BSuzinator

The reason this game is so addictive is because of human interaction, and a niche community. I've told people before that the internal economy and rules set in place make this what I dreamed DayZ would've turned into. And since it's always PvP and no bots this creates immense diversity in gameplay and replayability. It's not an experience you can get anywhere else really.

Here is my story about the "other" Altis Life. This is a long one, so spare me your Betty Butthurt about length...something you must clearly be intimidated by
 
Seriously, head over to the "competitors" servers. (I'm not going to name them, out of respect for the folks at Asylum). You'll be begging to come back here, and will be thankful for all of the people who try to RP and cops who have tons of restraint/professionalism...for a game (you can laugh at that statement, I know I know)
I played for a few hours on one of their heavily populated servers last night, and it was a god damn warzone everywhere I went. Within the first 5 minutes (not even kidding) I was robbed at gunpoint and taken hostage. I was then put into a large transport vehicle (which was filled with meth) which lead to the cops eventually running into this vehicle.
The cops simply threw on their sirens, jumped out and without even a moments noticed...all three of them opened fire on the vehicle (which was stopped the moment we saw the cops). Down myself and my abductor in the vehicle.
The vehicle was then seized, I was brought straight to the HQ (without a word being said) and "processed".
 
My processed consisted of being given a full priced ticket, or sent straight to jail by an officer who did not explain my charges, give me a chance to explain, gave zero other options, etc. (I was charged with possession of meth, even though I did not have keys to the truck...and was kidnapped)
When I stated "i'm brand new to the island, I have no money" his response was to re-issue me the ticket again, while saying "if you fail to pay this ticket twice, you will be sent straight to jail".
 
After doing 10 minutes in the slammer I got out, booked it to Athira, bought a quad and within meer seconds of that...the guy next to me started robbing the gas station. Three cop cars showed up a few moments later and just started opening fire on the gas station, lighting up anyone in the vicinity. Including myself, who was just standing there with my arms by my hips, doing nothing.
Finally i'm able to get up, run away, got my quad, bought a pick axe, backpack and thought "I need to get out of this area and make easy legal money".
So I booked it up to a nearby mine, and it was quiet and peaceful. Started to mine and then all of a sudden I get a message (I did not even hear this dude, or see any vehicles ANYWHERE) saying "hands up or die", before I could even react "BANG" I was dead.
Respawned again, this time in Neo, to the sight of two cars flipped over, gun shots in the distance and cars flying up and down the street with cops in tow.
I buy a quad with the last of my money, and go "screw it, i'll go run drugs". On my way to heroin, I get within about 200m of the red circle and notice a ton of cops were there. I sat and watched as the 5 guys they had detained magically all "dropped" dead. AKA they all disconnected. This proceeded with the cops getting in their cars and leaving the area. One of them must have saw me leaving the area, because he decided to pull me over. He throws on his lights, I keep going...like an asshole, he pit maneuvers me, I crash and die. I message him "wtf?", he replies "lolz".
 
So be thankfully kiddies, Asylum is far better in almost every way. There will always be the occasional bad apple, but that's what the reporting system is for. USE IT! But in the end, take my advice...be thankful of the players and cops around you who try to ensure we all have an enjoyable and balanced environment to play in.
 
-End Rant-

So let me get this straight:
1. We have fixes to problems, but were not pushing them
2. We have two developers , one is out of the country , the other one isn't yet we haven't been able to open a door for a week.
 
A server that has been the BEST altis life server for three - four years can't push an already complete fix for opening doors???
 
Some red flag should be going off if we have FIXES from people who AREN"T Developers and we can't even make them happen. Its been a week without
fucking doors here. Not asking for Jetpacks, just working doors. Even a simple post about maybe something complicated that we dont understand to update us since from what it looks like is that the only guy who gives a fuck had to leave town.
 
