Fake/Scam/Redirect servers everywhere. Is the game DEAD already?

[MothMook]

"Where is everyone?" Have you ever wondered about this after playing on full pop (100+ players) server for a hour and noticing that there's no dead bodies, zombies, players, gunshots... ANYTHING! I've never felt so lonely... In fact, I feel less lonely in my single player Minecraft world!

Let me tell my story. I recently started playing this game (I have 15 hours) and I loved it. BUT. Since official servers lack moderation and the game seems to have the worst anti cheat I kept dying to speedhacking script kiddies and I thought that community servers was the only way to enjoy this game. I opened
the "community servers" tab and oh God... I found LITERALLY THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF full pop servers (255/255 + OVER 2 MILLION PEOPLE IN QUEUE. And some of the servers advertise cheats and plugins for fake players count) with same mods and ip addresses that seem to redirect you to one ♥♥♥♥♥♥ almost empty server... (Skyfall, Manhunt and others...)
I've also heard that they managed to put their fake servers in "official servers" tab (with fake player count of course) disguising them as official DayZ servers. But I can't confirm that.

Literally dead game. Hope I didn't install some malware while trying to find something playable.
For a 50$ game this is a scam.

70K people a day... Where is everyone? Official servers? Sure, there are some players but only about 7 official servers are full, others are almost empty... Am I doing something wrong? Where do you people find servers with actual people? Battlemetrics is fooled by these servers too (not all of them but some can still display fake player count).

W H E R E I S E V E R Y O N E ?

[Coffee]

You just need to learn to recognise the fake servers. There are good community servers with real pop like Karmakrew and Dayone.

[MothMook]

Originally posted by Coffee:

You just need to learn to recognise the fake servers. There are good community servers with real pop like Karmakrew and Dayone.

Some servers show something like "96/120". Seems good. I join it. Aaaaand. Wait. It's the same server I tried to join 30 minutes ago.
Different names but same IP address... How do I know if the server is not fake?

[Coffee]

By reputation if you don't know. Ask friends, ask here, see where streamers are playing. There are many ways.
I agree going in blind it's a trap but it's the way it is. Community servers are free to do pretty much what they want. Some act ethically and some don't.

[Coffee]

If you want to play cherno. Karmakrew have a 100 slot server that's almost always high pop. If you haven't played 100 pop cherno I recommend.

[MothMook]

Originally posted by Coffee:

Community servers are free to do pretty much what they want. Some act ethically and some don't.

Questionable policy but okay. The fact that I need to use these crutches to simply play the moderated version of the game I payed 50$ for is insane if you ask me.
I'm pretty sure it takes several ip bans (1 IP address banned = hundreds of servers gone from the list) from time to time and that would solve so many problems with fake servers.

[1337Dude]

You need to use DZSA Launcher

[Coffee]

Originally posted by MothMook:

Originally posted by Coffee:

Community servers are free to do pretty much what they want. Some act ethically and some don't.

Questionable policy but okay. The fact that I need to use these crutches to simply play the moderated version of the game I payed 50$ for is insane if you ask me.
I'm pretty sure it takes several ip bans (1 IP address banned = hundreds of servers gone from the list) from time to time and that would solve so many problems with fake servers.

I kind of agree, they could probably do more to counter stuff like that. I have to be honest I probably wouldn't play Dayz anymore if there was no modder access and community servers. Modding has given us amazing maps one after the other which keeps the game interesting for me. All these great maps like Deer Isle, Namalsk, PNW, Banov, Deadfall etc are all made and hosted by community members. There are downsides to this open access strategy but the good outweighs the bad IMO.

[MothMook]

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

You need to use DZSA Launcher

Okay, I'll try it. But as I told to Coffee - crutches, crutches, crutches....

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by MothMook:

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

You need to use DZSA Launcher

Okay, I'll try it. But as I told to Coffee - crutches, crutches, crutches....

Yea. It's absurd. The launcher issue is particularly complicated because it has more to do with Steam and their API than DayZ. If their servers didn't have to "talk" with Steam's main server, they'd have more power to fix it.

It makes it really difficult for new players because they're practically forced to research this issue online or else they're funneled into some fake server.

If I were the DayZ devs, I'd do whatever it takes to fix this issue.

Clearly DZ:SA uses a completely different method for their server browser. BI should consider implementing a similar solution.

