How our rankings work

Most DayZ server lists run on votes and paid placement. Servers push players to vote daily (usually bribing them with in-game loot), and the top slots are sold as "premium". The result: the top of those lists shows whoever spent the most, not where anyone actually plays.

Some servers go further and fake the player count itself - a proxy sits on the Steam query port and rewrites the number before it reaches server browsers. At the time of writing, servers we track advertise 4,459,793 players combined, while Steam reports 56,598 people playing DayZ worldwide. Most of the advertised number does not exist.

We measure, we don't ask. Every 15 minutes we query all 262,310 tracked servers directly - the same protocol the DayZ launcher uses - and record who is actually online. Rankings sort by those measured numbers.

Fakers get flagged. Padded counts betray themselves: numbers that never change, servers "full" 24/7 without ever losing a single player, capacities larger than the DayZ engine can host. Right now 262,851 servers are flagged for padded counts. They are hidden from rankings and marked with a warning on their pages - and the flag clears itself if the server starts showing a real, living population.

No votes. Vote buttons measure who nags hardest, not who is good. Reviews here come from verified members only - accounts with both Steam and Discord linked - and owners cannot review themselves.

No pay-to-rank. Ever. Claimed servers can customise their page - banner, colours, description - but nothing a server owner can do or pay for moves their position in the measured rankings. The moment ranking is for sale, every number on the site is worthless.

Sponsored listings - clearly labeled, outside the rankings. The Index may offer sponsored slots: promotion meant for freshly opened or struggling servers that need their first players, not a megaphone for the biggest networks. Every sponsored slot is marked "Sponsored", sits visibly apart from the measured rankings, and never changes a server's position, rating, player numbers or spoof flags. If a sponsored server fakes its counts, it gets flagged like anyone else.

Every server page shows its measured player history - 24 hours, a week, a month. Real populations breathe: they dip overnight and peak in the evening. Flat lines don't. All of it is also available raw through our public API.

Browse the server list - or if you run a server, claim it from its page and make it yours. Claiming is free and always will be.