=VG= Acro1

People like @HombreDeSombrero are the reason we don't enforce mics

1 hour ago, =VG= .Blizzard. said:

People don`t want to play COOP with a bunch of randoms anymore, they give a shit about rules and everyone around them.

Lol @=VG= .Blizzard. I don't know when you last played but may have been a bad streak  I feel like these are the players one gets annoyed about the most, but let's never forget about the other side. The Skirmishers, Skitalez's, Skiddles, Spartanishes and many others who don't start with an S but are equally great teamworkers. The positive, in my experience, far outweighs the negative. Also, if a certain map becomes harder because a certain asset squad is not super competent, doesn't that just add a nice layer of depth for infantry cuz now they gotta switch tactics?

I kinda feel like Covid gave PR a slight boost in playercount, and with that came a few new but worthy players. Yeah you get the no-mic no-type peeps and asset stealers sure, but we can always take care of them. That's why we have a strong admin team. The last days whenever I played, about 20% of people I saw would classify as the bored retards that you describe. The others were always involved and helping. We had 40-player server nights where I could barely notice the stupid apples around because the 75% pop that is smart was doing some great heavy lifting and great work.

PR is not the game for bored, jump-n-dump players. If they leave, that's good in my book. I'm more concerned about good, capable players who would've stayed but are leaving because of a negative athmosphere or idiots calling them noobs. The loud-mouths should be corrected, the newbies taught. Every week I notice at least 1 new player saying 'ello guyz, I em new pleyeur, how I take wepon?' and I don't even play that much. So I think PR is not a dead game, the community is what makes it and the community is dope. Our community is dope.

Honestly to me the bots are great now. I love the smoke mechanic, I love their sniper-with-a-G3 accuracy that keeps you on your toes. Had a great round with Skirmisher's squad a few night ago and we were getting PUMMELED to hell, but that was awesome! The challenge, the jokes, the camaraderie, the teamwork. Shit, this is what makes this game beautiful. I'll gladly pass on the quick-dopamine-boost-from-winning-every-round junkies that come and go anyway. My main fear and the thing I hate most above all, is the players who make maps a routine. Cap here, go there, yell 'allahu akbar' at end screen and repeat. Fuck routine and fuck the dopamine addicts that come with it. PR has so much more, and I've seen that myself over the past days, which made this Acro a very happy Acro .

Life is good. PR is good 

36 minutes ago, LangMaster said:

80% of the time we don't have that many people neither do we have enough brain cells for that

True, certain maps really need a high-value playerbase but even when we get 40 players and good skillz, I've not seen any Soul Rebel, Ghost Train or Korengal, and seen Dragon Fly like once I feel like we might lose out on great rounds on fun maps

Hey bois.

I heard some comments lately about the same maps being overplayed, today someone asked "Why we almost never play Kozelsk, Soul Rebel etc?". I myself am guilty of simply forgetting that certain maps exist, so I wanna put the map numbers here again to remind everyone about the wide variety of maps that we have. We oftenly do mapvotes pretty late and then we don't have time to really think about 'all' the maps anymore, so the usual ones keep returning. Certain maps are better than others for sure, but by reading this list I kinda realised that "damn, I just forgot about the existence of Falklands, Kozelsk, Shijia etc even though I loved playing them" cuz the others come up so often. Hope it can do the same for you !
Especially since some of the popular 'challenging' maps have seemingly gotten easier, we could draw some more inspiration here to fill the gap.

Below is a chart of how often each map has been played since PR 1.6 release on May 1st, 2020.

Chart (click to enlarge)

Numbers

Peace!

@Condrad Having done design in Blender and Sketchup for about 10+ years (on and off), my answer is the same: It depends. Will you make drawings, plans, or renders? Do you need material/stresstesting? Product render size/photorealism/ complexity and detail-level of your models all play a part. Give us some details, so we can assist you better, both on system and software:

• Will you make concept designs or blueprints? Does your work need to be technically relevent, or pleasing to the eye, or both? Do you intend to translate the design into measurement plans or is this just to create concepts?
• Suppose you make a 3D-visualisation, a 'realistic' render. Should this image be as photorealistic as possible? Or will a more obvious CGI-look be good enough?
• Do you plan to design furnitures piece by piece, or will you also create entire room designs? The latter requires more RAM and VRAM for rendering.

