Official servers going dark.

[emuthreat 2837]

Since my last post about public servers disappearing, I have moved all of my play to official servers--thinking for some reason that they'd be more stable.  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that the official servers should be adequately available over time and running properly.

 

In the last two weeks, I have had two official servers on which I was playing, go dark.  I was under the impression that the officail servers such as"DayZ US Central 1-55" and "DayZ US East 1-58" were supposed to be the ones that GSP's had to keep up and running as part of their contractual obligation for the right to rent out other servers for this game.

 

Needless to say, I am more than disappointed.  How can I be expected to give reliable feedback about the game, when I can't even reliably use the same server for more than a couple weeks?  Unless I can host my own server on my own hardware, and be solely responsible for my satisfaction with the server uptime and availability, it is imperative that the "official servers" be offered and maintained consistently.

 

As stated in my previous post about servers going dark, the continued functionality and availability of officail public servers is an absolutely necessary part of making the game playable.  This issue is separate from the core development process, in that we don't have to wait for a new engine module.  I believe that there is already an existing agreement between BI and their selected server hosting companies, all that is missing is enforcement of the contractual obligations upon those companies.  Can't somneone at BI just write a few emails to these companies and see why they can't keep a server running.

 

I will add that after a week or two on these servers, two things seem to happen.  Lootbombs start showing up and bogging down sections of the map.  And in the case of my most recent lost server, 1-55, the population would start to increase.  In fact, once 1-55 became full of players, it would shut down more than once an hour.  I'm REALLY interested to learn what the problem is here.  Is it something about the game that is too hard on the servers,  are the server hosting companies simply skimping on resources?

 

I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend setting up high value supply drops, and recording the coordinates, only to find that the server that I'd used to prepare these "treasure maps" is no longer accessible.  And yes, I know it might be mere days before the wipe, that's the problem.  All the time I had spent collecting this stuff and scattering it around the map is now void, I don't even get to use anything myself, other than what's on my back.

 

TLDR: Even "officail" servers cannot be trusted to stay up, this is unacceptable.  Without proper oversight of officail servers, DayZ becomes more like an ironic, long-form exercise in masochism.  People are being paid to make sure these servers are available, and they are failing.

[BeefBacon 1185]

Asking for stable servers on an alpha game is like.... somebody help me with an apt metaphor.

 

It's silly, is what I'm getting at. Yes it's frustrating, and yes server providers are being paid, but you don't know what the circumstances are. Maybe a new item spawning in a certain location has caused the server data to become corrupt and they're trying to fix it? Or maybe they're just a terrible server host that aren't maintaining their servers properly. However, given the current state of the game it isn't entirely unlikely that servers are currently a wee bit unstable, and are likely to go down for extended periods of time.

[emuthreat 2837]

Asking for stable servers on an alpha game is like.... somebody help me with an apt metaphor.

 

It's silly, is what I'm getting at. Yes it's frustrating, and yes server providers are being paid, but you don't know what the circumstances are. Maybe a new item spawning in a certain location has caused the server data to become corrupt and they're trying to fix it? Or maybe they're just a terrible server host that aren't maintaining their servers properly. However, given the current state of the game it isn't entirely unlikely that servers are currently a wee bit unstable, and are likely to go down for extended periods of time.

Why some servers and not others?  What are these reasons they go down for extended/indefinite periods?  Is there any way I can research an official server to determine the risk of arbitrarily losing all of my gameplay efforts?  WHAT CAN BE DONE TO IMPROVE THIS SITUATION, besides claiming alpha?

 

I fear that years down the line people will still think it is too much to ask that official servers do not disappear.  I can just see the game making it through beta, and still people will respond to complaints like these with the tired expression of "don't get attached to your gear."  This is a persistent world survival game, and the ability to go back to the same place on the the same server and find what you left there is THE core gameplay mechanic of the finished product.  

 

I sincerely hope that it was the lootbombs (which are looking like they will soon become a thing of the past) that made these servers disappear.  I can totally understand how after sifting through a lootbomb, and stacking bags full of clothing in the corner of a barracks would, from the perspective of a person examining server data, obfuscate what is a legitimate stash, and what is just crap that people have moved out of the way.  But I don't see how this would prevent them from just resetting the server's persistence, and letting us get back to it.

