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

[purepassion 22]

Thank you dA for going there and reporting your experiences!

I am now even more so looking forward to the future of Day Z :)

[Binkowski 26]

Pro: Brings population and sales for ArmA which otherwise were dire(5 servers with people? crap). Also hopefully now more people can call for better control system and not clunky awkward movement.

Five servers with people other than DayZ? What time of day were you playing? Because I seem to be able to find servers other than DayZ just fine after you sift through the slew of DayZ servers. The game wasn't dead, and DayZ didn't "save" it.

[antoineflemming 14]

Five servers with people other than DayZ? What time of day were you playing? Because I seem to be able to find servers other than DayZ just fine after you sift through the slew of DayZ servers. The game wasn't dead, and DayZ didn't "save" it.

My thoughts exactly! And that's the kind of attitude that annoys me. The idea that DayZ is ArmA2's salvation. ArmA2 was doing pretty well before DayZ came along. And I haven't seen any substantial change in ArmA2 after DayZ came along.

[WhoCares 0]

Posted this over in the DayZ forums, but fits here even better...

If there is just 10% of DayZ players that try ArmA and 10% of those actually like it and become "Armaholics", then I don't see the bad thing in that.

Attraction of CoD kiddies? They will come anyway, as they came with the launch of ArmA2, ArmA, OFP - media coverage and the like always did that with the launch of a new game - some stayed around and adapted, the others left after a few days/weeks/months. And DayZ has already done that "damage", as it already attracted those and some (hopefully many!) will get ArmA3 anyway, disregarding whether DayZ will come as a mod for it or as a standalone game based on the engine.

Flooding by Noobs? We were all newbies 11 years ago, but one of the most friendly and helpful communities got us around the rough edges and the learning curve - I hope there is still something left of that community instead of looking down as a simmer on those ordinary gamers...

I also hope there is still some room for new players in the ArmA community - disregarding of their background!

In fact, I think the sim in ArmA needs more players, and DayZ is a chance to attract people and convince them of its qualities, that would otherwise not look at it.

The only valid concern might be that the development might get more and more influenced by DayZ, disregarding the sim. But with VBS2 behind, I don't see that happen either.

Eventually, there might be that step that ArmA and DayZ become different threads of the engine, but I hope that day is still far away, as I see them both benefiting from each other, more so then I see a negative infulence...

[jibemorel 10]

Some Mr Hall interviews @REZZED 2012

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nbpwOrS3ChU

[metalcraze 290]

If there is just 10% of DayZ players that try ArmA and 10% of those actually like it and become "Armaholics", then I don't see the bad thing in that.

It's not about how many of them start to like ArmA but how many of them can't stop spamming everything with DayZ related BS.

[dmarkwick 261]

Glass half empty :)

[R0adki11 3949]

I for one think Dayz is a good thing for Arma2, it certainly has brought more players into the community so of those players may not stay but the ones who do will be come more interested in the other mods besides Dayz.

I have genuine evidence of this, im part of a small gaming community called FragIt which partly based in an internet cafe/ gaming cafe. Most of the members of the community are virtual members spread out all over the UK and Europe, some of our members recently have bought Arma2 just to play Dayz, but many have also found other mods to play for example like IV44 and also have started to play some of the conventional PvP game types in Arma2. Which in end brings more players to the Arma2 community.

And what is even better is that most of the new members which are playing Arma2 in the FragIT community, have all said they will be upgrading their PC this summer ready for Arma3. :)

[MavericK96 0]

My thoughts exactly! And that's the kind of attitude that annoys me. The idea that DayZ is ArmA2's salvation. ArmA2 was doing pretty well before DayZ came along. And I haven't seen any substantial change in ArmA2 after DayZ came along.

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. :j:

[Shagulon 1]

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 0]

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. :j:

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.

Edited July 10, 2012 by Simon C

[Cards525 10]

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.

Edited July 10, 2012 by Cards525
Worded a sentence wrong.

[dannyb 1]

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 0]

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 11]

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 956]

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.

Edited July 10, 2012 by ProfTournesol

[dmarkwick 261]

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 0]

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. :cool:

[jblackrupert 14]

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.

[W0lle 1052]

We all stop the general DayZ discussion here now and return to the original purpose of the thread: Listing pro and cons about DayZ.

Thanks.

[Zaippo 1]

PROS:

1. Sales, which will more or less allow BIS to work on new projects and maybe expand their staff (if needed.) Also motivates them!

2. More fame. New players and potential modders hear about this game. Even some of my friends bought this for DayZ (and possibly for other mods. And it was on sale.)

Homever, I'm more of opposer to DayZ. So here comes the CONS:

1. More fame= new players= more people that I hope wouldn't have ever heard about ArmA. Or the "mainstream people." It's good that new players hear about this, but there's also too many people that shouldn't be playing this. They don't do tutorials and they ask about everything in-game. Even the basic stuff "How I jump over fence? Why when I have 5 mags I only have 30 rounds to be used and 4 in other mags?" And they have no idea about ArmA's gameplay, map scale, controls or how it plays.

