f13.net

 

• Big open worlds to explore between 200 to 400 square kilometers
• Two modes of play: Normal and Hardcore
• Combination of first-person and third-person perspectives
• Meld of PvE (player versus environment) and PvP (player versus player)
• Strong Role Playing Elements
• Multiple playable characters with customizable features
• Unique social elements, including bounties, help requests, trap setting, etc.
• Safe settlements where players can purchase, sell and store items as well as post notes for other players
• Dozens of unique skills that can be learned and improved
• Up to 250 players per game server
• New weapons and items become available as players explore the game world
• Full developer support with regularly scheduled, free content updates
• Dedicated public servers as well as private servers that can be completely self-managed in game client
• Single purchase, downloadable client with ability to play full game without subscriptions or requiring in-game transactions

The War Z describes itself as a “Survival Horror MMO that immerses players in a zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic world in which a viral outbreak has decimated the human population leaving, in its wake, a nightmare of epic proportion.” It’ll be available unbelievably soon: Fall 2012 for $30 (coincidentally, the same price of Arma 2: Combined Operations), and it won’t carry a subscription fee.

People around the world are hunting these “special” zombies, however they can only be found at night, and they are rare, so players will need to go to places where zombies gather in masses – namely – big cities, larger towns, etc. If you hunt these special zombies and extract the stem cells, you’ll be able to sell them to merchants at “safe settlements” for Gold Coins – the most valuable currency in the game.

You might get away with that on a book, but with the WW-Z movie coming out, they're going to be buried by lawsuits.

People are paying 30$ for a fragile early alpha mod on a clunky platform...

Good, competition will spur both this and Day-Z to grow.

This is also why we’re allowing players to rent their own servers and create their own private worlds with their own rules. Some will do just that—building their own virtual “strongholds” so to say and inviting other people to join as long as they are going to follow their rules. Some will band together into clans and will fight other clans—either on public or private servers.

Yes.
Here's another interview, with some screenshots. (http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/27/the-war-z-new-screenshots-interview-on-weapons-game-systems-ambition/)


This game sounds too good to be true. But competition is always good - the more the merrier.

I am tempted. Done. (The Euro to Dollar conversion helps me a lot in these silly purchases).
Also, this video answers a few legitimate questions about (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-YVPvPlTl0) the differences between War Z and Day Z.

+ Love the "Time capsule" thing, it's really good for a sandbox. And yes, echoes of Demon's Souls.
- Sucks that there's no proximity voice chat. That would have made all the difference in the world.

You know what I'd love?

Ultima Online Zombies.

Oh, look.

http://www.uozombies.com

Wow, that was quick.



...


Ahem.

Ocotber 15th - Release notes
It's sunny day here in Los Angeles, but we're still in the office crunching to get game out by tomorrow.

Today we're setting up serviers, uploading game files to CDN and prepping us and our pet zombies for Survivors invasion that will happen on October 15th afternoon Pacific standard time here in United States. For our overseas players - PST time zone is -8 hours to GMT.

Do we expect bugs - YES we do. We're like 99% sure that game will be broken by our players on day one , and we're like 60% sure that we'll have some server issues  

For that I personally appologies to you, if your first day experience will be lets say not as fun as you've expected. Lets assure we'll be there to fix it ASAP.


I'll keep you updated on status of game deployment thought today and tomorrow.


Here's our Alpha roadmap :

- Map -we're starting with around 30% of the map available on October 15th, and will unlock more areas up to full map unlocked few days before October 31st.
- We'll start with 30 players per map and will be gradually increase number of slots on daily basis ( as we unlock more space on map ) up to 70-100 per server.
- Marketplace will be almost useless at this stage. We'll have very few GC items, most items will be priced in "Dollars" - and only way right now to obrtain dolalrs is to hunt zombies in large cities - ie - super rare.
- Missions won't be available until we'll know what servers dynamics are, so hopefully around Octgober 25th.
- We've UNLOCKED safe settlements, removed any protection, as well as NPC services. So for first two weeks they're YOURS to conquer, build your own barricades and beses. Enjoy !
- Notes, barricades, building blocks are all in, they're extremely rare
- Weapons are rare, ammo is super rare - so expect more use melle weapons
- Weapons attachments are EPIC and rare - so if you'll find one - HOLD ON to it.

Things that WON'T be available till very end of Alpha or past October 31st beta release :

- Freiends and Clans
- Leaderboards
- Renting servers
- Stronghold servers

Basically we really want to make sure that by November you all will have same footing in a game, and also we'll fix all bugs that can hinder premium services like renting servers and strongholds stability. We don't want you to waste money, but more importantly we don't want you to have subpar experience for the paying services in a game.

So - sometimes tomorrow ( mean USA monday, not EU one  ) we'll post client to http://www.thewarz.com/download

Feel free to spread it as wide as possible - upload to sites, torrents, etc. To play game you'll need to have valid serial key, so we're okay with free distribution of the game client.


to be continued !
Last edited by sergeytitov; Today at 08:59 PM.
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

Both normal and Hardcore characters will be playing on same servers, and there'll be no visual differences between those characters. Ie - you can't say who's playing Hardcore or Normal just by looking on them.

There'll be special servers that are reserved for Hardcore survivors only. Those servers will be exactly same as other public servers, but they will feature spawns of rare weapons and items, not available on "mixed" servers.

Main difference between two modes comes at how death of the character is handled. In both modes when you die, you lose your backpack. But in case of Hardcore mode your death will be also permanent for your character - ie character with all of his stats, etc will be deleted. You'll have to create new character and start from the beginning - spawning at initial zones, with all skills/trainings gone, etc.

Normal characters on other hand will be just put into "lockdown" for certain period of time - we're testing how long it'll be, for now that time is set to 24 hours of real world time. Once "revived" your character will be able to continue to play from approximately same location where he died, all hist skills/stats will remain same.


We're discussing right now if there'll be other differences between those two game modes, and here's list of what we want to try ( but not sure if it'll go into final game or not ) :

Other Hardcore mode features :
- Gain Experience faster
- gun crosshair is not rendered, ie need to use aim mode and real ironsights or optics to aim
- Information about how many bullets left in magazine is not displayed
- slightly different Skill Tree

Hacks & Cheats - how to beat The War Z !
There's single worst problem that massively multiplayer online game can have - hacking. Game can look like shit, game can be unbalanced, game can be glitchy by itself, game can be not fun. But hacks are that will kill that online game. As soon as hacks start widespreading, players will stop playing game.

So fighting hacks are top priority for every game developer. Simplest approach is to use one of the comercially available "shield" programs - punkbuster, SShield, etc. Biggest problem with it, is that those programs are basically cookie cutter solutions that won't really protect your game. they will make it harder to hack it, but they won't stop cheaters or hackers.

