Dean Hall, creator of the incredibly popular and immediately successful standalone release of zombie game DayZ, has just committed computer genocide. By his own count he has just killed off 212,604 characters in DayZ with the click of a mouse. What if you weren't playing the game and your character was offline? Well he or she wasn't safe either- as soon as you start up the game again and join your character will be dead. Presumably zombies got to them all.
What reason could there be behind this madness? Who gave this man such tremendous power over the lives of so many? What horrible events led Mr. Hall down this terrible path?
Well, two words - "Security Vulnerabilities". With literally hundreds of thousands of gamers playing DayZ in the first day alone there was no doubt that things would start breaking down left and right, and they did. This is an Alpa version that's been released on Steam Early Access, after all, and not indicitive of the final product. This new patch should help things but to make sure all the security holes were plugged that had to wipe the entire database.
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For people upset that the hours of work that went into their characters was spent in vain, well, you can bet that it's going to happen again sometime soon. Then again, if you somehow missed the big warning on the front of the game's store page (you know,the one that says "WARNING: THIS GAME IS EARLY ACCESS ALPHA. PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE IT UNLESS YOU WANT TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME AND ARE PREPARED TO HANDLE WITH SERIOUS ISSUES AND POSSIBLE INTERRUPTIONS OF GAME FUNCTIONING") you shouldn't be able to complain.
Developer Bohemia Interactive knows that during this alpha process it's likely that some future calamity will require another database wipe. If anything it's fitting with the theme of the game, which is sheer, unbridled brutality. Death is permanent in this game as it is and they do absolutely no hand-holding to guide you through the game or show you how to suvive. It's a mean post-apocalyptic world out there.
Says Mr. King of the patching - "This is all part of the testing process, we've identified some additional areas of security and enabled some we had left off so we could really see the holes in the architecture without having to rely on the higher tier security measures. Because the vulnerability would allow a player to create items (and they had been) we have decided to wipe the whole database. We could not announce this, as we didn't want to encourage those exploiting to try and figure out a way of leaving items on the ground. We have killed all characters in the database, who existed after all our servers moved to the new version (0.29).
Important updates like this WILL attract database wipes during the alpha process. We apologize for the inconvenience but I am sure everyone can agree, it is not fair to keep going with the bad data and some of the unfinished items were spawned in game - which could cause crashes and other issues thus confusing our alpha testing. Many people were experiencing crashes relating to these items that had been created in the game."
More on DayZ as we hear it.