 

I know the game is still alpha, but if they are offering official servers to play on, then they should be usable. I'll satiate your request for a metaphor:

 

If some people found a nice place to camp, and set up a primitive campground, but then it became popular enough for a well-funded attempt to improve said campground; this would roughly paralell the DayZ development process.  They offer certain campsites with limited amenities to the public, for a fee, while working to improve the rest of the campground.  The official servers are like these "early access" campsites, that people may use before the necessary improvements are made to allow people to lease parcels and build cabins.  So if you had paid a reduced fee to camp at this wonderful place, knowing that improvements are still being made, but that you have still paid to use what is available at the moment and offer feedback during the development of the project; would you be okay with having to arbitrarily pack up your camp from the space that had just been offered to you, and that you had paid for the opportunity to test out?  

 

I'm not complaining about the dismal framerate, or the lootbombs, or any number of other things that I know are currently being worked on.  I am complaining on the apparent lack of care regarding the continued availability of these official servers.  I really do not think it is too much to ask that the official servers be usable on more than a week-by-week basis.

 

If the only way to play DayZ  includes a chioce between renting your own server, or choosing a group who looks like they have enough money and members to alleviate the dread of their server going dark for non-payment some day, then I would consider that a failure to provide reasonable accomodation for those who have purchased the title, to play the game.

 

I'll now go crazy with a baseball metaphor.  Imagine that you have a season pass to a baseball game for only two seats, but then the stadium decides to close that section for whatever reasons.   Sure there are other seats to choose from, but the view is worse, and there is no shade, and the drink and hot dog vendors rerely pay attention to that area. You should not have to ask ahead of time if the seats you have chosen will still be available when you want to use them.  Nor should you be forced into buying a season pass/party bus package deal, with a private organization large enough to gurantee that the seats paid for will be available.

 

Maybe you have a large project at a DIY pottery shop that you are working on.  You have already paid a deposit for all the materials, but you cannot finish the project in one day.  Each day when you come back, your project is gone, but the nice lady at the help desk says that since you already paid your deposit, you are free to go and choose a new project to work on.

After how many days of coming back to find that your work is just "gone" would you still consider this place to be a good use of your recreational time and energy?

Edited May 18, 2015 by emuthreat

[Steak and Potatoes 13480]

Interesting insight, although in theory anyone could rename a server US-544 and or line it up with an appearence of public (official). I suppose you could go to the GSP site's themselves and check the demo servers as they are always listed i.e. gameservers scroll down to the demo listed servers, I don't think I have ever seen those change and they are public afaik. I would need to trob around in the mud for a bit to give you an in depth answer and try to help your dilemma. As always one could argue find a good community and stick to it, if you enjoy the server and they have good funds going it will stay up for as long as you have a say in it.

[emuthreat 2837]

-snip-

Thanks for the suggestion; at best, it gives me a better tool to cross reference the IP to confirm it is an official server.  I switched to the official servers because I had problems in the past with other servers going dark, and using officail servers was the suggested solution.  I would be very interested in finding a way to verify the expected service life of the official servers.  

[derLoko 30]

DayZ lost half its playerbase in the last few weeks. Maybe there were simply too many servers and some were shut down by BI.

[emuthreat 2837]

DayZ lost half its playerbase in the last few weeks. Maybe there were simply too many servers and some were shut down by BI.

Isn't that what server messages are for?  I'd gladly move all my stuff to avoid it all going poof, but I'd rather play on a server that was going to stick around.

 

Regardless, I can speculate plenty on my own.  I am looking for people to work towards getting this fixed, or suggestions for workaround.

[RagedDrew 209]

DayZ lost half its playerbase in the last few weeks. Maybe there were simply too many servers and some were shut down by BI.

Source?

 

Interesting insight, although in theory anyone could rename a server US-544 and or line it up with an appearence of public (official).

 

In theory indeed, however my clan tried this with their server due to butthurt ex members and people who just wanted to troll us as often as possible. So we changed the server to something that looked similar to an offical server from Vilayer (Our GSP at the time) they then contacted the person who had rented the server and told them to change it as we can do that. Now, this is just but one of the many GSP out there but I'm going to assume it'll be the same for them all.

Edited May 19, 2015 by RagedDrew

[sneakydudes 278]

Interesting insight, although in theory anyone could rename a server US-544 and or line it up with an appearence of public (official). I suppose you could go to the GSP site's themselves and check the demo servers as they are always listed i.e. gameservers scroll down to the demo listed servers, I don't think I have ever seen those change and they are public afaik. I would need to trob around in the mud for a bit to give you an in depth answer and try to help your dilemma. As always one could argue find a good community and stick to it, if you enjoy the server and they have good funds going it will stay up for as long as you have a say in it.