2. DayZ game mentality. Currently it's pretty much deatchmatch but with zombies. Who would honestly start shooting at every single person he sees in real apocalypse? Maybe few, but not 95% of survivors. I have run into friendly group whom I teamed with in my few game sessions, but it's pretty much "Not in Skype? Shoot him." And I swear that I have been TKed more in vanilla servers more often. And met more ppl who "can't" play.

3. Annoying and ignorant comments on Youtube and elsewhere. This is reason I registered here 3 years too late (yes, I'm lazy a person.) I try to ignore comments like "A2 had 2 players before DayZ; A3: DayZ; I hate old-fag elitist core community!" But it really annoys me. Trying to honestly discuss something with others you can likely have some kind of hate comment in response. OFC some core members go bit extreme but not as much as DayZ guys...

4. The DayZ community overall. Many are surprised that there's other mods for A2, not to mention their scale. As, honestly in my personal opinion, there's not that much of content on DayZ now or it's "broken." Although some of stuff is complex and it's Alpha explains/justifies it. But still, some guys should research some stuff before making idiotic comments (see cons No. 1 and 3)

5. Now IDK if this has been fixed, but when I tried it (early-late June) the servers were horribly overloaded. It took 40+ mins to connect. Stability on both main and game servers was horrible. I hope this has been fixed. I still don't see on DayZ homepage "Donate for more server space!" I will try this again once it's Beta/release version, it isn't so popular and servers can handle it or if some of my friends want to play it.

These are things that most bug me, shortened version of them atleast. As said, I'm new here and this was first thread to blow up some steam and it felt like I could write something sensible here. Also, I haven't written on any forums much, so please don't insta-:31: ;)

[Cards525 10]

You win the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Deadfast 43]

I played DayZ for a week before I stopped. I really liked the idea of zombie apocalypse (who doesn't :p) but the actual execution didn't quite live up to my expectations. What I experienced came closer to a deathmatch than zombie survival. Surprisingly, I did not get killed by a "bandit" but just the thought that one might be hiding with a sniper rifle shooting everything in sight (I saw this, twice) completely destroyed the atmosphere for me.

[[frl]myke 15]

You win the Nobel Peace Prize.

You win +1 Infraction for spamming.

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[antoineflemming 14]

I played DayZ for a week before I stopped. I really liked the idea of zombie apocalypse (who doesn't :p) but the actual execution didn't quite live up to my expectations. What I experienced came closer to a deathmatch than zombie survival. Surprisingly, I did not get killed by a "bandit" but just the thought that one might be hiding with a sniper rifle shooting everything in sight (I saw this, twice) completely destroyed the atmosphere for me.

And, see, that's my problem with a large part of the DayZ crowd. There's always been those kind of players, but seems like there was a large influx of players that have that mentality of just shooting everything in sight. That's the same reason this community criticizes the "COD kiddies" type of players. DayZ has attracted a lot of these console-arcade-twitch shooter players who only care about "getting moar fragz". And the reason that DayZ is so popular is that its theme of zombies caters to these players. The reason there are so many people playing DayZ is because most of these players are arcade players. While there are a few players who are actually getting into ArmA2, that's NOT the norm, or the trend.

I understand your optimism, DMarkwick, that DayZ players are their own community, and that ultimately they will come over to ArmA, but that's not guaranteed, nor is that the case for the majority. And this is the main reason I and several others believe that, currently, DayZ is more of a con than a pro. Because those DayZ players do bleed over to ArmA2, and it's not to learn ArmA2 or to join the ArmA community. DayZ's popularity is no different than COD's popularity. COD builds on popularity of arcade shoot 'em up gameplay. Treyarch's games, like DayZ, builds on the popularity of zombie games. That's the primary reason Treyarch is now as successful as Infinity Ward, because of their zombies. DayZ is no different.

The DayZ mod would be more of a positive for me if it didn't include zombies. Why? Because, then, it'd only attract players who were actually interested in the survival aspect of the mod. There would be no confusion on the point of the mod, or the core theme of the mod. It would suggest a greater focus on realism in survival-based gameplay, rather than having a double focus on survival AND zombies. Those who were drawn ONLY by zombies, most of whom tend to be from the arcade FPS crowd, wouldn't be drawn to it, and you'd have the remnant who actually did pick up DayZ because of the survival aspect. It would appear boring to all those who only cared about zombies, and those who only cared about shooting other players. Banditry wouldn't go away, but it would be diminished. That's really the only way that I would be a proponent of DayZ. If I knew that it fully thrived off of the type of game ArmA2 is, a realistic sandbox simulator, just without the military part, and not on a current industry-wide obsession with zombies. And I know that bandits in the mod target other players, but most of them wouldn't be playing DayZ if there weren't zombies. And then you wouldn't have a mod which's sales numbers (increased ArmA2 sales might as well be considered DayZ sales) overshadow it's speculated contributions to ArmA2. Because, honestly, those contributions, those benefits, theoretically should exist regardless of the number of players DayZ has brought in. Because any improvements should be made because DayZ highlights the need for certain MP improvements, NOT because DayZ has a certain large number of players that warrants new improvements. The improvements should be because of necessity, not player numbers.

EDIT: W0lle, this is meant as one big "con" by the way, not meant as a general DayZ discussion. I hope this is ok.