In general, designing is a resource-heavy task that requires a PC stronger than what you need for Word and internet browsing. To top it off, not all design software has been greatly optimized in the past years, so RAM gobbling is not too uncommon.

@=VG= m823us what is the game like? Realistic/shooter-y, and is the community teamwork-focused or rather blast'em past'em?

@Zeee I've updated the PR COOP RULES  page to include that squad leaders must communicate. Literally everyone already agreed on this, but it slipped through somewhere and wasn't written down 'officially'. This is now set in stone .

I'll have a look at the rules page and see if we can make them more skimmable and easy to read. Like @System said, you have a follow button at the top of the page that notifies you upon change.

As a squad leader it's much preferred to have a microphone, but not disaster if you don't have one. Think of the succesful 'inf no mic' squads for example, that can work pretty well. This is the reason we don't enforce a strict 'all SLs must have microphones' policy. I myself lead the occasional Trans/NoMicInf squad and it works out pretty well. NoMic squads are a tad slower than VOIP squads, but that's far from problematic. IMO, forcing the use of microphones for squad leads will improve anything, as it will also shrink our pool of good squad leaders that are willing to 'do the job'.

When you experience problems with a no-mic user, it's usually the person himself and not the lack of a mic. Whenever I play after 22:00 I cant use mic because my family sleeps, and I've never had complaints. Compare this to someone like PRBF2TROJAN (or whatever his name is) who doesnt have a mic AND doesn't communicate. Those are the problematic cases.

1 hour ago, TH0M said:

Other times you got no-mic SL going rogue, skipping flags, kidnapping their whole squad with them, firing mortar without saying anything, not helping the team defend / attack, etc.. In these cases the problem is not having no mic, but having no will to communicate, and in my opinion, that's the main problem.

If there's any doubt, let this memo clear it up: For squad leaders, microphones are not required but communication IS REQUIRED, and non-communicating squad leaders ARE breaking our rules! Players can report their SL's if they don't talk/type at all, and they should be dealt with and resigned if necessary. Exchange of info within and between squads is the backbone of our beautiful game, so we can't have squad leaders fucking off doing their own thing. Personally I'd also make it a habit to remove non-responsive players from your squad, so that eventually they'll get bored and leave. Harsh as it may sound, there are thousands of games available for the zero-comms type people. PR is not one of them.

Important footnote:

@Zeee makes a good point: certain rules are not always clear, and some info is lost in versions or website updates. I'll have a look at our official PRCOOP rules page, and make sure to update it accordingly. Thanks for bringing this up!

@PRBF2TROJANEXE

I'm getting it too. The issue lies with the website itself, not your own computer.

Web service certificates allow websites to use the HTTPS protocol. It's that fancy padlock you see in your URL bar that shows you have a secure connection to the website. This means that the data you send (messages, passwords etc) are encrypted, so they can't easily be snooped by people trying to steal your data.

This certificate doesn't last forever, it requires renewal from time to time. When it expires or if your browser detects something else wrong with it, you'll get the warning that you screenshotted. This is because an invalid SSL certiticate could also indicate that the website has been hacked, and your data is being snooped.

In this case, I believe that this is just a little error somewhere and not a malicious attack BUT for optimal safety, you should still:

- not send any private or sensitive data on this website until the SSL certificate is restored

- If you entered your password after seeing this error, change your password

Likely excessive, but better safe than sorry

@=VG= SemlerPDX has control of web-related shiz, he'll take a look when he notices this.

For any kind of 3D rendering and decent-tier video production, I'd advise NVidia GPU's. Their OptiX raytracing libraries are great for producing good renders quickly, and their NVENC video encoder is a-freaking-mazing for video stuff. Miles ahead of competition afaik.

1: HOLY SHIT on both those rigs. Secondly: what's your use for the rig, apart from gaming? Do you do any creative work, 3D stuff, data crunching,... Or is this purely for games?

2 hours ago, =VG= Kavelenko said:

Not quite correct, you can camp spawn points so long as they are not outside the flag that is being capped

This is true, but Apartments was not the currently capturable flag during most of that spawncamping. Now I did notice that Apartments seems to be the point where 95% of the enemy team spawns, whereas I thought they did more so at Palace. Since the bots would recap Apartments (yes?) if left unchecked, it does need to be guarded. Still think ground-based units (who have actual capping power) would be better for this though. CAS can shoot but if they miss a body and the flag goes neutral, someone's gonna have to fall back anyway.

