Nicolai

Decent background music.

Signed up.

Thank you, organizers, excellent. Thank you fellow team members, you were hard-charged, while making use of your your experience in a laid-back fashion. I didn't need to do any corrections, explanations of basic things, nor to start micromanaging anything in the field. Thank you for the timely and well coordinated initiatives big and small, which were supporting the mission at the same time, the snappy comms, enjoyed being the FTL - couldn't be any better from my perspective.

Signed up!

You can use the item "Maglite XL50". You will find it in the "Virtual Arsenal". You find the "Virtual Arsenal" when starting up the game with all EU#3 mods, without joining a server right away.. in the "Learn" section.. This will lead you to a place, where you can work on your saved loadouts.. In any backpack under "Miscellaneous Items" you will find the "Maglite XL50" somewhere at the bottom. Once in your backpack you can use it on the self interaction while in the map to switch it on. Like this:

Well, browsing to the 2 TB of raw video material I recorded during the last days, I got more depressed than I was before. What came to my attention, what we need to look into, and what I didn't realize while in-game so much is about the 100/110/120: * on the 100, the A SL freq, there was almost constantly an enormous amount of chatter, which seems to mainly circulate around the question "how can I get me an my buddies to 500m distance to the enemy and on a roof and start EU1-ing from a static position?" - comms discipline was bad on that freq and I don't think good leaders can enjoy that for long (looking at Ryko), as it was not team oriented, but only oriented in "me me me" * at least in our team, where also vlk was in (see above), the radio discipline was good: the radio was used occasionally for combat specific comms We didn't harrass SL with constant suggestions on what to do next, what we would want and not want next. It was terse and how it should be. BACONMOP explained, probably for the 100th time, also in this thread, how it can work with the radio comms AND the moving of units. I'm happy about the 100/110/120 as well, as it enables me to use the radio at all, while being parked somewhere. So I'm happy about playing the game in a wrong way? Because then the game offers me some space to be right for me? This smells fishy to me. How can I be happy about playing the game in a wrong way? Let's face it: the situation, where you move in as two teams close, lead by SL, like told in the primers, is when things go good. As soon as things go awry or RPG gunners are around you, standing in voice distance is just like "dancing" formations in the field. You look at keeping a formation and forget looking for enemies. In the end result maybe a nice moving pattern to watch for CMD, still ends in death for the team. No questions asked, when the team gets blunt faced when asked to get into some formation, because the members don't know what that means, is depressing. It's just the same with the radio or all the other equipment used in the game.. when the players never use it, they don't know how to use it, when they actually need it. So a big part of the gameplay we have is also a training. We have in other spots these discussions about training, skill certification and that direction.. well it's not gonna happen.. staying casual.. so we have to live with players being incompetent at the start. Good with me, I've seen many players becoming highly apt in everything in only a few days of playing on that server, changing their behaviour a lot and becoming very strong and reliable battle buddies. Same I experienced with the radios, a few days into 100/110/120 and the people start actually being able to use their radio. Whooha. What we did wrong, from my perspective, in the past few days is not so much dividing the radio circuits, but to play a squad like it was a platoon, and to play the team as it was a squad. That aberration is not caused by the radio circuit division but highly fostered by it. So while being happy about 100/110/120, I'm unhappy about it at the same time. I've talked directly to my teammembers yesterday, and again teamlead and the AR guy as the two other and me were agreeing upon being bored for several AOs following up on each other, disbanding and disconnecting not because it was late, but because it was - while being a good team - just BORING to stand around doing nothing. It was just politeness we didn't mention it, yet. It's certainly an arbitrary assumption, but to me it seems like the radio freq division into 100/110/120 is abused by teamleaders being attention hungry, the SL giving up against that constant amount of nagging, resulting in moving the teams as if they were squads and reducing themselves to being radio prostitutes for the teams. As good as I like Rykos leadership, as sure I am that anyone having to deal with such behaviour will not enjoy it for long. As long as we need to continue like this.. I suggest we put more squad in our teams and more platoon in our squad, so that we can enjoy platooning while fireteaming and squadding while we're platooning. Everyone else maybe should get back to EU1 and continue to be a scrub.

