boudreux

It sounds like a lot of good things here.

http://www.armainteractive.com/forum...read.php?t=398

Is anyone involved with this, or knows more about it?

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Paperchase

Ah, another metagame. Plays a lot in the fashion of BF2Combat, I bet. (Contrary to what that founder of BF2Combat says, pay to play is not the future of FPS Gaming.)

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|TG-Irr|Paperchase

Dslyecxi

I agree with that completely. One of the head guys of ArmAInt contacted me to see if my group would be interested, and I must say... it doesn't hold any appeal. Paying to play combined with god only knows what insofar as gaming quality goes, and it's just.. eh. I'm not interested.

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BigGaayAl

I find the concept utterly hilarious.

For the love of god I don't see why groups like BF2Combat don't switch to TG. Some of them would require a serious conversion though to see the TG way of things.

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Shiner

Thanks for the link. The TG Mod group is working towards a similar goal of persistence and a "meta" game without perhaps the cost/quality/admin issues of a daily tournement.

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boudreux

I have no idea how I didn't notice the "pay to play" aspect. Would be awesome if we could have a TG-moderated form of this.

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Paperchase

...because they don't want to lose their special EA Relationship?

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BigGaayAl

Do they have one? Don't know what you are talking about here. What does it give them?

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Paperchase

From Wikipedia.

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CouchMonkey

Hello all,

I just wanted to stop in and say hello. I am part owner in the company who sponsors ArmaInteractive. I just wanted to dispel a couple misconceptions and perhaps answer some of your questions about our tournament.

First and foremost we are not affiliated in any way to Combat Studios, BF2C or any other tournament. We do not share the same ideals as them.

A brief background of this tournament:
We started ArmAI a couple months back because we were looking to stress the limits of ArmA. We wanted to play the game the way it was meant to be played, large scale, multi-sided, CTI/Capture and hold. Our battlefield will also perpetuate week after week. Currently we have about 30 objectives on the map, each one has a resource allotment on it. At the end of the day, commanders can call in reinforcements with their resources. Any resources they lose will be tallied. That is what we set out to do, and we are well on our way to do that. Most of the tournaments, especially the free ones (not saying that is what TG is going to do, if anything), are either very good scripted missions, typically COOP, or one off missions here and there. To a lot of people this is cool, but for people like us, we don’t want fight bots day in and day out (especially the moronic ArmA bots).

Now as for you topic of Pay to play. Unlike some of the other tournaments out there, we only charge because we have to. All of our income goes to the cost of maintaining the tournament. Unlike you guys we don’t have a billion supporters and advertisers to pay for everything. As we get more people, the costs will go down. They already have actually.

So long and short of it, we are not out to rape our members. We feel that our service is quite unique to everything out there and so far our members will agree that this is something they will pay for. If you want, please sign up for our free beta. We had our first match last night and it was loads of fun.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I will pop in here from time to time or feel free to PM me.

Thanks for your interest and your comments

Shiner

CouchMonkey,

Welcome to the community and thank you for joining in the discussion here. I'm very interested to see what you can accomplish with your campaign and I've recently completed a sign-up for your beta. As I alluded too above, a daily contest is way beyond our support levels and I completely understand that in order to accomplish that sort of environment, you would have to have a system of defraying costs. Supporting members here are "volunteers" that do just that, help defray the costs.

You are welcome to stop by and join us on the tacticalgamer servers or here in the forums. PM me anytime if you have any questions or comments.

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CouchMonkey

Thanks . We are probably going to do a twice weekly campaign to start things out. We do this only because it takes a lot of work to mod the mission file to reflect the previous day's activities. There is a lot that goes on outside of the 14 hour battledays. A lot of our members get together on the training server and practice. In addition our more senior members what vehicles to replenish and what to lay out on the field. In addition we will mod the towns the armies own after fighting with firebases (if they want to purchase them). So there we go well beyond what most people do in tournaments. I know with OFP there were always problems with ensuring people had the right mods and sometimes the servers were never up to par. Rest assured, that sort of thing will not happen with is.

You guys have a heck of a community here. I just wish I learned about you sooner .

Thanks again.

TheBigC

IMHO, it holds some value as for a concept to making basically a evolving Multiplayer Campaign. Beyond that I thing that there are too many limitations on the format proposed to be worthy of the monetary costs. I understand completely the time and effort it takes to make something this original; for that mad props to you and your crew. You and your team have put together a nice sales pitch to get some people that are lacking opportunities like that elsewhere. Some of the things I noticed off the bat was that you are limited to 2 nights of gaming based on the fact the changes have to be made to the dynamic pricing for the campaigns. There were several rules that may be too constrictive to the player that wants to play simply for a little while or even on certain days. I know personally I would not groove the fact that I pay $9 for 2 days of gaming, versus my $5 voluntary membership here and is 24/7 of evolving/custom content.

