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.