dannyb

I think a major reason that ARMA 2 is not more popular is because, at least in my experience, the community seems very impatient of newbies. This is true of all games, but the serious style of the genre attracts serious people. Nothing wrong with that, but it's difficult to introduce new players to the genre when a community values experience as much as this one does. The closing of the recent DayZ thread is a pretty good example. There's an earnest, polite discussion going on as to pros and cons of the most popular mod for the ARMA engine, and somebody doesn't like it. It's off-putting, and it's an attitude fairly dominant in this community. I once tried to get friends to play ACE. I don't do that anymore. Having said that, I agree with the accessibility factors. But if we're honest with ourselves, I think that some of that inaccessibility is actually a plus for the serious sim gamer. We take some pride in the fact that the learning curve is steep enough to keep less-serious folks away.

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.