Originally posted by SoMuchMass
5k is pocket change for a lot of people.  Heck, some people give streamers on Twitch 50k donations.  

LOL- either those people are just insanely rich or they will be broke shortly. I can't imagine giving anyone 5k for a game unless it was for an investment and I have the money. IMO, this would be a seriously poor use of funds no matter how much money you have. There is much more good you could do with that money via charitable donations that make an impact on the real world.

I haven't played WW2OL for years. However from what I remember, there is no reason to play it now that H&G is in open beta. The games are very similar- at least in their premise. For someone who is a casual fan of these games, why would I pay any sub when I can jump on H&G for nothing and get a similar experience? It seems to me that you can earn most equipment by playing H&G whereas the free to play mode in WW2OL will always be limited.

I think H&G puts the final nail in WWOL's coffin.

Strictly speaking, you could say that any leisure activity is a waste of time- you could be making money for yourself or making a difference for other people rather than playing any kind of game. However unless you are so motivated to be always working, then there is not much of a difference on how you use your leisure time.  I don't think games are any more of a waste of time than most other activities that involve some form of escapism.

The proliferation of all kinds of games and the multitude of hours that people have to play them only proves one thing- we have much easier lives than all the people who have ever lived before us. I for one am thankful for that.

WarZ finally allowed players to rent private servers and anyone dumb enough to do so will pay dearly to play this buggy, hacker infested game on their own server.

The lowest cost server is $42 US dollars a month it keeps going from there. I believe the highest price server is $70. Hammerpoint indicated during alpha that the cost would be around $30.

This is no surprise to anyone who has seen how Hammerpoint operates. These guys are complete scam artists. Stay far away from WarZ.

First of all, I am going to state upfron that I am no DayZ fanboy. All of what the OP says is true on public servers. From what I understand, ARMA II is a niche game that was constructed as an open engine for small groups of friends to play on. According to their fans, this worked very well until the explosion of popularity due to DayZ. ARMA is meant to allow scripts to be run so server admins can set up scenarios to play on. It is also true that Battle Eye does not work very well.

The only DayZ experience that I have had without hackers has been on whitelisted servers. You have to sign up on these to play  and the server admin knows who the members are. Hackers cannot just pop on and destroy the game for other players. Currently, this is the only way to play DayZ. To the OP, I would recommned making your server a whitelisted server. I am sure it is alot of work but thats the only way to do it right now.

According to Dean Hall, this issue has been a major priority for the standalone game. They are also launching on Steam and that should help as well. Even with all of this, I am still only going to play DayZ on whitelisted servers. Most script kiddies simply do not have the patience to get whitelisted so they stick to the easily accessible public servers.

There are several problems with the PVP in this game. First, there are currently design issues. There is no penalty for killing people. Then there is the issue that the toon is not tied to a specific server so the player can jump around as they please and cause grief to many more people. Server hopping is one of the biggest exploits in the game right now and the dev's haven't said one word about how they plan to stop it.  There are various other exploits as well and it seems that every patch introduces a new one even if it does manage to take one out.

The hacks also make PVP very unenjoyable. The most common hack being sold on cheat sites is ESP which essentially allows you to see everyone within a 400m radius or so. It is so bad that I tried an experment. I went to one of the semi-popular loot spots and got myself killed by zombies on the outskirts behind a building that was not enterable. There is little or no loot that spawns in near these types of buildings and there is a death cam that allows you to look around as well. Within 30 min., three people came directly to that area and shot my corpse. It was night out and fairly dark and these players just came around the corner of the building with guns blazing like they knew someone was there. I guess they couldn't tell that I was already dead but I am sure the hack programmers will eventually fix that little flaw in their program.

This is a spot on depiction of what this game is like. The whole game from its inception is nothing more than a mod for War Inc. They have simply added zombies and a bigger map. They refuse to buy a commercial anti-cheat system and therefore the script kiddies are everywhere. There are very few honest players left in the game. Those that aren't using cheat programs are heavilty exploiting the poor game design like server hopping. The newest patch also gave these exploiters the ability to 'climb' and fire from the tops of trees.

The whole game is a cheat. Buying this game is a serious waste of time and money.

You like FPS with zombies as a minor side point. However, the hacks and exploits ruins even that part of the game. Also, the dev's just cut the number of servers and upped the player max on the other servers to 70. This results in a game that more closely resembles a team death match more than anything else since the map is not big enough to support this number of players I would say the average survival time for new players is about 10-15 minutes right now if they are lucky enough not to get killed immediately upon spawning in.

Surival has no point other than to live long enough to kill other players. It appears to me that the dev's are trying to force people to use the cash shop in order to avoid being totally frustrated. There is no crafting, no ability to build a base and really hardly any features of an MMO. Zombies are not hard to kill and I would estimate that 90% of player deaths result from other players- many of them using hacks that can be cheaply purchased on the net. The anti-cheat system does not work at all. IMO, the game right now is nothing more than a money grab from low end devlopers with few ethics. For example, the game says on its FAQ that it is not pay to win and the devs promised no game altering items would be sold in the cash shop. Yet, right now anyone can buy 100 round drums of ammo for automatic weapons.

I definitely would not have pre-ordered this game if I had known this is how it would be.