Arma 3 co-op with a Zeus at it’s purest form is DnD with a military theme. This would make it a roleplaying game. I have recently noticed, as i’m sure others have as well, that that aspect is becoming a bit lost to us. Arma is janky game, as we all know. But that doesn’t mean every little bug or issue has to break immersion. We’re all here because we want to play soldier-man, but straight up saying stuff like "Oh, i got Zeus-healed", "Zeus spawned some enemies" or "My vehicle Arma’d" is immersion-breaking. After talking about it with some other members i’ve found others share this opinion, so it would be nice if we could pay some more attention to it.
Some examples:
"I got Zeus healed" -> "Armour caught the round"
"Zeus spawned enemies" -> "Enemy reinforcements at that building!"
"My vehicle got Arma’d" -> "Engine failure (?)"
Not trying to talk shit or take shots here, just making a suggestion.
Altough I agree a 100% with what you said and would love to see that players pay a bit more attention to the roleplaying aspect, sometimes you simply cannot avoid stating the "facts". For example, if I play as a PLT lead and DGR gets flipped because of ARMA jankyness, I need to know that it was ARMA that messed things up and not the driver of the vehicle so can ask for some help from PLT. Otherwise, I might get unnecessarily pissed off at the DGR driver and blame him for losing a crucial vehicle.
Fortunately, situations like the one described above is on the rarer side and in all other situations I would like if we see more roleplaying. Thanks for bringing this one up, [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/19944121/avatar/small.1626508277.png” name=“Shadisica”]19944121[/user] .
I agree completely, I do enjoy RP more than I do winning, and it always it takes me out of the experience to hear people saying "oh zeus just did that" to every single thing.
Big ramble incoming:
I don’t have a problem with people talking about getting ArmA’d to be honest, it’s a part of the game and a part of the world we pretend to inhabit :LOL:.
It’s the fourth wall breaking of mentioning zeus all the time that I don’t enjoy, "oh I just got Zeus healed", "oh just get HQ to magically repair our broken vehicle", "get zeus to teleport x over here". That annoys me. We should always pretend the shit we’re in is real, in my opinion. It doesn’t stop you from having a laugh or enjoying yourself but just get in character!
Another thing I’ve noticed on a similar thread is that as a GM, is that there is a tendency to call into "HQ" about everything, like HQ Is your babysitter, anyone who has had me as GM knows that my response is usually me roleplaying a guy in a back office saying "I don’t know what you expect me to do about it."
I don’t think HQ should really "support" players at all to be honest - the most I ever do is heal the odd player if a total wipe is on the horizon or I think they got BS’d
I think players take the game less seriously when the Zeus constantly:
Just spawns or teleport resources to the group.
Spawns or teleports players right into the centre of the group, at which point the player shouts "I GOT TELEPORTED IN!"
Fixes every fuckup from players. IMO if you flip it, tough, you break it, tough. I ain’t fixing it, and at most I’ll wait for some "engineers" to drive in from base to fix it. DAGR gets their tank blown up, a lot of Zeus just gives them another one but nah tough you’re down a resource. Let players make their own mistakes and learn from it
Fourth wall breaking from the GM themself. I hate that.
People will take the game as seriously as they infer from leadership, and that takes me out of it. A GM that tinkers with the player experience constantly will cultivate players who expect their experience to be tinkered with and talk about amongst themselves.
I love your suggestions Shadisica and it always bugs me when I am zeus, that people say: Shiny did that, Shiny healed this or Shiny destroyed that. Feels to fake for me to stick to making an immersive in depth universe for you all to play in.
I feel like getting "Arma’d" and being able to talk about it is an integral part of Arma culture, and shouldn’t be restricted. To me it’s a term that has at least some endearing quality to it. Not sure if this is where it originated, but back in Arma 2 your legs would often get broken through interaction with the environment and you’d need a medic in order to do anything other than crawl on the ground. It was often a comical sight and so usually when I hear that term, I see the vision of somebody crawling on the ground yelling for a medic.