There's only solution that works like 100% of the time and can't be hacked - for a game to process all of the game logic on server. Ie - just make your client to be dumb rendering "terminal". This approach will work for certain type of slower games - like League og Legends for example ( yet still you can create Bots - programs that are basically send keyboard and mouse commands to the game, emulating real person playing game ). it won't work for fast paced COD or CS style shooters, since those games are all about reaction time. And you can't process everything on server because of network lag. So you have to do some calculations on client and this is how hackers and cheaters will attack the game.

We first encountered massive hack attacks on our engine, when Online Warmongers Group released open beta of War Inc on Steam. On day one they've got around 300,000 registered users, so less than in a week after that both amateurish and professional hackers have delivered first versions of hacks and cheat programs. We ( tech guys at Arktos Entertainment - mothership for both studios - Online Warmongers and Hammerpoint ) have already protected base parts like calculating damage, processing what weapons you own and can use, ammo count, etc on server - so you wasn't able to create super gun or access items that you don't own for example.

Yet - speedhacks, teleports, wallhacks, aimbots, instant reloads, things like that started popping up.

We've fixed speedhacks, teleports, and people who basically kill players from other side of the map first. We also have fixed all small hacks like setting spread for guns to zero, negating effects of recoil, etc.

We've added layer of defense by running part of the client in safest low level "ring" of windows, encrypting memory areas - ie making it's extremely hard to create new hacks.

And it worked ! We basically emilinated all major game ruining hacks.

Our next step was to create early detection system - system that will allow us to detect if certain types of hacks are used and to automatically ban players who're using hacks or cheat programs. As of today this detection system is able to detect roughly 99% of all hack attempts and either will ban users automatically and kick them from server, or will notify GMs about hack attempt.

It will even detects system level hacks like wallhacks and aimbots, by analyzing tons of realtime data and matching it to certain patterns. Once those types of cheats are being detected, information is sent to our GMs, who can act upon it.

And it's funny nowdays to see people advertising paid cheat programs for War Inc, and read feedback from people who bought them and either found they never worked as advertized ( ie pure scam for money ) or they being banned as soon as they started using them.

Overall work that been done developing and perfecting this system for War Inc Battlezone ( www.thewarinc.com ) have layed out foundation for Version 2 of our "Shield.net" project that we're going to use for The War Z.

Since The War Z is a much slower paced game, we've been able to move more calculations to server side and for those we still have to do on client side, we have enough time to validate them before accepting information received from client or rejecting it.

Yes we know that there'll be more hacking attempts, there'll be new holes that we'll have to patch, but this is why we have dedicated coding team that sole goal is to fight hacking attempts.
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

"but it's Alpha!" is not a valid excuse.

Do we expect bugs - YES we do. We're like 99% sure that game will be broken by our players on day one , and we're like 60% sure that we'll have some server issues  

Day One - 15,000 concurrent users (http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?22280-Day-One-15-000-concurrent-users)

    We've locked at 15,000 concurrent users. Tomorrow we're going to start more instances and will try to get to 30,000 CCU. Thank you for your patience if you having problems get into the game today !

    We've peaked at slightly over 20,000 users less than an hour after launch, but will have to lock down at 15,000 since we wanted to make sure that servers are not going overload our backend. We're going increase number of available servers daily, so hopefully by mid week it won't an issue anymore.

That's the problem though, money bring entitlement, and too many feels that 20$ are a fair price to purchase the right to talk shit.

As I posted before - from over 100,000 users, we've had 58 requests for refund. And we granted refund to all of those 58 guys.

If you like to get refund - no problem - ask your payment provider for refund. They'll contact us ( paypal, etc ) and we'll accept this refund. Your account will be deleted and you'll never be able to buy this game again. Problem solved.

As for doing nothing - we have close to dozen people working literally day and night to fix bugs.

Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

Your account will be deleted and you'll never be able to buy this game again. Problem solved.

That seems unnecessarily hostile, particularly when they just took the moral highground.  

Especially when their closest competitor is better polished at (last I checked) the same price (if you were to buy ArmA2).

Daily Update.
First of all crashes - most of them are associated with 32bit Os versions. We're going to release patch tonight that will hopefully eliminate crashes on 64bit Os, and will reduce it chances on 32bit OS.

Second - loots, killing zombies, etc. We've added few tweaks there, some of you already noticed that there're more loot spawned and it's easier to kill zombies. Still - AIM AT HEAD
.

Servers - bunch of new servers rolling out tonight, so hopefully it'll help.

Last but not least - billing bug :) - today bunch of people paid just once, but received between 10 to 30 keys :). We thought carefully about it and here's what we've decided - this is OUR fuckup, and your gain. Enjoy your keys, plus I just ask you - don't sell them - just give them away - easy come, easy go.

More updates coming.

Game Crashes and other bugs - PLEASE READ !!!

Survivors,

You've been faithful to us and unfortunately we let you down - looks like our game wasn't stable enough to sustains dozen of thousands players abusing it at same time :). Game stability is nowhere where it was when we had only couple hundred testers playing it for a few hours a day.

Right now we have over 20,000 players playing on GAME
SERVERS, and over 10,000 players trying to get into the game.

I personally apologies for current game build instability and let me assure you we're working non stop to make stable as soon as possible. I don't want even say "it's alpha" - alpha for me means game maybe in unbalanced, it may crash, but it should be generally stable.

As token of our gratitude we're going to unlock all game characters for you tomorrow.

Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

To our beloved hater RHINOCRUNCH - Open letter
Dear Rhino,

I really don't know why you hate us so much, so you have come up with so much lies and bullshit that doesn't survive even a minor fact check, but I firmly believe that people are good unless proven otherwise by a court or flashlight .

So if you're a man who stand behind his believes and his word, here's my offer to you - unedited realtime interview with you, where I will answer truthfully EVERY single question you will ask about The War Z. I can promise you only one thing - you'll get TRUE answers to all of your questions that are related to war z development.

For you this will be a moment of truth - to get me on record and broadcast it live to your audience, gain more viewers ( and more ad dollars - lets be honest - this is why you're doing all this right ?).

I know you're reading forums, I know you're PLAYING the game. In fact we know more about you than you think, so I know for sure you'll read this. But just in case I'm asking players who want to make sure rhino will read this - can somebody go and post link to this to his youtube page.

You can PM me or Kewk with subject "RHINOCRUNCH WANTS TRUTH".

I don't want to change your "religion" - I know you're super fan of DayZ who's hating us so much. But based on what other people who're doing business with you are saying, you also very "$$$ hungry" and looking for ways to expand your audience. Here's your chance. Be a man.

PS: btw if you want - we can do it at our office, sitting playing game and chatting.


Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

I personally don't give a shit, but it happens that I've invested my money into TWO different teams - ones making War Inc and other making War Z and another game. And he called them "child molestors" and scam artists. And they're pissed off.

So I'm doing this for them.


Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

some numbers for you guys :

Day 4 of public Alpha.
- over 100,000 active accounts
- over 86,000 playing DAILY
- over 22,000 playing at any given second ( CCU )

True story, noobs are asking VEHEMENTLY on the official forums for PVE only servers. In a PVP game. Dev denied the request, pretty much asking what the hell did they think they were buying.

