Please leave all your feedback about the "Blue Night" event here. Images, videos, and stories are very appreciated!
[justify]Apart from all the technical, mostly ACRE, issues, it was a really good missions. As part of bravo we had a great tactical first half of the missions. Great movement, great communication and overall good performance. Story telling was also excellent with civilians coming up and informing us about things or intel left behind by the local terrorist. This intel first had to be translated by Argon before Bravo Lead of PL could make use of it. For me this was really cool and something i haven’t seen often. Thank you Arba for all the work you put into this op.[/justify]
[justify]After we, Bravo, cleared out the first town, we used the helicopter to move onto the next objective. Sadly, our rotor blade struck something and we went down. Argon scream for us to jump out of the door, so a couple of us did and Teddy, Argon and I survived touching the ground. Cinematically the helo went down behind us and a wall of flames rose up. The shockwave took Argon down, so that Teddy and I were the last people alive of Bravo. Luckily Freghar, Alphas medic, was close by, patched us up and thus saved our live.[/justify]
[justify]After the following radio breakdown, Bravos efficiency was severely harmed but this did not stop us having fun. There were multiple times where people were in tears from laughing too hard. Argon lost it in the helicopter after Teddy read out the following message from Tropical, who we lost to Alpha: "Day 1. I’ve been among Alpha for the past 5 minutes. They are savages. Sexual jokes are a routine for them. Everyone seems so different. I am scared. I pray for Bravo to find me. I’ve hid in a bush so they wouldn’t see me"[/justify]
Overall, this was a really enjoyable mission. I had a blast! Thank you guys!
That was an interesting mission and I’m gonna start from the negatives so we can get past it quickly.
-I really don’t like those missions where we go to one little tiny compound that can be cleared in 15 minutes with perfect teammates just to find out about another place like that where we again find out about yet another place like that and so on. I dislike that very much but that is probably just me.
-Bravo didn’t get to do much
On the good side
-I loved that we had to translate everything which was something I would never think of, really fun thing to implement.
-Really nice area, it was calming to just look around 
-I just love that we switched NVGs. With vanilla it’s like literally playing the same game, the very same thing as a day mission but everything is green. And the type of green that is tiring for my eyes. THIS! This actually makes night missions fun for me. Night missions are all about the difficulty of playing in darkness and this mod is just perfect for that. Before it was either flares&flashlight or just regular mission with everything green. It’s also nice how it actually reacts to amount of light there is. There was clear sky so it wasn’t complete garbage, you could see something in those googles and when the flares appeared it was easy to shoot with NV.
-That story of mine where because of these annoying issues with radios I ended up with Alpha
That whole thing with going from one place to another slowed us down immensely and we seriously have to work on our speed. Honestly this mission had so much chill moments, we could have finished the mission easily if we kept the right pace.
So enough about the mission, let’s get to the dirt.
People have to be respectful to eachother at all times. It’s one thing to say smth along the lines of "C’mon Bravo move your fucking asses, we gotta get moving" in the heat of the moment when your team doesn’t listen to you(or radios broke…) but it’s whole another thing to tell someone to shut the fuck up because they break your immersion while you wait for the chopper to take you home. We had a fallen soldier that was breaking immersion for people and now he’s dead but… when you wait for the chopper… I mean really… the mission is over, it’s time for our regular banter. I suppose it’s just the heat of the moment but just don’t say anything like this to people and actually mean it.
It’s also time to do something about the radios. it’s fucking unplayable and it keeps happening and I’ll do a brainstorming on that.
After the radios broke our formations went to utter shit and I think it would be also nice to maybe do like one or two missions where we have no radios(perhaps no markers?) to actually work on scenarios like that.
Thanks a lot for the mission Arab, it had some really good ideas (grabbing Intel to figure out where to go next and having to translate, starting in day light and finishing in pitch black darkness) and represents a great amount of work.
I am a bit disappointed things went sideways so fast when radios broke down. I know we rely on them a lot but when something goes wrong, you must try to find solutions quickly to make the best of things and keep people involved in the mission. In this case, keeping squads closer together to maintain visual contact, use runners to relay orders if needed…
I hope most people still had fun and that we can take a few lessons out of this mission.
Thanks Highway, Mikoi and Churizo for leading with me and trying to keep things together throughout.
I’ve written a page of notes so I’ll share some of them.
Individual level:
- Be patient and don’t run around like bitten by a spider.
- Listen on briefings. A lot of times individuals didn’t understand the mission or their role as an element.
- Clear communications and speak only when needed. Too many people speaking at the same time makes a nightmare for squad leader.
- Contact reports - practice that. A lot of times they couldn’t be heard.
Squad level:
- Repeat the order when given by platoon leader if needed. Relay it at all times to your squad. Be sure to include the "why" because it helps soldiers focus on their role.
- Do not juggle your fireteams back and forth. If you are looking for a position to move your fireteams, visually inspect it yourself first if you’re unsure.