CAS was doing a semi okay job of guarding flags at a point, but it becomes clear that as time progresses, their main focus lies on finding flocks of enemies to blow up, and a rather lackluster way of keeping their bird alive (honestly, why do people keep 20 meters between them and the enemy? It's an Apache. This should be considered waste). The kicker of this round comes when CAS is bored at base though.

This is CAS pilot drilling a hole into CAS gunner's brain with an L85. Teamkill in main base is not appreciated, and appropriate action will be taken.

15 hours ago, Sciddles said:

A couple more shots would have taken it out and BOOM, CAS flew over and took the kill

The concept of 'kill-stealing' shouldn't be a thing in PR. I myself usually shoot anything at the frontlines if I can kill it without damaging friendlies. Probably 'stole' dozens of kills because I'm not gonna verify if someone else is pumping lead into them. We play to capture the area and to win the map. We can either play to win the game together or to score as many points for ourselves as possible, but not both simultaneously. Kill-whores should be nailed to crosses or play a different game. Just my opinion.

15 hours ago, Sciddles said:

CAS was camping the broken spawn point. 

That's spawncamping. Camping is mostly illegal for good reasons. Did anyone report CAS for this? Please remember that spawnraping and camping is not allowed except in certain situations to win the map. This was not one of them, CAS was way more useful elsewhere to guard flags. If it's blatant camping/rape, don't be afraid to bring it to our attention.

Now more often than not, poorly efficient situations like this occur because of bad communication between squad leaders. Did the APC leader make his plans clear? I'm not saying it's APC's fault, just that there is often a "they should know this"-attitude when nobody made an initial request to begin with. Always ensure that proper communication was made before we point at people for not cooperating.

Commander should be in his cozy tent manning the UAV, or delegating his boys Ain't no commander got no business shooting enemies personally.

Waddup Jersey! You've been gone dor ages man. PR 1.6 is here and it's awesome. WW2 maps are a thing and smoke works on bots. Lots of new goodies. Playercounts have actually been on the rise (shocking, I know) partially due to the pandemic and people having time on their hands.

Uninstall and reinstall the game fully, and make sure to run it as admin. That fixed my ping issues in the past. If it doesnt, make a post in the Tech Support section of the website so more ppl can see it.

For your admin question, send a dm to @=VG= m823us and @=VG= SemlerPDX They'll take care of this.

53 minutes ago, =VG= Inch said:

OUTPOST - Not playable by any means

Added to broken maps. Thanks 

Good stuff! Adding Carentan Alt and Route E-106 to the unplayable maps list.

When did you notice this stuff on Barracuda Large? I've played it recently and had no FOB issues

If you want a decent and 'flawless' gaming experience, Windows is your guy. No OS is perfect but Windows remains the top choice for gaming because it offers so much hardware support out of the box. Game publishers design their shizzle to be used on Windows primarily.

Gaming is not impossible on Ubuntu and other Linux distros, but you'll run into several caveats likely. Performance is almost always lower especially for non-linux titles. Support for graphics cards and peripherals is not always available or free of bugs. Each game specifically will have quirks that may not play well within Linux, so you won't always know which titles are playable.

For multimedia purposes, Linux distros offer great possibilities tho. You can use a general-purpose distro like Ubuntu, Mint or Elementary and just load it with great open-source tools like Blender, InkScape, ShotCut/Olive, GIMP and Krita. For me, literally the only creative software I'd consider paying for is Adobe's After Effects and Premiere, since they're top-notch for video editing. Any other 2D or 3D design task can be achieved within Blender/Krita/Inkscape with very little extra effort required, if any. Blender is actually praised for it's lightspeed workflow when modeling, and InkScape's UI and handles are way more user friendly than Adobe Illustrator IMO. Blender has also showed benchmarks where renders were noticeably faster in Linux compared to Windows, though that changes with technology.