Hey steak,

 

You know when we had our server running we should have named the pvp server US-East Public, that way I would have had more kills for the short time HAHAH

 

its been awhile sup man. How's the server, once it becomes more beta ish we might put it up again.

[Grimey Rick 3417]

Source?

http://steamcharts.com/app/221100#1y

[lrp1984 199]

Source?

 

 

 

 

In theory indeed, however my clan tried this with their server due to butthurt ex members and people who just wanted to troll us as often as possible. So we changed the server to something that looked similar to an offical server from Vilayer (Our GSP at the time) they then contacted the person who had rented the server and told them to change it as we can do that. Now, this is just but one of the many GSP out there but I'm going to assume it'll be the same for them all.

 

It's actually more like the last couple of months rather than couple weeks. See the stats below. I would say the brief addition of the central loot economy drove a lot of players away. However perhaps more significant was the release of GTA 5 on steam.

 

                          Month Avg. Players  Gain          % Gain             Peak Players

Last 30 Days     6,965.0                    -2,309.4     -24.90%           14,493

April 2015          9,274.4                    -4,572.1     -33.02%           25,784

March 2015      13,846.5                   -1,160.8     -7.73%             29,190

February 2015 15,007.2                    +559.8       +3.87%            29,001

http://steamcharts.com/app/221100

Edited May 19, 2015 by McTabish

[RagedDrew 209]

It's actually more like the last couple of months rather than couple weeks. See the stats below. I would say the brief addition of the central loot economy drove a lot of players away. However perhaps more significant was the release of GTA 5 on steam.

 

                          Month Avg. Players  Gain          % Gain             Peak Players

Last 30 Days     6,965.0                    -2,309.4     -24.90%           14,493

April 2015          9,274.4                    -4,572.1     -33.02%           25,784

March 2015      13,846.5                   -1,160.8     -7.73%             29,190

February 2015 15,007.2                    +559.8       +3.87%            29,001

http://steamcharts.com/app/221100

 

Still not half in a couple of weeks like the other guy said. Thanks for taking the time to get this info.

Edited May 19, 2015 by RagedDrew

[Parazight 1594]

Asking for stable servers on an alpha game is like.... somebody help me with an apt metaphor.

Like.. totally legitimate. 

 

The money we gave them was not 'alpha'.  It doesn't matter how many times BI says "but it's alpha" or "it's just a dev build" or any other string of words.  When you take people's money, you assume the responsibility of putting out a usable product.  

 

Seems like server status is something that could be conveyed to the public fairly easily.

[Surviv0r1969 151]

Like.. totally legitimate. 

 

The money we gave them was not 'alpha'.  It doesn't matter how many times BI says "but it's alpha" or "it's just a dev build" or any other string of words.  When you take people's money, you assume the responsibility of putting out a usable product.  

 

Seems like server status is something that could be conveyed to the public fairly easily.

do you not remember the notice on the game.... "please do NOT buy this product"

[BeefBacon 1185]

Like.. totally legitimate. 

 

The money we gave them was not 'alpha'.  It doesn't matter how many times BI says "but it's alpha" or "it's just a dev build" or any other string of words.  When you take people's money, you assume the responsibility of putting out a usable product.  

 

Seems like server status is something that could be conveyed to the public fairly easily.

 

It doesn't matter how much you say 'it's not an alpha'. It's an alpha. Money doesn't magically make things happen.

 

I do agree, however, that they could be a little bit more forthcoming. Perhaps if an official server goes down we could be informed instead of being left in the lurch.

[Beizs 186]

Asking for stable servers on an alpha game is like.... somebody help me with an apt metaphor.

 

I don't quite agree with your premise here.

 

OP isn't asking for stable servers, he's asking for servers (especially official ones) that don't just completely disappear one day (short of it being years after the games completion and the company shutting everything down). That's more than reasonable. It's an alpha game, sure, but the physical servers aren't in alpha. They're pieces of hardware that the companies running them have an obligation to maintain (in order for them to be able to sell DayZ servers to people).

 

Data corruption (and therefore resets)? Fine, it's an alpha, it's bound to be buggy. Persistence resets? Fine, it's an alpha, they're balancing loot and removing duping. Server downtime? Fine, it's an alpha, the server software isn't finished, and, as such, isn't very stable.

 

But servers just shutting down permanently? Privately hosted servers, fine, that's not an issue. But there is literally no way you can put a server's complete disappearance down to the fact that the game is in alpha. That has literally nothing to do with it.

 

EDIT: Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the big issue is with this. Sure, you might lose your loot, but unless you manage to get everything on to your character on every single persistence reset, you're going to lose a lot of loot until the game is in stable. I just don't think the alpha has anything to do with this particular issue.

