MDC

I spent half my 20s and my 30s fixing the shit that Bohemia Interactive broke. Now I just make AI songs while I figure out what to do when I get to my 40s.

[MDC @MDConX]

I'm cashing out.

I've been working with the Arma engine for over a decade at this point (if I remember rightly, I started in 2011, so roughly ~13 years now). For that entire time I've been vehemently against monetization of any kind, due to feeling that the playerbase and server owners have been constantly abused by the choices that Bohemia (more specifically the DayZ team) have made. Longstanding bugs remain unfixed, ideas and in some cases entire codebases are straight up lifted from mods with a bit of tweaking to avoid lawsuits, and the modded community is treated like an unwanted stepchild.

Arma, by contrast, has a culture of supporting mods, to the point where new functionality was constantly opened up for modding, modders were consulted by the developers before any changes were pushed to release builds, and bugs and exploits were actively investigated by Dwarden and other members of the team. Those days, however, seem to be coming to a close as the DayZ team exerts more and more toxic control over the rest of BI.

Now you have non-technical people making decisions which affect millions of players (DayZ has a concurrent playerbase of 50,000, but at LEAST three of the mods taken down today have a million subscriptions or more), with zero care, all because they either misunderstood, or understood and deliberately misrepresented something they read and took offence at.

Here are the sub numbers for my mods, at time of removal:

KOTH- 1,013,359
AFixForScopes - 49,527
EvenMoreDoors - 467,025
BuildEverywhere - 382,972
ClaimVehicles - 47,958
AutoTransmissions - 21,317
DayZThermals - 16,823

My hours in DayZ jumped massively after the end of 2019; I've put more than 20,000 hours in, which works out at around 11 hours a day on average, 7 days a week. The majority of that was working on the game, trying to fix issues, learning the architecture through experimentation and analysis, bruteforce testing, etc. I had a TIA (mini stroke) a couple of years back due to the stress, and I've neglected family, friends, and the woman I love.

I had to investigate and personally beg a member of the Arma team to assist with closing an exploit that had been reported to the DayZ developers consistently for an entire year which allowed a hacker to execute any arbitrary operation and spoof legitimate player identities on any server, which was denied and swept under the rug by the DayZ team. The issue was *still* not going to be allowed to be fixed until I straight up blackmailed them with divulging details of the situation to Kotaku prior to the launch of Arma Reforger, as the issue was still present in that, and would've shaken faith in the product and tanked sales.

This situation has later been rewritten by current DayZ developers, specifically Arkensor and Jacob Mango, to claim that I "betrayed Bohemia's trust" by leaking a copy of the fixed server executable to server owners, after they tried to seize control of the situation they'd help suppress in the first place by trying to move the discussion to the Modders Discord. As my involvement pre-dated theirs, I was dealing with it outside of their little channel.

Throughout all of that, I have accepted money on four occasions. A donation from 3RNO for assistance with migration and backend administration work on StalkerZ, as well as some bugfixes and exploit mitigation. I accepted donations for KOTH when it was first released, and got a few from some of you in the first week, I did a commission (the Hacked Crates) on the Loaded server, and I was recently given another tip by Moroz for further assistance with StalkerZ. I've DEFINITELY received less than $1000 in that entire time, so that's less than 5 cents as an hourly wage, for what has essentially amounted to a full time job for the past 5 years, and a serious hobby for the previous 8 years.

And in all that time, I have not even received so much as a *thank you* from Bohemia. No mention in the Community Spotlight, no heads up before introducing gamebreaking changes; I've even been specifically excluded from both modding discussions and early access programmes due to my criticism.

What started this? When DayZ standalone was announced in... 2012? 2013 maybe? Myself and a bunch of other well-established DayZ Modders offered to work, free of charge, on DayZ Standalone. This was years ago, and we didn't know half of what we probably all do now, but we were all passionate and loved the game. All we wanted to do was to make it better.

And they told us to fuck off.

Some people did, of course, because why the hell wouldn't you. Except I'm autistic, and I couldn't let it go; so I just kept working on it, and attempting to hold them to account. Through my latter half of 20s, into my 30s, and now here I am approaching my 40s, and still waiting for just a "thank you" and maybe an apology to the other members of the community who give a shit about empty ones.

So, I'm done. They want me to fuck off? That's fine by me, it's taken me over a decade to learn my lesson but here we go.

