A view of ArmA II multiplayer from a TF2, CSS, BF2 player

[Zipper5 74]

SIX Updater and Yoma Tools are not included with Arma 2, therefore most people don't know they exist.

Domination and Warfare are pretty much the two missions 99% of public servers play (I don't mean any disrespect to the authors of either. The missions themselves are awesome and, in some ways, scripting marvels that I could never hope to emulate).

It's fine to have servers for people to unwind, what isn't fine is having those be the only public servers available, in my eyes. Tactical Gamer got it right - they played various missions on their public servers with many people. Those who didn't play along were kicked or banned, and those who did had a great time, myself included.

I don't think anyone's really saying it's "hard", they're saying it shouldn't be a necessity in order to have a multiplayer experience that's all that different from the other games on the market. And to that, I fully agree.

And jhoson14 - stop with the elitism (re: "And to OP, just stay with your BF2 please.")

[sickboy 13]

Well perhaps you should ask your self why there aren't such servers or not so many of such servers.

Running servers costs money, blood, sweat, tears.

Running (and adminning) public servers requires tremendous amounts of patience and resistance on top of that. Though perhaps to a lesser extent if you choose not to school your players but instead hit the kick / ban button early.

I've done both in the past, and I am glad that I am out of that world.

I can only speak for myself though :)

Previously I asked you why you didn't set up a server the way you wanted it, and iirc you said that money is the main reason.

Personally, I don't understand how you can expect other people to run servers, spend their money, time etc, on the way you want to play, if you don't want to spend that yourself either.

I would say that if money is a problem, then you can try and find like minded people, and share the costs and adminning.

But instead, we discuss every week in the forums how bad the server situation is, and that nobody is doing anything about it...

Can ya feel what i'm saying? :)

Edited April 28, 2011 by Sickboy

[Zipper5 74]

I am prepared, I just have no money. Need to finish highschool before the money starts coming in. :p

[celery 8]

For god sake, there's a ton of excusses in here.

I'm a new player and i see this server, but for some reason it dont let me play saying "you dont have XXX mod".

Instead of looking for the server name and trying to use google to find it ... I think its more easy to play the "OMG, i'm too lazy to search for myself". I need some one to take me by hand and help, its hard to think that this Server site will host the Mod they use.

But why would they make it easy? Hosting it to me download if i got to server site. God its too harsh on me... (Sorry for being ofensive, but i got really pissed with those type of excusses over these years)

OMG pressing "download" on both Yoma and SixUpdater is very Hard. Please dont make me suffer such think. Its too HARD!

vs.

You dont like Domi? OK, but at least give a look and start to use your little brain to see how much work has been done to make it happen.

BUT, the public servers only play it... Well, there's a lot of people who dosent have so much time free to expend on a more complex and tactical gameplay. Or they are just trying to relax. Get online, do some fast mission and in 1 hour they are out. For GOD, its PUBLIC, now i will go to a park and will start feeling pissed if see someone enjoying the nice sunny day because i dont like it...

Complaining because of the lack of an easy addon handling system is laziness and stupidity but every server playing the same mission is OK because people are lazy and just want to to relax and play for a little while... contradicting yourself much? FPDR

And to OP, just stay with your BF2 please.

Here you're just being an asshole.

[fruity_rudy 16]

Guys come on, it's getting more and more silly..you are right in many points, but the "look at him, and he is an asshole, and you stick with your game.."-statements are so bla..

as a high ranked bohemia officer said : ppl will always complain in here, no matter what you give em, no matter what you do..but it's so easy ,cause THIS community is not like others..

and for the newbies, pm me hop in our ts and server and we play..i prefer patience instead of yelling around , arguing about excuses and the he-said-she-said-things....my god

Edited April 28, 2011 by Fruity_Rudy

[celery 8]

Guys come on, it's getting more and more silly..you are right in many points, but the "look at him, and he is an asshole, and you stick with your game.."-statements are so bla..

as a high ranked bohemia officer said : ppl will always complain in here, no matter what you give em, no matter what you do..but it's so easy ,cause THIS community is not like others..

and for the newbies, pm me hop in our ts and server and we play..i prefer patience instead of yelling around , arguing about excuses and the he-said-she-said-things....my god

Why is an integrated addon management system a bad thing in your opinion?

