Paying DayZ Players for Playtime, Kills and Deaths

What Auto-Earn Is

Auto-Earn is currency your players get on their own, without you awarding it. It is set up on your server's Economy page, under Overview, and it is off until you switch it on.

A DayZ server can report three things, so DayZ offers three in-game earning rules:

All three are measured from GameGrid's own server-side mod — the one we load for you, that your players install nothing for. It is what tells us a player joined, left, or died, and who killed them.

Alongside these, the Discord earning rules (daily login, Discord activity) work the same on DayZ as on every other game. Everything a player earns in game is capped together by the daily limit at the bottom of the card.

Playtime

Set an amount per hour and a linked player earns it for every whole hour on your server. Playtime is measured from the joins and leaves the mod records, and a part-hour is carried forward rather than thrown away — so somebody who plays 40 minutes twice is paid for their hour.

A crash sends no leave. A session that ends that way is closed when the server next starts, so a crash can shorten the time a player is credited with. It never credits them with more.

What Counts as a Kill

A player kill is exactly that: a linked player killing another player. The server tells us who killed whom, and the pair has to be two different people.

Killing the infected or an animal earns nothing. That is not a policy we chose — the game reports a death of a *player*, so a zombie your player put down is never recorded at all and there is nothing to pay for.

The killfeed and the wallet count slightly differently, on purpose

On the killfeed and leaderboard, a kill scores when a player caused the death — including running somebody over or blowing them up.

Auto-Earn pays only for a direct kill. A roadkill or an explosion appears on your killfeed and on the board, and it does not pay.

The reason is that a vehicle or a blast is a much easier thing to arrange between two friends than a fight is. If you want those to pay as well, the honest way is to say so in your own server rules and award it from the Wallets tab — not to read the board as if it were the ledger.

The Death Penalty

The death penalty is taken whenever a linked player dies — killed by another player, by the infected, by an animal, by a fall, by drowning, by the cold, or by their own hand. Every death counts.

You type it as a positive number; GameGrid applies the sign. Two rules that are worth knowing before you set it high:

• A wallet never goes below zero. A player who has less than the penalty loses what they have and stops there. There is no debt on GameGrid.
• The penalty is not counted against the daily earning cap. The cap limits what players earn, not what they lose.

DayZ players die a lot, including to things nobody could have avoided. A penalty that is a meaningful fraction of an hour's pay is felt; one that is several hours' pay reads as a punishment for playing.

Nothing Pays Until a Player Links

A wallet exists because a player linked their Discord account to their character on your server. Until then there is nowhere for an earning to go, and Auto-Earn quietly passes that player by — their playtime, their kills and their deaths simply do not move a balance.

An event prize behaves differently, and the difference is worth knowing. A prize won by a player who has not linked yet is held against their name with the reason, and paid on the original claim the moment the link exists — a placement, a share for taking part and a per-kill bonus alike. Auto-Earn has nothing to hold, because an hour played is not a debt anybody agreed to, so it simply passes an unlinked player by.

On DayZ a player links by typing the code into in-game chat:

!link ABC1234

The code comes from /link in your Discord. The mod reads the chat line, and GameGrid matches it up. Those !link lines are stripped out of every chat feed in the panel and the API before anybody sees them, because the code is a secret for as long as it is unused.

There are three ways to finish a link, and all three end in the same place. The player runs /link in your Discord and types !link CODE in game. Or you mint the code yourself on the Customer API and hand it to them. Or you link their account by hand from the Economy page, which is the one to reach for when somebody cannot get Discord working.

Why a name is never enough

DayZ's default profile name is "Survivor", so a server can have several players under one name. GameGrid therefore matches a link on the player's SteamID64 or their 44-character DayZ ID, both of which the game reports and neither of which changes between sessions.

A name-only match is refused. Somebody who joins calling themselves by a linked player's name earns nothing into that wallet and costs it nothing when they die. That is the one rule that stops the whole feature being a way to farm somebody else's balance.

Spending It

What players do with the currency is the rest of the Economy page: an in-game shop priced from your own server's item list, and kits they claim with a command.

On DayZ an item is handed to a player by the same server-side mod. A purchase goes into their inventory while they are on the server, and anything that does not fit is dropped at their feet; a purchase made while they are offline, dead or unconscious is retried for a day, while a kit item that cannot be handed over at that moment is refunded instead. The Economy page states this for your own server.

See The Shop and Catalogue, Kits and Wallets and Earning.

An item you put on the ground from the Live Map is not a delivery and costs nobody anything — it lands where you clicked and anyone standing there can take it. See The DayZ Live Map.