I'm absolutely delighted at your efforts to fix this and engage the community openly, My thanks, and by proxy everyone who plays with me, greatly appreciate your awesome work on this key mod.

Unfortunately no. Just literally now updated a client and server and I get the same response although at least my profile loads with the splash in the top right now.
Still investigating.

OK, i changed mission name and this stopped the hanging, so there must have been a corrupt save. I still can't get the server to save and restore. Ive literally never had it working right. Troubleshoioting is hard because I don;t even know what the desired effect is. I also cannot get Alive markers in this verison working.

Honestly, I'll try that. I tend to wonder about all the other configuraitons on the deidcated server and the impacts of soemthing not being right, but if im playing and Alive is working for most obvious things I guess it has to be right. Will report back.

Hang on, my commandline was trying out the "-servermod @aliveserver"; and i cant get that to work.

OK, no, I cannot get the server to restore, it appears to save, but when it restarts, it goes back to the start of the mission. Its a different behaviour from before. The side effect is that when it resets, it also resets player persistence. Player persistence only works in session, but it does work, although it duplicated my avatar as an AI and left it standing there.

respawnOnStart = -1;
respawn = 3;
enableTeamSwitch = 0;
respawnTemplates[] = {"MenuPosition"};
respawnButton = 1;

FWIW, the first demo mission I downloaded (operation Landlord) has RespawnOnStart = 0 so i dunno how these all test out OK, my understanding is that the respawn setting -1 is needed else player persistance isnt noticed because the unit respawns after death by runnign respawn script. Also not sure what player persistance/respawn has to do with the server not picking up its persistence on load...

Can you send me a setup that works for persistence with a config/modset so i can break this down into the simplest form for testing?

@SpyderBlack723 Yes:

@thebgpikester Player persistence only works in session, but it does work, although it duplicated my avatar as an AI and left it standing there.

@Tupolov @Tupolov Try Quick Start mission, as that defo works.

I'm being stupid, but what quick start mission? I downloaded the demo ALiVE missions, is there something else I should try? Do you mean create a misison based on the quickstart tutorial here: http://alivemod.com/wiki/index.php/Quickstart

@SavageCDN will give that a go, will be tomorrow before I can test.

...

I'm going to assume i'm being stupid again. But I think you've assumed i'm running a client.

How do you get to the PBO of a mission that's embedded into the pbo of your mod? Your quickstart is available as SHOWCASE from the Arma3 UI. I'm running a dedicated server from a commandline. I need to write the mission name to server config and have it in the MP folder for it to be able to be tested on the dedicated server, I don't have access to a UI and there is no point in trying to test on a hybrid or fat client if i'm reporting an issue with a dedicated server.

Are you guys not testing the software on dedicated servers?