[fruity_rudy 16]

It's not a bad thing, but its also not necessary, cause you can get in contact with people a) to explain that to you b) to play with as a good team ..that kind of management system is a good idea..

in the server lobby you can see , which addons the server is running. Thats a first help.. I just think that you can't compare this whole "arma-system" with other games, cause this game is like open source, not like casual games =press button and play or auto-download needed stuff.

Instead of that management system i would suggest some kind of "beginner's club" where people can join, ask , play..

When i am new to a game, and i have issues with joining servers, i look for developer's page or forum and there you go. I also had no clue in the beginning. I found some people and everything was fine

[.kju 3244]

Sorry for posting again, yet it seems worthwhile.

Major issues of the game itself:

• VON has had issues for far too long
  
• VON is not well integrated into the interface
  
• Chat is mixed with kill messages and status messages
  
• Addon servers are not recognizable (clear enough) in the server browser
  
• Overall the error messages the user gets shown (if at all..) are terrible
  
• Integrated addon download is missing (or at least an API to integrate community made tools)
  
• Lack of basic MP features (favorite servers, friends list, etc)
  
• The CO vs OA mess - BI should really provide a CO lite if they care
  
• BI provides no usable or good MP game modes out of the box (Warfare is not - only Benny made it playable)
  
• MP issues with BE, cheaters, connection to the server
  

[fruity_rudy 16]

Sorry for posting again, yet it seems worthwhile.

Major issues of the game itself:

• VON has had issues for far too long
  
• VON is not well integrated into the interface
  
• Chat is mixed with kill messages and status messages
  
• Addon servers are not recognizable (clear enough) in the server browser
  
• Overall the error messages the user gets shown (if at all..) are terrible
  
• Integrated addon download is missing (or at least an API to integrate community made tools)
  
• Lack of basic MP features (favorite servers, friends list, etc)
  
• The CO vs OA mess - BI should really provide a CO lite if they care
  
• BI provides no usable or good MP game modes out of the box (Warfare is not - only Benny made it playable)
  
• MP issues with BE, cheaters, connection to the server
  

i can only say "yes" to the last BE and cheaters...the other points are no issue imo. I only play on the same set of servers, i know what to do when i get kicked. Thats all because i'm not lazy and i wanna know more about this game to prevent these "issues" from happening. Are you seriously hopping from server to server?

Also in the past, when i've played other games, i always played on my favs. But everybody has another opinion about that.

[jhoson14 10]

Complaining because of the lack of an easy addon handling system is laziness and stupidity; but every server playing the same mission is OK because people are lazy and just want to to relax and play for a little while... contradicting yourself much?

We have 2 sides of the coin here...

Those who playing domi get a simple mission and to dont stick too long...This dont make then Lazy. Why? Well, they are on the server playing with all mods working. Simple.

The others who cant get in, start complaining to God because they cant seem to understand how to type the server name on google. Those are the lazy ones. Or maybe even more hard to do... Connect on server Teamspeaker and say "hey, i'm new on this can some one give some help?".

The mission being played on a server is choosen by server admin and people currently playing on it, if they want to play...Let then be. Dont like? Host your ow server or play in a comunity server like a lot of peopel here do. You cant force people to like the same thinks as you.

Or even better, make something that they will start to play insted of your hated domination. Since all this stupid bashing about the mission made Xeno drop off the project that he worked hard for many years.

"Here you're just being an asshole."

Ty very much for the compliment :D

[vfn4i83 0]

Why, just why every BF2 player goes to another game, inclusive this one and point how different it is and how much it should looks like the BF2 and strongly demand it?

Another thing this is not a game.

All games are maintained by they respective communities, and I believe you dont expect a EA game to even done the half you asked, and this community has done it already. The least you could do is use the "search key" on the forum.

[wipman 1]

Hi, the servers that force you to install certain addons or mods are a doom for some players, not only because you've to look for those required addons/mods... you've to install the right version, thing that could be a problem if they're not updated server side... but you also have to pull down your pants and install/play with that/those "über pimp" addons or mods required, that use to be the more popular ones and also force you to play in a fashion that you may not like or your computer could not handle because they're made by and for the rich guys with money enough to have the lastest über computer that handles the game + mods/addons that require twice the machine than the original game.

