iratus

Probably we're doing this during community beta ;)

Yeah, that also was my impression. Tanking enemy uniform isn't that OP if you think about it, because it not only confuses your enemy but also your allies. It's kind of the same as with those people who feel verry clever and are stealing enemy tanks during Warfare missions. They usualy get friendly-fired (and then tend to complain about it "why you kill me you morons!!! I said it in the chat that i'm stealing that tank!!11"). You simply don't know who's friend or foe if everyone wears the same uniform because there are no blue triangles floating over the heads of your teammates (unless you play on newbye difficulty of course). Using enemy uniforms may work for a small, well organised team fighting on its own deep beneath enemy lines (Spec Ops), but for larger forces the downsides outweight the benefits. I wonder how the AI reacts to players in disguise. If using enemy uniform only shows up in a specific mission its most probably a script dealing with it (using setCaptive and things like this).

And the feeling gets even better the day when you do something verry complex, start it in the expectation of errors popping up - and it just works!

I agree with this. That's why I prefer not to have to register my Arma to steam.

Even if considering some stealth use, 99% of the time you would just press whatever key is assigned to this action right after reloading. So in my opinion this would not add anything valuable to the game. Let it stay a part of the reloading acion as it is now.

That's right. But the preorder idea isn't about getting better feedback. It also isn't about "only the people who absolutely love ArmA should provide feedback". It's about excluding those people who would only participate at the alpha because they want an early "demo". Because, as said before, treating an alpha as a demo may lead to false assumptions (loads of bugs during alpha does not necessarily mean loads of bugs during the final build). And most of those people (the "demo-testers") would not provide much feedback anyways. As I said before, I'm not a fan of the preorder idea. But I see what some people think would be an advantage of it. I guess that's exactly what MadDocX suggested when he said: :) Wasn't there a Beta for Battelfield 3 for those who preordered? Or could one get access to it without preordering? (On the other hand even if EA did it in the past, that doesn't make it any better :) )

I guess he wants them to wait for the actual demo... We don't know yet. The Community Alpha will start after E3 (wich is 5. til 7. June). The exact details will be announced close to the start of the alpha.

^This! I'm not a huge fan of the preorder idea. But it would be a effective way to keep out all those who are mistaking a Alphatest for a demo (and I think this is important). There will be bugs, performance issues and all that bad stuff in the alpha because ironing out those problems is the purpose of an alphatest. It won't help someone to see if he/she "likes the gameplay" (at least not more than playing ArmAII Free). But anyways after E3 we will see wich selection method (if any) BIS decides to use. EDIT: That's exactly the problem. Chances are high the alpha will not "play smooth on most rigs, look good, and be interesting to play", because it is an early, not finished build still in alpha. (Well, maybe it will allready look good, depending on how much of the lightning and such is finished). It is not suited to give people a first impression of the final product. If the alphatest is free for everyone many people marginally interested in the game will sign up. A alpha with the usual ammount of stuff not (yet) working will shy away many people and may result in rumors about another buggy Arma (even more given the reputation of ArmA-series being buggy).

Of course. If it's a difficulty setting, you can set it "on" in the server config file and it's then activated for everyone playing at the server afaik.

News about the alphatest on Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/24/arma-3-playable-alpha-coming-post-e3/

Would be nice to have this as a difficulty setting. Default on lower difficulty levels could be "off", so new players would not get confused by it. Of course on highest difficulties it would be "on" (and one could activate it on lower difficulties if he so desires).

Part of the problem is: Many new players see Arma as just another FPS. They think something like "it's like Battlefield but requires more tactics". But ArmA is more a simulator than a FPS and the gameplay is verry different to say Battlefield or even Red Orchestra. When people enter Arma with this missconception, they run into a variety of problems. For example a buddy of mine was upset because he had no knife. He asked me what he is supposed to do if he runs out of ammo and i said "just pick up magazines/weapons from a dead soldier". Because he is used to Battlefield and such, he is used to disapearing bodies so he never thought about being able to pick up magazines from dead bodies. Funnily that wasn't even in a situation where there was any reason to use a knife, he still had about 300 or 400 bullets for his machinegun and it was no stealthy, sneaky mission. He missed the knife only because he is used to have one in all those other games. Those new players often also get their ass kicked repeadetly because they never have learned to play a game like Arma (i.e. stay in cover, scan the surroundings for enemies, engage targets at 300m with an assault rifle ect.). On the same time they may view themselves as expierienced FPS players, thus assume subconsciously something has to be wrong with the game if they aren't as good as they are used to. Back in the days of Cold War Crysis this wasn't that much of a problem, since back then there wheren't that many shooters. People hadn't that many expectations how a shooter has to be. Therefore they aproached the game more open minded and took what it had to offer whithout moaning about all the things that where different to other games. Nowadays it seems necessary to somehow point out that Arma different gameplaywise from all those modern military shooters.

