As you all know by now, I have officially stepped down as the Gaming Officer for ArmA. Yes this means I do not want to receive all those crazy PMs anymore!!

Seriously, I have no regrets over the last couple years being the GO. I have been around for all the really bad times as well as enjoyed the great success of late, both of which made the experience what it is. Of course I enjoyed the good times much better than the bad. There are not too many of you here that were around at the beginning when we started out. There was no other way to describe it then, but it was seriously painful. Most of it had to do with the fact that it was a broke game with a crowd that did not understand what we were trying to do here. Some thought of the game as some spin off from the BF2 genre, which in reality it was a carryover from Operation Flashpoint. The game was never about run and gun, rather a simulation. Yes being a simulation has had its challenges to deal with. At the beginning the game was so broke, we did not even have any type of Voice comms that were reliable, but we struggled to make it work. So being true life made it very unrealistic and next to impossible. Certain aspects of the game itself have improved drastically, but not up the level of where it needed to be 2 years later. Hopefully most of the issues will be fixed by ArmA2, sorry Bohemia Interactive but you put out a crap product, no matter your excuses. The game was never ready for prime time and it really showed for the first year and we are all still paying the price now for the bad taste it put into people’s mouth.

Now over my tenure as GO I have seen the so many thing change, some for the better, some for the worse. The game had to evolve if we wanted it to be having some sort of following here at TG as well as being enticing to outside players as well. I made certain compromises to keep the game going, as with little things as types of missions played to allowing certain MODs. Some have worked, some have not. But at the end of the day I do take responsibility for all the mistakes. Luckily, we have overcome some of my greatest mistakes in judgment and worked together to come up with a solution. Some decisions were definitely not popular ones and I have felt the wrath of the community for them ever since, but I still stand behind them. I tracked every bit of data over my time to either support or disprove my choices. I was literally checking online usage and stats hourly to begin to compile data for trend analysis. So I was considering the bigger picture, not just certain little opinions at times. With data to support everything, it definitely made it clearer that things were working or they weren’t.

Now one thing that I also wanted to tell you guys is simply thanks for supporting me. This game is about you and Tactical Gamer. I always wanted TG to be different than anyone else out there. We need to be unique in what we offer and how we play, if not we are simply competing with everyone else. The game itself does not have a player base large enough to be directly competing against another server or group. I have always heard people complain that we need to be more like this or that server. We are not that server so I refuse to be like them. I always had this mind set “screw the critics”. I refuse to listen them (critics) and decided to it my way anyway. Again, those choices were not always popular or positive, but they were decisions all the same and they led to where we are today either way. We are also not like any other server out there now. I did listen to everyone’s opinion, but in all fairness I had to only act on the ones that were for the good of majority, not just the minority no matter how loud they seemed to scream. Most servers have found a niche in either the way they play or the content they host; we have begun to carve out ours and I am confident Jeepo will continue to run with it.

Now I walk away from ArmA for several reasons, but ArmA will continue to not be far from my heart. I have always enjoyed Operation Flashpoint and the way it is so much fun to create content that everyone can enjoy. I want to return to that, by continuing to work on making missions and actually playing the game itself. As GO you are responsible for so much back side support and mundane administrative functions, it began to take the fun out of gaming for me. It is also a ton of time daily that is required to maintain it running smoothly. I also probably will not have the ability in the future to continue to be in game as well as constantly monitor the operations of ArmA. Most of you don’t know this but yes I am in the military, for 19 years now. I was gone six months last year on a deployment and continued to work on the servers and keep up on administrative functions the whole time. It was a real struggle for me to do this and it was also unfair to all of you because I could not see everything going on in game. I do not want to do that again when I go on my next trip. That is not to say I am not always around, but when I am deployed I do not have the necessary bandwidth to be in-game and play.

I do not know what the future hold for me at Tactical Gamer. I am going to be around, I am confident you all will still see me doing something around here.

But the most important thing I wanted to convey is Thank You!! Without you guys making an effort to support me I would have not had any success in my role. Between all the gamers and the Admins, you truly have made this a memorable experience that I have enjoyed. Now make sure you guys give Jeepo your full support as you did with me. For he is the one who now make the tough choices and take the ArmA community here to the next level.


V/r,
The Big C