!!! PK, spawn campers and PVP in general rant !!!

I'm trying to play at least couple hours a day every single day. Getting killed alot, but 80% of all kills are "honest" - I'm just being to careless. I'm not trying to hide. 20% are shitty kills by faggots who's spawn camping. Or by guys who just want to play shooter and shoot everyone on sight.

I like bandits who's killing me 80% of the time - they're adding athmosphere to the game - it's not just about zombies anymore, but also about freakin' hostile humans. And this is okay I guess.
Mindless kills and spawn camping are another story. Those ''people'' are just doing it for sake of ruining game for everyone, including themselves.

BTW if you have noticed, spawn camping rate went down a little since last patch. And in coming week we're moving to new spawn system, that will make it even harder to spawn camp.
We also preparing to open large portion of the map, which by itself will solve big chunk of PKing problem.
I hate to say "it's Alpha", but really it is . Ie - you won't even have access to full map, and more important without data we're getting right now, we won't be able to fine tune and balance game.

So bottom line - Alpha times are rough times, we just need get over it.


Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

My Last post

Guys,

First of all I think I owe an apology to some of you - in my last post I called some bad names toward some of you. So I'm sorry for calling you that . I've edited my post, but here's reason why I did that,
I my recent few sessions I've been killed several time for no reason at all. I understand that this is part of gameplay, but yes I felt rage toward probably all PVP players at this moment

So I understand how player who you're killing all the time are feeling. And while as I've said I feel that PVP aspect is an imporant part of the game athmosphere, we'll continue to work to make sure that by the time we'll go to Beta and will allow many more players into the game, we'll have solid systems in place to mitigate PK and spawn camping.

Basically - in real life you won't probably shoot on sight. It make no sense to spend valuable ammo on target that may not be that valuable to you.
Our goal is to make sure that PLAYERS COOPERATION work in a game. And it not going to be be turned into another zombie shooter


Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

ALPHA FEATURE for PK, spawn campers

We're thinking about displaying small RED triangle over active PKers ( ie guys who're opn killing spree ) and over Spawn campers ( we have means to detect that activity ), also we're going display nametage when you will aim at them.
We're going to display it only for bandits near you, not all over the map.
"Good bandits' - ie ones who're actively playing game, not just doing only PKing will not have that thing.


Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

The packaging of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing states that the objective of the game is for the player to "[...] deliver illegal cargo, with cops chasing [them]"; however, in actuality, there are no police in the game or, seemingly, any objectives to complete. The packaging also states that the player must "race trucks across the country" while delivering such cargo; however, although computer-controlled opponent vehicles do indeed appear in the game, they have no artificial intelligence, and never move from their starting position.

There are technically no obstacles for the player to negotiate in Big Rigs, as the truck may freely be driven on and off roads without any loss of traction, up or down 90° slopes with no loss or gain of speed, through structures such as buildings and trees, simply falling right through bridges, and even out of the boundaries of the map into an endless grey void. When the player's vehicle is put into reverse, it can accelerate indefinitely, but the truck will halt instantly when the reverse key is released.
Though there appear to be five courses from which to choose, only four are playable. One of the maps, titled "Nightride", does not function and selecting it simply crashes or quits the game.[1] Upon completion of the race, the game displays a large three-handled trophy and the now infamous text "YOU'RE WINNER !"

Guys, here is the story to this video, i mean audio.


My biggest beef is -

Why dont they play the full audio ?

Why do they edit this in their favor. That is very very sad.

I've asked to upload the full audio clip since the start. Which is about what, at least 40 minutes (the event that took place), and there I explain why I wanted to punish the spawn camping fools that kill anyone that just spawns. Anyways.

On Sunday I was playing in a server with a bunch of awesome Role Playing gentlemen. We decided to take over a big supermarket and create a SURVIVORS base in there. I specifically announced on Global that we are looking for great team players, and friendlies to come and join our group. I gave people directions how to find us, and I told people I will have food, water, and even guns for them. We are still testing the guns and their functionality. Some people are reporting weird bugs with silencers, flash hiders and even scopes. So I also needed to see if those bugs are common amongst players.

Its also impossible to test Riot Shields and Barricades on a dev server because you dont get the "natural random game effect". You just get Devs testing what we know might not be working.

Anyways, almost everyone had zero problem in the server with me giving people rifles, ammo, and food. And I will stay by my words and actions "I will help any good player who is there to have fun time, role play, help and protect innocent others"

At some point during this time, 2 players begin complaining about Spawn Killings. Basically they just bought our game, joined, and they didnt even have a chance to step into the world, they were killed instantly on the spot.

I announced on GLOBAL "Guys, Please do not spawn camp and kill people on their spawns. I will not tolerate this !!!"

Instead of people listening to me and saying "sorry", the spawn killer replied to me with Racial insults. I didnt have admin controls to kick or ban him, so I warned him ONE MORE TIME.

2 minutes later, another person joins and gets killed at the spawn camp within first 4 seconds. This person was furious and typing "I cant believe I just joined, and didnt even walk 2 feet before getting killed. WTF kind of game is that?"

At this moment I was warning people to stop Spawn Killing again.

Somebody tells me on Ventrilo "Dude you should go up to that spawn killer and kill him. To which I said "Heh, I would love to, but we dont have the admin controls yet, and I will most likely be blasted. However Soon i will be able to use God mod and punish those who dont want to listen"

Now here comes a scary part and the most disappointed part.

The person who recorded this AUDIO CLIP gets annoyed at me giving people guns and ammo, so he gets furious and starts threatening a person named Chris Tower, who is with us in the room and playing.

The person who recorded this I think goes by the name Betrayed, he starts saying things like "I will hack you so bad you wont know what hit you. I will hack your internet, and everything here."

So how come they dont want to post the whole clip?

I have 3 WITNESSES who saw this guy threatening folks playing.

Not at all. It's 25$.

The Global Inventory is nothing but the Britannia Bank in pre-Trammel Ultima Online. In fact, the mechanics of surviving, killing, dying and everything are exactly the same, from 1998 with a vengeance. For good or bad, it will be interesting to see it because me and a few others always wondered how that game would have worked 15 years later. This is gonna be an answer to that question.

Also, true, rented servers can be easilyy made into PvE-only servers. That's comparable to having your own private UO shard, or your own Trammel if you want, where you don't allow PKing. It will certainly help retention, to a degree, without butchering the original soul of the game as Trammel did.

A 'decent' comparison video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SCPdMck_Yc4) between War Z and Day Z.

I learned my lesson 15 years ago. PKing isn't fun for me. It's aneurysm inducing. I suspect this game will attract the sharks and those who weren't around in UO and much like UO all the prey will quickly leave. I doubt this development team will try a Trammel style fix. They strike me as PKers themselves who want a game for that subset of players. More power to them but this game will likely be a niche of a niche because of it.

