Please leave feed back, stories or videos about the event here!
Interesting concept, execution less so.
Looking forward to a return of more military ops without a special twist in the future.
Technical difficulties aside, a fun mission, love the concept. Lots to do for me the medic:) Only part I wasn’t fond of was the "vote" to potentially cancel the mission, won’t go into detail as it was discussed in debriefing.
So, this mission
First off all, I think it is very cheap to just say that leadership was bad this mission. While it is of course easy to say so, this is not true.
Secondly, I did ask whether everybody wanted to continue after the PLT wipe because it is something we have done in the past after 1,5 hrs and then a platoon wipe because I was hearing people say they didn’t want to continue. It seemed like the right thing to do in order to gauge everyone’s attitude. I will not apologise for this, I would do it again.
The good:
This mission was something very different with many potentially good ideas.
The bad:
The gear removal script:
This is something that I find very strange, why didn’t you just create a custom faction? I know that the process to do so is more tiresome than writing a script but you are also circumnavigating every barrier we put up to ensure good quality. saying that this faction with TFN would be a far stretch.
This script then caused issues throughout the mission, we were even lucky that one part of the script didn’t perform as expected!
The task-system:
While potentially interesting it barely worked. I saw the pop-up "clear the town" come up at least 10 times during the mission, the dialogue was also haphazard and appeared at random
Having us need to loot:
This caused way more harm than good, people turn into loot goblins at the first chance of this. They will run off without being told and become tiresome to control
No radios:
This added into the whole "difficult to control thing" people are now also unreachable when they are more than 5 meters away. The radios that were looted than also disappeared often due to the missing script.
Each of these issues are minor at most, but they all make leading and managing a group hard, this is why we saw 2/3 leaders disconnect during this mission.
What would I do if I were to run this?
- Use a custom faction to get a "civvie" faction
- Forbid players from looting but provide caches at point on the map for them to find which includes the gear needed, including radios and weapons etc.
- Not use the task system but instead use remote control on the unit that needed to speak and roleplay
Overall I think that this mission was hectic but not really in the right way, the issues caused a lot of problems which then causes major problems to lead. Also the players weren’t always holding up to standard, for example:
the first reinsert arrived in three waves which is not normal when the platoon is one position.
People just ran off whenever they wanted
People didn’t respond to orders or listen to information
First off all, I think it is very cheap to just say that leadership was bad this mission.
Not sure if previous was directed at me or others. Just wanted to make clear I personally had no problem with leadership this mission. Im sure it was a frustrating task and you guys did very well in my opinion… Damn Civs 
First off all, I think it is very cheap to just say that the mission was bad. While this is of course easy to say so, this is not true. It was different and had 1 fundamental error that was mission breaking. Everything else should by no means be breaking the mission or make people disregard the way we normally play. More details on why I believe so below.
-
I am learning to script
I want to say this was a mission to start with me learning the MP scripting of ARMA. I learned that an init is per player that joins and I should have renamed it to initserver. That would have fixed the task issue and the replacement issue. 2 of your concerns raised. -
People breaking emergion/fun for others
A lot of people did have fun. The ones who did not like this idea left the server. I would advise everyone that ever in a mission does not have fun to leave the server instead of ruining it for others. Instead of asking if people want to stop you can also just leave and join a table if you want to play anything else. Other people might join or might not, but do not purposely spoil other peoples fun. Whether that is by asking to stop the mission or by playing like a idiot on purpose because this mission or any mission is not our usual setting. Which brings me to my 3rd point. -
Mission is different then your normal attack, defence or drive to A? All rules go out the window!
Stop behaving like we are playing on a public arma server and you are new to the game, arma tactics and the CNTO. The amount of people I have seen that disregard everything we stand for is insane. I saw multiple people lone wolfing objectives, I saw people not covering sectors, I saw leaders not marking anything on the map or making plans, I saw people prioritize looting over covering or shooting while under fire, I saw people not helping people who are down to loot instead. Watching a lot of you guys play this OP actually made me mad and stand still and think about what the community as a whole is. Because it sure looked like a bunch of headless chicken. We all have 100s of hours into this game and we have played together for 100s of hours yet on this OP everyone did whatever the heck they wanted.
To quote Churizo here:
- Leading 101, making plans.
I mentioned during the debrief that I was disappointed in the leaders. It is easy to blame others of course. But I want someone to give me one example of a plan that was marked on the map and discussed with our elements. Standard 101 leadership. I understand not everyone is a leader or has qualification. But we did have at least 3 trainers on the ground who can, at any point step in if they feel something is not up to par. Very disappointing that none did and that you and others did not have fun. Here is the first thing in our training documentation on the subject on Leading.
- 1. Communications.
- 2. Map Tactics.
- 3. Squad Tactics.
