Operation: Red Out - March 5th '06

[Livonia]

yeah, 100 person cap next time.

lets get those pix up!

[El Phantasamo]

livoniairsoft said:

yeah, 100 person cap next time.

lets get those pix up!

HELL YEAH!

The guy hanging around the RA went through 6 ROLLS OF FILM! Cant wait to see those!

[Canto]

By the way... Who was playing music on the radios?

[RochesterJack]

I have to agree on the MilSim aspects of the game. It was much more fun when I actually served a purpose protecting El and we had certain designated tasks such as storming the crash site right off the bat for Comms. equipment.

I felt a lot more adrenaline and overall things were much more organized when you have set goals and objectives. Not to mention the fact that when you get THAT going, people are much more willing to obey to commands and use team-friendly tactics instead of just rushing into an attack / defend game.

I'd like to spend a lot more time planning the next event, hopefully for this summer, and fine tune it a bit more, making sure both forces have set goals and objectives throughout the day, as well as regulating things like attacks on the embassy. To be honest, from a MilSim perspective, the RA should have had much more numbers attacking the DF at the embassy, however every time we tried to take the house, let alone the ground surrounding it, we were slaughtered. The closest I ever made it during the actual firefight was about 5 feet from the back door.


Another point I'd like to hit on for the next event would be uniforms. There was a bit too much time spent deciding who was on what team, and too much random "Oh you're the enemy? BRAPAPAPAPAPAAP".

This is all a lot of critiquing, and I DID have an AWESOME time yesterday, a lot of the game was a lot of fun, but some of it just needed fine tuning.


You can't blame the planners though. They got swamped by placing a deadline on the registration, rather than on the headcount allowed. If we can hold it to a certain number of "soldiers", it will be much easier to tune how many per team and get it to be overall a much more realistic experience.

MilSim is what I am striving for, as a player, and hopefully I'll be able to make some input into game planning for the next one.

Bottom line: I think all Michigan really needs is one well ran MilSim OP.

...That, or we can raid John Lu's house and kidnap him....


Thanks for listening,
Jack.

[Zorak]

John Lu is a great marketing guy, and his success in getting military guys and premium fields for airsoft use is remarkable. If the one event I attended was any indication, his objectives and scenarios are nothing special. Michigan has the talent base to provide a much more entertaining experience.

[O'Dwah]

cantoxii said:

By the way... Who was playing music on the radios?

Yeah, that was getting annoying. James got on the radio and told em to cut it out, I think it may of been one of the refs.

[Knief]

I've got to start this out with some big thank yous. First, to James at Futureball for letting us use his field. I'd say that I should buy him a cake or a beer or something, but he made about 2100 off of us, not counting raffle tickets, so maybe he should buy me one. Next, I've got to thank Zorak for letting us use his chrono. That, and some help from a couple of players, are the only things that got the briefing going even close to on schedule. Munin, I really appreciate your help with keeping things on track early. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to you during or after the game, so I don't know what all else you did to keep things smooth, but I loved what I did see you do. On that note, I'm sure there are a lot of other unsung heros like Munin that i didn't notice. So thank you to anybody and everybody who did their small part to help with crown control or game play. On a more personal note, a guy with an AK from RA found my lost radio and returned it to me after the game. So thank you to him, and anybody else who found somebody else's stuff and got it back to them safely. If you found somebody's something or lost something, PM me and we'll see if we can match up items to owners and get everybody his stuff back. Thank you everybody who has given us feedback here or through PMs and IMs. We're taking it all to heart. Last but not least, I have to thank everybody that showed up. Without you, we wouldn't have had an Op to botch up. I hope to see you all out again (although maybe not all at the same time again). Thank you everybody.

With that said, we need to evaluate every bit of this Op to find out exactly what went wrong and why. So I'm going to go down the list of what I saw and what I think would help it. I would love all criticism of what I come up with.

Our first problem was registration. We wanted no more than 100 people, so about 80 would show up. When we had 80, we set a registration date three days away, hoping to get 20 more people. 100 more registered in those three days. Solution? Cap the number of players who register, not the date. That way, we can't have more than we think we can handle.

Our most important problem, as Jacko and others have said, was safety. I don't think we even considered briefing about keeping goggles on at all times unless in the parking lot. In a year of playing, we've never had that problem at our smaller games (maximum of 45 players). It didn't cross my mind that people would take their goggles of while they were on the field. Solution? The initial briefing was incomplete -- very incomplete. Safety needs to be addressed. This also has to include things like blind firing. It's been said, some people just didn't know. To go along with this, the briefing has to be the first and only warning about taking off your goggles. If it happens on the field, that person needs to be removed.

Very few people knew the objectives. This was caused by two problems. First, the briefing at the beginning was very incomplete. Second, CrazyCanuck wasn't properly briefed. My solution here is to only let event organizers be team leaders. That way, they know everything about the event, and they can pass it along to their respective teams and answer questions in game.

The lunch break caused a lot of chaos. Some people thought there was one, and some people didn't. Again, this was a breakdown between the organizers. If we do have a lunch break, not only does it need to be announced pre-game, but we need to have a system to stop all game play. The whistles were good, we just need more people with them, and all in communication.

