Official servers on PC used to be my favorite.
Ever since covid hit in 2020 I have been getting regularly killed by cheaters there.
I estimate that every 5 hours I get killed by an obvious cheater.
I really want to recommend DayZ to my friends, but when the official servers only lead to huge frustration with constant unavoidable cheater-deaths, and finding a proper vanilla DayZ community server being complicated, It just sets them up for a messed up experience which I cannot recommend.
Team Fortress 2 had a very similar problem, it was also nearly unplayable from 2020 - 2024.
But recently they banned (almost) every single cheater / bot in a single day.
Hopefully something like this can be possible for DayZ one day.
Invisible people dropping nades, suddenly everyone gets 1-tapped within one milisecond with no line of sight to any shooters and huge man-sized blood-petals squirt out of everyone, people running at ultra-speed like "The Flash" and also beating us up at the same speed, people gps locating stashes and players (they take me by the hand and lead me to them, explaining how their cheats work). All this has happened numerous, numerous, numerous times to me alone and many many other players.
I appreciate the cheater-ban statistics the DayZ team shares every year or so, but it is not even close to enough.
You are not providing a professional product to the consumer.
Please let us play the official DayZ experience we give you money for, thanks,
New players are very likely to join official servers, so they are set up to have a bad time.
How can you let this slide for 4 - 5 YEARS?
I feel bad sometimes when I think about how many new players go through this, it's such a struggle to get started for noobs only to run into guaranteed cheaters again and again and again.