Beware of Exploits and the Debug Forest – Ban waves coming.
Developers Rocket and Tonic had a few things to say on the 20th regarding the state of DayZ. This is a brief synopsis of the announcements.
It has been made clear that disconnecting to avoid death in the game is considered cheating, and will be patched out in future versions of the game. “I don’t know why, but people are assuming that I think this is part of the game. It’s not. Meta gaming is explicitly allowed, i.e. infiltrating teamspeak servers and groups, etc. But disconnecting to avoid death is an exploit.” says the creator of DayZ. He goes on to add that if you spawn in a forest or field full of prone players, DON’T kill or loot from anyone. This is the debug forest, also known as the debug hill. Spawning there usually means that one of your files is out of date. “I’m here to address the issue with people killing other players when they join in the debug forest,” says DayZ team member Tonic. “This whole thing has gotten out of control so we’re going to start enforcing bans for all that are caught killing there.” There is your only warning regarding the Debug Forest people. If you value your account and don’t want to have it banned, just get out of there nice and quiet.
Some players are calling out for a reset of the DayZ master servers (where player profiles and inventories are stored) whenever a major update goes live, so that veteran players and newbies get to experience the changes at the same level. The argument that is being made for this change is that long life players with NVGs and powerful weapons won’t realise just how difficult the game has become for newbies now that the starting kit has been nerfed and the zombies are stronger. What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to post them in the comment section below.
Lastly, Rocket has responded to requests from server owners that they should be able to kick players to make room for their clanmates. “Originally we trialed allowing servers to kick out players who had either donated money or were clan members of the owner to allow space for someone else,” he says on the official forums. “But abuse of this became RAMPANT. If we let server owners do this, what is stopping them from kicking someone who just killed them? What is to stop them kicking people for arbitrary reasons? etc… The ability to kick people is non existent for the time being. But this brings on issues of what to do if there is a Hacker on the server. Developers must be contacted in order to have that person booted. So the system obviously needs some consideration.