Yeah, the AT4s.. I remember I carried mine around yesterday while I switched to A2 rifleman, until I grew significantly miffed about not having anything reasonable to do few hours after equipping it. Finally I took out a technical with it, just to see some fireworks and to get rid of the extra weight of the AT4 before disconnecting. Goes along with AR in A2 realizing he has no assistant.. and the following crying circus. My A2 AR loadout doesn't even have a backpack. Yesterday I was asked to carry belts for an A2 AR, who had a full carryall already and an AT4. Srsly? I've been experimenting with ligthing up my loadout and differing between night/load/twilight loadouts maybe a bit too much. Currently I'm thinking if I should probably try to go on sidearm only.. Right now, when I'm using no scope to get some less distance to the enemy for more adrenaline rush.. I notice other players and teamleads seem to prefer to use scopes and long range rifles. YES, long range rifle is something you use to shoot at enemies >400m away. Not that it's completely stupid to waste a mag on scatter for each enemy you take out from that distance, not that it's EU1 style, misplaced and simply boring to only setup the whole team bunched up on roofs, hills and hit away on enemies between 400 and 650m away from you. It's wrong from so many more perspectives. And boring to be anything except a point man. I remember it to be actually interesting and that there were no secondary roles before enemy count was reduced to almost nothing - when an ambush from behind was not just a fantasy. I want the high difficulty due to high number of enemies back we had on 16th of Sept. This would help because those guys who break the game for me currently wouldn't even have a chance to get to the AO in one piece because of their negligence. It would create a bit more pressure on them to ask the more experienced players on how to proceed with a mission, after they have tried it a few times on their own. Right now, everyone seems to be maximizing loadout weight, just to die early in the field and respawn.. And I would also like seeing teams leaving people back at base again, who finally do not manage to get a loadout and radio setup in less than five minutes. Right now, when it is considered to be lonewolfing when moving 5m away from the team, even for addressing issues in direct talk, it's not possible for me to participate in any discussions, dialogue or help for others in the field, because when everyone talks at the same time in the same spot, nothing is going to happen. So I keep my mouth shut and try to be the sluggard you want me to be: showing no initiative, waiting for orders and rule picking at every occasion I find.

> One thing I'd like to add we need to stop wondering around medic and injured person and looking what is going on around them. If medic > is present and he didn't ask for your help, go watch that corner where enemies are coming from. Yes we are still doing that. Being Platoon Medic and Logistics Medic yesterday, I can say without a single doubt of bad memory: I wasn't called in a _single_ time in several hours of gameplay. But I was scolded at several times, because I wore a TAR EGLM, as it was against the rules - it was filled with purple smoke grenades. People what has become of you? I currently enjoy playing cards with grandma more.. it's more entertaining, it's more of an adventure.. because I don't know the cards I'll be dealt. And when grandma is cheating by looking at my cards, while I fill up cookies and tea in the kitchen, it's still a challenge, because I still don't know how the game will unfold. I want back the CHALLENGE!

IR strobes and IR grenades: Last time I checked it, before the large RHS and etc. update yesterday, the IR strobes ran out of power after a short while, what also made them undetachable with a requirement to relog. Also it was bugged, when taking some posture, the IR strobe would disappear early, even earlier than the event of it running out of power. With no difference to the IR grenades in this. The bugs made the IR strobe a pain to use.. as it was practically a single, time limited use. I still have some of them in some loadouts (for the team, those who forgot them and myself), still not using them anymore because of those bugs. Is it worth to have another look at it, or is it still bugged like that? Currently I only carry IR grenades for throwing on my position in my loadouts, when I'm staying in that location for more than a few seconds. No enemys: What was significantly boring for me in several roles yesterday: no enemys to shoot at, no enemys to spot, again practically nothing to do for me anymore and my team for about ten to fifteen AOs in a row. No matter if I was the logistics medic, rifleman, LMG assistant or whatever. The only "casualties" we had, when I remember correctly, is when some people fell off the buildings. Might be I'm always ending up in the loser team, where you can be happy when all participants manage to have a radio and set the frequency, at all. The day before ambient AI and other enemys were there in more reasonable (read higher) numbers, so we had actually something to do. What also is becoming a bad habit is telling people to stop lonewolfing, when they move away from their position for like 5 meters, and those other micro managing habits are continually getting more unpleasant, unsatisfying with regard to gameplay and obviously plainly idiotic, when there were reasonable numbers of enemies. Yesterday, most of the time our team was like a group of animals of prey, bunched together in such a way most of the time, that a single RPG would have killed us, which never came for several hours. All we did was watching the sky and pointing around with the rifles. So when a lot of people obviously have cried about there being too many ambient AI enemies, and those calls seem to have been followed immediately, giving more room for social awkwardness to show, where there is practically no enemy now, here is the call for more enemies, like it was before. I've seen the teamplay to be more satisfying, when you give the team something to do, except for being an audience to your elite planning, briefing, leading and shooting capabilities. Maybe I'm also completely wrong here - at least it feels like that. Thank you.

