After spending a long time playing Counter-Strike 2 and ARC Raiders, I started to feel burned out and wanted to try something completely new. That's when I discovered DayZ.
And honestly, I fell in love with it.
DayZ is easily one of the greatest survival games ever made. In my opinion, it's even better than Rust and Escape from Tarkov in terms of atmosphere, tension, and immersion.
After only a few dozen hours, it quickly became one of my favorite games. Once I bought it, I found myself playing around 10 hours a day, completely immersed in the world.
The core gameplay is incredible. The survival mechanics, exploration, and player interactions create a level of tension that very few games can match.
However, despite how great the game itself is, the overall game environment has some serious problems.

1. The Cheater Problem
The biggest issue in DayZ is cheating.
Whether you play on official servers or community servers, you will encounter cheaters.
On community servers, the situation is slightly better because admins can eventually ban them. But on official servers, there are no active admins monitoring the gameplay, which allows cheaters to act almost without consequences.
If you spend enough time on official servers, you will eventually get killed in extremely suspicious or impossible ways. At that point the game becomes frustrating and nearly unplayable.
Even on community servers, some cheaters use subtle cheats that are difficult to detect. For example, players using wallhacks may cheat for a long time before finally getting caught.
The real problem is that DayZ's anti-cheat system is very weak and hasn't received meaningful improvements for years. Cheaters can keep cheating at a very low cost by simply buying new accounts.
There are also many bugs in the game that allow players to go underground, fly into the sky, see enemies through walls, or duplicate items. There are also many other bugs I didn't list here.These issues have existed for many years and need to be fixed by the developers.
If the developers significantly improved the anti-cheat system, I truly believe many more players would start playing DayZ.

2. Fake "Official" Servers
If you live in Asia or Oceania, you may notice something strange in the server list.
There are many servers labeled as official servers with very low ping and extremely high player counts. But some of these are actually fake official servers.
Certain Chinese gray-market groups have exploited vulnerabilities in the server listing system and created servers that pretend to be official. The displayed ping and player numbers are often fake.
If you accidentally join one of these servers, it may download malicious mods to your computer. After that, whenever you try to join servers through the launcher, you may repeatedly get redirected back to these fake servers.
Inside these servers, many gameplay features are locked behind paid systems. If you don't spend money, you may not be able to properly play the game at all.
This issue has reportedly existed for many years, and many players have already exposed it. Unfortunately, the vulnerability that allows these fake servers to exist still hasn't been fully fixed.
These operators have already earned huge illegal profits by impersonating official servers. Some of them even impersonate the game developers on social media in certain regions to scam players. Many DayZ players have exposed these operations, but they still have not been effectively dealt with.

3. VPN Players and the CFTools System
If you live outside Europe, playing this game can be difficult. Most of the best servers are located in Europe. If you want to play on them from other regions, you often need to use a VPN to reduce ping and packet loss. Otherwise your character may frequently teleport or suffer sudden high latency.
However, cuz cheating is so widespread, community servers often use aggressive anti-cheat tools. For example, the CFTools plugin mod.
When you join a server, this plugin analyzes your network environment to detect potential linked accounts. If you use a VPN, your account may become associated with every cheater who has ever used the same VPN. The same can happen if you use public networks, such as a university network or an internet café.
Over time, the number of "linked accounts" can grow larger and larger. Because there are so many VPN players outside Europe, many cheaters also use VPNs. As a result, legitimate VPN users are often suspected of cheating, and getting whitelisted becomes extremely difficult.
For example, cuz of my work, I often stay in Japan, Australia, and China. I want to play vanilla servers, but most good vanilla servers are in Europe. I must use a VPN to play them, otherwise the ping makes the game unplayable.
I have used many VPN services from both Western companies and Chinese companies designed specifically for gaming. They work very well in terms of connection quality. But after only about ten days of playing, a server admin told me that my account was linked to 1500 cheater accounts, and the number was still increasing.
I was shocked. After researching, I learned about the CFTools system. A passionate DayZ player created it. It does help server administrators manage their servers more easily. But if you are a player who needs to use a VPN, it can create major problems.
I also discovered that real cheaters can easily change their network environment, allowing them to bypass these detection systems. Some cheaters even create their own VPN servers or use obscure VPN providers so that the plugin cannot detect their previous accounts.
As a result, the system often fails to effectively detect real cheaters, while legitimate VPN users are punished much more severely. Cheaters can easily buy new accounts and change their network setup at very low cost.
If the developers of CFTools could improve their system—for example by detecting hardware identifiers such as hard-drive IDs or motherboard IDs, or by detecting locally logged-in accounts—it might work much better.
Another idea would be to add a real-name verification system similar to FACEIT, allowing VPN users to verify their identity. Only VPN users who have been verified are allowed to join the server. Verified players could submit identity documents and photos, which would allow servers to trust legitimate VPN users while still punishing cheaters. Remove any potential accounts linked to verified players because of VPNs that don’t actually belong to them. If a verified player cheats, their identity could be permanently banned. They were unable to verify again or access the server again.
Many players who use VPNs truly love this game. They are legitimate players, and they should not be punished simply because of VPNs.

The Core Issue: Glitches and Cheating
The main issues in this game are all caused by these two. Many other issues are simply consequences of this. Fake official servers exploit vulnerabilities, and strict VPN restrictions on community servers exist mainly because of cheaters.
If these problems can be solved, DayZ would absolutely become an even more popular game with a much larger player base, because the core quality of the game itself is excellent.
After researching a lot of information and speaking with many server admins. I learned that Chinese players using VPNs make up one of the largest groups of cheaters, which has also led to stricter restrictions on VPN players. Many of the linked "potential accounts" detected by these systems belong to them.
This makes me very angry, because legitimate VPN players are also affected and sometimes cannot play the game normally.
To those cheaters: please stop doing this. Enjoy the game and improve your skills instead of ruining the experience for everyone else.

If the developers improve the anti-cheat system, fix vulnerabilities, and continue updating the game with new content, it could become one of the most popular games in the world.