Now I understand the beginning was hard because we did not have our task until we found weapons. After that I felt like it was every squad on it’s own. One squad completely ignored the objective to clear the town and walked out of town while the medic of the other squad joins them. The other squad in the meantime clears the town.
While assaulting the coms tower again, we have no plan on the map. As soon as the first shots landed a squad did some sort of rush towards a gas station while blowing up a perfectly fine vehicle. While on the hill and restarting the generator instead of waiting for reinforcements while drawing up a plan it is decided to just drive in straight towards the chopper and disregard everything, and on top of that also not wait for reinforcements even after me saying they were on route. You left them for dead. That also was the first reinsert which was 3 men strong. And they all arrived at the same time. I guess that was missed by everyone since you say they arrived in 3 waves. Which is not true. It was an order by platoon to move away from the great overwatch position you had, instead of waiting for reinserts to arrive as was ordered by HQ.
- Concept is cool, but I disliked the concept.
You say that you like the concept, the same as many others. But then the next thing you say is you dislike the mission.
So what exactly did you like? Playing as civis? The setting? The idea behind it?
I see people looting crap every mission of off dead enemies so I thought I would make a mission so you would actually have to do it. If you did not like this, then please tell every idiot that loots random shit during our regular OPs to stop as well. Also tell me what you liked and what you did not like so I can use this in the future.
-
Scripting sucks balls in arma for MP.
Testing my mission for 3 days straight was a very taxing and a very non rewarding process. Alone you can not test a lot of things, I asked for help on our discord multiple times on multiple things and I had one person help me. I am very proud that I was able to figure out all of this scripting on my own and I will continue to do so. But let’s be clear. Scripting in ARMA fucking sucks. It’s incredibly hard. It never works on our server even though it works on other servers. But without scripting you can do so much less. I am tired of having the standard attack and defense missions. It’s too easy to create, it’s too easy to execute unless there is a gimmick. I think every MM can attest on this. I do know that a lot of people like the basic missions. I just feel like a random mission generator can do the same as MM’s on this. I wanted to try and script things that we normally do by hand. Just to learn. Now that I know some things just don’t work or can cause issues that can be easily fixed by using normal methods I will no longer use scripts for them (it saves me shit tons of work anyway). -
What would I do if I were to rerun this?
- Change the gear not using a script but instead just using the ace arsenal.
- Remove the task system, instead use markers for objectives 1 to 6.
- Punish people who behave like cocks.
- Make us not fight CSAT but something unarmored instead.
In short, I do blame leadership because there was none. Yes the mission had it’s flaws as stated above but this mission could have been an easy success and I believe even an easy leader mission. However, since quite a few people did not listen to orders or just did whatever, whenever they wanted. It became a very hard mission to lead. This was not because of the mission in any sense. I hope people can behave in the future and otherwise people can ask them to behave. If you have issues with asking people to do this then please notify me or any other SSGT to have a chat with said person.
If anyone has a big mouth then also send me a PM and I will chat with said person. I feel people in general, including the CNTO, have become way less receptive for feedback and criticism. Can we just be nice and appreciate what people do and the fact that they try? That would be great.
PS. I do not mean to hurt any feelings with this reply. I am giving my side of the story here to tell you what I saw from a zeus perspective. If I did hurt your feelings then let me know. I am not trying to blame anyone for messing up this mission. There are loads of small things that came together to make it the chaos that it was.
I had great fun in the first hour of the op, the second part I was unconscious a lot due to unluck and some mistakes on my part (mainly underestimating enemy accuracy with NVG’s at dark).
The problem with the op was not that we had to loot. This was an interesting mechanic where you have to balance exposing yourself with the reward of more equipment/supplies. Alpha 1 was doing this very well in the first half hour. We were always covering each other and different sectors and only went looting 1-2 people max. This all fell apart a bit after all the medical gear got deleted, which meant we no longer had enough supplies to bandage ourselves and downed teammates. As a result, we had to keep scavenging further out to try to find a couple bandages to prevent downed players bleeding out. Since some of our members were down we also no longer were able to cover effectively at this point. Maybe this is what [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3602631/avatar/small.1411590107.jpeg” name=“Shiny”]3602631[/user] refers to when he says people were looting over helping downed friendlies? Idk, but I never saw any of us hoarding - we literally needed every bandage we could find to treat people. In this we were actually successful, since until the moment we pushed up the coastal road along the cliff we lost nobody.
The script deleting looted radios did create a problem with communications with leadership, it meant I was never really in the loop of what was happening, or where we were going exactly (beyond clearing this "general area"). This is something map markers could have helped with, however I myself also forgot to use them - also since this mission felt more like the WW2 ones recently, where you couldn’t share map markers over distance it didn’t even occur to me.