Im assuming @Gnashes is the guy doing all these fixes, its about time you put some trust in the guy. Im all for supporting this place but the FUCKING doors won't work and there's a fix sitting there. Promote more dev's or just sell the server off or something if its interfearing. There's a ton of people who still love the server

Accepted for interview. You have the TS.

Not gonna lie, I've driven with all 4 tires out for 15 minutes until the BH who was hunting me got bored.

Not gonna lie, I've driven with all 4 tires out for 15 minutes until the BH who was hunting me got bored.

@bamf can you please put a fucking distance on the combat storing thing? I can't store my fucking box truck at rebel because my gang is killing cops at the bank 10 km away...

Accepted for interview. Hours are low but we will see how it goes. Check your inbox for Teamspeak Address.

It has come to our attention that some of you in the community found a way to obtain loot crate keys without fully paying for them.  We have looked through the logs and we know who you are.  Not only are you stealing from us, you're stealing from the community when you do things like this.  
We will give you 48 hours to come in and make things right.  After that, action will be taken on your account.  

Bring back a Modded server PLEASE. Aussie life had potential. I'd be all for a Stratis sever with CUP_Weapons and TYRK_UNIFORMS or better yet a Modded Tanoa or Altis Life Server. Before we all shut this idea down for those who enjoyed Aussie Life yes it had it's Flaws but I had a great time overall!

I can show video's of players ghosting in while I am at a cartel I had a whole gang log in on me I myself only asking for just a certain place like just the red circle to notify that a player has logged in it does not have to be a whole 100 meters or even 25 meters extra. @bamf
^
 
If they get banned then that is their fault for cheating I would like to have a server free of assholes who cheat. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpZxXqaaz5g
 
First video, some old clips and some recent ones.
Go easy on me. Or don't. I don't care.

