Off topic - ARMA 2 question - Comparison to GB Options

[Tinker]

100/200/300M we used to have our tests in the British Army. SA80 ironsights. Would also get to fire off 10 rounds at 300M with your gas mask on.

[Cpl Ledanek]

100/200/300M we used to have our tests in the British Army. SA80 ironsights. Would also get to fire off 10 rounds at 300M with your gas mask on.

SA80 ironsights are amazing at night...how I got to experience it while in the USMC is still classified

[galzohar]

With enough effort it should be possible to get a high hit ratio on static targets at 300m in the prone position (and 100% hit ratio if you have a bipod or at least something good to rest your weapon on), but doing that on real people is not something you are expected to do in combat When I was in sniper school there were some marines who came to train in my base and they were saying they are hitting stuff at 400m with iron sights - In the shooting range - That is, they are well aware that they wouldn't have any chance to hit a real target in combat at those ranges, and 100m would be the true combat effective range (same as what they teach in the IDF - non-scoped/non-supported combat effective range = 100m). Even some SF marksmen use M193 instead of M855 because after all you won't fire above 300m so the advantages of the M855 aren't very useful.

In Arma 2 if the enemy is closer than 300m people would start calling it "CQB"
That's the biggest issue I have with the game, and again it's mostly a combination of island (map) design and how easy it is to use weapons.

[WhiteKnight77]

I trained at 500 yards with iron sights and put every round I fired on target (human silhouette). It isn't as difficult as it would seem. Knowing where to aim is the key and that is one thing all Marines are taught whether male or female, desk jocky or crew chief or grunt. Granted, grunts will get more range time than other MOSes, but all can fire. Will all engagments range out that far or farther? No, but having said knowledge could come in handy when faced with said distances.

I can't comment on the distances that the US Army trains to, but I am sure that they train to the distances they seem fit for their type of fighting.

Now I know that hitting stationary targets is a lot different than hitting a moving one, but if you understand how the wind works as does range in affecting where a round will hit, you can make adjustments while firing on moving targets while leading said target to hit it.

[galzohar]

The point is that no matter how much you train, actual combat conditions (moving target, target behind cover, etc) will reduce your effective range. Unfortunately Arma 2 has very little of those elements, and in addition gives too easy aiming, meaning that the average engagement range goes a lot higher than what it would be in real life.

[SiC-Disaster]

ArmA needs certain things to truely shine.
One of them is a good playerbase to play with. If you jump on any random Domination game, there is a high chance you will not enjoy your time there.
People will run around like headless chicken, uncoordinated and as lone wolves, and 80% of the time you will have no clue of where you need to be to get in on the action. Many was the time where i would join a server, spend 5 minutes traveling to a city several kilometers away only to get there when every tango had been shot and all friendly players had moved on to the next city.

Other times, you might get lucky. You join a server with people who play right. People who stick together, cover eachothers backs, relay information through VON, and many a time such a server will have people dedicated to the role of pilot, doing nothing combat-wise, but are just ferrying troops across the battlefield.
I well remember the day i joined one such server together with my buddy Nimster, we joined a few other guys and formed a squad but during the hectic assault on a city we lost all contact with the rest, and many of them got killed while we remained behind.
The city was taken eventually and only we two were left, and were many miles from the next objective.
So we asked through public chat if somebody could come pick us up and gave the map coordinates. One of these dedicated pilots found our location and after a few minutes we could hear his helicopter approaching.
After picking us up, we asked him to drop us off in a forward location where we could observe the enemy prior to a new attack, which he did.
We set up an observation post and relayed coordinates to the commander-player, so he could put down artillery and prep the area for the attack, getting rid of most of the hostile troops and vehicles before our tanks would come rolling in.
It was an amazing experience, and in such times you get sucked into the experience and you cannot settle with co-op that's anything less than this. And no other game comes close really.