[Coffee]

I use DZSA launcher to play community servers because it's way faster for me to refresh the whole server list. It takes a couple of seconds with DZSA and probably half an hour with the vanilla launcher. I feel the vanilla launcher tends to show community servers close to you first. For this reason it can take a long time for US servers I want to play on from Australia to show. You can easily filter what you are looking for too.

[MothMook]

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

Originally posted by MothMook:

Okay, I'll try it. But as I told to Coffee - crutches, crutches, crutches....

Yea. It's absurd. The launcher issue is particularly complicated because it has more to do with Steam and their API than DayZ.

This thing caught my by surprise. I dealt with heavily botted games before, that's why I instantly noticed something wrong with community servers (still wasted several hours running on empty servers but that only proved my suspicions). What I'm truly concerned about is why almost nobody talks about this? Shouldn't it be #1 topic a newcomer would see when getting into DayZ? How many people know about this issue? I think it's too serious to ignore.

And I also wonder if data these fake servers send affect total player count of this game. Steam charts says this game is at peak of it's popularity but do these numbers represent real players?

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by MothMook:

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

Yea. It's absurd. The launcher issue is particularly complicated because it has more to do with Steam and their API than DayZ.

This thing caught my by surprise. I dealt with heavily botted games before, that's why I instantly noticed something wrong with community servers (still wasted several hours running on empty servers but that only proved my suspicions). What I'm truly concerned about is why almost nobody talks about this? Shouldn't it be #1 topic a newcomer would see when getting into DayZ? How many people know about this issue? I think it's too serious to ignore.

And I also wonder if data these fake servers send affect total player count of this game. Steam charts says this game is at peak of it's popularity but do these numbers represent real players?

From my experience, companies try to distance themselves from issues they can't solve.

And you're newer, so you're missing context. This issue started happening within the last year. Before that there were a handful of servers utilizing a script to manipulate the player count on their servers. I'm guessing that script was reverse engineered or made open source because it seems like it's widely popular, and has been improved to manipulate the server browser in new ways.

Basically it was impossible to see anything other than infinite Chinese servers. At that time there was a sticky thread more or less recommending the use of the DZSA launcher. They fixed the issue eventually, but now it's back and arguably worse. No sticky addressing it though. If there's no public statement or sticky thread, we're left to make assumptions about their capability to fix the issue.

[MothMook]

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

Originally posted by MothMook:

This thing caught my by surprise. I dealt with heavily botted games before, that's why I instantly noticed something wrong with community servers (still wasted several hours running on empty servers but that only proved my suspicions). What I'm truly concerned about is why almost nobody talks about this? Shouldn't it be #1 topic a newcomer would see when getting into DayZ? How many people know about this issue? I think it's too serious to ignore.

And I also wonder if data these fake servers send affect total player count of this game. Steam charts says this game is at peak of it's popularity but do these numbers represent real players?

From my experience, companies try to distance themselves from issues they can't solve.

And you're newer, so you're missing context. This issue started happening within the last year. Before that there were a handful of servers utilizing a script to manipulate the player count on their servers. I'm guessing that script was reverse engineered or made open source because it seems like it's widely popular, and has been improved to manipulate the server browser in new ways.

Basically it was impossible to see anything other than infinite Chinese servers. At that time there was a sticky thread more or less recommending the use of the DZSA launcher. They fixed the issue eventually, but now it's back and arguably worse. No sticky addressing it though. If there's no public statement or sticky thread, we're left to make assumptions about their capability to fix the issue.

Okay. Is DZSA Launcher safe? Is Battle Eye chill with it and won't randomly flag it as a use of 3rd party software and staff?

[Amogus]

Originally posted by Coffee:

There are good community servers with real pop like Karmakrew

I've been watching a streamer doing 6-8 hour sessions on Karmakrew and he runs into maybe 1-2 people while camping high population areas like Zelenogorsk military. He also had similar experiences on their 60-man Sakhal servers where he'll maybe run into 1-2 people on the coast every hour or two, but most of his time is spent waiting for nothing to happen

Seriously, it's a 100-pop server and I can run straight from Zelenogorsk to Cherno, then back up to Staroye and not see a single player?

[Toyotaco06]

I guess this explains the servers I see now that are 100/100 +50