Potentially fake DayZ servers
Hello! I come here after having a conversation in the official DayZ discord a few days ago. There, a group of people complained that the Battlemetrics' server list and ranking for DayZ has recently become meaningless. In my opinion, everything was working well until August. However, recently a large number of potentially 'fake' servers have appeared.
We believe that these servers are fake because they share the same mods, and have virtually the same statistics. Let me show you three examples:
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/28650185?playerCount=7D
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/28650159?playerCount=7D
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/28650217?playerCount=7D
But it is not just three. There are many, many like this! That's why I think that the rankings are seriously distorted. Some people there said that they believe that this is because of two mods that redirect the traffic: DayZed and Namalsk Vanilla. I think that something should be done with these servers. Either delete them, or count them all as just one server?
In conclusion, I would like to ask Battlemetrics to review all the DayZ servers that share the same statistics. Something does not feel right at the moment. Thanks a lot in advance for your time! 🙂
5 Replies
They're all over the top 1000 (besides the first page / maybe two pages). Most of them have the same player count, and these seem to be the same fake (redirecting) servers that were all over the official launcher for a while.
Looking at the server IP addresses while spamming "next", they all seem to be duplicated from the same few IP addresses (using different ports)
Here's some more stuff I learned about this:
The reason the fake servers redirect is because they tell the player to load the DayZed mod (workshop ID 3205805313) which, if I understand correctly, requires the ability to override connection settings to allow joining between servers between different maps (and by default, will redirect to a single "joining" server belonging to them, I guess?)
DayZed (the server the mod is made for, and the server you end up joining) claims in their discord that they don't know who's hosting the fake servers, but claims there's nothing they can do about it (I'm sure there is something)
The servers actually don't seem fake, upon closer inspection. If you don't load the DayZed server mod, but still try to connect to one of these servers, you will start communicating with the game server of the "fake server" instead of only the query port (I had assumed they only had a fake query response set up, since the mod allowed them to redirect the game traffic elsewhere) but the "fake" game server will kick you for a missing mod/PBO.
So these fake servers actually exist, but it's impossible to join the server IP address that is listed because the mod they "require" redirects you to DayZed. It probably still costs the actor a good bit to do this (even though they're using cheap cloud hosting such as DigitalOcean) compared to what I originally thought, since these appear to be legit DayZ servers (but with fake player counts, since their real count is zero, because the mod overriding connection parameters)
The servers query ports seem to exist (across multiple IP addresses I checked) in a pattern, such as:
25811, 25830, 25831, 25850, 25851, 25870, ... which is weird and looks like it was done with automation but not randomness (p=p+1; p=p+19)
@Golden ball You may need to add the "Staff Needed" tag for them to see this.I am trying, I think that you can only add tags when you create a post. Once created, you can edit the message, but not the title nor the tags. Besides, 'staff needed' is not available when you create a new post. I think that a moderator has to do this.
@Staff
@Staff I came here only to report this error. I find it important, we are talking of >100 DayZ servers that are using one/two mods to manipulate their position in your ranking.
I am disappointed that this post has not received any reply from you after more than one week. In any case, having reported this problem I have done what I wanted to do here and I will be leaving this discord server in the next 24 hours. Stay safe.
Thank you for your support! 🙂