The public server was the most full it’s been in a very long time last night, and we noticed that the balance between sections and attachments can still be not quite right. We had an FST+sniper team, a tank, a heli, which amounted to 10 attachment people and 6 infantry. We made it work but it was too much, so I’ve increased the first attachment slot to open at 11 and then every 8 people after that, so basically it’s heli (which is exempt) + 1 attachment unless we get a ton of people on. Part of the issue with attachments on public is that there’s no central controller, so the first section commander can sometimes get oversaturated.

The FST has been rejigged a bit. You only need 3 people in it to function now, and it has lost the sniper team, forward observer and one of the logistics techs. This allows the FO to be stuck to the jet group, and now the jet pilot needs the FO to be online as well for him to function. The assistants are perfectly capable of acting as observers for the mortar. The sniper team has been moved into its own group after finding yesterday that, when done properly, the sniper team is significantly more capable than the FST, with a much faster setup time and less time needed for corrections.

Stripped out the heli and plane spawn systems. No more per-class cooldowns or anything like that, the only restriction is that you can only have 2 helis active at a time, and if you destroy one it’ll be 10 hours before it resets. You can still spawn one more after that, provided you haven’t already, but it will only allow 1 heli to be active at a time after that. If you crash 2 helis in one night then you shouldn’t be flying anyway. Same system applies for planes.

Speaking of helis, I’ve changed the playercounts for the different helis. It now staggers from the chinook at 5 players up to the cobra/apache at 14 players, roughly in order of commonality.

Added a MERT team. This is an attachment that consists of a pilot and 3 medics, and requires at least 2 people in the group. The pilot can spawn a chinook that will spawn even if there are 2 helis active already, and it will come already filled with a full complement of medical supplies, several times what you get in a normal medical box. The chinook is not a medical vehicle because that would defeat the point, but having dedicated medics on standby in a fast aerial platform should be enough to deal with any situation as long as the infantry commander communicates the situation quick enough. Once testing of the new medical changes is complete this team will either be removed or its group count increased to require 3 people in it, to ensure that only a high strength team can exist.

The team gets special privileges when it comes to the restriction system. Blinding a heli pilot and its crew while flying would be rather counterproductive, so it gives you 10 minutes to get back to base or get back up to strength if a man disconnects. This will probably migrate to FST as well to give them a chance to deal with restarts or whatever, and the new jet team uses this already.

While I’m here, I’d like to ask the guys that have actually read this far: we know now that the FST’s restriction system of needing a certain amount of people in the group works, what do you guys think about a generic UKSF team that requires all 8? Their kit would be fairly standard with no tacticool crap (max level of equipment would be a GMG WMIK that the leader can spawn, and their weapons would be M4 variants + ACOGs, a javelin, a couple of M72’s and a minimi), but they would be special because, when everything comes together just right, there’ll be a full section of dedicated players ready to go wherever and do whatever, which in our gameplay is pretty special. It would be so rare to have that many people ready and willing that it might end up being more rare than MMO’s.

I’ll be taking a break from development for a couple weeks, to get domination caught up and write up a new design document for what to do with it, it’s gotten better but the enemy acts like a punching bag sometimes and people quickly realise it’s not fun when they actually get to it. I’ll also be figuring out some creative solutions for the toxic people that bring everyone down but not quite to the point where a ban or infraction would be reasonable, because dealing with it passively has not worked. This period will also be useful for bedding in the latest changes, we’ll need a couple of large sessions to see how things pan out with attachment/infantry balance and a period of calm development wise will help with that.

I disagree with the UKSF idea, for the same reason people dislike too many attachments that's unorganised. You become disconnected from the teamwork aspect which is the primary reason everyone is here. That's why we're a general infantry group.

Usually I would agree but there's nothing in the design that would take away from normal gameplay, it's literally a full british section with some of the weapons coming from the USMC faction. All the available equipment and ammunition is the same. One of our issues at the moment is people fragmenting between the regular sections, on the one day a year this gets used it would actually fix that by building a full section of dedicated people.

I fell like there needs to be one section filled up to have 1 attachment also i dont think the heli should count as a attachment i fell like this will help improve teamwork and communication because the attachment would be section attached not just free roaming doing there own stuff like we saw last night which was not help full and made it boring for some people.

All of that's been in for weeks, future thought is to have 2 British sections that are open and then usmc/ANA sections that can only be accessed with a certain amount of people + bumping the attachment counts up further, but testing needs to be done to see how likely people are to put teams together like that first otherwise it's wasted effort.

Also i feel like there could be more verity to the missions on public like 99.2% of the time it is insurgency and it gets boring some times and i understand that time to create and make these things is very far and few between but maybe something like an invade and annex style of a mission would spouse things up in the public server and i know we have the trouble in insurgency thing going but this is just a suggestion because i would like to see people being more active in public and having fun

For the mission "same-yness" issue, we just need to bring back the old vote system whereby if X% vote to change map/mission it rolls.

Regarding the SF Team, whilst I see the benefit of it (moreso in its own, standalone mission with proper SF gear), I think that as discussed before, to have an SF team on public is an unfair representation of the group that would not correctly advertise us (which is one of the main functions anyway).

I also agree that the pilot should not be counted towards the attachment count as per condoxy's statement. The heli is key to keeping sections re-supplied and functioning. To add it as an attachment would mean that it either does not get picked over a force multiplier or that the attachments are never used which adds its own kettle of fish.

Heli is still exempt from the attachment slot system, it's the mert team (with its own pilot) that is an attachment.

Representation of the group is a very good point, it's not like we play as ANA or modern USMC on ops either but now that you mention it I agree that SF is a step too far, I won't bother with that.

Jayman started a map change system but didn't finish it, probably for good reason.

Vote skip system is complete on its branch, it's awaiting testing at some point.

https://github.com/TheWre ... set/tree/public_skip

Didn't hear about that, nice one. I'll give it a look later

I'd like to vote against this as hard as humanly possible, as a person who is in love with US gear it'd be a pain in the penor to be restricted to the bongs for 8/10 public sessions. And the USMC is usually the go-to team when lots of players are present at the mission start since it wouldn't split the players into two different sections.

In my opinion TWC-Pub shouldn't be confined to "the most british experience possible" as, back in ArmA2, the BAF were a minority among many different playable nations, and i'd love to see the trend continued.

It's just a thought, gotta have the bad ideas before the good ones. I've already thought of a better system but I'll leave that off here for the moment while I work on other stuff.