Friday 31 August 2012

DayZ Middleware Madness


We really are loving DayZ this end, I say we as its only the second title that the wife is willing to sit down and play along side me, acting as my spotter for all the hopping, crawling, scurrying and stumbling zombies around our collective character.

Our character whom has finally, after about a week of playing haplessly, managed to survive three whole days in game.  This is a record for us, and something of a note for the rest as its been done in the most trying of circumstances.

You see, there's some problem with the FPS, but only on certain servers.  Now the server base for the game already looks very very fragmented, with different groups running different versions of the server software (or at least versions labelled differently) with different settings in different time zones with different anti-cheat protection and different local rules and scripts.  The end result is one can spend a solid half hour trying to not only find a server which will work (the fps problem goes away) but actually a server that will let you in and stay in.

"You have been kicked because of battleye script restriction #40"... or #90... or #187... or whatever are common place, there is no explanation for this, neither from the battleye site itself, nor the DayZ team or the server hosts.  Clerver dicks residing upon the DayZ forum suggest telling the server administrator about being kicked, that they (the server host) needs to update their battleye script... But, you can't find out who these people are... I've tried to track down four different server hosts to tell them that their servers insta-kick... But I feel sometimes its a loosing battle.

Some server hosts simply keep themselves secret, they lock down their server, and only allow themselves to play on it... With all the riches of their cache going onto their hive bound character they can then jump into other servers with impunity and harvest rich murder counts and hassle other players.  I've even had one (whom I will not name) mail me back, "U winey biatch just coz we got da idea 2 keep srva 4 us an get da gears"... Its like... WTF... I just mailed you to tell you your server has a battleye script restriction and insta kicks after an embarrassingly long wait on the loading screen... Yet you mail be back admitting you are fraudulently farming gear in the game?

This attitude seems rife, the DayZ team don't seem to be making much effort with the plethora of posts regarding server spoofing going on, I think that infact they're overwhelmed with the numbers.

And there's the problem, the numbers, I remember working on the forums for "The Lordz" managing the machinations of a few hundred people each day, and there was always one moron trying to goad you, or get a rise out of you; they call them trolls now-a-days, we called them "Surfs".  So I can relate to the DayZ team struggling with over a million players gaggling at the gates each morning.  But, I can't really accept that they can't put up a post on their own forums explaining a few things.  My recent post about the servers being down, it became a really very popular post from the internets to my blog... No DayZ member ever got back to me... yet I had over 250 visits to my site... The trouble shooting section on the DayZ forum, the Bug reporting section and indeed the dedicated development bug tracker they have in place are swamped with issues, not the least of which is that if DayZ becomes a real stand-alone product then they need to polish it.

Yet there's no reply.  I've seen "Rocket" on the youtubes, I've seen his look and attitude to the game, he plays in a group, he plays on servers he controls (I don't doubt), he and his crew don't (at least I don't think) go out into the wild hillbilly world of finding a server like myself, like any player new to the game would.



I for my part am patient and look at my local kit, check its working and then select through lots of servers to find one working... Others won't, they'll just say "fuck this shit"...

Yes, the game is "in alpha", but when something is in alpha you're generally releasing it to get feedback, I just think the reaction the team have is now so overwhelming that they can't hear the sound for the noise.  And we definiately can't hear them disseminating any news.

Right now, I hope they update the server software, bringing all the servers listing different versions together into a single version which works, looking at the server browser right now I can see 95948, 96063, 96061, 95883, 95913 and 96015 all listed as the version of the mod/game servers are running... This fracturing is terrible and the main cause of my frustrations with the game.



It was also the source of my problems with the crowbar, I picked it up on a server able to give it me, 96061, but then played on servers running 95938 and 95953, meaning I couldn't use, or put the thing down... very annoying and all server side, no indication given that it was my machine, or the hive... gah for middleware madness.

No comments:

Post a Comment