Squad Night?

[Pro-ActiveDeath]

Greetings and Welcome,

It looked like I missed the party last night, as many TG members were playing Squad. It was good to see, but unfortunately I was not available to join you guys. However, it did start me down the path of perhaps a "Squad Night" or two a week would be a good way to combat attrition to PUBG (guilty pleasure), allow us to play Squad together as a group, and have the server jumping at least a few nights a week. I understand the goal would be to have it filled 24/7 but until the next release I don't know if that would happen anyway.

I don't have the statistics on how frequently the server is full or if their are certain days it's more full than others, but I think having some structure might help during this lull in the action. Example being if Monday & Thursdays were "Squad" night, we could all try and play together. The weekends are the weekends. Knowing everyone's schedule is different (plus time zones) usually makes these things harder to pull off but I'm suggesting it regardless.

The idea has about as many pro's as it does cons, but I thought at least starting the conversation might be helpful. Thoughts, comments, concerns?

[Gaunt]

Last night there were a lot of people on. I'm only able to play for an hour or two at a time now, but playing PUBG has made me realize some things about Squad.
1. Free Look needs to be added ASAP.
2. PUBG has made me more patient and okay, laying in wait for people to pass me by.
3. I'm more aware of going for headshots than center mass.
4. I'm maximizing my ammo use.

Last night is a great example of this, facing of mostly TG guys with Wookie in my squad. We knew the US was going to attack District from the East in the river, so we placed ourselves in the middle of the river hiding in the tall grass. Sure enough you guys started coming over, throwing smoke right infront of us. We were popping people left and right! Then I moved up and well... I'm just going to not brag.. I my Kill/Death/Incap was 28/1/33. For the first time ever I ran out of ammo and had to run back on a 10 minute trip for more ammo. I was out in the fields between District and Gran Dell only using single shot to the heads until I ran out. After you guys retook village we had to fall back and then I got in a BTR with Wookie. We took out a few vehicles, HUMMV, TRANSPO, etc.

Welp, I had a blast! Thanks Gents!

[-Hudson-]

So Squad night?

[disposableHero]

I can get behind this. I know that the 9-series of releases is a bit stale, and Gaunt is correct: playing PUBG makes you want these features in Squad ASAP. Heck, they even have working boats and swimming (even though Squad has said they won't allow swimming) in the UE4 engine. Beyond stale maps and lacking features, let's not forget that the summer is usually a slow time as people spend time outdoors and are busy with activities. The combination of boredom and burn-out, plus warm summer nights (there's a song in there somewhere) and PUBG have hit us hard in terms of regulars.

Both games fill a need. Squad is, rightly, tending toward longer rounds and PUBG rounds run, at best, 30-35 minutes depending on how long you survive. PUBG allows you to only depend on 3 other people to achieve success whereas Squad requires you to depend on the other 8 in your squad plus 30 more on your team to achieve victory. So PUBG offers you a shorter round for the "time challenged" adults in our group and fewer headaches.

Our community was built on Squad, not PUBG. PUBG is a great outlet and I'm glad that we all still game together while playing it. This tells me the community is strong. We've made a few changes to how we do things with Squad, with gathering Discord as opposed to Teamspeak to increase accessibility and admin availability being a small example. We will implement a few others over the course of the next few weeks.

I have every hope that once v10 drops we'll see a resurgence on the Squad server, but it does not sit empty most nights. It fills for about 4-5 hours each week night and, if it is seeded early, most of the weekend. The rounds I've had lately have been of good quality, and I've met some good players. Hopefully they will return to our server frequently and eventually we can count some of them as part of the TG community. That's how most of you guys made it here and the process will continue.

As far as regular Squad nights, I think this is a great idea. It's tough for me to know which nights would work best, so perhaps we just try to rally the troops in Discord with a "#SquadNight" tag or something in the private channel and let it act as a sort of Bat Signal? Otherwise, we do have some events that we'd like to try - Older v Young as well as a few scenarios that were presented to us. Any other ideas? Otherwise, I'm not too terribly concerned and feel pretty confident v10 will see a return of a lot of TG tags to provide leadership and quality to the server.