Yeah! Signed up.

ADDED IN 0.3.9: [..] + Fully functional Shtora active protection system to all applicable vehicles [..] Whew.. goodbye easy tank kills with Javelin and Titan. Long live the M3 MAAWS!

Welcome to the forums!

About the tl;dr: there wasn't anything in that, that's new to you or that I haven't learnt from you. Cheers.

Thanks for looking for CQB maps and evaluating them. CQB being something I'm really missing a lot.. For me not so much the size of the city matters, rather the quality of the buildings: I prefer much more the irregular, asymmetric, partly broken, destructible buildings like in Zargabad city for CQB or even on Altis - compared to most of the buildings present on Fallujah, Chernarus and Panthera. The size of the map doesn't really matter to me here. I'm sure you'll find the best available and practically feasible maps for that, as I'm sure I'm not the only one with a dedication for CQB in here.

I have made very good experiences also with something like the following, especially when things got really awry in the field and when it was not possible to settle it there: after the mission I consult specific people I was in contact with in private. Often, delicate issues can better be talked about openly in the privacy between you, me and the gatepost. Public humiliation is not the intention, the private atmosphere allows even the most polite person to talk straight out what was perceived as wrong. Also, the conversation does not need to happen on a level that everyone in the teams participating a debrief can follow and understand, which is difficult, especially when they most didn't witness the actual situation and thus can't have anything to contribute to it, except general wisdom. Usually, it has been sufficient to let every party describe the personal, subjectively perceived situation to the other party or parties involved, to ease up tensions built up on a failed mission. Of course, it happens too, that people aren't really interested in playing the game cooperatively, so the debrief or private consultation becomes a farce. For some good reason, these are the rare cases, where nothing will help and a foobar situation is the best that can reasonably be expected. I remember the sessions I had with you to be reasonable, no matter what role you've played. Thanks for these, here!

Where do I need to sign? Want! CQB! Now!

Yes, and I give it three problematics: My rename suggestion would be "Improving self awareness", if anyone of the people, who most of the statements in here are addressed to, would participate. So far it's rather another one for the archive.