EX-Forum Mod Devin here. Let me tell ya some stuff you can spout on for a new youtube video


My forum account was hacked, my fault, they deleted a lot of posts. I was de-modded and banned, got my computer secure, re-modded and unbanned and took care of business as usual. Except their company is full of dumb fucks and didn't backup the forums at all. No backups whatsoever.

Sergay then took it upon himself to tell Kewk to demote me for my fuckup that could have been reversed if they were not so fucking stupid.

I then made a post on the forums about how I knew this was coming; and I was sorry and would not long be supporting a company that did not support their unpaid volunteer Moderators that spent over 100+ hours answering THEIR CUSTOMERS questions and concerns as well as relaying them the ideas the community had for their bullshit game.

I was then banned for making a "Rage quit" thread permanent and here is the even funnier part my in-game account banned under the excuse I requested a refund

So, since I didn't sign any sort of NDA for those fuckfaces here are some interesting facts.

WarZ is a direct port over from War Inc. They literally took the game and added NPCs, made a large map, and changed around camera angles and gun settings while adding more functionality and switching over some things. ALL ART however was actually done in-house by their amazing ART team. (Those were the best guys to know, they were in touch more with the community than Kewk)


They randomly ban accounts that have a certain amount of time spent playing in-game, knowing they are hooked on the game so they re-buy the game.

Their anti-hack is actually functional but here's the kicker..wanna know WHY their bans are TEMPORARY the first time around? 0.8% hacking? Try an EXTREMELY LARGE PORTION of the player base is hacking. If they banned everyone they'd have a mass refund issue on their hands, and no one to play their piss poor of an excuse game.

they plan to HALT DEVELOPMENT AND ABANDON THE GAME in SIX months if revenue is not enough for them (I.E. People are not buying GC and spending the fuck out of it) -- take note, if they do not get ENOUGH revenue. They will have enough revenue to pay for the game development for over a year at this point in time already, but if they don't get enough to give themselves regular raises they will stop making the game and shut down the servers and website.

Here is a "Proof of ban" picture & a proof of me NOT requesting a refund.

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g255/kiddingdragn12/proofofban.png

Wipe, new packages, new features roadmap, new antihack, Steam version !


Hey hey !

Things were quite busy here at Hammerpoint Interactive and today I just want to go over several topics that everybody keep asking about.

1. Wipe
As we're moving toward Foundation Release ( which most likely will be at same time we'll launch game on Steam ) we'll do a wipe - most likely this weekend. You'll get back all GC you bought as part of the packages, you'll also get some extra free GC as our thank you for being early players. Most likely you'll have all in game characters unlocked for - once again - our present to you guys! We also thinking about giving our some "zombie survival kits" - set of items necessary to start over surviving in a zombie world.

2. New way of buying game. New packages
As we've said before - we want our early adopters to feel special - so we decided that we'll stop selling Survivor, Pioneer packages ( Legend's sales are over for good now, with about 500 or so keys are still available at retail Gamestop locations around USA ). Instead we'll offer number of "unnamed" packages that doesn't offer any recognition ingame, or doesn't unlock any characters from the start, etc. Only difference between packages will be the amount of GC you get.

3. New Antihack
New antihack is coming. I think it'll happen around mid-end of December - new system is relying on analyzing players patterns and reacting upon them. It's pretty complex system running on separate server, and we hope it will let us to replace existing system - that still most of the time ( is wallhack or ESP is used ) rely on humans to ban cheaters - which can take day or two. Once again - we'll become slightly more secure in our never ending fight with hackers.

4. Steam release
Okay this one is simple - game will become available on Steam. We also exploring ways for existing users to link game to their Steam accounts - nothing to report there yet, but we're working on this.


5. GC Sale
Yes you'll be able to buy GC after wipe!


6. New features roadmap.
Okay this one will be more like "wishlist" - it's based on Hammerpoint's internal development plan, but as always something may come up - new hacks, other things that will slow us down. So please take this more like a guidelines, not hard promises:

Foundation Release ( December 2012 )
- Clans
- Friends
- Leaderboards
- Server rentals
- New set of building blocks ( aka barricades and USABLE objects like hydroponics systems )
- Call for help functionality
- Accessing your inventory from Safe Settlement without loging out of the game
- Accessing Store from Safe Settlement without loging out of the game
- .22 cal guns - rifles, pistols
- More cool melee weapons
- Better use of ballistic helmets, armor vests.
- Flare guns ( okay we had it for a while, but just didn't released it to you guys yet )
- Better weight system
- Option to turn on crosshairs in TPS


Still December 2012, but maybe moved to January '13
- "Safe" or "Locker" items - allows you to safely store items anywhere on the map ( think of DayZ's tents, but working properly ). Two types - one with 4-5 digits PIN lock, other with no lock at all
- Map adjustments - even more walkable places - mountains, hills, some tweaks on textures, more enterable buildings, more stuff, new types of trees, etc. Lighting tweaks.
- New characters
- New survival items ( energy tonics to replenish Stamina, meds, etc )
- Tear Gas ( yes this is why you'll want gas masks )
- More civilian weapons

January-February 2013
- 5-6 stronghold maps to be added to the game
- Driveable Vehicles
- Melee fist fights
- Player defined missions !


March 2013
- Better Medic system
- Potentially ( okay POTENTIALLY is a keyword ) - weapons crafting

June - August 2013
- New Map ! One that will be probably 4 times bigger than current Colorado map
- 5-6 more stronghold maps


Have fun and thank you for playing The War Z!!!



Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

What will ruin both DayZ AND WarZ is the same thing that ruins every other online game.

Other people.

Hey everyone !

I'd like to address some of the community questions and concerns raised over last week.


1) What does "Foundation Release" means? Where all those features you promised ?

I really hoped that we've been communicating to community our development plans really well, but apparently some people are still have questions. First of all - "Foundation Release' means that we feel that game reached state when we can drop "Beta version" designation. It means that our system are mature enough to represent BASE for future feature development and expansion.

As we've noted several times in a past - online games in general, and The War Z in particular - are not boxed products - it's a game service to our users. We start with a basic set of features and we keep adding more content and features working together with community to make sure that game is going into direction our PAYING customers want. Ie - if you have bought the game, and keep playing game - your voice will count.

In next 1-4 weeks we plan to add more features to our initial Release :


- Leaderboards
- Rental for Gameworld and Stronghold servers
- Locker items so you'll be able to store your loot in a game world, as well as way to facilitate items dealing between players.
- New "building blocks" - items that will allow you to customize your Stronghold meta game experience

This should cover all base features that we've promised game will have at release when we've announced it back in July 2012.


2) What happened to Skills ?

We've launched our Skills test for a small group of players 1.5 weeks ago. We've hoped that we'll be able to make skills available to all players this year, but I can tell you that it's not going to happen. Our initial tests showed that we still have work to do, and we're working with active War z players to make sure that skill trees alone will be huge part of the gameplay and character development and will create value for your characters.