- If you get wounded and need medical attention that is blocking you from continuing the ongoing assault or maneuver, inform your squad, transfer leadership temporarily to one of your fireteam leaders. Being late to support the other squad’s effort is a dangerous thing.
- Fireteam leaders - maintain discipline of fireteam at all times.
There have been a lot of good things - briefing, drill rehearsals, squad briefings, overall it was satisfying though we can do better. Think the length of the mission took a toll on concentration levels so as a general feedback to mission makers - keep number of encounters to two per event (objectives) plus one extra in case players overachieve.
A a pilot it was very interesting in the beginning. I just had to fly in Alpha then Bravo and Platoon. Nothing special. I changed to the AH-6 and stayed low, in cover to not make the enemy aware of our presence. Platoon asked me to move a little bit further so i think i may be a little bit close. Did some more transports and switched a few times the Helo. Enough to do the whole time. I crashed at the second Objective, totally my mistake. I like the second objective, that steep hill down in the valley was beautiful to look at. The flying was a little bit harder since my ingress and egress possibilities run short whenever i tried to do attack runs.
At one point it just was too hard to fly for me. I still don’t know if someone else may have felt more confortable but at the LZ in the Compound i knew instantly i cannot garante a save landing. From this point on i was sweating for every maneuver, that no joke, my t-shirt was damp (maybe just a fever attack xD). It was a very hard moment to realize, there is pretty much only a flat big airfield where i will be able to land comfortably (where i in the end crashed my second helo).
It was a hell of experience and i will probably not signe up for pilot in another night-mission like this, without doing some training myself.
I still enjoyed the mission, for me it was too long but you know that i was sick, that changes a lot. Acre was a issue, but since reaper did not had a lot of communication going, it was ok. But this is really something we have to look into.
[youtube]quoLaJvQ6iE[/youtube]
Not much to say about this one.
Radio’s ruined it for me, shouting took it’s toll on my voice. I think ACRE should be removed asap and replaced by TFAR.
As far as actual gameplay I am very satisfied with my squad, when radio’s broke they kept passing on orders to eachother which allowed us to stay combat effective.
Overall I think it was a great mission that was cut short by technical issues.
I agree regarding acre. It’s bugged too much.
Sneaky Arba is sneaky:
[youtube]k2z9zLhwPjQ[/youtube]
[youtube]s6diSwcix9M[/youtube]
I have a few (positive) things to say so let’s get started.
Practicing peeling at the beginning turned out being useless for the mission but a very good refresh on basic drills, it’s something we used to do but eventually stopped. It is my opinion that we should keep doing it, good call Stuka!
When approaching the town of Pita Alpha was split and A1 was to move with Bravo and PLT Sgt. I didn’t understand the reason but it’s not my duty to and it’s fine. Overall that worked well enough but we need to remember to switch to a separate radio channel to improve coordination because that was an issue. The attack on the town itself went good from Alpha perspective and we did a great job.
On the second objective we had a hard time, under fire even before dropping out of the helicopter but slowly we managed to secure the area and cover our sectors (awesome job A1 on overwatching the pass).
After the radios stopped working Alpha still managed to be combat effective thanks to Lastmikoi doing a fantastic coordination job as SL, I really appreciate that. Briefing in the helicopter giving us instructions on what to do turned out to be more than enough to coordinate even without radios.
NVGs were challenging to say the least and while I disliked them before this configuration is too hard to play and we may want to improve their effectiveness ever so slightly. Great work Dulabu as Reaper!
Thanks Arba for the mission, I enjoyed it!
"He is friendly" Aha.
Anyway there was allot of communication problems (acre?). So that did take the fun away.
I did miss a little to shoot on stuff and the moving from Bravo was also really slow. So i think with faster moving this mission would be more fun…
The (new) nightvision makes it also hard to play the game for me last night:
We are walking up a hill, to the last compound to clear that out, this is the vision i got. I don’t fancy graphic card…
This is how the second Chopper crashed… if you still want to know xD
[youtube]T4h5dEyYGKE[/youtube]
I had feeling during the Op like the enemy is not resisting enough. I would assume that if the enemy get under attack so he try to somehow fight back.
If we do have overwhelming power above our opponents and enemy is holding some objects so there is a lack of surprise and danger for the players.
Missions where it is "attack and clean" and there is not enough enemies tend to be less adventurous. (on the other hand to clean houses against AI is very deadly)
To move somehow the AI on the map is sometimes very difficult as they are slow or they do not listen or they are even bugged and nothing can not be done. But the dynamic when the AI is unpredictable and can move is very interasting.
In this Op was problém with communication as I heard SQL Churizo only in 50% of time on my radio and it caused that teams were stuck or run forward too much not knowing about orders.
I did like that we had to use the flashlights and flares were greate too. The attack on the "last" objective was very atmospheric. :thumb: