was a pretty good article. i'll post the link to the PC mag article, and i'll cut/paste it here.

link: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/13/rocket-dayz-is-two-or-three-hours-away-from-complete-disaster-at-any-time/

Rocket: DayZ is “two or three hours away from complete disaster at any time”

DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall has been speaking to Edge about the pressures of designing the game and delivering DayZ updates to the vocal community. “It’s scary and it’s also fun at the same time,” he says. “In a way, the project is basically about two or three hours away from complete disaster at any time. Every time we do an update it’s just terrifying. And a lot of people get very frustrated when things go wrong.”

Hall may describe the process of updating the mod as “terrifying,” but he also suggests that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There are almost two sides [to the community],” he explains. “There’s the side that will just support anything that happens in the project, and then there’s the side that’s very critical of things that happen but continues playing.

“And I think that’s very important, because otherwise it’ll lose direction and ego will come into it. For me, the importance is that the right community is involved in it, because if we don’t have that then we can’t push the experiment of having players create the world.”

DayZ has been download half a million times already. Its success has seen Arma 2 rise to the top of the Steam charts in recent weeks. Catch up with the latest mod changes in our DayZ update post, and read our extensive interviews with Dean Hall for more insight into the thinking behind DayZ.

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adding in the Massively article that was posted today as well: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/07/13/the-firing-line-dayz-forge-and-rapid-assault/

If you're like me, games are more of a lifestyle than a hobby, and MMORPGs are but one piece of the puzzle. Massively has even branched out and begun to cover various non-MMO titles in recent months, but rarely do we mention mods.

DayZ shatters the mold, though, both because of its skyrocketing popularity (it topped 500,000 players this week) and its curious blend of shooter and open-world sandbox gameplay. If you're unfamiliar with the phenomenon, let me explain. DayZ is a mod for 2009's ARMA II (it also requires the Operation: Arrowhead expansion pack). It drops players into a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland and basically tasks them with staying alive.

This involves not only killing zombies and other players but also collecting food, water, medicine, and weapons. Modder Dean Hall also coded in environmental effects, bodily infections, broken bones, and low blood pressure. Players must eat and drink, and Hall has said that he intentionally created a nightmare gameplay experience as a way to upend traditional notions of balance.

"I wanted to see what happened if I [broke] the balance. What if I put the player in a situation that is essentially hopeless where every part of the world is out to get them and if they make one mistake that mistake could cost them their character's life?" he told a news organization in his native New Zealand.

DayZ is also (re)opening developer eyes to the potential of the PC mod scene. Hall's work has reportedly generated upwards of two million dollars for original ARMA II publisher Bohemia Interactive.

"We've got 80,000 unique players signed up in two and a half weeks, and the vast majority of those are new players. It's really unprecedented to have a product that's three or four years old to all of a sudden launch back up out of nowhere," said Bohemia CEO Marek Spanel.