I imagine this is a sensitive topic, and I shouldn’t bring it up with only 2 missions worth of experience, but I’m seeing the opportunity to do it now. I don’t tend to deal with those situations well: The missions have been over twice as long as what I’m used to. It seems as though it’s always one mission per session and so they naturally need to be lengthier than if there were multiple. This has its positive effects such as only needing to brief/debrief once and giving a mission maker more time to shine for their efforts, but I think it also has negative effects such as missions taking on a meandering feeling and the ultimate goal of the mission becoming clouded through too many firefights outside of the scope of the objective.
Either way I think less grand missions would mitigate some of these immersion-breaking elements naturally such as requiring less reinserts and less reliance on Zeus for logistics (and more potty breaks). I understand if this idea is too disruptive to the overall structure of how things are done in the larger view. This is just my view.
[user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/20513773/avatar/small.1610532818.png” name=“Cday”]20513773[/user] There is precedence of running two missions in one night instead of one, especially if one of them is a one life mission. I personally joined the unit with the mindset of creating two per night whenever I would book a mission slot but the fact that I have to write up an OPORD for both of them has made me lazy and now I only do one per night…
[user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/19944121/avatar/small.1626508277.png” name=“Shadisica”]19944121[/user] Good post overall. I am very guilty of metagaming a lot. Half of my 1700 hours in arma are in the editor so its always obvious whenever zeus does something to change the situation on the ground as opposed to it being part of the mission. That doesn’t mean I should call it out and ruin immersion for others so I’ll work on that from now on.
For most id agree but for zeus heal especially its vital information for both the medic and squad leader to know that a full heal has been applied. and if we transitioned to saying "the armour stopped that one" it would lead to both wasted medic time and the fireteam/squad leaders to have misleading information about their elements health.
I completely with the sentiment, but sometimes it is very hard.
For example, last Friday Churizo and Hateboarder got completely wrecked by the King Tiger. In 7 minutes of constant medicing, I together with a lot of help from Anarchy and Quantum managed to stabilize and recover them both to a point where I could’ve woken them within the next minute (blood was almost good again), only to see them both stand up with all wounds gone. At the time then it does feel like all the effort is for naught then, provoking the response "I took all the effort to heal you guys and then Zeus takes my…"
That is not a criticism of Zeus, because without the heals we got there we would’ve wiped several times over to the Tigers or the FLAK in that town (MAT would’ve been dead and we wouldn’t have been able to kill the 2nd Tiger at all). It’s just that sometimes spontaneous responses to a unexpected event aren’t always going to be in character. To that end, I agree with Seb in that minimising the intervention from Zeus in the first place (where possible) is the best solution.
I do think that "being Arma’d" to me is not really fourth wall breaking. I see it more as a glitch of physics in the universe we inhabit than anything else, and we all learn to live with it (mostly).
In any case I’ll also try to improve things from my side and manage my responses better. I think (after playing antistasi) a better way of referring to a Zeus heal is to mention getting PAK’ed, since personal aid kits are actually a part of the game and how the medical system works, even if we don’t apply them in our ops atm. It conveys the same information (which as also mentioned before is important), but keeps us in character.
I agree with Koffer. I think sometimes its important info that needs to be communicated (like being zeus healed, or a vehicle needing unflipping due to game bugginess rather than driver/crew incompetence) and the rest just needs to be zeus being more careful that their actions are unseen. You should very rarely (if ever) see troops spawned in in front of you, that’s immersion breaking in itself let alone someone calling it out and as for teleporting someone in maybe zeus should spawn them in 100m back from the lines and they can run forward rather than being teleported into the middle of friendlies (though admittedly when they get there they should refrain from saying "I got teleported" and maybe say they got driven up to the lines)
That brings up a good point in that you’d either need to make both missions yourself or coordinate with someone else to make multiple shorter missions for the same event. I wouldn’t mind doing that at some point.[/quote]
