, I think they should go away. 

[NeoArmageddon 957]

Roughly 75% if the license infringements over CUP are by "Life Servers" and their owners (the rest is mostly Exile). Most of the time those are modified reuploads not being under the correct license or the usage of CUP on monetized servers (which is forbidden according to our license).

I had similar experiences when releasing Map Builder and helping out in the terrains Skype group: Most request were about adding "stolen" content to "stolen" terrains for some monetized Life servers ("I am planning a new, absolutly unique Life server with a big income. Can you help me adding XYZ to Celle2?").

 

I am not saying Life servers and their owners are bad in general, but in comparison to other types of groups the percentage of "bad people" seems to be higher than elsewhere.

 

If you want an indepth discussion of our experiences as modders for your thesis, feel free to join the CUP Discord channel or write me a PM ;)

[beno_83au 1362]

I've had a go at a few different times throughout life's life. Never really thought much of it to be honest.

[terox 316]

There is also a major difference in ideology between the long term milsim community and the newer RPG community

 

Historically ofp/arma has a very strong modding community. The community itself has taken B.I to where they are now and in the majority of cases all the modding work has been released freely with editing rights granted as part of their eula's, ( if indeed a eula was defined in the first place) with little if any thought going into economic gain. There has been the odd case of somebody not giving credit to the original creator for work that they have copied/re hashed/edited etc but that is a minor percentage when you consider the vast amount of content created by 3rd parties.

The historic community is the milsim community which afaik have never run their servers for economic gain. So lets state that they are in it simply for the good of the community, nothing else.

All the work they did and continue to do was based on somebody elses previous work, they just want to improve on it and so on and so forth

 

Now compare that with my perception of Some, not all of the RPG server community.

(I know some RPG server hosts who have the right morale fibre and run servers for the good of the community, so lets not tar every RPG host with the same disdain)

 

 

So lets look at the bad eggs from my point of view

1. They want to encrypt their missions so nobody steals their ideas (Not their idea in the first place)
2. Charge for cosmetic b/s
3. Want to make A LOT OF MONEY for "Their hard work"..... we are talking a lot of money here.
4. They forced B.I to change the eula
5. (Wondering what was behind BI's decision to allow the binarising of mission.sqm's)
6. They are Secretive
7. Its all about player numbers to them, they want to be on top of the  Player Number list, (More players more money)
8. They run their servers purely for economic gain, not because they love this community and want to see it thrive

Their argument behind monetarising their server is to pay for its upkeep.

This is just absolute tosh. I have been running a milsim community since the early days of OFP, in all that time the only money that we have ever received has been purely donations. These donations have covered our running costs, paid for brand new servers (We colocate, not rent) and hardware upgrades. My opinion is, if your doing things well, folks want to keep you up and running, there is absolutely no need to charge for access. So I guess for 13 years I must have been doing things right or we wouldnt be here today and at the moment we are stronger than ever before. For that reason I believe there argument to be complete b/s.

If i can keep a smallish community going for so long then rest assured there is no need to charge for access and anyone who says otherwise is talking crap

 

Its greed nothing more.

 

When it comes to the content/ideas they run with, most if not all of it is based on others work. You can be assured that when this original work was created, it was not released to be used for economical gain as you see it being used today.

Because of this, we are now seeing a change in the modders community, we are now seeing less modders and those who still mod are releasing their work with eulas forbidding the useage on these monetarised servers.

It has caused a bone of contention for quite a while now and is poisoning the fabric of this great community.

 

I'm starting to waffle now so i'll stop and wait for the hail of crap that is about to come this way

 

 

 

Open source

Milsim

[chris5790 24]

They want to encrypt their missions so nobody steals their ideas (Not their idea in the first place)

You mean they are exactly doing the same like Sa-Matra which even got money as a reward for doing this? Well the major problem is BI itself which is supporting this behavior since he never had to publish any code since he has won his award. I would have forced him to publish any further development...

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

I suppose there is a natural split, because 90% of the A3 modders, those creating any new content, are not from the cops & robbers part of the A3 community. And as such, 90% of the edits they make to Tonics work, is copyright violations.

 

 

Also, as chris5790 pointed out, Bohemia Interactive is rewarding, encouraging and nudging modders to encrypt/obfuscate/binarize/hide/watermark their IP. In my opinion, since they are encouraging it, we should do exactly that.

 

 

Personally I have no problems with AL communities, just observing and commenting.