I've been playing to the ArmA series for years and from the OFP times... and i haven't found any possible solution other than change the MP server browser to offer more detailed info about the full name (version included) of the addons/mods allowed (if any) and/or required (if any) and leave the "hard job" of find 'em in Armedassault.com or Armaholic.com and install 'em. To me the main problem is the few info that the MP server browser offers to the joining players, with the right info will be a kids game to get the required things to play on a certain server or servers; but... there should be something too to enable/dissable the installed mods/addons on the server browser and that wouldn't require to restart the game. It's not an easy issue for the players but is much harder by the BIS side, IMO. Let's C ya

[gossamersolid 155]

Sorry for posting again, yet it seems worthwhile.

Major issues of the game itself:

• VON has had issues for far too long
  
• VON is not well integrated into the interface
  
• Chat is mixed with kill messages and status messages
  
• Addon servers are not recognizable (clear enough) in the server browser
  
• Overall the error messages the user gets shown (if at all..) are terrible
  
• Integrated addon download is missing (or at least an API to integrate community made tools)
  
• Lack of basic MP features (favorite servers, friends list, etc)
  
• The CO vs OA mess - BI should really provide a CO lite if they care
  
• BI provides no usable or good MP game modes out of the box (Warfare is not - only Benny made it playable)
  
• MP issues with BE, cheaters, connection to the server
  

I'd love to see the favourites list and a CO lite. CO Lite would really help with MP population. Don't need to include the campaigns in CO Lite, just really low quality units.

The integrated addon download would be great too. I've read from somebody (I think it was Suma) that it wasn't possible because the game cannot load addons on the fly, but what if it downloaded the addons then restarted the game with them loaded? The "expansions" manager in game already does that IIRC.

[Bee8190 10]

@vfn4i83

Why, just why every BF2 player goes to another game, inclusive this one and point how different it is and how much it should looks like the BF2 and strongly demand it?

Another thing this is not a game.

bla bla dude ,really would like to know ''your'' source, or did you just copy topic from COD to BF? I can't believe how many ppl here think that they are the uber hardcore gamers and whatnot...

YES i did play BF2 (never COD though :P,i suppose its somewhat same anyways) and i had plenty of fun with that game and later on, BF2 brought me to project reality and i had even more fun.Now, i got arma and feel like im gonna stick to it for some time but does that makes me noob that I've begun with BF2? hell no, looking forward seeing you on some CTI server and we ll see who's noob :cool:

I'm done

[jhoson14 10]

Just the normal BF2/CoD/CS player think. If u say something bad about their game they call you to a round and want to see who kills more... I'M THE PW0N3R M0TH3RF4CK4 K1LL4!!!111

In arma most peoples dont care about kills/score. Most care about teamwork,farplay and fun.

With all due respect to PR (but this will happen). We gonna have tons and tons of PR players on this Forum Bashing every single diferent think concerning BF2 to ArmA gameplay (and what not) diferences when they start playing the mod.

[vfn4i83 0]

@vfn4i83

...

bla bla ...

that makes me noob that I've begun with BF2? hell no, looking forward seeing you on some CTI server and we ll see who's noob :cool:

I'm done

B Sigmund Froud has talk really lengthly about this.

I I'm not, still young got a lot to do in life.

Still have to buy a 2Gb mem stick, mine has burned down, but you can find me at UO servers playing some Missions and PVP and sometimes at CFBattles, too; not this year thou.

[Zipper5 74]

In arma most peoples dont care about kills/score. Most care about teamwork,farplay and fun.

Getting lots of kills or a high score cannot involve teamwork, fair play, or fun?

[[frl]myke 14]

Getting lots of kills or a high score cannot involve teamwork, fair play, or fun?

It is not about "cannot involve", more about "doesn't matter". In our clan i do often fly either planes ot choppers. Especially when flying planes, i get easily a lot of kills, let alone when i drop a MOAB. On the other side, in other mission i do transport duty and hardly get a single kill during the mission.

Usually at the end i don't even know how many kills i got. If we managed to complete the tasks successfully without too many losses, well then i think i just had as many kills as it was needed.

[galzohar 31]

I think no matter how much the community tries to make things better, if something isn't hardcoded into the game to make things easier for new players to get into modded servers and find servers that suit what they like to play (which unfortunately, as said earlier, probably requires a miracle), then those discussions will keep popping up.