Bottom line - we're moving full steam ahead, but at the same time we know that now we CAN'T afford to rush half baked feature that as important as Skill Trees.


3) What's with hackers - how many of them you've banned ? Also - did you really banned innocent players ?

Let me just say this again - we have ZERO tolerance toward hackers and cheaters. And we'll fight them as hard as we can. Over last week we've banned over 3,000 players. Just to give you idea - this is less than 1% of our active players. As we've learned later - few hundred of those who been banned was using game exploits that are not considered by us being hacks, but still - we don't appreciate people trying to break game and not reporting it.

Anyway - we've adjusted our system, and we've unbanned all those "innocent" players and gave them 700GC to compensate for 2-3 days they were unable to play.

Now - some people said that we do not have anti cheat engine or anything and we've caught those guys by placing objects in a world that can't be accessed other than by using hacks. First of all - yes we did that. Second - it was up to system ( yes we have one developed by special anticheat engine team ) to catch those guys and report them to operators. Yet - this "one time" trick only helped us to catch around 1000 potential cheaters. Rest was up to our automated wallhack/ESP/noclip detection engine and our behavioral analytic software.

What will happens next ? We'll be actively fighting hackers. Hopefully we'll get it to the point when risk of being banned will be much greater than any benefits than they potentially get from using hacks.


4) What's about all that hate toward The War Z ?

Okay I can say "I don't know' and I'll be right - I don't know for sure, but at same time I have some ideas. As far as you know we're doing surveys asking our players what they like and what they don't like about our game and service. We're doing it once a month.

We've did our last survey yesterday. It got us over 100,000 replies - so we can safely say statistically it represent what our players think. We've got an overall approval of 93% !!! That's INSANE number. 40% just like game as is, 50% like game, but feel it needs more polishing and adding some new features ( yes - server rentals  ). 5.5% played game, didn't like it and only 1.5% of respondents - some of the are guys who been recently banned - said they hate game.

Statistically speaking we can just say "okay, who cares about that 1.5%", but we really like to know what those guys are thinking. Because there's another set of numbers :

- 30% of our players played DayZ
- 70% of our players never played Dayz
- 5% of our players never heard about DayZ before they started looking into The War Z

This means that most of our players are new to the "genre" of zombie survival game. They either like zombie games, or they like MMO's or they like survival games. They do not play The War Z because they've been fans of Dayz or even played it.

I think there are a few groups of players who don't like us for what we're doing :


1) Extreme DayZ fanboys. I really envy to Dayz creators for having such loyal players, yet I don't think we can do anything - yes we've announced game right before DayZ mod reached it's prime and it started losing popularity after that. And yes - The War Z and DayZ themes are similar. Heck - both projects are using same reference to other products in their titles )). So - if I'll be a Dayz fanboy - I'll be royally pissed off at The War Z. Especially since they won't be able to do anything about it, all they can do is to spread lies and false information about game. They just love to omit obvious facts and bend words.

2) Players that got a different game from what they expected. One example of this - is whole PVE vs PVP discussion. When we asked our players - we've got very interesting results - half of players want unrestricted PVP, half want to eliminate PVP aspect of the game and keep game strictly PVE. Problem that can't be solved by us.

And it doesn't help obviously that The War Z got super popular despite any negativity that those people try to spread. I mean - game IS a big success for a small indie, self funded development team. It's nowhere near success stories like Minecraft, but at same time we're just two months old - we've launched first public alpha of the game on October 15th.


5) What's next for The War Z ?
Is to have nice holidays time off, with only operations team working 24/7. And after that get back to release more content, new features and listen to what our players will want game to be.




Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone !
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

I am really annoyed at Steam. For some reason I assumed for a long time that they had someone in charge of checking the products they were selling to be somewhat solid, or at least not total frauds.

Why would you assume that for a second? They do the same amount of checking a retail outlet does. "Is there something that looks like a game in the box?".

I higly dislike TotalBiscuit, and still we agree on this aspect. He uses my same identical words when he says that Valve should take more responsibility for the stuff they put up. Which does not make us right, it means more people "felt" that so far Steam had higher standards for the minimum level of completion of the stuff they sold.

I can't stand his whine about "you should never be able to lose items you paid forr!". Leave hardcore PvP alone.

The reason Steam didn't vet this game is because they have a policy that allows publishers who already have games on Steam to skip the review process.  The guys that made the War Z also made War Inc., which I believe is a f2p shooter available on Steam.  This may force Steam to review or change that policy.  Some more good info in the links.

Does anyone now how the game actually works for someone who knows the trick? There seemed to be a lot of zombies and beating them off with a torch not too practical. Can you make the stealth work well enough or is there some way to lose them?

Some interesting bit of information from an ex-WarZ forum mod.  If true, and judging from recent events it probably is, just confirms what a bunch of douches the devs are.

"Controversial zombie shooter The War Z has been removed from Steam. A Valve representative told Kotaku that the game was mistakenly published in the digital store and will not return until the company speaks with developer Hammerpoint Interactive. A listing for The War Z remains available, but the game cannot be purchased at this time." [...] "Valve says it mistakenly published Hammerpoint Interactive's open-world zombie game; refunds available."

With the speed and time recorded, it's possible to measure the distance between grid lines as 289.8m

Where this game has the edge over DayZ is that you can join a server at any time and it works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUrKdAjN4DM

 :awesome_for_real:

We don't hand out half-star ratings lightly. This is independent of our disgust with Executive Producer Sergey Titov's insulting attitude -- Craig's speaking strictly as a gamer who felt ripped off after playing. And yes, if DayZ were being sold in its current, unfinished state, we'd have similar problems with it. But it ain't!

Gamespy reviews awards it.. (http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-war-z/1227010p1.html) 0.5 out of 5 stars.

The invulnerable save versus head hit is not that logical, you'd still expect to disable a zombie with enough body hits. And even then it should have visual feedback to that effect. It does explain why he easily dropped the first and failed to kill any of the later ones.

His previous experience was Day-Z too, which is why he trusts to stealth first and running second. Though he's really just a talking head rather than an expert gamer. Which taken another way I'm sure his first try matches a lot of new players.


I wonder what the ping is like from Australia... least Day-Z had local servers (albeit full).

But really Day-Z is a bad game as well. And much the same of being a thin layer over an existing shooter. The advantage being he was first, maybe a teeny bit more honest and in theory wasn't taking your money. I hope the Survivarium guys can impress because the concept is interesting even if the implementations are terrible.

So it seems like the War Z's trademark has been suspended (http://warzscam.tumblr.com/post/38634146432/update-exclusive-war-z-trademark-suspended-game) by the USPTO, likely due to the World War Z movie.

Naturally, Herr Titov doesn't seem to care.

Dear fellow Survivors,
It has now been more than two months since we launched public access to The War Z. We’ve definitely had our ups and downs, and I thought that this Holiday break was the right time for me to try to step back a little and think about our journey since it started. This may be a little long, but I would appreciate if you could stay with me for a few minutes as I try to go over the highlights of the game as well as some of the hurdles and controversies, how we have addressed that and what our plans are.