If OA addon would have required ArmA2 the community would have been split into the following two groups: People who do not have the Addon People who have the addon For mission makers and serverhosts this means they have the option to play it safe and only use Vanilla content to ensure the mission is playable for everyone. With OA being a stand alone expansion the community is split into the following three groups: People who only have ArmA2 People who have ArmA2 and OA People who only have OA So we have one fraction more. For mission makers and serverhosts this means there is no "safe way", they allways have to "cut off" part of the community. On the other hand, one could imagine some people would not have bought OA if it hadn't be standalone (because they didn't allready have ArmA2). one could allso imagine some of them might even have bought ArmA2 Vanilla later on because they got interested in OA and ArmA in general.

I have to say Rise of Flight is not a good comparison though. Sure, it has many trees, buildings and other object in the world. But since it is a pure flight sim those objects can be quite simple compared to the objects ArmA needs, because the player rarely sees them up close. If a player would walk around on the landscape of Rise of Flight as an infantryman it would feel rather dull because of the lack of details. Its not only the huge maps and thousands of objects ArmA has to bring, it also has to deliver them with relatively high details. Most other games do either one or the other. Doing both at the same time is much more difficult (and ArmA packs AI, ballistic simulation et cetera on top of that). I'm not saying "ArmA is as good optimized as humanly possible". But since there seems no game around that does the same things ArmA does and runs better, a statement like "it is poorly optimized" is somewhat baseless.

Exactly. And even if 95% of the new people are what some of us may call "CoD kiddies", the remaining 5% will be worth it. (Don't worry those "CoD kiddies" will not stay long anyways because there are no kill streaks and if you play ArmA like CoD you get ypur butt kicked repeadetly :D). Additionally those 95% would still need to buy ArmA3 wich means more money for BIS that can be invested in addons and DLCs. So anything that encourages new people to play Arma3 without alienating the core Arma gameplay should be considered a good thing by the community.

Sell ArmA 3 on Stam? Yes. Those people who like the services Steam provides for them (mainly autopatching and all that) may buy it there. And the presence there will result in more sales for BIS (wich then means more money can get invested in cool addons, ArmA 4 and so on) I own many games on Steam, but I will buy ArmA 3 boxed or at Sprocket (if digital) because I want to run mods on it - Steams habit of autopatching and saving the gamefiles in predefined locations sometimes doesn't work well with mods. So I want to stay in control here. Integrate Steamworks into ArmA 3? No. If Steamworks gets integrated in ArmA 3 we all have to register it (aka soulbind) to Steam even if we bought it elsewhere, and we have to run Steam in the background. And what advantages do we get? Achievements, leaderboards, profiles, and avatars? I don't need them (and we allready have squad.xml including squadlogos wich are way cooler). Matchmaking? Sure, the ability to invite friends directly onto the server you are currently playing comes in handy, but i don't want to get "soulbinded" just to have the option to be lazy. I dont see the pros outweigh the cons here.

The option to set weapons, magazines ect. available to players during the briefing side specific. For example: class Weapons_east { class AK74 {count = 8;}; class RPG18 {count = 2;}; class Binocular {count = 2;}; }; class Weapons_west { class M16 {count = 8;}; class M136 {count = 2;}; class Binocular {count = 2;}; };

I wonder why they voted no.

Besides tecnical hurdles regarding the implementation, I can't see any arguments against being able to change audio-output midgame. So I believe only a troll would vote "no" in this poll. --> Wishlist

Im talking about the X-Com: Ufo Defense remake from Firaxis (wich was announced yesterday), not about that name-recycling FPS thing from that other studio. Since Firaxis is making it, it may be worth something at the end. Go check out those links: http://www.firaxis.com/news/news_detail.php?id=2011 http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/05/firaxis-re-making-xcom-enemy-unknown/ (sorry for being off-topic..)

Voted. Of course there was only one real option I could pick (even with X-COM: Enemy Unknown being on the list).

You can do this in ArmA2 with the M249. It has not much recoil ingame and you can compensate it a bit by moving your mouse downwards. I like the recoil as it is in ArmA2.

To get new players into the game Arma needs a good and working campaign. Most people I know even play at least some singleplayer in a game even if they bought it primarilly for multiplayer. Some of them do so in order to get "the hang" of the game before they throw themselves into multiplayer battles. Others just like to play singleplayer. If the campaign works (oposed to buggy Harvest Red :mad:) and has a good story, chances are greater that those players will try multiplayer as well. And i think most of us agree that ArmA 3 needs tutorials in some form, since the Arma series is verry complex. In my eyes a good campaign is the best tutorial. You don't get everything thrown at you from the start, instead you get things step by step. It allso does not feel as boring as playing a "real" tutorial, since it has not this "i have to finish this tutorial before i begin to play"-feel. And if you crash your first chopper after 10 seconds you just load the last savegame/restart the mission instead of wrecking the whole game for ten or so players ad getting blamed as a noob for it.

Wait! There will be no piano cords??? :eek: If there are no piano cords in ArmA3 i will loose my faith in BIS! They really should add piano cords to the game, im sure most piano players would agree with me!