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

Roughly 75% if the license infringements over CUP are by "Life Servers" and their owners (the rest is mostly Exile). Most of the time those are modified reuploads not being under the correct license or the usage of CUP on monetized servers (which is forbidden according to our license).

I had similar experiences when releasing Map Builder and helping out in the terrains Skype group: Most request were about adding "stolen" content to "stolen" terrains for some monetized Life servers ("I am planning a new, absolutly unique Life server with a big income. Can you help me adding XYZ to Celle2?").

 

I am not saying Life servers and their owners are bad in general, but in comparison to other types of groups the percentage of "bad people" seems to be higher than elsewhere.

 

If you want an indepth discussion of our experiences as modders for your thesis, feel free to join the CUP Discord channel or write me a PM ;)

 

 

Are you a CUP dev?

 

I've been asked by a number of people recently to add CUP to our public coop server, due to the server browser changes. Told them I'd check the license and get back to them. yes we are monetized, to cover the $75/mo server cost.

[NeoArmageddon 957]

Are you a CUP dev?

 

I've been asked by a number of people recently to add CUP to our public coop server, due to the server browser changes. Told them I'd check the license and get back to them. yes we are monetized, to cover the $75/mo server cost.

 

No monetaization with CUP allowed. Sorry ;)

 

P.S. My server also costs 70€ per month and I am paying for it with donations from my squadmates.

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

No monetaization with CUP allowed. Sorry ;)

 

P.S. My server also costs 70€ per month and I am paying for it with donations from my squadmates.

 

thats fine, thanks for response

 

would be nice if our community would support the server without having to dangle 'rewards' like custom skins, for helping to keep it running. most of the core community donates to our milsim server, so the public server misses out, despite that being where most of the core community came from :(

[George Matthews 1]

Vanilla Altis Life servers usually stay out of the drama, its the mod's that are used on modded life servers that usually start drama.

People see the money that goes into some modded life servers and decide to start copying what there content in order to make some easy money.

This gives life servers a bad name.

 

This is why I don't monetize my server

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

modded life servers

 

Altis Life is a mod.

[I give up 152]

Vanilla Altis Life servers 

There is no such thing.

Life is a mod, not vanilla. 

All this discussion about credits is just a non sense, Credits for mods? lawl.

Btw, Life is receiving so much hate because it sucks and has nothing to do with ARMA.

[dscha 147]

Altis Life is a mod.

 

Life is a mod, not vanilla.

 

Ordinary Altis Life is a MISSION, not a Mod...

Learn the difference.

 

Btw, Life is receiving so much hate because it sucks and has nothing to do with ARMA.

If it sucks, why do so many ppl play it?

Life is not particular bad. The bad part are just the retarded Server-Owner, who try to make profit from it (like "Cayden" or whatever the name of that sob was).

---

Oh, tell me: What has "to do" with Arma?

Exile?

Epoch?

DayZ?

CTF Maps?

Koth?

Coop?

TvT?

...

There is no real "Arma only". It also became a part of Arma like CTI-Gamemodes became one, back in OFP (Oh btw.: there were also "life"-like Server, just4Info ;) ).

RV is and was an "Open World" Engine, live with it and don't throw any random Arguments around...

[Varanon 892]

 There is no real "Arma only". It also became a part of Arma like CTI-Gamemodes became one, back in OFP (Oh btw.: there were also "life"-like Server, just4Info ;) ).

RV is and was an "Open World" Engine, live with it and don't throw any random Arguments around...

 

Well, you could argue that Arma is a military sandbox, and as such, 'Life' would not be "real" Arma. Of course, that would be rather narrow minded. I liked DayZ for a time, until I realized it's just a glorified deathmatch with a lot of running, ridiculous ways to commit suicide and force feed shit to other players (what I miss form DayZ are, well, the 'Z' part).

 

Having said that, I personally have nothing against 'Life' servers, other than that I don't like playing that kind of game, but that's personal preference.

 

One problem I do have with 'Life', though, and that's when decisions are made (by Bohemia) to move the game into that general direction. Say what you want, but the change in the fatigue system was definitely one of those steps. It might not have been exclusively influenced by it, but part of the decision making process are likely to have been 'Life' servers. Or other missions that you spent a long time walking in (Like Exile, I guess).

 

Maybe it's just my perception and the whole change of the fatigue system was really motivated by other reasons (those that have been given were a total miss, though).

 

The real problem is, IMHO, money. The fact that BI allows servers to take entrance fees. This leads to competition between the servers, resulting in all the bad stuff like wanting to protect missions and scripts from theft and the actual theft (or rather, copyright infringements) of other modder's works. Or other games, for that. Arma Life (I think that was the one) and some other foul eggs are really ruining the reputation of the genuine servers.

