ATAG's 1st Bomber Night this Weekend

[Bounder!]

Just wanted to says thanks to ATAG for the event today, it was my first major foray into CoD multiplayer and although I didn't shoot anything down I had a blast. I did get into a small skirmish, saw someone creeping up behind me just in time to take enough evasive action to survive - although not without a few extra ventilation holes in my wing! I enjoyed meeting up with other players and learning to navigate (or get horribly lost for a while as was more often the case!) I had been meaning to get online for a while now and this event finally got me to take the plunge, so cheers, hope there are more of these to come!

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber

Its a good concept, hope to see later editions with red attacking and later planesets... Good stuff!

Great idea, except.......very few of us can actually fly a Blenhiem. Just getting the B off the ground is the first hurdle then nursing her to the coast with out cooking the engine is a sign of success.

Most of us would need extensive training.

[5./JG27.Farber]

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

Great idea, except.......very few of us can actually fly a Blenhiem. Just getting the B off the ground is the first hurdle then nursing her to the coast with out cooking the engine is a sign of success.

Most of us would need extensive training.

keeps you out of trouble

[salmo]

Bliss,
Sadly, my experience wasn't what I had hoped for. Here's some comments. Please take then in the positive vein that they are given, the bomber-night concept is a good one.

1. Start time
Advertised start time was Sat 23.00PM (Australian Eastern Summer Time). I came across you post here advertising the match had started at about 7.30pm AEST. I jumped online in a Spit1 to find my base was crawling with 109's straffing everything in sight. All I could do was takeoff & get in a low (<500m) dogfight. Inevitably I lost every time. Also, the red pilots on TS reported all targets had been at least partly destroyed.

I have no problem with "vulching" over bases, after all war... is... war. The issue I have is about the match start-time. By starting before the advertised time you placed red pilots at a disadvatage becuase blue was already at the red bases & had already destroyed targets before most reds came online.

I became so frustrated with my online experience, that I abandoned the match & sat down & wrote a "match script" that counts down to start time & destroys planes that takeoff before match start

May I suggest that matches start exactly on the advertised time in future. Somethingh akin the the United Squadron league matches.

2. Match duration
Having the match extend ove the entire weekend seems a little confusing to me. What happens when all targets are destroyed in the first 6 hours of play? What happens if someone gets online at an ungodly hour & is virtually the only pilot online? Maybe the match could be played over say 3 hours, but replayed at convenient times throughout the weekend.

3. Team organisation
I got onto the ATAG TS server & found several ATAG members flying blue & a slightly smaller number of licorice-allsorts flying red. When I enetred the red channel pilots were asking where the enemy was; where the targets were; what they had to do etc. Quite frankly, it was a major disappointment to me to find players unprepared for the match when you had taken the time to post recon photo's & a match scenario etc.

May I suggest that players "register" for these events. The registration should include a declaration that they understand any rules & have read maps, instructions etc. The registration need not be absolutely binding, but at least you might get an indication of numbers & better prepared pilots.

4. Battle map
The numbers on-line were relatively low (6-16 pilots). By having 3 widely seperated targets, you effectively split these number further, so that there were very few planes over any one target.

May I suggest one primary target, and say 2 secondary targets no more than 10km from the primary target. this would tend to concentrate game play better.

Cheers
Sal

[ATAG_Dutch]

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

Great idea, except.......very few of us can actually fly a Blenhiem. Just getting the B off the ground is the first hurdle then nursing her to the coast with out cooking the engine is a sign of success.
Most of us would need extensive training.

Bring it on, I say!

Get the red guys learning instead of moaning.

Anyone who wants to fly the Blenheim just needs to team up with Watchman, Puppet, Knuckles, Krupi, Magpie... or even me.

A bomber night for the reds.

Oh yeeees.

@ Salmo - Sorry mate, but you mustn't have stayed on long enough, or were on the wrong server. Protecting the targets was the order of the day for red team, and plenty people did really good. As soon as either 4 hours or objective completion was reached, the mission started again giving everyone an opportunity to start over. I didn't see any untoward 'vulching', but the one I did see, I shot down...eventually.

[jimbop]

Salmo, see post #24 in this thread for a description of match timing etc. It is more sensible than you realise - rolling matches so mission resets every four hours.

Originally Posted by ATAG_Bliss

I think there's some confusion here.

The mission will run all weekend long. It's starting early for those fellas on the other side of the Earth

But the mission will rotate/recycle/start over after a certain amount of time. If the blues don't get all their objectives in a 4 hour window, reds will win and the mission/map will reload. On the same front if the blues destroy all their objectives, the mission will end with blues winning (but it will start over again) So basically, it will repeat this all weekend long. There's no particular show up time that everyone needs to be there for. It's just done this way so everyone that wants to throughout all the time zones will get a crack at it.

[Sokol1]

Easy times for "mud movers".

I fly 5 times. 1st in Stuka, find target but my bombs fail... Bounced by Spit, Dodge him two times until they lost contact, and I RTB - in middle of Chanel the mission end by time.
2st in Bf-110, find target but attack by Spit and shot down.
3st in Stuka, find target - the last - hit then and end the mission.



4st in Stuka, find target but shot down by FLAK.

5st in Stuka, find target, hit then and safety RTB, more than one hour of flight.

One time see more than 30 players, and the BLUE side ~50/50 between bombers and fighters, I see even a G-50 in the roster.

The only real difficulty is find references in terrain to navigate, so I use some in shore and then fly in straight course to target.

Thank you for the event.

Sokol1

[salmo]

Originally Posted by jimbop

Salmo, see post #24 in this thread for a description of match timing etc. It is more sensible than you realise - rolling matches so mission resets every four hours.

Thankyou Jimbop, I must have missed that info, It's also in the first post so my point No2 above no longer applies. However, points 1, 3, & 4 need consideration.

[FFCW_Urizen]

1st flight, after a complete failure in navigation skills , i managed to reach redhill, strafed a few planes w/o damaging them, i got a bad hit into my right engine and i had to crash her.
2nd flight, found my way much better, but got pked by flak.
3rd flight, launcher crashed.
4th flight, strafed redhill again w/o doing much damage.

but still, i had my fun.

btw, how can i add bombs to my plane or can i even add them (110C-7)?

€: nevermind, figured it out

[335th_GRAthos]

Flew two missions, more than 3hrs total.

Thank God for the navigation autopilot of the ME110, I would have been driven crazy otherwise. Navigation was stll a pain (did the same a Sokol flying along the marks at the coast and 90° turns) the worst challenge been visual navigation.

Dropped bombs on the target and got out as quickly as I could (as my gunner was spotting enemies each time). That was most frustrating because neither time I could circle around the target and inspect the damage.

During a mission restart yesterday, we gathered some ten ME110 ready to take off at the airfield. This was the most difficult moment: Our frame rate dropped to 5fps. I made a fly around the airfield waiting for some other ME110 and I had 1 (one) fps :0
Worst even, I noticed a tremendous "memory leak" and had to immediately bail out and restart the game. The trick was to wait until the airfield had less traffic, take off and fly straight out of the "low fps" area; After that the meory leak is bearable. {I am looking forward to the new graphics model where the momory leak has been -as per Luthier- fixed}.



It was a great event ATAG, many thanks!


~S~