Hi McQ and Gilly, Hi all!
Would like to share my experience with last night's attempt. I was there at the time and since I had run into Mage before I asked him if he'd like to come along. He agreed, I was thinking that it doesn't matter too much if he's not yet in the picture since I was expecting the thing to start from a text chat with a briefing.
From previous experience I know how difficult it is to keep a lobby 'on the same page', the bigger the lobby and the more complex the mission, the harder it is. Even having a mic doesn't really solve this if the lobby is large. Voice quality goes right down, and then you have the possibility that someone has turned their sound off, or doesn't speak English.
It was impressive to see a full room of 16 players right at the beginning (the plague's over Mcq
). I don't know what everybody knew of the mission beforehand, but I can say for sure that it was too late for Mage to get the picture. He really didn't know what's going on, and perhaps he wasn't alone.
Because of this I started the text chat and was hoping we'd do the briefing there - sorry guys, I didn't mean to hijack your game.
Anyway it didn't catch on. Mage then decided to drop out and since I had brought him in I decided to pass as well. We played a great game of I16s in Club rules instead. There was another opportunity later which I missed since I was in a game with themeistor who wanted to do training for his semifinals.
So I missed the main action yesterday. Would like to hear your experience with the setup and mission!
We got to play some missions when the main show was over and only Zhang from the first group remained. We briefed the newcomers Stapler and Vdomini in the text chat (twice, since they didn't come at the same time...), and later again alfabravowiskey and wakespeak. It takes a lot of time to brief in text chat, especially when you have to do it repeately. I even sent wolfsalt away since i was tired of briefing again. Sorry wolf!
The missions (first 2 vs 2, later 3 vs 3) turned out to be great and immersive. There were a lot of problems however landing the Spitfire in Hawkinge, which delayed the games a lot. We also decided to not use the maps which led to some orientation problems. Here it would have made sense to make landing proficiency and prior orientation mandatory.
So long story short, I think historical missions are a great add on and we should keep writing more 'scripts' for them. But to make a good experience I think the briefings and questions should be all completed before starting a lobby. Even text chat is not good for this, only for collecting all players who are in the picture before starting the lobby, so that they know when to expect the lobby to go live and jump right in (in the correct number of players).
I think it should be known some time before who exactly will play, and by their 'application' for a game event they acknowledge having been briefed, so only a very few questions (or better none) remain before the game. Also it should not be allowed to bring someone along as I tried yesterday.
Hope I don't sound too harsh but I feel it's much more fun playing when all is clear than spending so much time trying to keep it together.
Hope we'll play this again soon!
MAC