Edited May 19, 2015 by Beizs

[SMoss 2101]

Hey guys, official servers on Stable branch are only taken down upon request. In these cases there will be a valid reason for doing so and there will simply just not be time enough to set up server messages warning users that these servers will be taken down. It might sound harsh, but at this stage in development, there is no guarantee for player progression regardless of the servers being used. Farther on down the line this will of course be a different story.

[Tatanko 5591]

I had this happen to me just yesterday with NJ 2-18. I had been using it as my "home" server for about the last month. Now it either doesn't show up at all or it appears online but stuck in a restart loop. Not the end of the world, but still sucks because I lost a great camp :(

[emuthreat 2837]

I had this happen to me just yesterday with NJ 2-18. I had been using it as my "home" server for about the last month. Now it either doesn't show up at all or it appears online but stuck in a restart loop. Not the end of the world, but still sucks because I lost a great camp :(

True, not the end of the world, but it does get pretty frustrating once it happens more than twice in the same month.  I can gear up just fine by myself, in fact I started a 1pp experimental guy yesterday, and already have a fully kitted AK74, MP5 and FNX.  I'm not too sure that it's ready for stable push yet.

 

The problem with my playstyle is that I do lots of solo loot runs and make bag drops that I can direct other people to via VOIP.  So when the server I am using goes down, it's like stealing from charity. lol

[emuthreat 2837]

Hey guys, official servers on Stable branch are only taken down upon request. In these cases there will be a valid reason for doing so and there will simply just not be time enough to set up server messages warning users that these servers will be taken down. It might sound harsh, but at this stage in development, there is no guarantee for player progression regardless of the servers being used. Farther on down the line this will of course be a different story.

Is there any information that you might be able to share, that would assist in choosing a more viable public server to play on?  I enjoy testing backpack persistence over long periods of time, and needless to say, a server disappearing scrubs all of my efforts.  When this just happens to occur on three servers (two official) within a two week period, it becomes VERY notable.

 

I understand that the game is in alpha, and that the servers in question likely got pulled because of loot problems making areas of the map "crash traps."  If it is allowed at this time, and you wouldn't mind sharing; do these taken down servers happen for any specific reason?  Does anyony survey the landscape on these servers to determine the cause and extent of the problem requiring their shutdown?

 

I am somewhat concerned at the frequency with which the servers that I use go offline.  Could this be caused by aspects of my playstyle, such as looting out villages, and leaving any useful items bagged up in an easy to remember bush?  I have noticed "lootbombs" develop in sheds and hunter's platforms near my central stash locations.

[AmberHelios 2071]

I am somewhat concerned at the frequency with which the servers that I use go offline.  Could this be caused by aspects of my playstyle, such as looting out villages, and leaving any useful items bagged up in an easy to remember bush?  I have noticed "lootbombs" develop in sheds and hunter's platforms near my central stash locations.

 

don't the devs get to have fun too, they have been following you and turning off the servers when you reach sufficient stock :)

[emuthreat 2837]

don't the devs get to have fun too, they have been following you and turning off the servers when you reach sufficient stock :)

Lol, I'm paranoid enough in DayZ as it is, thanks.  I was more wondering if the servers getting taken down was related to loot problems, and if there were any ingame practices that could help to avoid breaking the server.  I just want a cure for Vybor backpack cancer.

[SMoss 2101]

Lol, I'm paranoid enough in DayZ as it is, thanks.  I was more wondering if the servers getting taken down was related to loot problems, and if there were any ingame practices that could help to avoid breaking the server.  I just want a cure for Vybor backpack cancer.

I don't think it happens for one specific reason emuthreat.

[northofnowhere 39]

don't the devs get to have fun too, they have been following you and turning off the servers when you reach sufficient stock :)

I don't see how this is possible, there is no way the Dev's have time for this.  I am 100% certain the Dev Team follows my gaming experience around seeing what spawn point I want and ensuring I never get it.  There is physically no way they have time to also follow that guy around as well.

[emuthreat 2837]

I don't think it happens for one specific reason emuthreat.

Of course it's not one specific reason, the same way that it is never just one wrong move that causes a fishing line to bunch up in an unmanageable mess.  But there are causes, and there are things that can be done to mitigate those causes.

 

In this case, I'll just assume that it is too complicated to explain, and that the effort required to explain it would be best used sorting it.

 

Still it would be nice if I had some way of choosing a server that was likely to stay online for a couple months.