ArmA 2 allows a myriad of reallife tactics to work, even spotters for snipers are proving to be very useful. Whereas in any other game, a sniper is a single entity with potential to rape anything that comes on its way.
Given, snipers can still do that in ArmA 2 but there still is a use for spotters to do their job and not feel useless, helping them adjust to hit their targets.
The best way to ensure you get such an experience is by joining a community, and when you do find the one that suits you best, it's happy happy joy joy time every week.

As for controls, i think they are pretty good.
Having played since the release of Operation Flashpoint, which had pretty 'gamey' controls because they were pretty limited at the time, i went through ArmA 1 which had a lot of new options like leaning, rolling while prone, running in a crouched position etc.
Now that game really deserved the term clunky, because almost any action had to be done standing still.
If you wanted to reload you had to stand still, if you wanted to go from a jogging run to a crouched run you had to stand still, crouch and then move on etc etc etc.
ArmA 2 really fixed a lot of those issues, making movement feel very fluid to me and like a person above me said, it now feels like second nature moving around the battlefield.
I'll grant you that controls in buildings are not optimal. However i do believe many players are not aware of the length of their rifle in the game when they try to sidestep through a narrow corridor. The ArmA 2 character is not flexible and will not adjust his rifle to these positions like would happen in Vietcong for example.
And when you try to sidestep through a door that's just wide enough for your body to pass through, it should be no surprise that you cannot get through that door when you hold a metre-long rifle pointed ahead of you.
In these cases, the command 'weapon down' does let you to pass through that door.
The main problem to me is that the buildings in ArmA 2 are too small, too little to allow proper movement. This has been 90% fixed with the new buildings in Operation Arrowhead.

In conclusion:
Many times have i felt that ArmA 2 is what the next Ghost Recon should have been. It has its problems, as any game does.
But when the right elements come together (positive attitude, helpful, tactical players, well-designed missions) there is no other game that comes close to what ArmA 2 has to offer.

[galzohar]

While I agree buildings in Arma 2 are probably too small, this is far from the only issue. The real issue was some kind of a collision bug (which I demonstrated on youtube with a ~3 second video), though that too was fixed in OA.

When it comes to teamwork, it's really a combination of people you play with and the kind of mission the server is running. The problem with joining a community, though, is that most seem to have roleplaying stuck deep up their ass and they seem to focus on that more than on actually playing the game. For most of those it's more important that you "stick to playing your role" and don't care so much about "doing their best to completing the mission". I'm more of a fan of using teamwork to achieve the latter, not the former. And if I have to enforce some silly roleplaying rules in order to get teamwork in, then it means the missions that are being played need to be reworked so that they are more challenging and require more teamwork.

The main reason you see no teamwork in domination is because you don't need any teamwork in domination. If you care at all about completing the mission and don't care so much if you "played your role" in the process or "just kicked ass", then the result would be spending most of the time just running around, shooting stuff, respawninf, and repeat. You don't need anything more than that to win. Also there is absolutely no reason not to take the heaviest stuff you can - Even with ACE you don't have to travel for long so weight doesn't matter.

The missions you'll get teamwork out of are missions with actual objectives, no respawn and realistically limited gear that suits the mission. Even if you somehow get strangers to play them with you, they will pretty much have to work with you or else you will all just die and fail, since the mission actually requires more than 1 guy in order to complete it. If you only have 1 ACOG and 1 AT launcher for your team, there is no longer a good reason to put them both on the same guy. If you don't get a second chance after dying and the mission is actually a challenge then you will need to use your limited firepower (and manpower) the best way possible.

The problem is nobody makes those missions for the public. The few that do know how to make good missions either don't bother making them or only make missions for their community and keep them private, either because they just want to keep them for themselves or because they don't actually make them good for everyone but rather they make the mission only work if played in a very specific way which they then enforce on their players via rules or whatever. For example, not using aircraft on infantry targets, though I also heard less silly as well as sillier rules that communities use to make their missions work regardless of their massive design flaws.

