Folk Year 2

[fer]

Hi, I'm comrade Xiathorn, and I'm far too busy to--
Silence! Folk is one. Actually, it was one a few weeks ago. Maybe more. Look, I've been very busy directing the revolution.

Hurrah! ... So? What did we accomplish in year 1 of the revolution?
Well, together, in the last year we've managed to deliver:

• 55+ Folk sessions
• 65+ original Folk missions
• 120+ Folk forum accounts opened
• 35+ guests in the Folk Skype perma-chat
• Half a dozen joint sessions with MARSOC/Tier 1 and LDD Kyllikki
• Ongoing arrangement (now in its 4th month) whereby all Folk sessions include our comrades from ARPS (from the Rock, Paper, Shotgun community)
• Regular playercount is now around 20 per session

And that's just ArmA2; Folk sessions have also been running for DCS: A-10, and several comrades have acted as testers for comrade Headspace's personal project, TARS.

Cool. What's next?
Okay, here's how it is. Folk came about around the princple of 'low friction gaming'.

Is this the stuff explained in What is Folk?
Yes. In fact, before you continue reading this post you might want to re-read What is Folk?

Re-read. Has something changed?
No, and maybe nothing will; but now is a great moment to reflect on what Folk is now, and what we want it to be going forward in year 2.

Anything in particular?
Nothing's out of bounds for discussion, but the hosts would like to suggest a handful of topics that you want to think about:

1. Openness / Advertising
The Folk sessions began as invitation-only affairs; later, we posted on the BI forums and allowed people to email us requesting access; today our server details are published on the RPS forum, which is open to the public. Yet we still don't allow non-guests to view our forum. Should we retain the current set-up or become more open, perhaps allowing non-guests to read (but not post) to our forum, and publishing the server details more widely? Should we run another advertising campaign to attract more like-minded comrades?

2. Required addons
Central to the 'low-friction' concept was the absence of any required addons, allowing anyone with a vanilla copy of Operation Arrowhead (and later Combined Operations) to connect to the server and play. In recent months a few different comrades have asked about adopting selected addons, notably ACRE, but mission makers like to eat new islands from time to time as well. Are we happy to continue as vanilla fundamentalists in the name of making it very easy for people to participate, or are there exceptions we'd like to make?

3. In-game communication
This may be related to topic #2 if ACRE is a realistic option, but even if it isn't we need to look at our comms set-up. Historically we've been able to use a single TS3 channel for platoon-wide messages and group VON for intra-fireteam bickering, but our sessions are becoming large enough to make that less and less workable. We have (and have always had) a documented approach to using TS3's Channel Commander feature - as detailed in the thread: What is the Folk platoon? (and also in Getting started with TeamSpeak 3 (for ArmA2)). We haven't been strict about enforcing this - which would mean asking all guests to know how to use CC and be ready to do so if their element leader dies - but we could. Or should we?

4. Our comrades in ARPS
ARPS comrades now make up the majority of the Folk session playercount, and many of their number have Folk forum accounts - a few have even begun to write missions for the Folk sessions. This is excellent, but we do have some comms challenges because ARPS communicate primarily via the RPS Steam chat, a single thread in the RPS forum and their Mumble VoIP server (which they use for many other games). For now a few of us do a lot of cross-posting, but it's sometimes a bit hard to get dialogue happening with the totality of the Folk sessions' playerbase. Are there any creative solutions here?

Do I need to express an opinion on all of these topics?
Not at all, and if there are different topics you want to raise, please go ahead.

Is there a time-limit on this conversation?
Folk isn't broken (at least, we don't think it is), so changes won't happen unless there is a very clear consensus (which is not the same as a vocal minority). However, it's always healthy to question things.



Unless you are questioning the party leadership.

[Joseph-Sulphur]

Firstly, I'd like to thank Fer, Tigershark, Housemaster and all the other excellent people who have been making the missions that we play. Also, big thankyous to Fer and Nulkigan for organising the sessions and server stuff respectively.

Personally, as much as I love crawling through the rocky crags of Takistani valleys trying to hit that pesky BMP with an RPG, I very much enjoyed Tigershark's mission (Dogs of War?) in the oil fields where we play as PMCs, and wouldn't mind playing a few more missions with some BLUFOR toys and a larger scale (like Scud hunt).

[egg651]

OK, opinion time:
1. Whilst I have no particular aversion to new players joining FOLK sessions, I don't see a particular reason to advertise at the moment - we have regularly had healthy player counts for a good while now.

2. I would love to be able to use the multitude of audiovisual and other addons (Game tweaky stuff like okt_noblur, InstantViewDistance and CompassSize) that I use with ARPS, although I completely understand your reasoning that there might be issues if people forget to turn off ACE or similar mods that might cause issues if not run by everyone. As for required addons, that's something I am against. As much as others may like the extra features of ACE or ACRE, to me they just seem like unnecessary overcomplication - Particularly ACRE.

