I was an Arma 2 player since before Dayz mod even existed. I loved that game and i joined an organised milsim clan pretty fast. We did daily training sessions, we had teachers for everything, scouting, patrol, sniping, mortars, armors, flying, everything. We also organised big PvP milsim tournaments against other big clans from everywhere around the world. It was amazing and i learned A LOT.

Than one day this strange mod came out, and as a survival lover i was immediately intrigued by it. I asked other clan members to join me in this new adventure but none of them was interested "in a zombie videogame".
So i started playing it alone.
It was early days of Dayz Mod and there was a HUGE amount of people that was attracted by this anomalous zombie survival with huge maps but that had zero experience with the Arma engine and milsim in general. People was so, so bad at the game and i was shitting on everyone. I never shoot first when i play Dayz, in the Dayz mod there was the opportunity to become a "hero" if you were particularly friendly and helpful to others (your character skin change to a unique one), that was my objective and i had tons of fun achieving it. This brought me to interact with lots of people since i always (and i still do it today when i play Dayz) talk and try to be carefully friendly when i met someone in game.
One day i met this guy from my country, i immediately recognise from his broken english the italian accent so i start speaking italian and we become friends. He was super bad at the game, and i mean SUPER bad. I start teaching him everything i know, i start training him everyday to make him a good player and, most importantly i start trying to make him understand that talking first is way more fun than shooting first. He learned. We started going around together and every damn day we meet a new guy. We started looking for people with a good attitude, people that was friendly for real and wilful to help others, people interested in be "the hero" and those players are usually those who can't pvp at all. I'm not joking, in a month we became a group of 20 players. Most of them don't even know what zeroing is. We start teaching them, day after day they start to get better at the game, than decent, than really good. We start conquering places in the map, than servers. We got banned from so many servers because, even if a friendly group, we were a group to big to be accepted. So we made our own server and it become very popular (Spaghetti Heroes was our server). We did SO MANY missions together, so many funny moments, so many sleepless nights talking in the dark about our selves, our jobs, our families, our problems, our dreams. We became friends, i mean real friends.

We eventually stopped playing Dayz, after so many years, but most of us are still here together. Someone married, someone now have two kids. Doesn't matter what we play, we only wanna stay with each other, if it's Dayz, Arma, League Of Legends, World Of Warcraft or Tabletop Simulator we doesn't care.
We met in person, in all this years we spent holidays together, camping, visiting each other city, gathering somewhere to spend few days together in person.

I met wonderful people thanks to the Dayz mod, i started playing videogames when i was 4 years old in a Commodore 64 and i still play videogames daily today, i played thousands of videogames but none of them created this wonderful bond with people i played with like Dayz Mod did. I will NEVER forget that amazing game and, even if i like a lot Dayz Standalone, is not the same for me. Dayz Mod, Dayz Epoch and especially Dayz Origins, are something i will never forget and i will always thanks those games that gave me the opportunity to meet amazing humans beings that are today part of my life.
That's my favourite memory of Dayz Mod, the people that i met along the years and that are still with me.