[Lightspeed]

You join a server with people who play right. People who stick together, cover eachothers backs, relay information through VON, and many a time such a server will have people dedicated to the role of pilot, doing nothing combat-wise, but are just ferrying troops across the battlefield.
I well remember the day i joined one such server together with my buddy Nimster, we joined a few other guys and formed a squad but during the hectic assault on a city we lost all contact with the rest, and many of them got killed while we remained behind.
The city was taken eventually and only we two were left, and were many miles from the next objective.
So we asked through public chat if somebody could come pick us up and gave the map coordinates. One of these dedicated pilots found our location and after a few minutes we could hear his helicopter approaching.
After picking us up, we asked him to drop us off in a forward location where we could observe the enemy prior to a new attack, which he did.
We set up an observation post and relayed coordinates to the commander-player, so he could put down artillery and prep the area for the attack, getting rid of most of the hostile troops and vehicles before our tanks would come rolling in.
It was an amazing experience, and in such times you get sucked into the experience and you cannot settle with co-op that's anything less than this. And no other game comes close really.

try http://www.legionofsparta.com/ for this type of gaming experience.

Many times have i felt that ArmA 2 is what the next Ghost Recon should have been. It has its problems, as any game does.
But when the right elements come together (positive attitude, helpful, tactical players, well-designed missions) there is no other game that comes close to what ArmA 2 has to offer.

i agree 100% - with the right ppl playing the right servers this is the next GR with so much more to offer then our great GR ever offered.

@ galzohar
i respect completely what you are saying about creating missions with objectives and no respawns bcoz that is how i used to play Ghost Recon and it's unbeatable to play like that imo. however, just bcoz others choose to use respawns or play a role, etc duznt make them less of a player or an ass for doing it. the beauty of the game is it is so malleable that it can be tweaked to suit all types of players.

some ppl like respawns, Shaktactical love large battles with command structure and role playing, Legion of Sparta players like Ace, some dont, some want air some not, some like to drive armor into a city some dont, most of the players enjoy tactical domination strict role playing with commander controlling the play, etc ,etc.

the point is, one style isnt better then the other - its just personal opinion.

[desertjedi]

People will run around like headless chicken, uncoordinated and as lone wolves, and 80% of the time you will have no clue of where you need to be to get in on the action...But when the right elements come together (positive attitude, helpful, tactical players, well-designed missions) there is no other game that comes close to what ArmA 2 has to offer.

But how is that any different from any other combat game, tactical or non-tactical shooter? I'm sure I mentioned this but the last time I encountered fantastic teamplay on a regular (not random) basis was with VietCong. Some might say, that was just a hokey first-person-shooter. My point is...you could be playing 3D Backgammon and have the best combat gaming experience of your life as long as every player followed the orders of the designated Team Leader.

I hear of such experiences in Arma and Arma 2 but they appear to be random. And it appears that there are many different takes on "teamplay" in Arma as its far more complex a game than VietCong. My thought on this was always...if you build it, they will come. But running a zero-tolerance teamplay server reguires a server admin with a truly iron hand and a lot of time and effort.

[Buehgler_AS]

The potential complexity and openness of ArmA (and its descendants) really means that there is a wide variety of play that you will "bump into". For the type of play described in this thread, I think there are a number of groups out there that actively promote this type of play. Specifically, I think we (Alpha Squad) do a decent job of running a set of mods and servers that support special operations style small unit direct action missions -- we are still struggling to develop a large enough mission base, but I think we do quite well with what we have currently. As Lightspeed mention, the Sparta folks tend to support coordinated large combined arms type of missions. Tactical Gamer also tends to support similar large/persistent missions. For things in the middle there are folks like the Phoenix Soldiers or Sixth Sense who both tend to be somewhere in the middle.

If you are a bit patient and know what sort of gaming experience you want there are plenty of (non-role-playing focused) groups out there that will be quite welcoming and supportive.