There has been much discussion around the fact that there isn't a dedicated post to this topic, so I thought I would go ahead and start one to let the community know what is going on - as well as to begin a dialog on the subject.  
First and foremost let me say this:  no number of BE "mass kicks" is acceptable to @Paratus or myself.  We consider one in a day to be too many.  Also, I define something to a be a "mass kick" when 20 or more players are kicked from a single server in a 30 second interval with the dreaded "client not responding" message.  With that out of the way, let me give you a little background on the number and scope of the kicks (as I'll call them from here on).  
Here are the number of kicks we have had since 12/9/16 (with the count per server 1-4 in parenthesis to the side):  
9th:  9 (5, 2, 2, 0)
10th: 10 (3, 2, 1, 4)
11th: 11 (4, 1, 2, 4)
12th: 1 (S4)
13th: 1 (S1)
14th: 1 (S1)
The 9th-11th are the weekend, and I think we can all agree that the weekends are where we see more kicks.  I have a theory as to why that is the case, and I'll get to that in a minute, but let's take a look at the numbers.  I hear all the time that the mass kicks happen constantly, and while they are certainly prevalent on the weekends I do tend to think that the perception on the number of kicks greatly outweights the reality.  Now three weeks ago I would agree with you that there were more occurences of the kicks since I can look at just S4 and see that there were 16 kicks in a single Saturday for just that one server.  We have made incremental improvements though, so let's talk about what we have done and what we are continuing to do.  
First of all, we implemented kicks based on network activity.  One thing that we have noticed is that a single lagging player has the ability to affect network connectivity to all players in the game.  The kicks we implemented based on ping have been very helpful in ensuring that player is removed from the server faster - thus allowing network connectivity to continue for the rest of the players on the server.  There are additional network kicks that we can put in place (desync and packet loss for instance), but at this time we are only logging those items so that we can try to find a good balance before implementing new kicks based on those items.  
Second, we have been more aggressively monitoring the memory utilization of the Arma server process.  There is a disconnect in what the in game #monitor command reports as utilized memory and what the OS sees as utilized by Arma.  I've seen this discrepency at times be more than 30%, which can tend to point to a memory leak somewhere in the server executable.  That's not something we can fix, but we can try to minimize the leaks by using various memory allocators (mallocs).  We changed the malloc on S1 on Monday, but we are still seeing memory that does not appear to be released to the OS.  Perhaps that's how Arma is coded (to hold onto the memory that it allocates as it goes), but once you pass ~3GB the game gets desynced for everyone and the BE kicks start to happen.  
Third, we are looking at how we access the database from inside the game.  Those of you familiar with how the backend for a Life server works will likely have heard of extDB before.  That's the layer that sits between Arma and the database.  Typically this role is filled by an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver, and I guess you could call extDB (a makeshift) one for Arma.  Since Arma does not work directly with the ODBC driver provided by the database software manufacturer, you are then left with extDB (or Arma2Net) to connect to the database and keep all your houses, vehicles, items, player data, etc all in order.  This layer also has a malloc that uses memory inside the Arma application.  There is a chance that the memory we are seeing as not used inside the game, but used according to the OS could be leaked from the malloc for extDB.  We are investigating this, as well as looking to update extDB to more recent version.  We have a customized version of extDB, so we will need to redo those customizations as we upgrade that as well.  
Finally, we continue to analyze the logs we have to see what correlations we can find inside them.  Here is a summary of those findings:  
The kicks are more frequent when the servers are full, but the servers being full does not indicate that a kick is about to (or even likely) to happen.   The kicks tend to happen more when the OS sees ~3GB of RAM being used by the Arma server application.  Some of this is anecdotal since I need to be made aware of the kick and then check the RAM utilization inside of the OS.  I will say this though, this last weekend I checked the RAM on the server processes when I could, and once it got high I asked the admins to hard restart the server.  I think that did make a difference in the overall number of kicks for the weekend, but that's not a tenable solution to go forward.   The kicks tend to happen more on the weekend, which is when the servers are not only full - but also have higher turnover resulting in more unique users (UUs as @Gnashes likes to say) on the servers throughout those days.  As more players come and go to the server, more RAM is utilized by the game.  The servers are full during prime time on weeknights, but we just don't see the same number of kicks during the week.  We do have have fewer UUs during the week as well.   Given all of that, I believe the Arma server process starts to lag once the RAM utilization gets above some unknown threshold.  The game and OS allocate memory as players come and go, as well as during the normal course of a server session.  As the server begins to lag, the network communication begins to lag as well - and at some point we get players receiving "client not responding" kicks.  
Some of you may have seen that 64-bit versions of the game hit the development branch of Arma today.  I am hopeful that a 64-bit server version will alleviate the issues of RAM constraints and allow the server to not lag (and therefor not kick players).  Of course, all of this is still in development and could be subject to other bugs and issues.  Further, we will have to make sure that all the external DLLs we use with the Arma server are updated to 64-bit and free of bugs as well, but having a 64-bit server will finally allow us to utilize more of the horsepower we have on each and every server that we have in the data center.  
I'll talk to Paratus in the morning, but perhaps we can be a tad more aggressive with the hard restarts we do.  Currently we do a hard restart after 3 server sessions, but perhaps we should move that to after 2 server sessions.  We will also continue to monitor the logs, RAM utilization, and player counts to see if we can try to really narrow down when we get into situations where the kicks begin to happen.  
I hope this was informative for you all, and I'm happy to hear your feedback and suggestions.  
Bamf
P.S.  I'm going to ask that everyone stay on topic and not turn this into a flaming or finger pointing thread.  Posts that are off topic or just generally unhelpful will be heavily moderated so that we can keep this as an open discussion with the community.  
Edit:  One final thing of note is that this does happen in other communities as well, so it is not isolated to just Asylum.  

Let's not go back and forth here.  There is definitely a memory leak in Arma's server (at least to the best of my knowledge).  We are working on how we can try to get around that, but as a life server we keep lots of variables in memory (unlike other game modes) so we have to figure out how to flush that server side adequately.  
We are trying a new malloc on at least 1 server today, so we'll see if that does anything for us.  I'm also (more aggressively) monitoring the server performance to try to map server FPS, memory, and bandwidth into the same report that logs the BE kicks.  Again, we're looking at all angles here.  
Unfortunately we can't try something and see right away since this is typically (I believe) affected by high population over time before a hard reset happens.  

