Very interesting read on Reddit right now...

[Kraker Jak]

Why The Later SA Is Released, The More People Will Be Disappointed : dayz

Before you come here to just down vote actually read what I have to say as some of it makes sense.THEN
Ok lets get a little back story out for those of you who have not been around dayz for very long. In-case you did not know dayz became popular due to the fact it was the first zombie survival game that did things well the way dayz does it, and here is something a large amount of game reviews at the time stated was the only reason it was popular, it was the first game ever that you could login to ANY server and have the same character, gear, location, etc. That was due to the central Hive database that Every server connected to. This unified server system made people love DayZ even more. For those of you who are wondering the time frame I am talking about, I am referring to the very early stages of dayz, right around the end of april and mid may.
At the time what made dayz so amazing was the thrill of trying to survive with just what you find, and of course the hunt of trying to find a vehicle when less then 50 servers had vehicles and less then like 10 had helis, People were simply in love with trying to find the best possible loot and set up a tent base. A vehicle at the time seemed like an endgame as it saved you from the countless hours of back and fourth between airfields your base and cities. DayZ was simply more about surviving, And from what I can tell what Dean (Rocket) truly wants with DayZ.
NOW
Now the whole Idea of dayz has changed, most of the old players who made dayz big are gone, and its new players thinking that what dayz is now, is how it has always been. The central Hive is pretty much none existent, logging into pretty much every server will cause you to spawn with a new character and new gear. So right there a huge part of what dayz used to be is changed now.
I know this is going to get me a lot of hate, But here goes.
And now onto what is the worst thing to happen for dayz "Private Hives". Private Hives have ruined pretty much everything that made DayZ, DayZ. Surviving really is not a thing anymore when you have server admins putting 200+ vehicles on the server which take away from that sort of endgame like goal of finding a vehicle, You now have server admins with the ability to simply repair vehicles to full with the press of a button, and they now have the ability to spawn vehicles where ever they damn well please which is for sure not what dayz was about.
Now onto admins giving weapons, changing starting loadout, and more. Allowing admins the ability to give weapons, heal, and do what ever to players is also something that ruined what dayz was all about. You used to have to spend hours upon hours trying to find loot in military barracks and heli crashes (even though they used to almost never work) just to find say a DMR, If you had a squad with a DMR, a winchester, and an M4/M16 or two you were king You had Fun in your group as you knew that the 5 hours you just spent finding that DMR was worth it. Now that is all gone, server admins can simply give them selves guns weapons what ever, and give other players what ever they feel like. Heck you can now change it so instead of starting with basic survival gear you start with the best possible stuff in the game.... That makes playing pretty much pointless. Now this leads me onto what a decent amount of servers are doing, "donate for an as50" or "donate for a loadout of your choice" that sounds an awful lot like pay to win which is something no one expected dayz to ever be. Now granted you will say well not all servers do it. Well your right but a decent amount do, do it which is the reason why i am mentioning it.
And onto my last point.
NEW PLAYERS
Right now is the worst time for players to pickup dayz for the first time as not only do they have to get used to the clunky inventory system, and just learn what dayz is. They now have to choose from what map and what mod of dayz mod they want to play, which as a new player you might not even choose actual dayz on chernarus. You then have to choose one of the 6 thousand servers that are out there knowing that what ever server you join is the one you will need to stick with, but not only that you need to hope you pick a server that 1 the admin is not going to be abusing his powers, and 2 a server that is not going to change maps and you lose all your effort, and 3 one that is not going to be cancelled a week from now and once again you lose all your stuff. Which going back to the THEN part of this section is something you did NOT have to worry about when dayz was more towards rockets vision.
And onto the topic
WHY PEOPLE WILL BE DISAPPOINTED
Lets talk about the title and why I said "Why The Later SA Is Released, The More People Will Be Disappointed" As you may or may not know rocket is developing the game he had always dreamed dayz could be, So that game will be more towards what dayz used to be and not what it has become now. That means at least for a decent amount of time in the beginning, there will be NO private hives, there will simply be the one main Hive that they run. He has said that he does not want to do private hives at first because they want to simply work on fixing bugs and new features at first which will result in possibly large changes that will need to be made on a daily basis to the Hive. No private hives means no "200+ vehicle servers", no "admin maps", no player tracking, no special starting gear and loadouts, no donator classes, no plunking down vehicles where ever you please, none of that. That right there is huge news to those who think dayz SA is going to be like dayz now just with improvements. Personally I hope Rocket does not allow private hives at all for at least a year, It simply changes the idea of DayZ too much, Don't get me wrong I hope admins get some more tools then they get on a official server now, but I hope to what ever god you believe in they don't get all of what they get now.
Now for those of you who only play say taviana or only play dayz 2017 and think normal dayz on chernarus sucks, well you are also going to be out of luck as rocket has also stated that modding will NOT be allowed for the foreseeable future as well going back to private hives, they simply want to work on fixing issues and working on improvements to dayz rather then supporting people trying to day one make 20 maps. I am also personally very happy about this news too as no modding means no extra maps which means no private hives will need to be made.
From what I just said a lot of you might be thinking to yourself oh what he said is false, SA is going to have everything well its simply not. There are plenty of places for you to look to find sources for what I said, Its all been said by rocket. Plain and simple.
Now for those of you who understand what I have said can think to yourself, those who have not played dayz way back when and realize what its truly about may not like SA when it comes out as its simply not going to have the million maps and private hives with admin maps and tools. That right there I know for a fact will make a lot of people hate SA.
Then of course the longer the mod is out and SA is still just "in development" players will be buying arma 2 for dayz mod playing it and getting in their heads that is what dayz is and that is what they can expect from SA.
If SA would have released back when Rocket said (end of 2012) more people most likely would have expected what they got as even though its only been 3 months private hives were not as big then as they are now, and since then a lot more mods and maps have come out which have changed dayz even more.
Just my thought, take it for what its worth.

thoughts?