3. I have voiced my opinions on CC in the RPS forums, and I'll cross post here:

To decide how useful CC is you have to look at what it is intended to do and how well it accomplishes its task - Here, it's task is to improve the ability for squaddies to communicate between themselves in mumble, and the way it does this is by limiting the recipients of command chat to squad leaders, which is entirely ineffective. Without CC enabled, everyone can hear the command chat and the squaddies know when they have to shut up. With CC enabled, the SL has the extra work of telling his squaddies to shut up, he still gets the same amount of chatter, and the squaddies still have to shut up. They just don't hear anything. So effectively, CC doesn't extend the amount of freedom of squaddies to talk at all. If anything it restricts it, as people might be hesitant to talk if they are unsure if the SL is listening to someone else.
In the end it comes down to this - With CC: Awkward silence and another key to set up. Without CC: Everyone hears the chatter.

4. Solution: Kick ARPS out. It's full of idiots, especially that Egg guy. What a douche.

EDIT
P.S: This:

Firstly, I'd like to thank Fer, Tigershark, Housemaster and all the other excellent people who have been making the missions that we play. Also, big thankyous to Fer and Nulkigan for organising the sessions and server stuff respectively.

[car00ke]

Wanted to share my thoughts too:

1. Openness / Advertising
I do agree to open the forum for a bigger public. This way they can have a look at what we do and who we are, maybe gives a better idea before they join us if this is what they are looking for. I would also make them not able to post unless they register. This way at least we know a bit of who’s posting… (EDIT:) Maybe keep the part of the forum closed where there are posts of personal things like pictures etc?


2. Required addons
I have played with ACRE a few times with Jefke, it is an experience to do it that way. I would be open minded about this and see what others think.


3. In-game communication
I would really like for comms to be more clear, maybe it’s because of my in-experience, but I find it really hard to know who is talking and to whom I’m supposed to listen to. So I would suggest more channels for fireteams and a commander channel…


4. Our comrades in ARPS
Isn’t there a possibility we could “merge” with ARPS? I mean, like a thread in the forum, that shows on our forum as well as on theirs? For better communication? And maybe they can come join us on Skype?

I would also like to say that I really enjoy the sessions with all you guys (Folk and ARPS) and that I appreciate all the work you put into making the missions etc.
It is really a fun way to close off my week every sunday

Thank you and thanks for giving me the opportunity to join you in the revolution!

Car00ke

(plz excuse me for spelling mistakes )

[Bodge]

1.
I don't think that opening up Folk will be a necessary change because the only public "advertising" is in the ARPS thread and we tend to actively encourage new players to play a session with us before joining a folk session. EDIT: Unless you want to advertise Folk's presence elsewhere ofc.

2.
I am not fussed about addons, I am immensely lazy and can rarely be arsed dealing with installing them. It is a monumental effort of willpower editing missions ¬_¬

3.
In game comms - I am more of a fan of Folk style chat, mainly because I prefer a quieter session. I don't mind seperate channels with CC and whisper and such but it not always as smooth as it should be. A universal voip channel with comms discipline seems to function better.

4.
ARPS - Thanks very much for having us, it is nice having the seperate session particularly as our "tactical" nights are a little inconsistent. It has definitely had an effect on some of our play sessions as people have grown to appreciate the structure provided by a chain of command.

The only thing is that I would like to remind people to do things in the Folk style while on their server.

In the spirit of comradeship I would like to remind Folk that if they fancy a game during the week that there is almost always people about in the RPS chat that will join in. It would be great to see you on weekdays, at the moment it is only really Fer and you know what he's like.

[Grizzly]

On the addons: We can keep sunday as the 'no addon - main folk' event, and do other events on other days which allow us to play with certain mods, say ACE or ACRE. Or both. Although the player count will probably not be all that high, there could be some turnup.

[Headspace]

I should probably comment on the A-10/general FS stuff.

In January or thereabouts we started having a regular A-10 session. After I moved, that kind of evaporated because I was unable to get back from work during the session time. In addition, a lot of our flight sim people are in Europe and a handful are in the US, so it sort of splits things in half.

I'm thinking we should do the following with this:

- Have either a single weekend flight simming session that last a couple hours or do two during the week that are in the respective compatable time zones.

- Decide if we would like to stick to A-10 or expand it to other sims like LOMAC or even IL-2/COD. A-10 can be intimidating for newer players. I don't want that to drive off interest.

I also can't tell you how how helpful people have been in testing TARS, internally. Folk is the only place that did real "internal testing" of this addon.

[egg651]

- Decide if we would like to stick to A-10 or expand it to other sims like LOMAC or even IL-2/COD. A-10 can be intimidating for newer players. I don't want that to drive off interest.

