| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Muhlakai |
Posted - 20 May 2008 : 13:23:43
I've spent most of the last few days finally getting my web site up to speed. It's finally about 90% done. If anyone has time, I'd appreciate feedback. I have three goals with the site:
1. Have more information than you need, but always the info that you want.
2. Make sure that it's easy to find the information you want and skip the information you don't.
3. Be a really great resource that's useful for far more than just my own players.
I don't think I'm all the way there with #1. Let me know if there's anything you'd find useful, especially in the tactics section. (Yes, I plan on having gun profiles in the tactics section similar to what's been started here on the forums and linking to them from the armory as well.) Incidentally, I know I need more pictures.
I think I've done pretty well with #2, although my headers need to be bigger on the front page.
I need to know what folks might appreciate for #3. The field owners' section will eventually include troubleshooting stuff that I've compiled including pictures and procedures. My goal is to make it comprehensive enough that if I wanted to have an employee fix something on a gun that they could just review the info on my site instead of me or my wife sitting with them the entire time. (I'm just going to assume that they know how to use a soldering iron.)
What do you think a player's wish list would be for information on the site? What would you look for? As far as #3 goes I'd like the tactics section to be comprehensive enough that paintball and airsoft sites link to it just for the strats & tacs.
Thanks in advance for any help I get. Also, let me know if I missed your field on my list.
Woot! www.mikescombatgames.com FTW! |
| 5 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Muhlakai |
Posted - 26 May 2008 : 07:13:53
Intel was AMAZING! (Thanks, Rex!) We actually made do with a day-glo plastic board with the message clipped to it. We ran it twice at our most recent open play up in Portland (I got to play both times, too!) and everyone loved it! A few things we learned:
- Good placement and hiding of the laptop is critical and also very tough. You want people to have to look carefully for it but you don't want to force people to comb your field. Our first game the laptop was hidden 5 feet off of a trail in brush that was so thick that you needed to be farther from the trail than the laptop to see it. This might have worked if...
- Equidistant placement from both bases is of relatively low importance but that said, you don't want one team to be able to see people decoding the laptop from their spawn point. In the first game my wife put the laptop in such a location (remember the 5' off the trail placement?) that you had to turn your back on the red team's base (while in very clear line of sight) to see the laptop. Once the red team found the laptop the green team never again got close.
- I think that ideal placement has the laptop hidden somewhere that it can be seen from the trail, but maybe only in a small angle. I recommend that the angle is straight out from the trail and not at a crazy oblique angle. Also, it's nice if the location has paths that are easy to ambush during extraction.
- The codebreaker job is unusual. Most of the game the codebreaker is going to hide. It is DEADLY for your success if your codebreaker dies, so you spend a lot of time trying to prevent that, especially at the start. (There was some back-and-forth in one game, but usually both teams just worked very hard not to let their codebreaker die in the first place.) Once you find the laptop the codebreaker still isn't likely to be engaging opponents but taking and keeping cover. Decoding is a thankless task because you have your teammates yelling out the inbound vector of tangoes to each other and yelling at you to go faster or asking for progress estimates. Finally, the codebreaker gets escorted back to base (or is crazy and runs solo) but they don't really get to look around; they're just fleeing to extraction. In many ways it's closer to a VIP escort than anything else.
- Communication is really important and at some point you have to be willing to shout to your teammates just to get the job done. In our second game it was 4 vs. 3 players (my team was the trio) and we didn't have radios. I had sent a teammate up a hill to retake it because I had seen several opponents trucking up the far side. Suddenly I saw the opposing codebreaker crashing down through the brush with his cipher unrolled. I shouted for my teammate to check where he'd been for the laptop and opened fire. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him. Fortunately, one of his teammates thought it was my teammate that was crashing down and killed his own codebreaker with friendly fire!
- Intel is an interesting mix of "hide, hunt, search, escort," which is, interestingly, the same as a VIP escort. Overall I think I like Intel better than VIP escort for most events. Players have an easier time looking for the laptop than looking out for an ambush and it's easier to understand hiding one person than it is to try hiding your whole team (or even chunks of your team). Even better, both teams are hunting the codebreaker on the other team and escorting their codebreaker at the same time. It keeps everyone much busier on more concrete tasks for the whole time.
- I found that teams often wanted their second-best player as the codebreaker. They wanted their best free to hunt down the opposing codebreaker but wanted their codebreaker to be a skilled player for the hiding and running aspects. This put some great pressure on the less-skilled players to rise to the challenge, which they often did better than they'd expected of themselves.
- Teams tend to search the same general area at the same time out of fear that the other team will find the laptop and they won't know. Here, "general area" refers to any space that's relatively easy to mentally delineate (surrounded by one circuit of trails, for instance) but is small enough that you can run to any other space and fire on an enemy within a short (~30 seconds) time frame. This game would be VERY difficult to run successfully in a park without much brush cover.
Some administration suggestions:
- I required that both teams told the other who their codebreaker was. That made it possible to know who you were looking for and prevented people from getting frustrated.
- I coded the messages "incorrectly." I used a dingbats/wingdings font to code four 4-letter words and forgot to include the numbering step. I think it worked better overall because it made the decoding a little more immediately sensible but increased the number of characters that codebreakers needed to deal with. I used real 4-letter words, but I might use random 4-letter sets in the future for games with very experienced players.
- Instead of quarterback wristbands I just made some small, tightly rolled cipher keys that had to be held open or they'd tend to roll back up. They worked great and when rolled up were only about an inch and a half long.
- I'm going to be making a wooden prop laptop for this game. I'll DEFINITELY be painting it in a day-glow color, though. It's CRUCIAL that players can see the thing or they get frustrated.
- If players are totally clueless after 15-20 minutes of searching give them a hint on where the laptop is (or isn't). If they've been looking in the wrong place then telling them relieves the stress of wondering if you've missed the stupid thing. |
| First Person Sports |
Posted - 24 May 2008 : 14:34:11
I just checked out your site Mike...three comments, I think that the homepage has a huge amount of information on it.....for some this is great for others they may feel overwhelmed...personally I like having a bunch of info right there to take in. Second, I think it is a really great thing for you to put the other field info from across the country on your site. I appreciate it and hope I can return the favor :) and last...I'm glad you liked the INTEL game type...have you played it yet? and if so what did you think? |
| Muhlakai |
Posted - 22 May 2008 : 04:44:59
Thanks for the feedback. I tried to implement your suggestions. Did I correctly understand and repair the problems? (Bigger header pics, prices more prominent, big header pic to catch attention on index page.) |
| Brat |
Posted - 20 May 2008 : 15:55:47
i liked it, but as angel said the pictures aren't big enough and that there is nothing really that caught my eye, But with one or two bigger pics i think it will be alright.
I also loved the Tactics section. and the exercises there as well seeing that Pole Dancing is one  |
| Angel |
Posted - 20 May 2008 : 13:33:10
Looking Good. I found it easy to use but i didn't see any prices. I could have missed them or maybe you haven't put them up yet. Otherwise my only other thing is that i think the pics on the home page could be a little bigger they were a bit hard to see. The gun page was really easy to follow as well as the games page. |
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