[maximusboomus]

I think he does pose some valid points, the ideals of day z will be temporarily returned to rockets vision of day z. The central hub is great as long as people can't hack like tight now.

That being said I do worry the kitsch factor won't be there, but time will tell I guess...



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[THATriggerHappy]

i hope he is right thats the game i fell in love with not this shit that has too many vehicles and everyone has kickass guns. if it ends up being like the old dayz i might actually play it again. shit was fun even with all the fucking bugs it used to have i still thought it was funner back then. but hey thats just me.

[Kanati]

But that's the endgame of what dayz is. Everyone having too many guns. The spawn rates dictate that and that hasn't changed from what I can gather. Like I've said from day one, once the zeds are no longer the threat it turns to pvp only and since the maps are so large it's a hoarders game. You can play the game without ever running into someone else if you choose to play it like that. So that leaves you and your end-game guns to run around the map and hoard.

[THATriggerHappy]

it sure does seem like there are a whole lot more crashed choppers to be honest i dont think there were more than 3 or 4 on the whole map and they wouldnt have 4 or 5 guns on them either. ammo was a bitch to come by there were no ammo boxes that gave you 20 clips of ammo so if you did get lucky and find a kickass gun you had to be careful with your bullets. hell even different pistols were hard to come by besides the makarov. fuck the backpack are even too easy to come by. used to be a treasure just to find a damn czech backpack.

[Nuckle]

it sure does seem like there are a whole lot more crashed choppers to be honest i dont think there were more than 3 or 4 on the whole map and they wouldnt have 4 or 5 guns on them either. ammo was a bitch to come by there were no ammo boxes that gave you 20 clips of ammo so if you did get lucky and find a kickass gun you had to be careful with your bullets. hell even different pistols were hard to come by besides the makarov. fuck the backpack are even too easy to come by. used to be a treasure just to find a damn czech backpack.

....yes and people bitched about that. Said that all the cool servers have more gear, more cars, more down choppers etc etc etc.

[CivilWars]

Such is the nature of gaming these days. My guess is if we went the traditional route, even if we did away with the white list and opened the server, we would never get above 5-10 players, but if you look at the servers that are "OMGZORZ 4k vehicles, more guns than zombies, all the loot you want" they are packed. This ties in with PR dying and CoD X being king of the castle.

I am not saying we have to be like those servers, just saying why those servers are the way they are. Most server owners/providers would rather have a full server with crappy rules over a server with great rules and only a select few players.

[SgtRazor]

I think the kid, I hope he is a kid with that kind of grammar, is looking back on DayZ with a warped view.

I remember playing Aprilish-August, and one thing I remember is the rampant hacking. He makes no mention of that; it was out of control and the biggest grief I, and many others, had with the mod in the beginning. I came back to DayZ once I saw that TPG had their own whitelisted server, and I have not had one case of hacking since then; and that is the beauty of whitelisted, private hives. Furthermore, if a hacker were to go through the steps to join and screw all of us, thanks to DB backups we can get that back. That won't happen with the Pub servers.

His case against custom loadouts is also ridiculous in my opinion. How many times has DayZ altered the loadouts? You used to spawn with a weapon, back in his perceived "good ol dayz", now the default is nothing but a flashlight. And here he is complaining about people spawning with a weapon or custom loadouts, or the game getting too easy. DayZ doesn't even know what it wants as a default loadout.

Now, I will agree that I think the loadouts for donors is exactly a pay-to-win offspring. I understand the business strategy behind it. There are costs to running a server, and a quick way to cover those costs is to offer special loots for people willing to pay. I just think it is contrary to the concept of donations, and the nature of DayZ. But as I have no financial stake in any server's success, the way each server conducts its business is not my business.

[Kanati]

I don't understand it being pay-to-win though. Pay-to-win implies there's an endgame and someone wins. That's not the case in DayZ. And whomever kills the person gets their stuff if they choose. So it's more pay-to-avoid-time-wasting-scavenging. But you are still going to die if someone walks up and pops you in the face with a bullet. Plus it's not like we're offering 5 dollar slots for "all the things and god mode". It's minor crap like a map... meat... ghillee suit... frozen poop on a stick maybe (hell I don't know what's available in this game)... I don't think these are things that can easily turn the tide in one's favor.

[Mr_Blonde_OPS]

....yes and people bitched about that. Said that all the cool servers have more gear, more cars, more down choppers etc etc etc.

I can sense the sarcasm in your fingers. Civil is right, the sad part about todays gaming generation is that it is all about instant gratification. I have posted at least three times the question of what kind of community we wanted? Of course no one ever answered me because I'm guessing I made my point, and that point is that we are trying to grow into that massive community because...well at the end of the day it's mostly all about $$$. And what brings in the most players/what is most popular now? (even though it is sad and depressing) More vehicles, cooler weapons, instant gratification.

We have always said our type of players at TPG are the minority. People who like the game straight out of the box, where less is more, and they like to work for their gratification. So that is why my question is such a important one. Do we adapt our playstyle to feed the needs of little kiddies who just want to shoot a bitch or do we hold what is true to TPG? It is possible to make our own niche, and we have done it before, but we have to stick with this and promote it the right way. We have seen that there are people out there who want to play the way we do. It may just take longer to populate the server if we do it that way...maybe not.

And for the record, I was under the impression that the way we are playing now on Panthera is all part of the server setup and the Highs really haven't played around with anything...