First impressions

General Discussions
1

Hi guys, I’m new to this community and after my first mission with you (Podagorsk Corps) I would like to share my impressions.

First of all - I would like to swiftly introduce myself - I’m 21y old student from Poland, interested in whole variety of different things, from first aid, through gaming, airsoft, to paragliding etc. I’m a creator of Empire of Gamers community (http://www.empireofgamers.com), co-creator of NUclear.outsiDE ArmA3 community and its Polish Altis Life and International Epoch servers, to which I invite you (http://nuclear-community.enjin.com/), and was for few weeks a member of 1stPB ArmA3 tactical group (http://www.1st-parachute-brigade.co.uk/index.php), where I learned some basics and got interested into some serious tactical operations. The group disbanded and I found Carpe, where I settled now :slight_smile:

Now to the impressions:
My previous group was stylized after british army, and I thought they are organised. When I saw todays operation suddenly previous experience with tactical play seemed like a bunch of children playing with plastic soldiers in kindergarten.

I really love the way you communicate, organise, move, command etc, even thou you do not have a "proper" role/rank system like most of groups out there. It’s a blast seeing coordinated movement of multiple units and spending time just on transportation and manouvers, which adds to immersion big time.

I’d like to give great kudos to Clarke for being a great squad leader. He was very informative, helpful and confident about what action to take.

There were complaints about communication and formations, well I still have to read the Dyslexi’s guide and I thought I could rely on my knowledge, but the differences seem to be too big (single file, staggered file, double file, 360, line and fishbone were the only ones I knew). So I guess I just added to the chaos at some points, yet I am eager to learn, so next time I’ll be prepared. It would be nice if you had some sort of bootcamp to verify the practical knowledge of recruits and teach them the basics, correct errors. I know there are trainings, but they generaly cover 1 topic extensively, while single training for recruits explaining controls, popular formations, communication and mechanics would reduce the problem by 60-80%. The proficiency will come with deployments and specialized trainings, but the basics help alot to fit in.

Lastly, I’d like to excuse my hotmicing and bad comms - can’t wear headphones till next week because of ear operation I had, and thank you all for great, immersive and fun experiance. I feel exhausted as if I really was there ;), yet happy and hungry for more.

Hi again, and warm cheers!

2

[justify]Heyo Abuk,

I am very impressed with this post, not just because of the kind words adressed to me. :LOL: Something I value and respect highly in people is the ability to self reflect and re evaluate ones position. Ryujin and I had a meeting post op to accurately identify when, how and why communications broke down during some moments of the mission. This is something we do on a regular basis and even if these discussions can sometimes be quite long or even heated it always serves the purpose of self improvement and making this community as polished as possible. We are both very passionate about this project. Carpe Noctem never expects absolute perfection from our members, but what we do want to see is members (including the officers) reflecting on mistakes and striving to become better at what we do for the sake of everyones enjoyment. I think with this post you definitely showed that you are a great fit for this community, keep it up!

The bootcamp for Recruits idea was heavily under review during the conceptional phase of this community and we ended up deciding against it. There were three options at hand:[/justify]

  1. Offer regular or on demand bootcamp for Recruits, but letting them join operations right away.
  2. Offer regualr or on demand bootcamp for Recruits, preventing them to join any operation until they completed it.
  3. Shift burden of bootcamp onto the Recruits by relying on mature members to do their own base reading / video watching from our documentation then contacting their JrNCO if they have questions - weeding out "problem" members who do not do so after a couple of operations.

[justify]The reason why we went with option three is our experience as high ranking officers in a previous community where it was always a huge workload to conduct Recruit bootcamps. Simply hopping onto the server with one trainer and one Recruit (or maybe two / three) is very ineffective since you can’t properly train full fledged fire team formations, radio comms and tactics such as bounding etc. You need a minimum of six people, four of them experienced, to teach these methods in an environment that is close to what we actually use in the field. Considering that the drop out rate of Recruits for any Arma community is usually 50% and above this really generates a situation where the work input does not merrit the benefits. In the future when we grow to a larger player base with regular 25-30 people on each event (that will probably require around 50-60 members total) we’ll reconsider making a bootcamp mandatory since we’ll have more JrNCOs and NCOs to spread the work load around a bit. Currently we offer four training per month, all of them always have one main lesson and two/three smaller sub lessons that are added in a modular fashion from our own training SOPs. The sub lessons usually adress things we noticed in the previous week that need some retraining.

Btw I took an hour to look through the EoG website and forums, an interesting environment that you created there. If you got some ideas in the future to improve the CNTO on a community level feel free to send a PM to Ryujin, Shiny and me. We’ll review it in one of our monthly NCO meetings.[/justify]

3

What this guy said up there ^^^^

I’d like to point another major reason why we opted not to have bootcamp trainings; We don’t know what you know or don’t know. Meaning, we can create a curriculum for bootcamp, but you never get people with same knowledge. You might get a guy who knows most of the stuff you’d teach them, but at the same time you might get a guy who doesn’t know how to use basic Arma mechanics. So you have logistical nightmare as well as just nightmare of creating the curriculum itself (how basic or how advanced should you go?).

P.S. I’ve had situations where on same training session I had a guy who didn’t know how do adjust his stance and a guy who in next two events was leading a fireteam. Neither of them were much happy with that session, and it was very straining on me as well.

4

I was making a reply for 15 mins and misclicked, which erased whole text… infuriating :stuck_out_tongue:
So in short:

  • Bootcamp: interesting approach, which I will investigate and experiance
  • Read article about undercover journalist in ShackTac, it shined some light and inspired me
  • Thanks for checking on EoG, forums dead, teamspeak is its core for now

You can find me (use freely and have fun) here:
EoG:
teamspeak: ts3.empireofgamers.com
NuDe:
teamspeak: 92.222.181.189
Epoch: 62.61.41.74 port: 2322
AltisLife(polish,scripted,customized): 62.61.41.74 port: 2302

5

Very impressive! I’m looking forward to see what else you cook up, Abuk. With an attitude like yours, and the personality to match, I can only anticipate good things from you. You’re only confirming the good impression I got during the mod check up.

I’m looking forward to playing with you on the field.

6

The exact same thing happened to me when I was right at the end of my first post in this thread at 4am. Was like "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" Flipped the table and went to bed.

7

Thread moved to the newly created Community Introductions.

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