39 minutes ago, =VG= Inch said:

i only heard that its much lightweight compared to Windows

In general yes. Windows 10 wants to use approx. 1-3GB of RAM by default. Linux distros usually use less. Some distros like Damn Small Linux, Puppy or TinyCore are so small that they run entirely in RAM memory. You can boot them from a USB drive, remove the drive and still use the PC normally. For graphical purposes though, I'm thinking you'd want a general purpose (Linux thats kinda like Windows) which are bigger.

One distro called Ubuntu Studio is geared towards creative use. It comes loaded with the creative sector's leading open source applications for design, video/sound editing, and more. Gaming, as mentioned before, will be more challenging.

There's a shit ton of things about Linux that make it awesome, and a good number of things why you may still want to use Windows

Regardless of this, you can run any linux distro as a VM for free by using VirtualBox.

So @=VG= Inch What OS'es are you thinking of, and what's your rig's purpose?

Great argument @Sciddles. We're getting a bunch of new players, and we do need to show them the ropes. Several recent newbies that I've seen were actually very eager to learn the game. You make a really good point that I myself am guilty of sometimes: We're not at our apex game when it comes to teaching newbies. The server, especially now, is in need of more @Risiko94's and in general a more noob-friendly attitude. While we are no training server (because that classification gets you more trolls and zero-fucks-given noobs), new players should find a good starting point in our server to learn the ropes of the game. They should be able to tag along infantry squads to learn how the tactics, weapon dynamics etc all work.

I'd like to tie this into another point that I've heard Sciddles make previously, namely about toxic playstyle in some squads. in PR we should be 1 team , competing against the enemy AKA bots. Sadly it's not uncommon to see squads making it a point-whore race, competing with other squads for the top spot which grants them 15 seconds of bullshit internet glory. When another squad fails to cap a flag, an oftenly heard reflex is "fucking noobs" instead of "let's go and assist". This is certainly not true for our entire playerbase, not even half or a quarter, but it's too frequent nonetheless. I myself had a great friend who taught me all the basics on my first play of the game, and that was a huge boost to both my experience and the value I can give to my team. Let us be that friend.

Also, that CAS stuff is bullshit indeed. CAS is a support unit that should support infantry on capping flags. If they are called for assistance but they choose to fubar some other flag purely for kills, give us a swift !r and we'll return an equally swift whiplash to the point-whore or flagskipper in question.

Point-whoring, killfarming and competing for the top spot on the server are detrimental to the spirit of PR and will eventually cause it's downfall. =VG= is one of PR's largest communities and is pretty much the leader COOP community. We sometimes forget that it's not just us regulars who play, but also a lot of good-hearted blueberries. It's easy to assume that everyone you don't know is a noob. Let's stop doing that.

This may seem like an unlogical tip, but I want to really recommend playing more difficult maps WAY more oftenly (within server pop limits ofc). Several players already commented that gameplay feels like we steamroll each map. A lack of challenge makes people 'create competition' by competing with each other for the top spot. Playing hard maps with noobs seems counterintuitive, but it forces teamwork and cooperation in order to win the map, exactly what the game was designed to be.

I've long feared the decay in the sense of teamwork, but having @Sciddles report it here is a stern wake-up call to me that we've been slacking in this regard. This man is one of our more recent players but his integrity and sense of fair play are both noteworthy and commendable. I'm glad you joined our server man, and I'm glad you are who you are and brought this up to us. Most of us have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in this game, made great moments to remember and forged great friendships. We welcome the young and the old, the timid and the bold. We share many laughs, moments of great teamwork, and mourn the loss of our brothers when they occur. Our server community made that possible, and I'll be damned if that community ever ceases to exist.

I want to join @Sciddles in his pledge, and become more actively supportive of new players in our community. I'd like to invite all my brothers and the one sister that I've met here throughout the years to join me and continue the great work we've been doing for years. 

Let us be more welcoming to noobs in the squad and take those few minutes to explain stuff to them. The veteran players will be there to cover the shooting part
Let us be understanding of newbies and help them become the new veterans that we'll love to play with. ALL of us were in their shoes.
Let us read the battlefield and make our next move accordingly, without expecting others to do it for us.
Let us rely more on our teammates instead of expecting the worst. And if they do mess up? We'll improvise. We're good at that, PR-style. 
Let us lead by example, let us think about the ones next to us and not just about our own score for meager internet points. Let us instead make memories together with a team of hilarious random people from all over the world as we kick some R-BOT ass.

