[AWE] [GAMENIGHT] Operation Blackhawk Down - Benjamin Levine

[Copey]

Operation Blackhawk Down

 

When: Sunday 18^th June, 1900 UK LOCAL (GMT +1)  

Server: EU3/AWE

Briefing / Planning: 1845 UK LOCAL (GMT +1) 

Mission Start: 1900

Map: Dingor

Mods: Standard AWE

First person lock: No

Loadouts: Provided, with a limited arsenal.

Respawns: Yes

Mission Length: ~120 minutes. Possibly longer

Factions: BLUFOR (US Army) vs OPFOR (Militia)

JIP: Yes

 

SIGN UP Link: https://goo.gl/forms/b9XQnCsXvezE4c3x1

 

OVERVIEW

 

Two very high ranking Somali Militia leaders are meeting. Your unit; 2nd Platoon, Baker Company, 75th Ranger Regiment are tasked with extracting them alive. Use the element of surprise during the early morning to capture them. However a local rebellion sponsored by the militia is happening en route to target. Be aware of militia heavy weapons. You will have gunship support. QRF forces and air support are not expected to be available. 

 

Depending on how long the gamenight runs for, zeus operations may be run following this event. 

 

 

 

 

 

Any questions or updates should/will be posted in this thread.

 

Regards,

Copey

(Events Manager)

[JayBeBird]

hey i am sorry i am not going to able to be at the event tomorrow as it farthers day and going our for a meal with family 

 

JayBeBird 

[BenjaminHL]

This misson will be best with a larger player count, as well more fun. Hopefully turnout will be good and as a side note JIP is available and encouraged. 

 

Hope I'll see you all there,

Ben 

[Nutek]

Let's go !

[BenjaminHL]

Sorry this op was received so negatively I worked really hard to make this work and spent lots of time on the mission, but through the misinterpretation of command the mission turned out to be a failure. Sorry if I wasted anyone time, I know that mine was. 

 

-Ben

[Stanhope]

I have 2 questions about the scripting part.

When we initially crashed with the chinook, was it intended behaviour that only half the people survived?
Upon respawn after that crash none of the respawns had a gun, was that intentional?

[JaSmAn]

14 hours ago, BenjaminHL said:

Sorry this op was received so negatively I worked really hard to make this work and spent lots of time on the mission, but through the misinterpretation of command the mission turned out to be a failure. Sorry if I wasted anyone time, I know that mine was. 

 

-Ben

Ben don't feel too bad about the mission and the way it ended up. Some people gave you a hard time, but if they have opinions they should post them here along with suggestions on how to improve.

 

Here's my suggestion - and I'm going to sound like a broken record - IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ORDERS and the chain of command. 

 

In real life, combat operations go to wrong all the time, like this one was supposed to. The story is a crashed chopper, everyone's lost their kit, command is down, orders are not flowing. So, in real life, soldiers have standard procedures which they follow, as well as a standard chain of command. One of the things we do worst is AWE is give orders properly and follow chain of command. Very simply put, most ASLs (including whoever was ASL during your op) have no idea how to give clear orders ahead of the mission. I just watched the stream and ASL says "we have no orders....." Not good. EVERYONE should know what the hell is going, and last night, nobody did.

 

As a mission designer it is your job to help the ASL (or PlatCo) give good orders. In other words, you need to give him the scenario, the intel, the possible situations that may develop, and in a case where you need a heavily scripted turn of events like this one, some hints as to what might happen. In other words, "what happens if the chopper gets shot down....." If you did, then ASL didn't pass any of that on to the TLs or the TLs didn't pass anything down.

 

A couple of specific things:

 

1) The respawn was in a bad place. I spawned back after the crash and immediately got shot in the head. That means I lost 4 minutes, and when I came back the second time I had no weapon and it took me a good couple of minutes to find one. I was combat ineffective for a long time, and then it took me even longer to sort of make sense of what was going on. Suggestion, move the spawn to a safe place, inside a house or something like that. 

 

2) My Shacktac stopped working on respawn. This was bad, because it's hard enough to find your squad with it, more so without it. I don't know if that was unique to me. I think that what you want is for people to get organised as soon as possible to get on with the mission. On the flip side, TLs were terrible at getting people organised. I lost my team and never found them again until the very end. I'm pretty sure they weren't looking for me. TLs have a responsibility to make their team function and not just run off, which mine did.

 

3) Where I think things got very wrong was when the tanks showed up. I heard you say that the reason you put the tanks in was to keep people in the compound. But that was never going to happen. I think everyone just reacted to, "tank, we have nothing to kill it with, get the F out!"

 

4) You had a chance to let people regroup at the airfield. I'm not sure if it was you who placed the infantry there or not, but there were bad guys with RPGs at the airfield and it was only natural for the pilots and ASL to get the plane to safety. When the RPG hit the plane, that was it, game over. My suggestion would be that you should have kept the airfield safe and delivered an Overlord message to secure the airfield, or something like that.  

 

I think this just shows that players won't react how you expect, and if you expect them to react a certain way you should tell them. In other words, give them a Standard Operating Procedure ahead of the game.

 

My final thought, and a repeat of my previous comments: improve your briefing, take time to give good clear orders and intel. No mission in real life would happen without these. They shouldn't happen on AWE either.

 

And one for the community - ASLs and TLs, learn to give good orders!

 

Ben, don't get discouraged; don't give up on making missions.

 

And finally, I'm happy to help you write orders, give ideas for future missions, etc....

 

[Ryko]

15 hours ago, Stanhope said:

When we initially crashed with the chinook, was it intended behaviour that only half the people survived?

 

I wrote that script: that was not the intention and I'm surprised people died as everyone is set allowDamage false before the chopper is hit, and allowDamage true only after the end of the waking animation.  Arma being arma.

 

Quote

Upon respawn after that crash none of the respawns had a gun, was that intentional?

 

Ben might have been using his respawn script which respawns you with the gear you had when you died.  Since the second part of my script has you "waking up" with your gun and some of your ammo / supplies scattered around you, any dead players probably spawned without that kit.

[BenjaminHL]

@JaSmAn Trust me man it wasn't the people that got to me after the mission, but instead it was my personal feelings about the mission. Also thank you for the feedback and being supportive. And although I appreciate your offer to 'write orders' it is my gamenight, my experiences, and my mistakes that I will learn from and fix.  

 

Thanks to everyone how came,

Ben

[JaSmAn]

1 hour ago, Ryko said:

 

I wrote that script: that was not the intention and I'm surprised people died as everyone is set allowDamage false before the chopper is hit, and allowDamage true only after the end of the waking animation.  Arma being arma.

 

 

Ben might have been using his respawn script which respawns you with the gear you had when you died.  Since the second part of my script has you "waking up" with your gun and some of your ammo / supplies scattered around you, any dead players probably spawned without that kit.

 

@Ryko the "waking animation" was actually a black screen for a long time which then went to a respawn screen.