First of all a very big and sincere “Thank You!” to all of you. We are really proud of the community we have formed with you guys. Every day we have hundreds of thousands of players on our servers, and this is a life-changing event for the team and me. We are blessed to have you as members of the community and we are well aware that without you the game would be nothing.  Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players. This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as “haters” or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault.  I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others.  This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture – my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a “perfect storm” that affected all of our community members.  For that I’m truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z.

I do not take this situation lightly, and last week events were especially humbling for me. I’ve experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we can’t change the past. The only thing we can do is to be sure that we won’t repeat the same mistakes in the future. I have realized that as the leader of this ship, I missed all early warnings that were saying, “Your community is not as happy as you think they are, you need to alter course.” I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period.  Though that is something to be very proud of, allowing that to overshadow the existing community and their satisfaction was poor judgment.  

I want to give you some insight into what our plans are for the future, but before we get to that, I’d like to clear the air with you on several important topics.

Community management and moderation – the problem
Even since the early Alpha launch, this game has always cultivated a large and loyal player base that is very active in the game. Again, thank you for this. Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for this large success and the way we managed the community was not the way it should’ve been. We relied too much on forum moderators, whose primary role was to punish those who break rules, not to engage the community and guide conversations into productive discussions about problems. There wasn’t enough presence of the development team on forums, there wasn’t enough updates on development of UPCOMING features. We failed to communicate our position and messaging on the outside platforms such as Facebook, twitter and various online websites, and when we did this we chose to rely more on arrogance rather than being humble and trying to understand why people were saying negative things. We chose to tune out negative reactions to the game, not paying enough attention to them – and this, again, is my fault. We chose to rely too much on numbers – percentage of refund requests, number and dynamic of our daily and monthly active users, etc. Well, in hindsight – those things probably work well for more casual games, but the hardcore PC gaming community is much different and can be very vocal about what they feel. Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number. And it’s not just a number – those are real people with real issues they are having with the game. OP Productions (publisher for War Z) and me personally have failed to address those issues effectively.

Community management and moderation – the solution!
We’re changing our community management procedures and rules right now. We’re going to reevaluate publishing and marketing team performance, and I will make sure that Hammerpoint Interactive developers will have a much stronger voice when it comes to community management and we won’t rely 100% on OP Productions to single handedly handle this. Lots of changes will be happening very fast in the weeks to come. One of the ideas that I proposed was to select 10 players from around the world who can represent the player community and invite them to our offices in Los Angeles, to meet the team, check out what we’re doing, and share with actual developers their concerns, wishes and thoughts on the game. We also will involve community, to a much higher degree, in the process of making our next map for the War Z (called “California”). We’ll be discussing many of the aspects of the map with you and asking for feedback.

We’re revisiting our forum policies; we’re going to bring on an additional community management team, additional moderators and we’ll train them how to respond to things properly. There will still be restrictions on harassment, trash talk, etc. But we’ll make sure that every opinion is heard. At the same time, I must also be cautious: we cannot address all issues and there cannot be only one voice. Please accept that. With hundreds of thousands of players playing, talking, chatting, voicing their strong opinions, there will always be diverging opinions. And some issues that are minor ones are sometimes brought to light by very vocal channels. I would even say there is sometimes a beginning of controversy because the game is now so popular. So there is sometimes a distortion between the severity of the issue and the attention it gets. But we will clearly implement steps to better listen to the community.  

What is Foundation Release?
The most asked question of the last week was “is this the final release?”  My answer has always been that for an online game a “final” release means that the game is dead – so there’s really no such thing, you never stop developing, making changes to and adding new features to the game. This is how we came to call the current version of The War Z “Foundation Release.”  We launched the Foundation Release on December 17, 2012 as our first-stage release that we use as a foundation to build upon. It does include the core features and a fully playable environment. This is our version 1.0, and of course  we will continue to improve that version as time goes on.  Did we rush to get it done? That is a tough question, but to answer honestly I think that we all pushed very hard to be first to market and in time for the holidays. Our entire team was working late, long hours to iron out issues and include as many features as possible.  This is part of the reality of being a smaller, independent game developer. If we had a larger team and more funding we may have done things differently, but I’m not sure. I don’t think it was a mistake because our numbers have been strong since day one and, even with the recent negativity, our metrics are really solid and we’ve been continuing to grow.  The negative opinions are always the most vocal, but most players are really enjoying the game and we’ve been attracting more and more daily active players every week.  A lot of the gaming journalists that have been playing the game have also given us some great feedback. I realize that we will take a few hits from some of the traditional gaming press in terms of review scores, but I’m hoping that even they will consider that this game is a living project that will continue to evolve as time goes on. We are very proud of our Foundation Release, and we do stand behind it like we have stood behind any previous version.

What’s on the Horizon?
As for what will happen next with The War Z? We’re currently evaluating the relationship between Hammerpoint and OP Productions.  I firmly believe that Hammerpoint should be playing a more prominent role in publishing/game operating process. We’re in a process of adding new key members to our team, bringing on guys who have much more experience operating and growing successful online games and I know this is going to make a huge difference in terms of development.  We’ll be making some big decisions in terms of leadership for both companies and I will personally change how I handle many things.  Above all we will continue to develop and make this game the best that it can be.  

I know that to some people my words won’t matter much. I understand that. I hope that will change as we move forward and deliver the features that our players have been waiting for. I can promise you that from now on things will be much more transparent, and we’ll provide better communication and engage our community to discuss upcoming features way before they appear in the game.

I do believe that we aren’t even close to uncovering the true potential for The War Z, and I hope that in the coming year, we’ll be able to regain trust from people who were alienated by our actions and we’ll be able to move forward and grow the game together.

Thank you for reading all this, thank you for supporting the game and thank you for helping us to change and realize what’s important as well as what is not.

I hope you are all having a happy holiday and I wish you the best for the New Year!

Sincerely,
Sergey Titov
Executive Producer, The War Z

I can't help feeling a bit of petty pleasure that this is going so bad. It's so utterly predictable that an open-world pvp game is going to be shit but I still enjoy watching them die a horrible death. It's probably just unresolved anger from UO.

- Name plates have been added to players. These name plates will display when you target another player.
- New reputation titles have been added to the game. Reputation icons will display under nameplates for easy identification of friendly or foe! (everyone's titles will be reset to civilian) Please see our dev diaries for a detailed explanation tomorrow morning (1/18/13).

Reputation

There are 6 levels on each side of the spectrum, ranging from Constable to Paragon, and Thug to Villain. The early levels in these trees will be relatively easy to get...but getting higher ranks will be quite difficult.

Killing lawmen and civilians earns you negative points, pushing you further down the bandit tree. If you aren't careful, and continue killing, you'll end up with the label of Outlaw or higher. Once you've crossed this boundary the only way to redeem yourself will be to create a new character. Conversely, a Lawman who changes his colors will be severely penalized for killing other lawmen and civilians, and will quickly lose his ranks if he's not careful, sliding quickly into the bandit tree.