Shit, newbies can be frustrating, but I remember my own beginner days and I would want everyone to have such a teacher and the welcoming that I had. I've played on =VG= on and off for 10+ years now and it's still my #1 game community. We all came as strangers, and now most of us are daily visitors. Let us continue to and become an even better version of what it already is. We made this, and we will make it better.  Hey who knows, one day we'll be sporting one of these on our desks, walls or around our necks.

Alright, I'm gonna stop talking. Thanks @Sciddles, and thanks to all players and admins who make =VG= the great community that it is (at least to me , let's be humble).

See y'all in the field.

Honestly thought this was gonna be a complaint report about @=VG= .Blizzard.  

What Blizzard games do you play @=VG= BLuDKLoT?

Heyyy he finally got here! Happy to have you Sciddley. Always a pleasure to see you in-game and on TS.

Did he just call PR a young man's game? 

Most important to me is a good mission story and 'movie-realistic' risks. Not the classic 'we need to capture this point from the rebels' or 'oh no! Enemies want to cap this base. You must defend!.' Give me something with betrayal, intrigue and surprises.

Something like driving to a mission point but the road is suddenly blocked by a million sheep, and as you drive either left of right to avoid them you'll get ambushed by the enemy because that was their plan. Now you're crunching how they knew about it, and story guides you into a traitor who will become a kill target later. A bit of Cluedo mixed in with the shooting.

Have a war criminal somewhere who needs to be captured but then when you're in the room with him he just starts laughing and goes 'allahu akbar' before blowing himself up, so survival depends on who understood what was happening and either killed him before he could push or ran out to cover.

Have a VIP enemy warlord who has to be taken out because he's been ethnic cleansing some hutu's , but you need to sever their radio comms first because if you kill him and his buddies are alerted, they'll send a barrage your way to destroy evidence etc...

Have a night mission where you need to infiltrate an enemy camp to rescue hostages, but your breach point needs to be cleared of guards. You gotta kill them simultaneously so they can't raise alarm, but once they're dead you're on the clock because in 10 minutes their superior will do his name calls on radio and notice something's amiss.

Missions that really require logical thinking, terrain strategy and well-timed cooperative action. One that may take you 3 hours but feels like you were playing in a movie.

@X0RI remain where I stand  Your code looks great, the functionality has it's use, but I consider 'flipping vehicles' a necessary hazard of the game. Deep ditches and steep terrain should be able to neutralize your vehicle like they do in real life. If everyone can unflip: YOLO'ing everywhere and even less care take of the vehicle, cuz "we'll just flip it". If only admins could do it: that's another frequent request they'd be bothered with all the time.

I like your idea about limiting to engineers, but I'm afraid it's easily circumvented and doesn't play nicely with the game:

• 2-seater APC flips: driver takes engi and poof, vehicle good. Essentially 'always' has an engi on board.
• Vehicle flips completely: Will likely go kaboom before an engi can be flown in or someone can switch to the kit.  If it survives: will likely be severely damaged.
• Vehicle is stuck in ditch: command may place it in a position where it simply falls down again, and the almighty PR physics will likely send it to heaven instantly.
• Vehicle is flipped on side on a sloped surface: Depending on the slope, it will likely tumble down again or get rocket-launched by almighty PR physics.

Considering this all too, my sentiment is pretty much the same as before: Un-flipping vehicles by command is too arcade-y and not realistic/hard enough for PR. You hit an obstacle and flip? Vehicle lost. You underestimated that gap in the road? Start walking. If anything, the 'flipping weakness' in vehicles illustrates that they should be cared for, not expended freely, and that adds to the realism aspect of the game. Vehicles are already getting dumped way more often than they should, and this would only add to that 'expendable' notion. One should actively keep their vehicle from flipping by not hitting the obstacles it can't cross and by not crossing insane ditches. A while back, there was even a warning in the loading screen telling you to be careful when off-roading vehicles, since eg trucks flip easily. I think it's still there.

So in summary again: Fan of the idea, the work and the code. It's clear that you put good thought into this . Not a fan of having it in PR. Had this been BF2 vanilla, that would have been different since that's a shoot'em'up gallery anyway.