Anyone who wants to repack my mods can send me a reasonable donation to https://t.co/Ja3Jrex6QN if you can afford it. You know who you are. I don't know how much, I don't know your financial situation or how much you care about my work. People caught taking the piss though, and raking in tons of donations, I will come after you. I have 12+ hours a day free now and literally nothing better to do with my time, and the IP is still mine ultimately. Valve will honor any DMCA takedowns regardless of what Bohemia says I can do regarding access to their workshop.

I'm done protecting the "integrity" of the DayZ community; if the developers themselves are going to utterly destroy someone because they can't bring themselves to say thanks, then I'm going to take a severance package. All I want to do going forward is make up for the poor choices I've made over the past 10 years and do something nice for my family and my fiancee.

I'm going to get in my car now, and drive the 4 hours to visit my family. I'm sorry for the inconvenience today and I honestly hope you all find a way out of this cycle of abuse so this never happens to anyone else again.

[MDC @MDConX]

@EntireHQ What if we don't like Git, or any sort of version control for that matter? Just curious.

[MDC @MDConX]

@ShatteredSFW One of the greatest things a person in any way involved with electronics or tech can own is a universal power supply (switchable voltage, interchangeable tips). 2 amps for £10, 5 amps for £20 from Amazon. Some advice for the next time you lose one!

[MDC @MDConX]

@ShatteredSFW That's amazing 🤣

[MDC @MDConX]

@WillowChem Turtleneck gives librarian vibes; this is not a criticism.

[MDC @MDConX]

Another new track, once again inspired by @battlesquatch's #Anastara.

[MDC @MDConX]

@RogerClarke236 Also, you talk a lot of shit for someone 30 minutes away from me and 6 months from the end of an 18 month suspended sentence 🙂

[MDC @MDConX]

I'm cashing out.

I've been working with the Arma engine for over a decade at this point (if I remember rightly, I started in 2011, so roughly ~13 years now). For that entire time I've been vehemently against monetization of any kind, due to feeling that the playerbase and server owners have been constantly abused by the choices that Bohemia (more specifically the DayZ team) have made. Longstanding bugs remain unfixed, ideas and in some cases entire codebases are straight up lifted from mods with a bit of tweaking to avoid lawsuits, and the modded community is treated like an unwanted stepchild.

Arma, by contrast, has a culture of supporting mods, to the point where new functionality was constantly opened up for modding, modders were consulted by the developers before any changes were pushed to release builds, and bugs and exploits were actively investigated by Dwarden and other members of the team. Those days, however, seem to be coming to a close as the DayZ team exerts more and more toxic control over the rest of BI.

Now you have non-technical people making decisions which affect millions of players (DayZ has a concurrent playerbase of 50,000, but at LEAST three of the mods taken down today have a million subscriptions or more), with zero care, all because they either misunderstood, or understood and deliberately misrepresented something they read and took offence at.

Here are the sub numbers for my mods, at time of removal:

KOTH- 1,013,359
AFixForScopes - 49,527
EvenMoreDoors - 467,025
BuildEverywhere - 382,972
ClaimVehicles - 47,958
AutoTransmissions - 21,317
DayZThermals - 16,823

My hours in DayZ jumped massively after the end of 2019; I've put more than 20,000 hours in, which works out at around 11 hours a day on average, 7 days a week. The majority of that was working on the game, trying to fix issues, learning the architecture through experimentation and analysis, bruteforce testing, etc. I had a TIA (mini stroke) a couple of years back due to the stress, and I've neglected family, friends, and the woman I love.

I had to investigate and personally beg a member of the Arma team to assist with closing an exploit that had been reported to the DayZ developers consistently for an entire year which allowed a hacker to execute any arbitrary operation and spoof legitimate player identities on any server, which was denied and swept under the rug by the DayZ team. The issue was *still* not going to be allowed to be fixed until I straight up blackmailed them with divulging details of the situation to Kotaku prior to the launch of Arma Reforger, as the issue was still present in that, and would've shaken faith in the product and tanked sales.

This situation has later been rewritten by current DayZ developers, specifically Arkensor and Jacob Mango, to claim that I "betrayed Bohemia's trust" by leaking a copy of the fixed server executable to server owners, after they tried to seize control of the situation they'd help suppress in the first place by trying to move the discussion to the Modders Discord. As my involvement pre-dated theirs, I was dealing with it outside of their little channel.

