The Story of Professionals Playground
Professionals Playground was started by Bomb (Jeremiah) back in 2015, during his junior year of high school. What began as a passion project — a place to play DayZ Epoch the way he wanted to play it — turned into a long-running community that's still going strong today.
Over the years, Jeremiah poured countless hours into learning to code, customizing every corner of the server experience, and earning a computer science degree along the way. Nearly every custom feature on the server — the towing system, the CCTV network, the weed farming, the Karrosh Kasino, the remote garage opener, the Discord bot, and the player web portal — was written by him, for this community.
The Server Opens
Professionals Playground launches. Jeremiah is in junior year of high school, running the server out of sheer love for DayZ Epoch. The foundation of custom scripting begins.
Growth & Development
The server grows a community. Custom features are added incrementally. Jeremiah picks up coding seriously — what starts as SQF scripting expands into broader development skills. Several admins join the team over this period.
Server Goes Offline
With the game's population declining and life getting busy, the server is taken offline. The community disperses, but the project isn't abandoned — just on pause.
Revival — Epoch 1.0.7
When the DayZ Epoch team released version 1.0.7, it reignited the spark. Professionals Playground comes back online, now with years' worth of development experience behind it and a cleaner, more polished server than ever before.
Solo Administration
With the game's population naturally declining and a history of admin abuse from past staff, the decision is made to run the server solo — no admin team. It turns out this works better. No politics, no favoritism, no one with access who shouldn't have it.
Discord Bot v1 Launches
The first version of the custom Professionals Playground Discord bot goes live, connecting player Discord accounts to the game server and enabling a new layer of community interaction and server tooling.
Discord Bot — Major Revision
In the window between graduating college and starting his first full-time job, Jeremiah rebuilt and significantly expanded the Discord bot. New commands, tighter integrations, and a much more robust architecture made this the definitive v2 of the bot.
Karrosh Kasino Opens
A fully custom in-game casino — designed by longtime community member Karrosh and coded by Bomb — is added to the server. Named the Karrosh Kasino to honour years of friendship, loyalty, and support.
Player Web Portal Launches
The Professionals Playground Player Web Portal goes live, giving every player browser-based access to their stats, base, garage, leaderboards, shop, bounty board, and more. Combined with ongoing Discord bot improvements, it's now easier than ever to run and engage with the server without needing admins watching at all times.
Why No Admins?
Over the years, we've had several admins on the server. Some were great — but others abused their access, made decisions that hurt the community, or simply couldn't be trusted with the tools they were given. Each time it happened, it eroded player trust and created more problems than it solved.
As the player base has naturally shrunk with the age of the game, the need for a full admin team has diminished too. With the new Discord bot and web app, Jeremiah can monitor for cheaters and dupers, review logs, take moderation action, and generally run the server more effectively without needing anyone else to be watching at all times.
The result: a fairer, more consistent server experience for everyone. No admin abuse. No exceptions.
Philosophy
Professionals Playground has always been about one thing: a well-made, honestly-run server. No pay-to-win mechanics. No shortcuts. Just a carefully crafted survival experience built from scratch by someone who loves the game.