Even if installing a mod would just require nothing more than installing six updater, typing the mod's name (with typos even) and pressing "enter", we'd probably still have problems in multiplayer with people either not knowing the updater even exists, not knowing how to use it or giving up before they even try to use it.

Basically every step a player has to take in order to get into a game multiplies the chance for that player to get frustrated and quit.

It's not even about domination or about teamwork. It's simply that players either don't even get to that point, or get to the point of playing some vanilla domination/warfare but get stuck there because they can't get into anything else successfully.

Now you can also say that "empty servers tend to play empty, people join the populated ones", but I believe that this isn't the source of the problem, because we wouldn't have been in this situation in the firstplace if finding and joining servers to your liking would have been easier.

As for server cost and server admins, the problem is that those who have the time to properly admin the servers don't have the money to run them, and those that have the money don't have the time (makes sense, as making money takes time, no? :)), but for one reason or another they don't actually even try to team up. And to actually get a good server running you need quite a decently sized team. On Zeus even for just getting 2 gaming nights a week involves a combined effort from quite a few people both budget-wise and management-wise - A server that is populated full-time simply requires that much more. A single person has absolutely no chance to do this properly. And with Arma being a niche game without as many players, it's quite hard to build a good team to get this done properly.

[TheBigHerm 10]

I read through this entire thing, pretty much from start to finish. I read input from developers, server administrators like myself, public players, new comers, old goats High School forum moderators...how they got that job I dont know...but the one thing I didn't see was what I would have expected from a community that is so small and should be closer knit...a way forward. Everyone swallow your pride and charlie mike.

If you have the knowledge to fix the things (Im thinking sickboy, GLT and Xeno on this one) fix it! You guys are doing great things for this community. You dont have to answer to anyone... If you run servers, do your best to make them available. I know my servers ALWAYS have administrators ON and AVAILABLE. Yes, we run domination, but we run more than one server instance. We run Invasion '44 servers, ACE and ACRE servers, Insurgency Servers, Vanilla Domination servers...I do that to make sure that anyone that wants to play will have the ability to do so. If you are a public player...you have to put forth the effort to get into the server as well. You cant just hop into the forums hear and gripe about how bad the game sucks because it took you 15 minutes to download a mod to get into a server. If you get into a server, especially one of mine, I can guarantee that your idea of teamplay and tactics...and probably this game as a whole, would change immensely.

[Zipper5 74]

... High School forum moderators...how they got that job I dont know...

Guess I just lucked out. ;)

[smookie 11]

Myke;1907531']It is not about "cannot involve"' date=' more about "doesn't matter". In our clan i do often fly either planes ot choppers. Especially when flying planes, i get easily a lot of kills, let alone when i drop a MOAB. On the other side, in other mission i do transport duty and hardly get a single kill during the mission.

Usually at the end i don't even know how many kills i got. If we managed to complete the tasks successfully without too many losses, well then i think i just had as many kills as it was needed.[/quote']

You can't say that about the public play! The missions played on majority of servers are the ones that promote going for a frag rather than playing as a team - evolution, domination, valhalla, warfare or another crap - you dont kill, you dont get "money" (welcome back, counterstrike!). They simply do not encourage you to work as a team. Not rly...

[whisper 0]

A thread containing 55 tons of misconceptions about gameplay X from people of gameplay Y who don't have a clue about X but talk (and smack talk, ofc, because they are THAT better than the rest) with authority, when they have none.

Elitism crap, like each time such subject is brought up

[ArmAriffic 10]

well you have your way now, the creation of domination has officially stopped and won't be updated again, hope people like you are happy now all bugs in it now are going to stay.

IMO it is crappy that creation of domination has been stopped but it can be good in a way, hopefully some servers will keep running it but someone may make another super team based mp mission that takes the armaverse by storm

[Zipper5 74]

well you have your way now, the creation of domination has officially stopped and won't be updated again

2. Domination

I have no idea why people play on these servers. People run around like headless chickens. There's no organization anywhere at all, people just run into a helicopter, which usually crashes due to lag, and if it doesn't, everyone ejects, spends 5 minutes running to a random household corner, starts shooting everything that moves, and dies to a random dude hiding in a bush. Theres no teamwork involved, which is pretty disgraceful IMO as ArmA II is known for it's realism and I have never ever experienced teamwork in a public game.

Point out anywhere in that where he criticizes the mission and/or Xeno, and not the players/servers.