Throughout all of that, I have accepted money on four occasions. A donation from 3RNO for assistance with migration and backend administration work on StalkerZ, as well as some bugfixes and exploit mitigation. I accepted donations for KOTH when it was first released, and got a few from some of you in the first week, I did a commission (the Hacked Crates) on the Loaded server, and I was recently given another tip by Moroz for further assistance with StalkerZ. I've DEFINITELY received less than $1000 in that entire time, so that's less than 5 cents as an hourly wage, for what has essentially amounted to a full time job for the past 5 years, and a serious hobby for the previous 8 years.

And in all that time, I have not even received so much as a *thank you* from Bohemia. No mention in the Community Spotlight, no heads up before introducing gamebreaking changes; I've even been specifically excluded from both modding discussions and early access programmes due to my criticism.

What started this? When DayZ standalone was announced in... 2012? 2013 maybe? Myself and a bunch of other well-established DayZ Modders offered to work, free of charge, on DayZ Standalone. This was years ago, and we didn't know half of what we probably all do now, but we were all passionate and loved the game. All we wanted to do was to make it better.

And they told us to fuck off.

Some people did, of course, because why the hell wouldn't you. Except I'm autistic, and I couldn't let it go; so I just kept working on it, and attempting to hold them to account. Through my latter half of 20s, into my 30s, and now here I am approaching my 40s, and still waiting for just a "thank you" and maybe an apology to the other members of the community who give a shit about empty ones.

So, I'm done. They want me to fuck off? That's fine by me, it's taken me over a decade to learn my lesson but here we go.

Anyone who wants to repack my mods can send me a reasonable donation to https://t.co/Ja3Jrex6QN if you can afford it. You know who you are. I don't know how much, I don't know your financial situation or how much you care about my work. People caught taking the piss though, and raking in tons of donations, I will come after you. I have 12+ hours a day free now and literally nothing better to do with my time, and the IP is still mine ultimately. Valve will honor any DMCA takedowns regardless of what Bohemia says I can do regarding access to their workshop.

I'm done protecting the "integrity" of the DayZ community; if the developers themselves are going to utterly destroy someone because they can't bring themselves to say thanks, then I'm going to take a severance package. All I want to do going forward is make up for the poor choices I've made over the past 10 years and do something nice for my family and my fiancee.

I'm going to get in my car now, and drive the 4 hours to visit my family. I'm sorry for the inconvenience today and I honestly hope you all find a way out of this cycle of abuse so this never happens to anyone else again.

[MDC @MDConX]

@RogerClarke236 Yep, decent people from the DayZ community tossed me £3k in 24 hours to say thanks for my work, meanwhile you're still praying servers won't find out what a shitter you are. Karma worked out pretty well I'd say.

[MDC @MDConX]

@RealPNavarro No, it's because American car engines are poorly designed and generate significantly less bhp per litre (or per "cubic inch" if you insist on still using our old measurement system), which makes them... let me check... ah yes, worse.

[MDC @MDConX]

@DH5tv @Twitch @TwitchSupport @StreamElements Ahhhh, I thought it was being pushed via the Extensions/Connections route, haven't been to the dashboard in a while so hadn't seen the Sponsorships section.

[MDC @MDConX]

@PercentageEgg I imagine this will wind up as a Decoding the Unknown video from @SimonWhistler, assuming it's not a memecoin.

[MDC @MDConX]

@digg Aaaaaand it's gone. Shame, time to pull out old episodes of the thebroken and reminisce.

[MDC @MDConX]

Well, @ScheduleOneGame is pretty fire.

[MDC @MDConX]

@ShatteredSFW The bathroom stuff is pretty simple. Anyone who can tolerate the fact that the floor of mens toilets are covered in piss can use them. Anyone else either has to hold it, or use the ladies.

In that dress, you look too classy for the former 🤣

[MDC @MDConX]

@gwennelsonuk @pjansenCCR Basically just goes to show that they don't want any sort of "fairness", they just want trans people to lose.

[MDC @MDConX]

@LVPXN "Would you still love me if I was an iceberg?"

[MDC @MDConX]

@gwennelsonuk I know that feeling, it's a nightmare sometimes 😂

[MDC @MDConX]

@DH5tv @DayZ @bohemiainteract

[MDC @MDConX]

@richminer And yet I can't even do something as simple as change the font on the Android phone I was forced to purchase by the discontinuation of Windows Phone.

[MDC @MDConX]

@tacularr For the record, DayZ *also* issues manual global BattlEye bans, just because their CM has a personal issue with someone criticising the game. I was at 23,000 hours, the majority of which were spent modding.