Understood.. That's also what made me shiver, when I looked at the map - and maybe that same shiver is also the reason it got mentioned and debated in this thread here. And yeah, if they did their job, they'd knew and that AO wasn't that large, that 15 WPs would be justifiable or even be reasonable. Your BUT is going well with your IFs. The amount of 15 WP in that mission, its duration and final unsuccessful cancellation - all this might be usable as an indicator how much CMD didn't do its job. But that's too simple of a view from my perspective and I stated before I don't want to whine about any commands our team got. I'm pretty sure there was a CMD, probably even a SL, and I'm pretty sure they did some things.. I don't even dare to ask if these things were the right things or not. From my perspective all the jobs done on that mission were lacking so much in the result, that the only thing we were left to do was what we actually did: making 15 WPs, moving from each one to the next, as already described and finally breaking it off. That shows me how absurdly diverging the activities were with regard to a cooperative mission - if we didn't do it, we could just have disconnected or continued standing around watching the CAS fireworks. And even our 15 WPs didn't help to solve this mission. In case watching the CAS firework is really what it is expected I'd like to ask for announcements, that we know in which direction to look and can make a sandwich break.. or do the laundry.. In absence of any orders the more experienced players usually show some sort of self initiative. Might that be already loading a vehicle with ammo for some team like HAT, AAT, MMG to move in as a rolling ammobox.. bringing a Darter into a hold pos at alt 500m around the AO.. getting the whole team on the same frequency, completing the radio check.. getting your team on a secondary radio frequency, all those things you can do, which do not predetermine anything in the AO, which do not make the enemy aware of your presence, can offer an advantage later on in the mission, etc., everything non intrusive, whether you're TL, SL or rifleman, while CMD is still figuring out a plan. What I usually experience is the disregard of any sort of self initiative and also a disrespect and active sabotaging towards the results of such initiatives. For example self proclaimed policing weirdos sabotaging team efforts by shooting your team's darter, because it was against the rules from their understanding, changing the radio frequencies, once the team has completely set and checked it for no reason, telling me it was against the rules to carry an AN/PRC-152, while it isn't, .. and this blabla.. Just the same as leaders telling you to move and forgetting to tell you where you should move.. really hilarious sometimes. Overall, when I get the impression the kind of player CMD, SL or TL seems to want is a brainless sluggard, I can assure you that's what you will end up with. And I can assure you at the same time, that this is certainly not what you want to play. On the other hand, the amounts of new players rightfully request more specific orders and feedback, in order to get doing something, to get more experienced and to get feedback if they are doing their job in a good way and where they can improve. This difficulty of balance doesn't make the game unplayable, instead it's the whole challenge in it. It's not so much about which rifle you chose.. To me the disrespectful and disregarding behaviour with regard to new and more experienced players alike is exactly that same dicking around, that got mentioned in the rules and threads, just in a different disguise. That's just like educating your child to be a jerk, based on the wrong assumption that in a world like we have a jerk would have it easier to survive. To put another analogy: modern cities are synonyms of junk mixed with disease. Not because all the junk goes to the city, but because the city turns everything that comes to the city into junk. ... http://everythingsaproblem.tumblr.com

Hey Lone, thanks for that comment. I don't understand: "but if a commander goes over 5-6 WP before you even get there that's no good." Can you further elaborate what that means? "That's okay then, especially if you put them in group chat [..]" Here I have a completely different opinion! These waypoints were placed, moved to and cleared on our team's initiative and thus those waypoints were our team's contribution results to the other teams. That is explicitly: marking these waypoints, moving the entire team there, clearing these waypoints, communicating that fact and then moving on to the next waypoint. So, the one and only place for these waypoints to be placed, from my limited perspective, is the side channel and not the group channel. Simply because nobody in the other teams, including SL/CMD, would be able to see them, if they were in the group channel only. Probably due to my limited perspective I do not currently see any valid reason for putting those waypoints in the group channel, especially while we were lacking any other waypoints. ?!

Lol vlk. ++

Yes. Not only hidden in a house, but also spawned inside a house of the type you cannot get into. Got that the day before yesterday on video.. Another frequent reason for this mission to be difficult to finish is to just start shooting at all enemy you see immediately, instead of herding them together, circling/flanking them, and choking them out - before starting to take them out, to make sure any survivor stragglers cannot run away and hide behind a wall, preventing the mission from finishing with just the same result. Yes, not complaining is also my strategy, even though it can mean prolonged suffering, especially few CMD elements favor hindsight sessions and thus practically disable all possible constructive feedback, except from their present players they happen to be in direct contact with. I guess that also explains why we had a lot of fluctuation in SL and CMD, yesterday again, while our team kept quite stable through hours of operation - and yesterday we even weren't on Fallujah. Just the same kind of loser party, this time on Panthera. Hope it made clear the issues are not to be announced with the mission makers and we must improve at other spots. Currently hard to tell for me, where those spots are.. so probably really some kind of task here. And about WP15.. those were indeed the traces of my teamlead keeping us busy with actual reasonable work! Yes, we might have had the micromanaging issue kicking in, only one among other frequently noticed oddities - actually I don't even know, as my teamlead was operating the radio. I guess that 15 also shows part of the issue, that our teamlead had all the hassle with selecting waypoints, and, of course, additionally had all the extra work to do in coordinating those with the other teams. So the number 15 (fifteen) shows exactly what Ryko said.. it was >2.5h and with the loadout and getting to the AO issues.. easily >3h of something I would never want to get into in real life. What freshens up this quite a bit are those players, who actually knew how to play, then join the team for their casual screaming fit, scold teammembers moving a few meters, asking whether they have been ordered to do so, then using their marksman rifles to take out enemies >500m away, getting killed quickly, needing audience for their EU1 style hill camping and then finally (rage?) quitting after a few minutes of bollocks.. I came to Arma 3 about a year ago, by some article in a psychological blog, some psychologist discussing whether it rather was a murder simulator or a story generator. She clearly missed that part, when people play it like it was a "jerk" simulator. What Lone's contribution is touching upon is the difficulty of making the game playable and enjoyable in a leader position (team, squad, platoon, ...) for a heterogenous team of inexperienced and experienced players. That does not so much require experience in the game itself or knowledge of the actual missions played, I think, rather some kind of balancing skill between being reserved and directed acting is required, which is - from my perspective - one of the most difficult parts of the game.

