Don't Revive Me Bro
THE STATE OF BATTLEFIELD
19 DEC 2013
by Redd_Dragon

It is safe to say we’ve been here before. Back when DLC was a new acronym, map packs were free and BC2 had cemented itself as our favorite free-time-waster.

The game was broken then too. Slugs were OP, the SV98 was the bane of many and it was Heavy Metal or bust. Then came BF3, where you would fall through the map and get sucked into the pit of despair on Operation Metro, get killed by rookies running the latest IR scope on Damavand Peak and lose your shit as your teammate pointed his 16 billion candle-power tac-light at your retinas.

Has anything changed?

For almost three years I’ve been plugged in, helping create the “pulse” of the Battlefield community, watching validated, and sometimes overblown, anger slowly take over a once positive and inclusive community destined for greatness.

Painstakingly-crafted montages of amazing gameplay have been replaced by glitch and “troll” videos. Clans have disbanded and moved on to other games. Tips and Tricks have been replaced with overwhelming “sighs”. Community-driven Battlefield sites have closed up shop. And all of this is happening in what is arguably the second-biggest FPS on the planet.

So what are we to do? Do we “blackout” again, as folks begin to do that on their own? Can we rally the Community Managers, even though they aren’t given the tools to manage the community? Do we just go dark? Do we just give up?

2014 is on the immediate horizon. Isn’t it time we stop hoping for games to be finished at launch and start requiring it? When do we stop apologizing for others actions and start making waves with our wallets? Are we so afraid we’ll miss out on a day one DLC or the newest dog tag that we give EA access to our cash any time they ask for it?

I don’t know what the solution is yet, and I don’t know if I ever will but I do know I’m not having fun in a game that takes so much and gives so little. Until I can play a round without a bug causing me grief, I won’t be playing. I would rather spend that energy on something else during my free-time.

With that said, I want you to keep playing because I hope there are individuals in the community with the mental fortitude to tough it out. Hell, I want to keep playing, but I can’t right now for multiple reasons, and in the end it breaks my heart. I’ve given a lot to this community — helped others build it up from almost nothing — and I’m sick of seeing it rise up and slowly wither away time and time again.

If you’d like to join me on the battlefield you may just have to wait awhile.

PU02 Patch Notes
Performance:

Esamir Object Optimization. We optimized the number of unique objects, overall object count, and polygons per object on Esamir. This will give players the same environment based performance increases they see on Indar.
Physics Optimization – We have changed the way we simulate various aspects of the server and client to more efficiently process players and vehicles in the game.
Client Memory Optimization – Animations have gotten some serious work to reduce their overall cost without reducing quality. Many per-player animation costs are reduced for players at a distance.
Additional client crashes fixed.
UI – Optimized dynamic image loading and processing to reduce GUI advance spikes ( eliminates over 50% of the intermittent 4+ms spikes we were seeing )
UI - Optimized data processing on the loadout pages

Balance:

Significant changes have been made to infantry and vehicle balance. These changes are listed in the last sections of the patch notes and are over 10,000 words.


Holidays:

Over the next few weeks you may come across some snowmen scattered across the frozen wasteland of Esamir. These jolly and harmless fellows can be blown up for a nice chunk of XP, and, if you can light up enough of them you may earn a special reward. Also, keep your eye out for a rare blinged out Golden Snowman who gives a very exclusive reward. If you see one, make sure you get it before your squadmates do!
Nanite Systems has been hard at work on a new pistol. Get a silver medal with it and you will unlock a special title.
In addition to new holiday camos and decals, from the 18th of December through the 1st of January we will be having some huge sales in game.
Each day during those two weeks a new category in the marketplace (such as "shotguns" or "helmets") will be on sale for 50% off. In addition all Items of the Day items will be 99SC regardless of their original cost, and Members Only Item of the Day items will be 1SC, so make sure you log in every day and don't miss out on anything good!
Make sure to give your enemies the gift of C4 this holiday season!

Depot:

Fixed camo coverage on several infantry weapons
Razor fins attachment will no longer appear washed out at night
Camo coverage and LOD adjustments to several vehicle attachments
VS infantry weapons now have more camo coverage
Weapon camos will no longer be applied to all the weapons in the slot; they will apply to just the one selected
Increased the intensity of camo to 100% and added more coverage on MAX weapons
Lowered the cert point cost of some optics on starting weapons to let new characters customize their weapon earlier.

Combat:

Deployables should no longer sink into the ground
Spawn Beacons can no longer be placed inside facility walls
A bug allowing players to squad deploy as MAXs has been addressed
Fixed an issue with fall damage not registering at heights below 100m
NC scope’s magnification now correctly matches their labels
AV turrets collision better matches the geometry
Recoil animations while in iron sights have been toned down on several TR carbines
Resolved an issue where certain items could be unlocked in the VR zone for use in the main world

Vehicles:

Tank mines should explode more reliably when activated by vehicles
Fixed an issue where the Liberator could bypass the Biodome geometry and kill players inside
VS Mine guard is no longer displaying confusing allegiances (NC colors)
Horn of Liberty should now properly unlock account wide
Decals should display correctly on scythes
Hood ornaments should now display when used in combination with bumpers
Cockpit glass should all be fixed now

Animation:


Fixed an issue with Spawn Beacon animation
Improved iron sights animations
Engineers using turrets should now have more accurate animations
Revive animations should play more reliably
Fixed an issue where landing gear on flying vehicles would end up in the wrong position

Misc:

Occasionally, players would end up remaining in the world when servers were brought down; that should no longer occur
Proximity repair hologram on the Sunderer should no longer appear incorrectly
Fixed an issue where launching the game on Windows XP could cause the world to tint an odd color for a period of time
Fixed a few issues relating to window resizing and initialization that could cause bugs and errors
Running with multiple monitors should be tolerable now, but note that we don’t yet support UI window adjustments in this mode
Fixed a graphical corruption issue that could occur with certain particles on AMD graphics cards
A small group of accounts have had items removed that were incorrectly purchased without subtracting Station Cash.

