On Tuesday, April 20th, Bohemia Interactive released the 1.12 update for Dayz which introduced many new items, as well as a new system for weapon damage. As a result, the majority of the weapons in the game are now one-shot kills or one-shot knockouts with or without plate carriers. As the owners of large servers such as Conquest, Lost Souls, Blackout, Endgame, Modded++, UK/Rapture, Oasis, and Better Dayz, we have polled our community and there is an overwhelmingly negative view of this update. We have seen members quit the game, we have seen the update resulting in pvp being "unplayable." With over 60,000 players between our communities, we believe there are many more players on Dayz who have a similar view of the update.

So as such, we are asking Bohemia to provide a hotfix for better balancing. On servers with PVP as a focus, or even just as a feature, it has made for an overall worse experience for the Dayz player base as a whole. One-shot knockouts with armor do not make for a better experience. One-shot kills for most guns without armor do not make for a better experience, they just make for a more frustrated and disengaged player base. Why would you take the time to build up a character, and try to loot the best guns if someone with a Mosin can knock you out with a plate carrier on and hit you again when you are? 

On many community servers, a big feature is discord kill feeds which track stats in-game. As a result of knockouts becoming more common, more people are being deprived of kills and stats counted because players are using the restart command to get around having deaths count. Even something as simple as removing the restart feature could help to fix that issue, as well as increase the overall realism of the game.

We do hope that Bohemia Interactive listens to the requests of its players and top communities. One-hit knockouts and kills, along with the new abuse of the restart feature as a result, have resulted in a worse experience for the Dayz player base as a whole. With new survival games on the horizon for console, PVP in Dayz needed a change, but not one so drastic as to push long-time players away from Dayz and towards new competitors.