The DayZ Experience: I Call Bullshit

Welcome to part 2 of ‘The DayZ Experience’, in this part of the series we take a look at a few public opinions and perspectives of DayZ, and why I call bullshit on them.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out part 1 of ‘The DayZ Experience’ here.

‘DayZ is dead’ is something I hear a lot on social media, in stream chat and in YouTube comments. As with most comments made by gamers, they are usually over generalized and overly dramatic. Just because YOU have stopped playing it or YOU got bored of it, that doesn’t mean it is dead. Yes, we get that you are bored of the game, yes you want more weapons, yes you want more loot…but have you considered that those requests might be the reason you are bored with the DayZ?

The majority of people I see complaining that DayZ isn’t what it used to be are the players that join the ‘high loot’ servers, sprint to a military area and are ‘kitted up’ with enough gear to arm a small army within 30 minutes. This isn’t they way the game was designed to be played…yeah yeah I know what you are going to say, play how you want to play, blah blah. I call BULLSHIT. DayZ isn’t dead, the way you are experiencing DayZ is dead.

What is DayZ?

“DayZ is a gritty, authentic, open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game, in which players follow a single goal: to survive in the harsh post-apocalyptic landscape as long as they can. Players can live through powerful events and emotions arising form the ever-evolving emergent gameplay.”

This is the what is written under the heading of ‘About DayZ’ on the game website. It is a pretty generic paragraph describing the main aspects of what DayZ is as a game. For most people they would conclude that is a fairly obvious description of a player trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic environment. A reasonable person would come to the conclusion that this kind of environment would have limited resources, limited supplies and would be a challenge to survive.

So it would be fair to assume that when a player spawned into Chernarus in DayZ, they would be presented with a harsh post-apocalyptic landscape with limited supplies.
Unfortunately that isn’t the case with a lot of servers lately. A lot of community servers have opted for what I call ‘mil-sim’ style DayZ servers. These are basically servers that have a regularly scheduled persistence reset, be it several times a day or once a week. What the persistence reset does is effectively wipe the record of any loot that has spawned and starts fresh, so even though people may have a lot of military gear, the server hive doesn’t know this, due to the database being reset, and starts spawning in more gear. As you can imagine, this causes a lot more gear to be available to players, and disrupts the core focus of the game…post-apocalyptic survival.

Some community server providers take it one step further and have separate servers that don’t have the persistent resets, and share the hive with the servers that do have the resets. This means that people can constantly collect loot from the server that is respawning gear, switch the the persistent server and store it in tents and barrels. Generally people just continue to keep collecting the gear, filling up tents with gear, and are never actually experiencing what DayZ has to offer as a survival game.

DayZ is Dead

BULLSHIT. From my experience, the people that claim ‘DayZ is dead’ or start posting on Twitter that they are over DayZ and can’t handle it anymore, these are the ones that play DayZ in the manner mentioned above. They spawn in, run to a military spawn location, search for an M4, die, respawn…of course that is going to get boring, you are playing CoD just with a better map and less shit talk over VoIP.
People also say you shouldn’t get attached to your loot, I call BULLSHIT. The thought of losing your loot during an encounter is what brings on that intense rush when playing DayZ. If you have survived on a persistent DayZ server long enough to have loot, you have invested many hours into this character, you should bloody be attached to it.
Remember in part one when we talked about the first time I played DayZ mod. This was on a vanilla server, no high loot military, no bulk loot stashes. It was me, with limited supplies, barely surviving and it was the best experience I had ever had in a video game. Yes, getting in firefights is fun. But that feeling that we all experienced when we played vanilla DayZ mod, or even standalone before persistence reset servers became so abundant, that feeling came from the fear of dying and loosing what you had worked so hard to collect. That excitement of finding a gun with just a FEW rounds, not a few full magazines, just a few rounds. And the hard decision of whether to use the rounds to kill someone or not. The adrenaline that starts pumping when you get into a firefight with just a basic single action rifle, or a pistol with only a few rounds. Geez, I’m even starting to get that intense feeling of excitement just writing about the experience.
If people want to have that ‘DayZ experience’ again, all they have to do is stop loading into those high loot persistence reset servers. Load into a 1PP, persistence server that doesn’t share a hive with non-persistent servers and SURVIVE!

Try the real DayZ

Now at this point, I can only imagine how many people are pulling on their keyboard warrior shoes ready to shout random pleb abuse at me and tell me to stop ‘playing PvE’ or some crap.
My only comment to you is, if you are bored of DayZ, if you are complaining about how long development is taking, if you are wanting helicopters and more weapons, then you really haven’t experienced DayZ if you think these items are priorities. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get into PvP encounters, just do it as a survivor with limited resources, not some pleb straight outta CoD with his M4 and unlimited rounds. You will have a much more intense experience.

So please, load into a private hive (1PP preferred, but 3PP if you must) server with persistence enabled. DayZ Underground, HIHB & =UN= are a few of my favourites. Play on them for a week, go loot towns for the little supplies that are available, SURVIVE. Hunt animals, craft some leather clothing. Farm some food. Explore the map. When you do encounter other players and you have gear to protect. It will make you think about your character, and the how to proceed with the encounter. Because you have invested time into your character, you are attached. This is what makes the DayZ experience, and what will give you that intense rush once more. Please, let me know how you went and what you experienced. I’m confident you will enjoy it once you start playing DayZ in this way. There is so much more to DayZ than just the firefights.

In part 3, I’m hoping I will have some stories to share from players who followed my suggestions and tried DayZ on a 1PP persistence enabled server. So if you did try it, share your experience with us. You can email me at dale@thefriendlybandit.com

 

Featured Image Credit: @theaussieck