[chris5790 24]

Well, you could argue that Arma is a military sandbox, and as such, 'Life' would not be "real" Arma. Of course, that would be rather narrow minded. I liked DayZ for a time, until I realized it's just a glorified deathmatch with a lot of running, ridiculous ways to commit suicide and force feed shit to other players (what I miss form DayZ are, well, the 'Z' part).

 

Having said that, I personally have nothing against 'Life' servers, other than that I don't like playing that kind of game, but that's personal preference.

 

One problem I do have with 'Life', though, and that's when decisions are made (by Bohemia) to move the game into that general direction. Say what you want, but the change in the fatigue system was definitely one of those steps. It might not have been exclusively influenced by it, but part of the decision making process are likely to have been 'Life' servers. Or other missions that you spent a long time walking in (Like Exile, I guess).

 

Maybe it's just my perception and the whole change of the fatigue system was really motivated by other reasons (those that have been given were a total miss, though).

 

The real problem is, IMHO, money. The fact that BI allows servers to take entrance fees. This leads to competition between the servers, resulting in all the bad stuff like wanting to protect missions and scripts from theft and the actual theft (or rather, copyright infringements) of other modder's works. Or other games, for that. Arma Life (I think that was the one) and some other foul eggs are really ruining the reputation of the genuine servers.

You're right. Definitally you're right. It's a multiperspectival problem made by BI and Tonic. Tonic started to "protect" his code by makros (silly and not effective but at least he tried). Afterwards Mikero released MakePBO with obfuscation. He also wrote in his ReadMe that this feature was essentially made for Altis Life servers. BI supported this by supporting people like Sa-Matra protecting their code even if the got douzens of dollars as a reward for MANW. 

 

Even if you don't like Altis Life there are no real reasons for hating it. People hating Altis Life should be more precise. They could either hate Tonic for starting this kiddieparty or the server owners for creating money machines (Regarding Ruhrpott Altis Life which is still doing it atm). I definetly support the monetization because it's a more controlled way than before but it should be harder to get approved. As long as only Schubert is reviewing this evidences this is a looong process and you can't have control about every server. We have to deal with it. There is no solution for this problem.

 

The new fatigue system. Well it was and is garbage. Every Altis Life server hates it and every "normal" player too. Altis Life servers have the problem that it can't be adjusted without addons - every other modded framework doesn't cares about this. I want the old system to come back or just an option you could activate in your mission / mod to change to the old without any legacy addons.

 

DayZ is lost in Alpha stage. The hype killed it. It will never be revived any more. It was totally dumb to start a own game for it. The standalone started at the point where DayZ wasn't that popular any more. Like I said the hype killed it. Same applies to Altis Life. It will die slowly and silently.

 

Also huge thanks to Dscha. Like he said there is a difference between mod, modification and mission. Calling Altis Life a mod is wrong. It's a gameplay modification built into a mission. You could achieve same with addons which was tried (on a brazenly way) by Arma 3 Life. 

[Kiika 2]

Arma 3 Life servers, especially servers with TFR that get a lot of players just have a lot of drama in them.. People forget that we are here to have fun. The game is taken very seriously and people just get overly salty over a game, people create drama and it makes it not enjoyable after a while. A lot of people just deal with it, but personally I change communities a lot because I get tired of the same people. 

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

 modded life servers

 

 

 

Altis Life is a mod

 

 

 

Ordinary Altis Life is a MISSION, not a Mod...

Learn the difference.

 

 

 

 

Also huge thanks to Dscha. Like he said there is a difference between mod, modification and mission. Calling Altis Life a mod is wrong. It's a gameplay modification built into a mission.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In reality, BI has classed 'modding'/game modifications as anything other than official content and what is available through the unmodified Editor.

 

The term you should acquaint yourselves with is 'Addons'.

 

What you call an unmodded/vanilla life server, is actually a modded server (running the altis life mod) with no required addons.

[Unamatrix 1]

I like altis life servers

[drstighd 2]

Completely agree with this post..

[pixelmonkey 10]

Thank you everyone for submitting such in-depth and comprehensive answers (It's always nice to hear from the good side of the ArmA community every once in a while) !

[pixelmonkey 10]

(Edit)

 

Sorry for posting that twice. I don't have the mental capability to figure out how to delete this post so I've decided to edit it out, I apologize for my incompetence.