The Fighting TTLGers present: Arma 3 (a TTLG Coop Saturdays spin-off) - by Thirith
Thirith on 7/12/2019 at 17:44
Thanks to henke (who was able to join after all), Jeshibu, Malf and demagogue for a weird, fun last session of 2019!
We started with Dynamic Drug Raid (Tanoa), which started bloody enough, but while we had heavy initial losses, Malf and Jeshibu not only survived, they also destroyed the drug cache - possibly with a little help from an omniscient ghost or two. They then took the liberated pickup truck to the exfiltration spot, where a friendly chopper came and circled them for a minute or so without ever landing - so we declared the mission a success and ended it manually. Hooray! (Mission ending triggers not working may just be the most frequent Arma bug.)
Next up: Guerillas in the Mist (Altis). After some impromptu war crimes (some say that Malf may just have grenaded some friendlies and their truck because we were overly cautious), we managed to clear the first objective, a small camp - but the second camp, complete with an aggressive MRAP, pretty much did us in. One after the other fell and bled out on that hill, until we were all dead. It was tense, it was tragic, and many a manly tear was shed.
Finally, we tried our hand at Operation Bolero (Altis), where the mission was to keep enemy weapons to fall into the wrong hands. Or something. The objective wasn't particularly clear, but we did our best, until we fell into something of a Benny Hill routine, where one guy would go down, another would go and help him, then that guy would get shot, so a third guy would try to help the first and second, possibly getting one of them on their feet again, only to get shot again, rinse and repeat. All the while, Jeshibu and demagogue were on a nearby hill, ready to snipe any bad guys they saw (i.e. none) and observing the carnage happening to the rest of the team. Thankfully, the mission had respawn, so after we all got shot to bits, we went back in and henke took out the nasty MRAP with two well-aimed rockets. As the mission didn't end at that point, we lit up the enemy truck, in every sense of the word (we didn't have any proper grenades left, only smoke grenades and glowsticks, which made the truck look all Halloweeny), and then shot at it until it exploded. The mission still didn't finish, so we declared it a triumph. Huzzah!
Thanks to everyone for the fun Arma sessions we've had in 2019. We'll be back in 2020, for more fun, friendly fire and script triggers not firing. Till then, don't get shot (too much)!
demagogue on 7/12/2019 at 17:59
Ah you didn't notice all the bodies in the Bolero compound? There were at least 5 guys I sniped in there, and another 2 or 3 out in the streets. It was just those two MRAPs that kept taking all of you out. I couldn't do anything about them! I still tried. XD
Thirith on 7/12/2019 at 18:04
Ah, sorry about that. I didn't want to downplay your contribution. I just kept hearing Jesh say that you guys hadn't fired a shot yet, and then I got distracted by all the getting shot. ;)
Thirith on 9/12/2019 at 09:30
I've just remembered that I'll probably not be around on 11 January, so I'm scheduling the first
Arma session of 2020 a week earlier:
Quote:
The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 4 January 2020
Time: 3-6pm UK timeAs always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam.
I'm hoping to do at least a draft version of a mission for the gang by then, but no guarantees - the Christmas break has a habit of being more busy than expected.
Anyway, I'll send around a Steam message to everyone to keep them updated, and I'll send a reminder towards the end of the year. In the meantime, happy holidays and don't get shot by friendly AI! (Or, if you're Jeshibu, by me.)
Tony_Tarantula on 9/12/2019 at 15:59
Add me to the STEAM group. I've got a lot of shit going on but I should be on family leave at the time.
henke on 9/12/2019 at 16:09
Tony, no, man. We really don't wanna play with you. :|
Thirith on 4/1/2020 at 17:14
Damn. I hope that this is a good omen - we had the first Arma session of 2020 and it was a complete mess. First mission we started three times, in the hope that it wouldn't always kill us within seconds, but boy, were we wrong. Arma just had it in for us, to an extent where it didn't even matter whether we were playing well or not. The next mission had us starting in the bodies of seagulls in that odd spectator mode Arma sometimes switches to, except we couldn't even move the birds or the viewing angle. Third mission had an utterly bugged revive system where sometimes we just couldn't be revived, sometimes the person reviving us would end up immobile themselves, and sometimes we respawned only to find that we couldn't see anything other than blackness and the occasional green marker.
Then Al_B joined us and suddenly everything got better. :cheeky:
Okay, we did revert to missions that we knew worked, first Firefight Pelagia (Altis), one of the standard missions that aren't wildly original but that work. We managed to clear Pelagia and Malf only killed one of our own men (he said he was trying to heal him, but a Combat Life Saver should know that guns don't heal people, people heal people...). We then tried another tried and tested mission, Specter (Altis), which saw the four of us - henke, Malf, Al_B and myself - attacking a hotel where some journalists were kept hostage. Unfortunately henke quickly succumbed to near-terminal PTSD (AKA his connection to the server went belly-up), then I got killed because I'd stupidly changed my gun to single-shot instead of auto, which meant that I hit the guy who killed me once and didn't get to hit him a second time. Malf survived for longer, but then he too got killed. Al, who hadn't played Arma with us for about a year or so, survived the longest and took down the most enemies, but then he too was swarmed and killed. Still, fun two missions after a disastrous beginning. Let's hope the Arma sessions over the year will also just get better and better! :p
Thanks to everyone for joining today! Not sure yet if the next game will be in two or three weeks. I'll post an update once I know and I'll send around PMs on Steam.
Al_B on 4/1/2020 at 19:28
Thanks for hosting it! Been ages since I've been able to participate and it was great getting back into the missions and joining in with the fun. I now understand the reference that Malf made to you turning into a seagull during the last mission :)
Thirith on 12/1/2020 at 09:45
Details for the next session:
Quote:
The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 25 January 2020
Time: 3-6pm UK timeAs always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's online.
Thirith on 16/1/2020 at 07:21
It seems there's an Arma sale on Steam, either right now or this weekend. Anyone who wants to complete their collection of DLC (to make sure that they never get the in-game ads again) or who's interested in checking out the game and joining our semi-regular sessions, this might be a great opportunity.