Standard Spawn Options:

Increased standard spawn options to include:
Nearest Small outpost by lattice links
Nearest Large outpost by lattice links


This should alleviate situations where pilots and others are downed more than one region away from a friendly territory and are stuck with no good spawn options. This change will offer the nearest small outpost and nearest large outpost in addition to the nearest major facility that is already available. This should allow those players to either join the nearest front or fall back to spawn another vehicle at a larger facility. Please note that the distance is by lattice-links, not as the crow flies.
You can now deploy at any warpgate regardless of your current continent.

Squad Leader Indicators:

Functionality for a squad leader to mark a cap point has been added. This will add arrows to the objective indicator on the HUD that your squadmates can see. Hold the spot button down (q by default) to bring up the quick menu while targeting a capture point to set the indicator.
Squad leaders no longer have to cert into the ability to set a primary squad target using the Q menu (QAM)
Players who previously purchased the Squad Objectives certification from the squad leadership certifications tree will be refunded the 30 CP cost

UI:

Capture point capture progress bars should now update every .5 seconds instead of every 2 seconds
Objectives are now clamped to the edge of the screen
You will now receive a notification whenever you unlock a title
When turning off your UI the overhead icons will once again hide
Enable VSync whether windowed or fullscreen mode
Continent map should load faster the first time you open it every game session
Commissioner variants should no longer appear in the Certs menus
Added some functionality to sort by name and rank on several social screens in the UI
Map searching will no longer produce double results after swapping characters
Addressed an issue where Sunderer icons could display in bad locations

World:

Warpgate rotation
Freyr Amp Station update. We've added multiple cap points to the Freyr Amp Station. Each cap point is tied to a nearby spawn room. By reducing the reliance on Sunderers for spawning, this should facilitate some fierce infantry battles at Freyr.
Adjusted Biolab pain fields to follow capture status correctly
VR Training zone minimap should no longer appear as black occasionally
VR Training zone should no longer have black terrain

A lot more information can be found here:
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/in ... 621/#.Uq_Y5m2Vr4g.twitter

Rocket
19 DEC 2013

Status:
◾Pushed to experimental branch

New:
◾Config: added anim hooks for zombie feeding(should allow for zombie to deal damage to unconscious players)
◾Config: greeting with 2 handed weapon now possible without disarming
◾UI: Inspect option in the inventory screen (shows item in 3D, draft system only)
◾Engine: Servers with incompatible version marked in the server browser
◾Engine: The „Player uses modified data“ message is removed from CHAT
◾Design: you can craft splint and fix broken limbs with it
◾Design: players who disconnect when unconscious will die
◾Design: players who disconnect when restrained will die
◾New weapon: Magnum .357 Revolver + ammo

Fixed:
◾Config: removed a small delay before the animation for un-shouldering a weapon starts playing when changing weapons (kneel and prone)
◾Config: fix a minor issue with one handed items not being correctly placed in right hand for a surrender transition
◾Config: m4 bolt and magazine animation improved
◾Config: adjusted collision shape for armed player(should fix occasional issues going up stairs)
◾Config: fixed an issue where unshouldering/shouldering weapon while moving forward caused the player to stop
◾Animations: Sprint updated (Unarmed) - Unarmed sprint faster now
◾Animations: Mosin Nagant Reload - Hand doesn't clip into scope when opening and closing bolt after each shot, weapon more stable now
◾UI: Early Access warning dialogue
◾Engine: Fix of players being able to talk globally when dead through Direct Chat
◾Design: damage is transferred from closed can to open one
◾Design: licking a battery now displays the battery's state properly
◾Design: wooden sticks model fits inventory slots better now
◾Crash: Occurs when pushing details twice on MP server browser
◾Engine: Updated rain texture with refraction
◾Design: Player blood and health not regenerating naturally

Found this one:

Rocket
19 DEC 2013

The source of the big delay in getting DayZ out was because of the new architecture that we built. As part of this, we spent a great deal of time making very efficient and new ways of doing things. Many of the problems of ArmA for security were by design, doors used by the application to achieve its needs. In ArmA these could not be closed, in DayZ we no longer need them. We thought we had closed some of them, but we found one and we've fixed it. However because some people will have spawned items, we decided to wipe the database to provide a clean slate.

All existing characters have been killed, if you are currently logged in when you next join your character will be dead.

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).

Please Note: It is more than likely that we will, much like other software, be continually identifying and patching these kinds of critical security vulnerabilities.

Important updates like this WILL attract database wipes during the alpha process.