From the perspective of a player that loves IL-2, but has never dabbled in any other combat flight sims, I can tell you that the idea of having all those fiddly controls scares me silly. Complex engine management in Cliffs Of Dover seems hard enough already without complicated weapon and communication systems

[Nullkigan]

1. Openness / Advertising
I have discussed this with Fer before, I think. If new blood is desired (at the moment I'm not convinced it is), then the best way to do this is to move away from the fishing hole everyone else is using. Folk is a lovely group, but advertising on the BIS boards is only going to reach a certian type of player. Instead, throwing things into thread on SomethingAwful, FacePunch, PCG, Penny Arcade or the other big online communities might get a few more bites. Many of those communities do have their own groups, but it would probably reach more of the Folk type of player.

Think of it like this: The RPS arma group has grown largely through affiliation with rps readers, many of whom hadn't really bothered to play online with a group before, and we've never had a presence amongst milsim groups or the BIS boards. The game weekend announcements from Jim Rossignol certainly helped increase playercounts, but that's not really an option for Folk, unless we were to use one as a marketing session?

2. Required addons
I still dislike serverside mods. Versioning will be a major issue for folk as players come from different communities with different versions of ace/acre/etc. It's possible to get around this e.g. by creating a @Folk set of addons, but still messy. We could perhaps expand the list of whitelisted clientside mods, at guest request?

There are two main issues with Acre to my knowledge. The first is that it's simply unstable. Less so these days, but Teamspeak 3 itself is not exactly the most solid piece of software ever either. The second issue is that the radios are custom items and therefore require adding to missions, which both restricts the pool of available missions and means they can't be shared with other groups.

If we were to move into using mods, I can quite easily find a terrabyte of bandwidth on one of my VPS boxes to host a yoma mod repository (or maybe a sixupdater one, but I have zero experience there).

3. In-game communication
This is a problem we've battled with for the RPS server but I eventually simply gave up on. The folk style is better but not something we've been able to properly enforce elsewhere.

A couple of people have voiced concerns about not being able to hear both the teamspeak3 and in-game channels at the same time, but I'm not convinced that ACRE would actualy improve this. CC definitely would. I'd LIKE to see CC get some use, as we've tried it with some success on the occasional RPS Tuesday, but it'd have to be enforced with a heavy guiding hand for the first session or three. Six to twelve people per channel is a good maximum but then you run into issues with alt tabbing and shifting people into their squads. With more admins on the teamspeak server shifting might not be as much of an issue?

4. Our comrades in ARPS
I have no ideas here. I personally have an aversion to skype because it is synonymous with work for me (or at least used to be) and I already have IRC and steam chat open constantly, neither of which bleep in quite as annoying or persistant a manner.

Getting crosstalk between the two groups is difficult because, frankly, there's little reason to spend much time on the Folk site. It's a horrible thing to say given the amount of effort that gets put into things like the AARs and guides, but it's also kind of true. RPS is a news site at the same time, so checking it several times a day is likely to yield some other amusement or distraction.

I am probably talking out of my rear end, though. I have no supporting evidence for any of these conclusions.

[fer]

Thanks for your feedback and thoughts so far (please keep it coming); some intial ideas from the Kremlin my tired head:

1. Openness / Advertising

I do agree to open the forum for a bigger public. This way they can have a look at what we do and who we are, maybe gives a better idea before they join us if this is what they are looking for. I would also make them not able to post unless they register. This way at least we know a bit of who’s posting… (EDIT:) Maybe keep the part of the forum closed where there are posts of personal things like pictures etc?

If we opened up to the public we would definitely want to restrict posting to registered users only, simply to counter the inevitable spam monsters that lurk out there. In such a scenario we might also choose to make selected parts of the forum invisible to unregistered users (e.g. server details, the threads about comrade Tigershark's adventures in latex etc.).

I have discussed this with Fer before, I think. If new blood is desired (at the moment I'm not convinced it is), then the best way to do this is to move away from the fishing hole everyone else is using. Folk is a lovely group, but advertising on the BIS boards is only going to reach a certian type of player. Instead, throwing things into thread on SomethingAwful, FacePunch, PCG, Penny Arcade or the other big online communities might get a few more bites. Many of those communities do have their own groups, but it would probably reach more of the Folk type of player.

A reality for all communities is churn: people burn out on a game or simply find other things to do; so to maintain a healthy player count some form of ongoing attraction is vital. Moreover, getting closer to 30 than 20 would open up the possibility of 15v15 adversarial missions - a super experience that I wish we could offer guests now. Comrade Admiral Nullkigan's suggestion about advertising in non-ArmAverse spaces sounds like a great plan, and one that we should probably pursue.

The game weekend announcements from Jim Rossignol certainly helped increase playercounts, but that's not really an option for Folk, unless we were to use one as a marketing session?