My consolidated opinion: the only thing I was longing for in the several hours of Fallujah yesterday was an enemy to shoot at. I perceived it mostly as standing around between WP 1 and WP 15, watching CAS doing a lot of fireworks, waiting for fellow teammates to regroup, who fell down the stairs or otherwise had reasons to respawn. Occasionally, we came into contact with enemies in a range of about 200-300m. Usually the first order I got, when we announced the contact was to move away from the enemy. To this day I do not understand what was the intention behind that frequent "moving away from the enemy quickly" tasking. Well there will be reaons, I guess. Also, I remember our team was ordered to move back into areas, which we had just cleared, just to stand around there and watch the skies - several times. Felt like being parked for further tasking, which is alright and which never came. That happened in a "clear the town" mission, which I understood to be played differently, so far: 1. everyone moves in as infantry, 2. air support is transport, 3. tanks are doing support jobs once requested by CMD - which is pointless and usually never required with the default enemy spawn amounts and, finally, 4. you take out the enemy you see. Getting the whole team into firing positions before opening fire is a wise thing with regard to 4., no questions asked, and we would have had a lot of opportunities with regard to the firing as we were moving quite well and reliably as a team. The least thing I want is to whine about the orders our team received.. I know how difficult the SL / Plt Commander roles are depending on the players joined, especially when being overwhelmed by offers about "doing this and that now" from highly motivated players, who will, of course, try each and every possible way of doing some things. And yeah, those who scream the loudest.. Summarizing, I remember it took >2.5h until everyone was depressed enough to restart that mission without even finishing it. A long time of suffering from my point of view. Fortunately, I was in Ryko's team - so I had enough to do - btw. thanks for the rounds yesterday - loved it, will do it anytime again. And srsly.. I don't think 1) or 2) would "fix" the root causes of how things were going along yesterday.

I wonder what Despite is going to say about this..

I jumped to signing-up - while in fact I can't participate today. Please revoke my application and apologies for that! (signed-up as "Nicolai")

Understood. I think I know that individual mind feeling like an outsider standing at the door, waiting for the invitation to offer its unique knowing. Authority is not delegating men, but procuring values. > Not everyone reads these forum posts. Those who do not read the rules, which are forum posts, and still play on the server, shouldn't be playing on the server in the first place. I wish you'd let yourself be less irritated by jerks like that - I know it's difficult. Authentic superiority is intolerable for the fool. Its simulations, on the other hand, fascinate him. > As well there won't be arguments about who can bring what. To be a protagonist in the game, it is enough to be a perfect actor, whatever the role one plays. The game has no secondary roles, only secondary actors. I have not yet experienced arguments like that, which were either futile (hovering around details irrelevant to what I perceive to be the whole, i.e. the game) or unfounded (by one part incorrectly interpreting, incorrectly quoting the rules or by inventing rules which do not exist). You're representing a lot of values I'd like to "procure" anytime, so far I've experienced them in the game.