DayZ creator angry about The War Z
January 18, 2013 7:48AM PST
 
By Eddie Makuch, News Editor

Dean Hall says he is "quite hurt personally" over confusion regarding Hammerpoint Interactive's controversial zombie game.
DayZ creator Dean Hall has spoken out against controversial zombie game The War Z, which features numerous similarities to Hall's game. Writing on Reddit, he explained that the consumer confusion surrounding both games has left him "quite personally hurt."

 
"I am angry about The War Z. I'm very angry," Hall said. "I'm quite hurt personally because anyone can see how similar the words are, and while the average gamer knows the difference individual people don't. I've had family members/close friends mistake the difference and confront me about what they believed was unethical behavior they thought I was making."

Hall further explained that he has bet his livelihood and reputation on DayZ, which is now at stake given the events surrounding The War Z.

"I really don't think anyone can understand just quite how exasperated that can make you feel when you've gambled everything on something, put your whole self and reputation on the line," he said. "So it hasn't made my life very pleasant and I disagree entirely with the conduct and how consumers have been treated."

This is not the first time Hall has spoken his mind about The War Z. In December, Hall said the controversy surrounding The War Z has left him "depressed," noting he contemplated quitting game development altogether because of it.

Data accessed includes email addresses used to log-in to the forum, forum passwords, which OP Productions says were encrypted, email addresses used to log in to the game, game passwords (again, which OP says were encrypted), in-game character names and the IP addresses from which players log-in to the forum and to the game.

I think all this game needs at this point is to be more Minecraft-y. You want to build something and defend it, from both players (or not if it's your private server) and zombies. It also needs achievements, or anything that helps setting up personal goals.

OP Productions LLC issues Security Alert for The War Z game players,

We are sorry to report that we have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases.  We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion.  This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority.  As part of the remediation and security enhancement process we will be taking the game and forums down temporarily.
 
We are issuing this Security Alert to all Survivors as a precaution so you can take some precautionary measures on your own. We have already taken a number of steps to increase security and are continuing to work with external advisors and investigators to identify and implement measures to minimize the chance of this happening in the future.

The data accessed included email addresses used to log-in to the forum and game, forum passwords which we encrypt, encrypted game passwords as well as in-game character names and the IP addresses from which players log-in to the forum and to the game. If you posted other information to the forum it is likely that such data was accessed as well.  We do not collect the names or addresses of our gamers so that information was not impacted unless you posted it on the forum. We are investigating whether additional information may have been obtained.

No Payment information Exposed.

All payments are made through a third party and not through our system.  Therefore there was absolutely no exposure of your payment or billing information of any kind.

Email Addresses.

If you registered on our forum your registration email address was taken. Those Survivors who use the same email address to access their game accounts should be aware that the hackers have the email address.

Passwords.

We encrypt all passwords. However, there is a possibility that simple passwords can be obtained using brute force even if they are encrypted.   Our research shows that many users are not using strong passwords.

 
Therefore, we are asking all of our players to please change your passwords immediately. You may do this by visiting our website or by clicking "Forgot Password" on The War Z launcher screen. If you use the same password for accounts on other services, you should change those passwords as well. Please make sure to use a strong password that is unique and uses a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.  Longer passwords are stronger. We suggest not to use password shorter than 8 symbols, with 12 to 15 symbols long password being preferred.

What we are doing.

We have engaged outside experts and investigators to assist in our investigation of this incident and committed substantial resources to that effort.  We have identified how access was obtained and have enhanced our security to improve game and forum safety. We are undertaking a full review and update of our servers and the services we use and adding additional security mechanisms.

The security of your data is important to us and we want our players to be assured that we take this situation very seriously.  We have taken steps to improve security to minimize the chance of this happening in the future and will continue to invest in improving security going forward.

This has been a humbling experience for us.  While we all know that there is no guaranty of security on the internet, our goal is to try our very best to protect your data.  We sincerely apologize.   

We will update you on status as we make progress.

Thank you,

The War Z Team

Backend got hacked

Definitely differentiating itself from Day Z. Personally, and for what it matters, I don't like this.

New Additions

Proximity voice chat added - It is now possible to hear and talk to other players that are within a 200m radius of you.
Please be aware that when you are using proximity voice chat you will be giving up your position. Any time you talk a speaker icon will appear above your head.

New Additions

The name of the game has changed! The games new name is now: Infestation: Survivor Stories The game and all applicable website URL's will be updated with this name as well.
Character names are now affected by the Profanity Filter. New characters will no longer be able to create names with profanity in them. Circumventing this filter can lead to a permanent ban of your account.
Added additional words to the Profanity Filter.
We've Changed the way the server browser selections menu functions. Now when you click "Play Game" you will be presented with channel tabs. On the left side of the channel you can click it to browser servers. On the right hand side you can click it to quick join.
Updated Boulder with a new survivor stronghold, safe settlement section (overrun - non-functional), and expanded military camp. For more info check out the Dev Diary HERE. http://forums.infestationmmo.com/index.php?%2Ftopic%2F25920-dev-diary-67-boulder-modifications-and-improvements-to-the-loot-system%2F
Adjusted some vehicles, climbable objects, and walls for a greater gameplay experience in Clearview.
Updated spawn points around Clearview to help combat spawn camping. This is an initial test and if it works out we will do the same for other cities.
We have removed the Hardcore option from the game. Unfortunately this feature was not being used by many players. All current Hardcore characters will remain until death.
Hardcore leaderboards have been removed from the game.

System Improvements
Reduced the distance at which zombies are visible.
Improved the grass on all video settings.
Improvements to lighting shaders.
Updated zombie and player animations for a performance boost.
Updated zombie pathing across the entire map.

Dear Survivor !

 

We are pleased to bring you our latest content addition: Stronghold Servers!
It has been a long and windy road but with the support and patience from our fans we are officially ready to release the Stronghold servers.

 

Again, to all our players, with special thanks to our Pioneers and Legendary accounts, we are truly thankful to you for your continued support.

With our total number of unique players that have played Infestation reaching over the 2,000,000 mark and with more than 100,000 players daily, we just wanted to extend our gratitude out to our early adopters and supporters for helping us reach this feat, you will always be an extended part of our apocalyptic family. 

 

Along this journey, we have done away with GC transactions for Marketplace items and made the Game Dollars the primary purchase method all items that can be found in game.

 

We have also improved anti cheat mechanics as well as fixing exploits that cheaters were capitalizing on for monetary gain.


Colorado has been revamped, increasing it’s size up to 160% of the original map. Not to mention “California” map being added to the public test servers, a map over 6x the original release map with an insane player limit of 300.

 

We've put the power of weapon and item crafting into the hands of players. With newly added elements, players collect resources in game that, when combined with other ingredients on the list, create new and unique items.

