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Wrong item appears in hands
Reviewed, NormalPublic

Description

I want to start this ticket with a note about reproducibility: every single time I play this game I get this bug or encounter another player experiencing it. Every player I have ever talked to instantly understands the nature of the bug; it is infamous, and endemic. It is also frustratingly nebulous: it occurs seemingly at random, and unless you have a traveling companion it can be nearly impossible to tell you have the bug at all.

I'm trying to avoid muddying the waters by making any assumptions here. The bug has existed for years and in that time a lot of superstition and folk knowledge has sprung up around it. It makes sense: the nature of the bug requires another to inform you that what you see happening is not what other players are seeing. It completely breaks immersion and makes it impossible to trust your senses. Of course people are going to get a little unscientific about it.

I'm talking about the "hand bug," which is so commonplace it seems like the entire player base knows it by name.

The symptoms: the object you see in your hands is not the object other players see. Other players see you holding an object you held earlier in your character's life, or sometimes nothing at all. When you use the object it affects the world and other players correctly, but other players hear the sound of the item you appear to be holding.

If this bug was reproducible on demand it would be one of the most powerful exploits imaginable. Why? Let's examine some hand bug scenarios that will be instantly familiar to most players:

You get shot at by a gun that is making absolutely no gunshot sound, because from your perspective the other player is holding a cooking pot. The player shooting has an unfair advantage but doesn't know it; they can't tell nobody else can see or hear their gun unless they have a teammate to let them know.

You are in a high-tier military area surrounded by zombies, and fire a couple rounds from the Mk 2 you see in your hands. Suddenly all the zombies aggro on you, because you are actually shooting a shotgun or rifle. Nearby players immediately start heading towards you, because they have been given an unfair advantage. Experienced players may figure out what's going on from context, but a new player will have no idea what happened.

Your opponent in a close quarters firefight shoots a Mosin at you, and misses. You rush at them after the shot, thinking they will need to reload or switch weapons. You are mid-swing with a sledgehammer when suddenly automatic gunfire comes out of their bolt action rifle, because they're actually holding an AKM. The shooter has no idea they're experiencing the bug and is left wondering why you made such a dumb move.

Someone standing next to you appears to be holding a benign item such as a shirt or vitamins. They appear to "use" the item on you for a brief moment. 30 minutes later you've got kuru, because they were actually holding human steak.

You ask your friend for some tetracycline, and see their character model "medicating" you with a land mine. This is an amusing manifestation of the bug, and seemingly harmless, but the ethical obligation for experienced players after it occurs is to find a safe place to attempt various remedies to fix the bug--otherwise their teammate may be shooting a gun nobody can hear in the next firefight. If they were unscrupulous actors they could just do nothing--nobody has cheated, but the game has granted them a seriously unfair advantage.

Among all the purported cures for this bug, the one with the highest success rate is death. The second most effective fix seems to be a teammate tying the bugged player's hands up and having them wriggle out. But the bug may come back five minutes later, and this isn't the kind of fix we need anyway.

The hand bug needs to be prevented from happening entirely, because its consequences to other players on the server--dying to silent opponents wielding magic guns, giving away your position in dangerous areas without knowing it, never knowing if what you are seeing is real--are absolutely game breaking.

A bug that manifests at random and is difficult to perceive without another player's help is always going to be hard to pin down. Anecdotally, it seems to happen more often to players with worse ping--but it still happens with a low ping.

Beyond that, here is what I can say for certain: this bug occurs across every possible CPU/GPU/RAM configuration. It occurs on all versions of Windows. It occurs with the latest drivers installed. It occurs on official and community servers. It occurs on all graphics settings. It occurs on a fresh reinstall of DayZ. It occurs on 1.16 and 1.17 experimental. It has occurred since 1.11 and from what I'm told it began several patches prior to that.

To sum it up: a bug that commonly occurs to a massive swath of the player base every single time we play the game randomly confers an enormous competitive advantage that would be an instant ban for cheating if players were making it happen on purpose.

Details

Severity
Major
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Random
Operating System
Windows 10 x64
Operating System Version
Any
Category
General
Steps To Reproduce

Play DayZ with a friend on a full population public server, making sure you connect across the open internet and not some kind of 10ms test server on Bohemia's LAN. Stay alive for a few hours, keep looting the whole time, and pay constant attention to what's in each other's hands. If your teammate or anybody else you encounter seems to be performing actions that don't match the object you see in their hands, that's the hand bug.

Event Timeline

Hello,

The hand bug still regularly occurs as described above across all possible hardware and software configurations in DayZ experimental 1.17 update 3 (version 1.16.154707) released April 6th 2022.

@Geez I experienced this exact problem yesterday, while I was playing with my brother. I have video footage from both Pov's. For him it looked like I was raising my fists and then kill zombies at a distance with my telekinetic superpowers. On my and I was holding in my hands an amphibia, which is what I really used to headshot said zombies.

Game Version: 1.16.154567

Please let me know if you have any use for the footage. I will then upload it here.

Geez changed the task status from New to Reviewed.Apr 14 2022, 10:56 AM

@Geez I experienced this exact problem yesterday, while I was playing with my brother. I have video footage from both Pov's. For him it looked like I was raising my fists and then kill zombies at a distance with my telekinetic superpowers. On my and I was holding in my hands an amphibia, which is what I really used to headshot said zombies.

Game Version: 1.16.154567

Please let me know if you have any use for the footage. I will then upload it here.

Hello freerider3434.
This is a known issue related to desynchronisation. We are aware of its occurrence. You can still upload the video for us though, thank you.
Regards,
Geez

Hello @Geez,

First of all, thank you for the reply. I'm very glad to hear someone at Bohemia acknowledge the hand bug exists. It's also encouraging to hear that it has been narrowed down to a problem with desynchronization--that's something I hear a lot but I was trying to avoid assumptions in the ticket. I feel like the natural followup question anyone would have for you here is: if you acknowledge the bug exists, and all of the serious gamebreaking implications that necessarily follow from that, why have you changed the status of this ticket to Reviewed instead of Assigned? Is there a reason this known issue you are aware of is not scheduled for a fix in one of the upcoming updates? I am positive there are many people who would be grateful for anything else you can tell us. Thank you!

@pleasefixthehandbug Well spoken! What are you going to do with your username, once they've fixed it btw? ;D

Hello,

This bug is still occurring every time I play in the newly released DayZ Stable 1.17 Update 1 (Version 1.17.154732).

freerider3434 added a comment.EditedApr 25 2022, 12:27 AM

@Geez Hello Geez, here's a short video of the bug occurring, showing things in detail. I hope this illustrates the issue further and assists the dev-team in fixing it, as well as showing the gravity of this bug and it's impact on core gameplay.

Note the bugged slot in his backpack, to which I'm unable putting any items into. I highly suspect, that is where his (for me) invisible firearm, probably smg, is located.

From personal experience I can say, that this Desync issue is now worse than ever ;/

I was recently killed by a can of peaches while drinking at a well.

I see this at least once a day on every stream I watch.

I've seen many streamers running as a team that are forced to continue bugged because they don't have a rope and the Q is literally 2 hours long!!

If this can't be fixed we need a resync option without relogging.

Why isn't there some type of automatic sync check between the server and client?

Hey server what am I holding: Peaches
Client what is the server holding: Sir that there is a nade you just unpinned!!!

@Nate_LapT Yeah, unfortunaly 1.18 appears to have amplified this problem enormously :/