As for the TG ranks, most already achieve a level unparallel gaming experience versus elsewhere on public server and will continue to see content that will knock their socks off in the near future. One of the great features here is that TG already has the player base to run multiple servers, before the game has even been released in the US and England. That is a testament to the remarkable members that are dedicated to the mature gaming style we so love here. Another shining example would be that TG is starting to exclusively publish over 5 quality missions a week here; that is unmatched with any other Clan/Server/whatever that is public out there.

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CouchMonkey

Again, I don't mean to sound condescending to TG. But you don't seem to get what we are about. You guys do a great job with putting scrims together on a daily basis, there is never a lull in terms of game play. If there is not anything going on in ArmA, you can run over to BF2 and participate. I dig that.

ArmA is a completely different beast all together. It is even a lot more different than OFP. With OFP you could set up a mission anywhere on the island, typically because of the netcode, this mission was a smaller scale. Those who actually participated in an organized CTI has to admit that there were always server issues, mod issues, and balance issues. At the end of the day, where did it get you. I cant name another tournament that took a mission and perpetuated it. At the very best there was a BF2C type game play where you play one mission, move to the next, rince, and repeat.

the nice thing about ArmA as you know is the join in progress. That allows for uninterrupted game play. For our tournament, the battles will last approximately 12 hours. . I think where you get confused is that you think it stops there. Those who have participated in the tour so far knows that the battleday is only a small part of the giant equation. Sure we mod the maps but there are other things of interest such as:

1. Senior members can dictate the strategies used for the next battledays. With our resource system, reinforcements must be chosen, battle plans need to be drawn and the troops need to be trained.
2. Structured classes are forming for various activities such as chopper piloting, sniper, squad leading and the like.
3. People can just hang out and have fun on our 3 servers an, TS, and forums (nothing revolutionary here)

There is A LOT more that goes on besides the battledays.

We will also continue to adapt publicly available addons, content, and mods as well in addition our mod team has already and will continue to make custom equipment, scripts, and missions.

Finally we promise a fun, yet structured gameplay. You will not find the BF2C pubbies or anything of the sort. For the most part this game weeds out those types anyway, but if you do act up, you will be demoted and ultimately removed from the tournament.

Again, I do not think you fully understand what we are doing. I respect what you guys are doing and do not mean to take away from that. You don’t have to pitch your services to me, we are doing two completely different things.

Feel free to join up and try it out, beta is free.

Again, I believe we have covered the topic of costs. You guys have a great situation here because you have 12000 members and even if a small portion subscribes, that will cover the costs. We have only about 300 members and about 600USD/month in costs and upkeep. As I said before, we are not in it for the money. I doubt the owners of TG are in it for the money. They want to create n environment for gamers where they can come together and enjoy the games and hey, if you wanna donate, that’s cool. I can only wish that we get to that stage. Until then, unless we get some sugar mamma join, we have to charge.

Dslyecxi

I fully understand what you are about, and I think others here do as well.

Persistent campaigns are something my group has done in the past. We're not a "tournament", but I see that as a positive side - there is no "win at all costs" mentality, but rather we are all in it as a fairly tight-knit group that wants to have fun with our OFP and ArmA experience.

The pessimist in me says that a 12-hour "join when you want" session is going to pale in comparison to a tighter-knit, shorter-duration session.

That's great. I'm sure what you do will appeal to people. However, what you are doing is nothing that cannot be done with a good group, for free. I know that ShackTac (my group) can get any kind of gameplay we want, tailored exactly how we like it, and have a very good turnout without any cost to our playerbase. We can train at our leisure, with excellent and highly skilled players acting as the trainers, or we can do IRC, TS, Xfire, forums, our server, whatever. TG will be able to do any of that in short order as well.

Again, this is something that can be done with any good group, without the need to pay-to-play.

As I said before, I personally fully understand it, and I am not interested. If anything, I will look into coordinating with the NATO group that has recently formed - why? They're free, and I can guarantee that I will get high participation from my group if we do joint ops, whereas us moving into ArmAInt would likely pull maybe a handful of people due to everyone in the group recognizing, as I have stated, that we can get better gameplay within our own group than we will ever get from a pay-to-play environment.

Good luck with ArmAInt, though. I certainly don't wish failure upon you, I just do not believe that I will ever be willing to pay for a lesser experience than what I can get for free.

Oh, and while you're here... is WidowMaker, one of your admins (?), prior military service? And if so, what branch?

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