 

We even did what a lot of people were afraid wasn't going to happen, we added vehicles. Hit some bumps in the road but we are happy to have reached a point where things are actually gravitating in the right direction.

 

With Strongholds now being released, we have a little something for everyone to enjoy.

 

So what can we do on a Stronghold Server?

Stronghold Servers enable resource gathering for crafting and creation of user generated content\mini safe compounds.

 

Will I have Global Inventory Access?

Yes. GI will be accessible from one location on the map only.

 

What can I build?

Whatever you can dream up with the given resources.

 

Can I trade resources?

No. What you rake you take. However, you can learn a recipe to build a Farm and harvest the consumables to bank in your global inventory.

 

Can I attack or be attacked on this map?

Yes. Full on access to weapons and attack but weapons will not spawn.

***Harvesting Tool will not deal any damage to players or zombies.

 

Are there zombies?

No. No zombie threats to worry about.

 

What about repairing items?

Repair benches will be available and you can always use the NPC shops to access inventory and marketplace. They will be scattered in various towns and locations on the map.

***Harvesting Tool cannot be repaired. Can be purchased in Marketplace or found on the regular server maps only.

 

How much will Stronghold Server Rental cost per month?

10 Players: 750 GC

20 Players: 1125 GC

30 Players: 1500 GC

40 Players: 1875 GC

50 Players: 2250 GC

 

We will be awarding Legendary and Pioneer accounts with Stronghold time that was promised at the time of purchase.

 

This is a GC allotment so it is at the discretion of the user on how to spend it. We, of course, would love for you to spend it towards whatever your heart desires, but strongly suggest not missing out the possibilities of your own creations come to life, within the Stronghold servers.

 

Legendary accounts will receive 4500 GC for a 6 months of 10 Player Stronghold hosting.

Pioneer accounts will receive 1500 GC for a 2 months of 10 Player Stronghold hosting.

 

 Thank you all for everything...stay alive!!!!

 

Infestation TeamDear Survivor !

 

We are pleased to bring you our latest content addition: Stronghold Servers!
It has been a long and windy road but with the support and patience from our fans we are officially ready to release the Stronghold servers.

 

Again, to all our players, with special thanks to our Pioneers and Legendary accounts, we are truly thankful to you for your continued support.

With our total number of unique players that have played Infestation reaching over the 2,000,000 mark and with more than 100,000 players daily, we just wanted to extend our gratitude out to our early adopters and supporters for helping us reach this feat, you will always be an extended part of our apocalyptic family. 

 

Along this journey, we have done away with GC transactions for Marketplace items and made the Game Dollars the primary purchase method all items that can be found in game.

 

We have also improved anti cheat mechanics as well as fixing exploits that cheaters were capitalizing on for monetary gain.


Colorado has been revamped, increasing it’s size up to 160% of the original map. Not to mention “California” map being added to the public test servers, a map over 6x the original release map with an insane player limit of 300.

 

We've put the power of weapon and item crafting into the hands of players. With newly added elements, players collect resources in game that, when combined with other ingredients on the list, create new and unique items.

 

We even did what a lot of people were afraid wasn't going to happen, we added vehicles. Hit some bumps in the road but we are happy to have reached a point where things are actually gravitating in the right direction.

 

With Strongholds now being released, we have a little something for everyone to enjoy.

 

So what can we do on a Stronghold Server?

Stronghold Servers enable resource gathering for crafting and creation of user generated content\mini safe compounds.

 

Will I have Global Inventory Access?

Yes. GI will be accessible from one location on the map only.

 

What can I build?

Whatever you can dream up with the given resources.

 

Can I trade resources?

No. What you rake you take. However, you can learn a recipe to build a Farm and harvest the consumables to bank in your global inventory.

 

Can I attack or be attacked on this map?

Yes. Full on access to weapons and attack but weapons will not spawn.

***Harvesting Tool will not deal any damage to players or zombies.

 

Are there zombies?

No. No zombie threats to worry about.

 

What about repairing items?

Repair benches will be available and you can always use the NPC shops to access inventory and marketplace. They will be scattered in various towns and locations on the map.

***Harvesting Tool cannot be repaired. Can be purchased in Marketplace or found on the regular server maps only.

 

How much will Stronghold Server Rental cost per month?

10 Players: 750 GC

20 Players: 1125 GC

30 Players: 1500 GC

40 Players: 1875 GC

50 Players: 2250 GC

 

We will be awarding Legendary and Pioneer accounts with Stronghold time that was promised at the time of purchase.

 

This is a GC allotment so it is at the discretion of the user on how to spend it. We, of course, would love for you to spend it towards whatever your heart desires, but strongly suggest not missing out the possibilities of your own creations come to life, within the Stronghold servers.

 

Legendary accounts will receive 4500 GC for a 6 months of 10 Player Stronghold hosting.

Pioneer accounts will receive 1500 GC for a 2 months of 10 Player Stronghold hosting.

 

 Thank you all for everything...stay alive!!!!

 

Infestation Team

NECRO!

Believe it or not, this game is still alive and it is actually doing "pretty good". Since I didn't believe the rumors I checked it myself and I have to say that they added pretty much all the things they promised they were going to add. Vehicles, lots of weapons, stronghold servers, in game placeable lockboxes, super -rare- zombies, 200 players per server, progression and abilities, leaderboards, guilds, reputation system, removal of pay2win, and even a new map (in public test now): California.

I always thought the negative feedback was ridiculously excessive and it was a mix of hating the game because it was "stealing" the idea of War Z, and just hating it because it was cool to hate it. If you add on top the crazy Russian homophobic boss then you have an idea on why this game has about 20% on Metacritic.

I am not saying it is a great game, but it is definitely much better than what you heard.

A friend of mine was checking me playing it on Twitch and gave the perfect description of it: "I see this is the arcade version of Day Z". Spot on.

20% ratings are and were unfair, period. In a Schild world that's a fair rating, but if you look to the generic metacritic standards, it makes no sense. That was simply the result of making fun of the beta of game that was cool to make fun of.
I certainly misused the word "hate", but even with the proper loathe that I have for that douche CEO (you know I kind of hate him for real actually) my point was just that this product was waaay overly-bashed. There were websites dedicated to bash it, and it got multiple DOS attacks in an attempt to punish it for existing. Hell, there were calls to boycott it (sadly not for the homophobic comment). It was also pulled from Steam because it didn't hav the big "it's BETA!" disclaimer that all games have now and works as a shield. In fact, I think Steam started doing that for all "early access" games after the War Z debacle, but only War Z paid the price.

I am not dismissing criticism, this game deserves lots of it, I am dismissing the excessive criticism this game got as a result of "internet pack-lulz mentality".

There are jobs on the line here, so no one should easily dump a rating of 20/100 to a game based on controversy in an industry that often (sadly) suceeds or fails based on those numbers.

There are jobs on the line here, so no one should easily dump a rating of 20/100 to a game based on controversy in an industry that often (sadly) suceeds or fails based on those numbers.