If someone logs out in within a cartel zone, upon logging in if the cartel is active, they should be forced to "respawn". By respawn i mean they should be given a choice for their character to come in to the game with all their previous gear at one of the default spawn locations.
 
Examples:
Kavala
Pyrgos
House 1
Donor

Both people are clearly mentally handicapped

Huh? Someone called? No? Dang 

I have noticed that too since the AE left the server rebel activity has increased. People want to go out and make money but if they want to make a good profit, even decent, they are forced to go to a select few locations. These locations are camped or commonly checked by robbers who find it easier to rob than to do the work themselves. And these civs doing the work cant defend themselves most of the time. rebels are also often these robbers who steal from civs purely because they are bored or it is fun. So that civ is now left with nothing while the rebels go blow up his truck or something. This may not be that related to the AE but it is still an issues that needs to be discussed and i think the AE helped it some. 
 
I think something that would help is raising pay for all jobs across the board to get asylum players back in the work force doing both legal and illegal jobs across the map. Nowaday you mostly only see people in kavala pistol banging to be honest. There really isn't much of a "middle class", you have pistol bangers and high tier rebels. This server has become rebel life and there is no innecntive to be anything else. Bounty hunting sucks, your really just a debuffed cop. there just isn't anything else really. Make more legal jobs, buff payouts across the board, make new endgames.
 
Take GTA onlines most recent update. They added business you could own and upgrade out of properties. You needed to get supplies and stock your business and if your business was illegal there was a chance cops could raid your house but you could defend it. This business would generate revenue but mainly it just added a ton of gameplay managing your businesses. 
 
Kinda got off track there but in short AE was a step in the right direction and i think we need a new level of jobs to open up both legal and illegal that play good and we need to buff all current jobs

7.7.3
The prison has been moved and totally remade. Thanks go to Hubschraber for the new prison design, which gives us the ability to overhaul its functionality in the near future. At the request of BIS, we are removing the Market system for duplicate loot crate rewards. Instead of having the ability to sell them (even for credit), you'll now receive credit automatically as soon as the duplicate item is received from a crate. Added confirmation dialog when buying Apex weapons if you don't have the Apex DLC. Added khaki RCO scopes for rebels and all rebel scopes for undercover cops. Fixed a restrain hotkey exploit. Improved the locking/removal of items which you're not permitted to have. Fixed a group cap exploit. Added Kebab and Doner Kebab food items.. really, Gnashes? Added medic uniforms and prison uniform to civ-seizable gear for cops. Fixed an exploit for selling at garages. The welcome message has returned for new civilians. SkipTracer base has been relocated. The Kavala/Georgetown police respawn cooldown has been removed. You can now repair vehicles which are on a dock. Civilians can no longer pick up dropped SWAT Mk1 weapons. At the request of BIS, the CSAT ghillie crate reward was replaced with CSAT fatigues. If you had the ghillie unlocked already you'll now be able to buy CSAT fatigues. The US Army desert camo promotion has come to an end. It will never be available again unless you unlocked it in the last couple of weeks. Hotfix 1
You can now actually go inside the main prison building. Fixed a bug preventing people from initiating a prison break. You can now repair on land, as well as on the bridges! Fixed some broken gates inside the new prison. Hotfix 2:
Rubber can now be gathered on Tanoa The Sfaka Arms Cartel location on Altis has been removed The Skiptracer base on Altis has relocated again, but is in the same relative location Purchasing a bounty hunter license now gives you a firearms license You can access the trunk of a boat while sitting in the boat Some APD underwater gear is now whitelisted for the APD

Literally thought you wanted to grow a house when i read the title.

You had a good 15 minutes to explain, he tried to roleplay with you but you've had about 5 people attacking the HQ.
Source: Am still restrained in the HQ.