[quote user_id=“3749902” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3749902/avatar/medium.1500023987.jpeg” name=“Churizo”]
Secondly, I did ask whether everybody wanted to continue after the PLT wipe because it is something we have done in the past after 1,5 hrs and then a platoon wipe because I was hearing people say they didn’t want to continue. It seemed like the right thing to do in order to gauge everyone’s attitude. I will not apologise for this, I would do it again. [/quote]
Please don’t, nothing kills the mood more than asking people to quit mid-op. Yes in the past this has happened, but not 1.5 hrs in. In my experience it only happened for the 22:00 (2 hour) reinsert on Tuesday or past 22:30 on Friday (2.5 hrs in), never after only 1.5 hrs. Even in those cases I didn’t really like it, but at least then you have had pretty much time to play a full op - here I died at 21:07 after an hour’s worth of play. If people then show up for emergency reinsert 20 minutes later when they wipe and call for mission end it really just kills it…
In the first town I think leadership was fine, unfortunately after Alpha lead left nobody really picked up that role. One of the main difficulties with COC this op was that during character select I was under the impression that roles really didn’t matter - as a results, the COC from roles then also wouldn’t matter. If you are roleplaying civilians, or even army people on holiday I would not expect the same COC as in an on-duty military unit. This was kind of the playstyle Alpha 1 picked up - where we decided together a good way to go, rather than following classic COC with a clear person in command. Also, since we often had no comms with other elements due to us not having radios or them being on other radio channels than channel 1 we did what we could with the information we had. Which worked well in town, and decent when pushing to the comms tower (we ran out of medical here).
[quote user_id=“3602631” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3602631/avatar/medium.1411590107.jpeg” name=“Shiny”]
4. Leading 101, making plans.
I mentioned during the debrief that I was disappointed in the leaders. It is easy to blame others of course. But I want someone to give me one example of a plan that was marked on the map and discussed with our elements. Standard 101 leadership. I understand not everyone is a leader or has qualification. But we did have at least 3 trainers on the ground who can, at any point step in if they feel something is not up to par. Very disappointing that none did and that you and others did not have fun. Here is the first thing in our training documentation on the subject on Leading.
- 1. Communications.
- 2. Map Tactics.
- 3. Squad Tactics.
Now I understand the beginning was hard because we did not have our task until we found weapons. After that I felt like it was every squad on it’s own. One squad completely ignored the objective to clear the town and walked out of town while the medic of the other squad joins them. The other squad in the meantime clears the town.
While assaulting the coms tower again, we have no plan on the map. As soon as the first shots landed a squad did some sort of rush towards a gas station while blowing up a perfectly fine vehicle. While on the hill and restarting the generator instead of waiting for reinforcements while drawing up a plan it is decided to just drive in straight towards the chopper and disregard everything, and on top of that also not wait for reinforcements even after me saying they were on route. You left them for dead. That also was the first reinsert which was 3 men strong. And they all arrived at the same time. I guess that was missed by everyone since you say they arrived in 3 waves. Which is not true. It was an order by platoon to move away from the great overwatch position you had, instead of waiting for reinserts to arrive as was ordered by HQ. [/quote]
While my leading was by no point stellar I would just like to say that we did plan things out. I divided the town between alpha and bravo on the map, and bravo did not run off on their own. They went towards the military range just outside of town to find better equipment, only to find it empty as heck. Why Alpha medic was with them I could not tell you though.
We also made a plan to attack the comms tower, with a plan on the map and everything. So I don’t know where you were as zeus but clearly you missed us actually trying to plan things. Churizo gave me good tips and pointers on how to best attack it but it all went to shit with squads having to cluster together to keep orders flowing without any radios and then subsequently dying because they were easy targets for AI.
Also "orders" from HQ were hardly orders. There was no HQ since we were on "holiday", there were no radios, and everything else you steam messaged me for. So since we’re talking about breaking immersion, that should be on there as well. Including waiting for a chopper to pick us up that just got shot down. So after it got shot down I sat down with the SLs and we decided to make a push for the airbase.
I will say that as PLT lead I shouldn’t have rage quit but I don’t play ArmA for novelty missions, I play it for its military simulation qualities. None of which are ever upheld in looting missions, no matter what community you are in. I’ve seen these missions tried in 3 other communities and it always goes to shit, even without a bug that removes radios and makes communication impossible unless we all inhabit the same 10 square meter zone.
Its a shame, but while I was there I was definitely making plans and giving squads their obj’s and zones to cover so I don’t know where this criticism comes from. I know that others could have made a better job of it but to say that we did nothing of the sort is not the truth.
On another note, I appreciate how shitty it must be to try and figure out some obscure scripts for three days straight only for the script to backfire on the server. So thank you for giving it a shot, and despite all this I hope you don’t get discouraged from playing with scripts in general.
That being said, whenever you can avoid scripting something such as gear and do it through the editor instead, I recommend the editor instead.
Overall I think this mission was a good learning opportunity for you and the community I think. We should use it as such.