The in game objective switches led to a lot of confusion. I was baffled by all of them but one. I don't know if somebody came up with them on the fly or what. The only one that I knew was going to happen was Damo and I kidnapping the ambassador mid game. He wasn't supposed to switch sides, nobody was supposed to go with us, and I don't know what the hell happened with the RA DF alliance thing. That one double cross shouldn't have been enough to send the game into a downward spiral like that. The solution to this one is just better pre game organization. We needed more face-to-face meetings, because online discussions just weren't cutting it. We were still planning some aspects of the game when this thread was posted, which resulted in 25 pages of confusions and arguments. That made rules unclear and hard to discern. I don't think that we were ready to pitch this Op to Hado when we did. We were inefficient in how we organized everything, and that was the clear downfall to this thing. We needed an itinerary finalized a month ago, an outline for the briefing instead of El just winging it, and probably an outsider to read over the objectives.

Somebody said that he thought one of the chronos was reading low. Did anybody else get this? We never compared the two to make sure they were reading the same, but they were both the same brand. Mine has always chronoed guns to be about what the owner expected. I don't know about Zorak's, but he didn't mention that it's off.

Enough has been said about cheating. I think that we should have addressed it in the briefing, but we can't stop it. The best we can do is call our teammates out if we see them get hit, and ask others to do the same.

Thank you all again for even allowing us to have a run at this thing. We'll polish up our methods a lot before we get another one of these going.

[Zorak]

Knief, I'd argue against having event staff as generals, but I don't think this thread is the best place to get into it.

Re the chronos, Munin and I were happy to loan you guys ours. I don't know that one of them was reading low. I know that my 249 chronied much slower than I expected, but the hopup was also way off, so that wouldn't be impossible. I just checked the manufacturer's web site and they had two interesting bits of information. Slow readings are possible if the light is funky, and the official operating range of the chrony only goes down to the freezing point. If we had any condensation or just funky AM lighting conditions, one of the chronies might have been reading wrong. I guess we'll know to rig the diffusers and compare readings next time.

[Munin]

My AEG chronoed exactly where I expected it to. I was about 5 FPS into the 25 foot engagement limit (which kept me from assaulting the embassy later in the game), which is more or less exactly where it's been every other time I've clocked it.

[Damo/DK]

Toothbrush's M15A4 chronoed low (234) on the right chrono.

[Matt (Achilles)]

You think thats low. My brand new UMG chronoed 79 high.

I think it might have been M/PS.

[Zorak]

My 249 showed 180 on the right chrony, and I know it doesn't shoot 180mp/s, because it hasn't exploded.

[toledoairsoft]

I had a great time guys thanks.

[buccshot]

Overall I have to say the good definitely outweighed the bad. It was good to finally meet you Canto, also who were the 2 snipers on the top floor of the embassy with the UTG rifles. I was the guy with the M15 Tactical Carbine and the face paint. I would definitely like to hook up with you guys on the weekend for a game. The second to last picture on the previous page has a close up of the side of my head I got the Grey caiman gloves and my ear bud mic. Overall great game I had a awesome time and will definitely go to the next one. As far as the lunch break negotiations, negotiations is for losers and the French.

[Talon]

I think that the camo could have been resolved with either
A. a headband, if you are shooting at anyone, they should be able to see your head (NO BLIND SHOOTING!)
B. a civilian top, and camo pants. That way there is no confusion about that soldier where all you can see is his upper torso over the roof of a car and his woodland shirt.

It would have been nice if everyone would have brought a kill rag like the rules required. Or been a little less lazy and held their guns above their heads.

As for the Pilot and MEU defection to the RA side. That was an improvised on the fly idea. We had captured the pilots and MEU and been dragging them around the field with us. And quite frankly, the guards (myself and darko) and the pilots were bored out of our F-ing Skulls! I didn't pay 15 dollars to go play guard duty, hell I can get PAID to do guard duty. So, in order for everyone to have fun, we "brainwashed" them so that they could actually shoot those little MP5K's at someone. It would have been nice if we could have had the MEU guys and the Pilots change into a pair of Jeans or something so that you would know they were RA, but sorry, we didn't have any spare Levi's at our Respawn. I was hoping that they would announce to the DF that MEU was fighting for RA just to avoid confusion, but I wasn't the Mom or General out there.

I would have liked it if instead of running allllll the way across the entire field to our Respawn everytime we died away from a medic, we could have just ran to the last point we controlled. Like Battlefield 2 or something, otherwise, what is really the point of claiming those flag poles than just a site for a new battle. In war you would capture territory and move your line up, including reinforcements. Though I think the ammo should definately stay at the far "fixed" spawn points so that there wasn't a bunch of gear hanging out inside the bus for example.

If there was going to be a large event like this with basically two entire companys there should have been a predetermined chain of command on both sides, with predetermined teams. That way squadleaders could have brought two radios, one for orders from the General and another to pass those orders onto his men.

And then of course the safety. I would remind a guy to keep his goggles on, on the field, and most would realize what they were doing and immediately replace them. But at least a few repeat offenders were little cocksuckers that would give you the "you're-not-my-mom" look and keep walking. A certain long haired hippy highschooler springs to mind... In the real Army, we don't do any mission without a safety breifing.

And a preset midway break should have been determined before hand and announced with an airhorn or something.

The next op should be a good one I think, with all this experience. I did have a lot of fun in the last half.