Would it be possible to use one of the fabled announcements to proclaim an ARPS/Folk session? Imagine throwing 60 people at the adversarial version of Cacheola! Actually, I don't have to imagine this because we (Folk + Tier 1 + LDDK) have done this a few times already, and it's awesome fun. In fact, I'm having a conversation about such an event now, but more on that later ...

2. Required addons

2. I would love to be able to use the multitude of audiovisual and other addons (Game tweaky stuff like okt_noblur, InstantViewDistance and CompassSize) that I use with ARPS, although I completely understand your reasoning that there might be issues if people forget to turn off ACE or similar mods that might cause issues if not run by everyone.

We might relax the server connection rules for a few sessions and see how it goes, but that would probably have some accompanying ground-rules: insta-kicks for anyone connecting with ACE2, and if sessions start experiencing crashes (something we've avoided almost completely in 12 months), we'd revert to white-listing again very quickly.

As for required addons, that's something I am against. As much as others may like the extra features of ACE or ACRE, to me they just seem like unnecessary overcomplication - Particularly ACRE.

Folk was originally envisaged as a set of sessions that offered tactical play without any requirement for mil-sim, dress-up or time-consuming set-up work. Frankly, Folk was envisaged for time-poor parents of young childern (like me) who didn't have a lot of time to burn preparing to game (like me) and instead wanted to focus 99% of their available game time on playing (like-- wait, this hasn't quite worked out as I planned it). Personally, I'm against moving away from vanilla - there are plenty of communities that offer addon-focused environments, and if guests want to move on to that (as has happened with Folk comrades going off to play with Tier 1, Tactical Gamer and Shack Tactical etc), that's cool too, especially if Folk sessions brought a new person to the ArmAverse.

That said, we do have an issue with comms and ACRE is one of two viable options for solving this. Even if we don't adopt it, we owe it to ourselves to at least have a grown-up discussion about it, and not dismiss it out of hand. In fact, before we talk too much more about ACRE, it would be really useful if someone who is familiar with it could post a bullet-point list of things we would have to do in order to use it. For example, do we have to install a plug-in for TS3? Does ACRE require any other addons? Would we have to edit our existing stock of missions and mission templates? It would be nice to frame this particular conversation with more specifics.

3. In-game communication

On reflection, this isn't an area where we necessarily need a mandate to change things: the use of TS3 CC was always part of the Folk comms set-up, but it simply hasn't been enforced much. Starting from this next session I'm going to ask that we try and make more use of it. We can definitely do some hand-holding for anyone who wants support getting set-up / familiar with it, and maybe even do 1-2 easy missions so comrades have a chance to practice. Please note that this doesn't negate the value of the ACRE conversation - but that might take a little while to bottom out and we can get going with CC now since it requires nothing new to be installed (or even written - the detailed guides are done and posted already).

4. Our comrades in ARPS

Getting crosstalk between the two groups is difficult because, frankly, there's little reason to spend much time on the Folk site. It's a horrible thing to say given the amount of effort that gets put into things like the AARs and guides, but it's also kind of true. RPS is a news site at the same time, so checking it several times a day is likely to yield some other amusement or distraction.

Though it's a tough criticism to swallow, comrade Admiral Nullkigan's observation that there isn't much of a reason to check the Folk forum regularly is probably fair - at least for those ARPS comrades who are mostly interested in dropping by for the Sunday Folk session. Those same comrades are very welcome to participate more fully in the Folk forum, but perhaps for now the best thing is for a few comrades with access to both forums to volunteer to act as cross-posters for anything particularly important?

In the spirit of comradeship I would like to remind Folk that if they fancy a game during the week that there is almost always people about in the RPS chat that will join in. It would be great to see you on weekdays, at the moment it is only really Fer and you know what he's like.

This! Again, it might be good if those comrades with access to the Folk Skype chat make a point of shouting out when some ad hoc is happening (and, vice versa, more Folk comrades loiter in the RPS Steam chat). Thanks for reminding us, comrade Bodge. Also, good of you to hint at how handsome I am. That was what you were hinting at, right?

x. Other stuff

Personally, as much as I love crawling through the rocky crags of Takistani valleys trying to hit that pesky BMP with an RPG, I very much enjoyed Tigershark's mission (Dogs of War?) in the oil fields where we play as PMCs, and wouldn't mind playing a few more missions with some BLUFOR toys and a larger scale (like Scud hunt).

The focus on non-BLUFOR missions where players are given low-tech weapons arose from a desire to force guests to work together (there is far less incentive when there is a preponderance of toys and weapons with optics); but we could certainly ensure the next few missions user BLUFOR or modern Russian equipment and vehicles. I've already changed my next WIP mission to reflect that, and might look at making a BLUFOR stub soon.