I'm glad you enjoyed the mission Freya, and the debrief.
We made a few tweaks to some, but most of the humorous lines in there are HR's original content. It was good to finally get the ball rolling. We were able to knock out one of the power plants, do some damage at Wilmington Airfield, and busted some tanks near the front. Had a couple good dogfights with you guys along the way too. Looking forward to knocking heads again tonight!
II./JG1_Schulte gave a good rundown of the campaign map and info tabs to the guys on TS before we flew. He's been neck deep in this with me, and built most of the map layout for the beta campaign, so if you see him around he can help answer questions.
On the scheduling topic, there are a number of issues with anything we try.
Option 1: The old (from IL-2 '46) GS schedule, two missions in the evening for NA players.
Problem(s): Not realistic for Europeans (with typical schedules and sleep cycles
) to make the missions.
Option 2: Make one of the missions a trans-Atlantic time. Which means it would have to be on a weekend, probably midday launch time for western NA so that it ends around midnight in central Europe.
Problem(s): Where we've seen this tried before, Sunday midday is usually much busier for people making NA attendance quite difficult. Saturday is the better day, but I really do not want to start competing directly with other organized events, and War Machine has the prime Saturday slot already. It just hurts both of us to overlap times.
Option 3: Run distinct NA and European evening mission times, within the same campaign scenario.
Problem(s): This may make for the best attendance, but it also introduces complications. Logistics aren't automated, they are very manually intensive, so we can't run back to back missions. Instead of cutting out a NA mission, maybe add one European mission on Thursday or Friday. This puts the launch time in the late morning or midday for me, and so we would need someone else from Europe to have remote access to launch the mission. I don't own the server we use, so that part is not up to me and we should not just assume it. For the sake of argument though, that would give each group a fair chance to plan their mission based on the previous one. We have to be careful with splitting up the teams like this though, especially since all resources are shared. This is something we specifically changed in order to give teams more flexibility to maximize the usage of what they have depending on the mission. However, I don't want to see fights about how "those guys lost all our planes/ammo/fuel/etc in their mission, now we're left with crap in ours". It's enough of a concern with teams who are always on and participating directly with each other every mission. If we split and fly different times, I just worry about that. I'm not just being paranoid, I've seen it happen in the past.
Option 4: Run completely independent campaigns. I don't mean just the mission times, I mean the entire setup (website, server, map, campaign files), hosting, managing, etc. I would be happy to pass along our flavor of the HR system and if someone wants to do a campaign for the European time zones, maybe we would all benefit with more missions at better times and closer team relations.
Problem(s): The obvious workload in the setup and management is not insignificant. It would also require even more people getting involved in total to support both teams and to form a capable command staff for each. Of course, it would likely allow for the largest possible amount of people to play in the system, so maybe that solves itself at least in part.
I'm open to ideas if anyone has other options that they think are better.
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