Recon9
Developer
Dev Team
Dev Leads
Los Santos Police Command
Los Santos NHS Command
Los Santos Police Trainer
Los Santos NHS Training
Los Santos Senior Firefighter
- Location
- Los Santos
What a night!
Hope everyone got some enjoyment from that. I wanted to use this post/thread to mention a few people that made this possible, talk about some of the lessons learned and get some feedback on how the event was.
Also with @Stavik now being banned, we will be opening up an interest form for the now open management position. If you feel you got what it takes click here: application process
SHOUTOUTS: For starters I need to mention some people that made this massive 4 day happening possible:
Pre-Events
- @Stavik created a really nice story in the few days leading up to the event with various news posts, tweets, mini events and one larger event on Halloween night. We wanted to start spreading some fear, confusion and panic. I think a lot of people had some very interesting nights and it was a lot of fun to see how things started evolving in RP. The fact that people started running around with water bottles as weapons, made my night!
- @GPlumb Without knowing anything about the storyline Liam Wyatt got pulled into one of the pre-events and without any OOC instructions or any cues he played his role perfectly. Top RP mate honestly really enjoyed that.
- Thanks to all the police that attended (even the salty ones that did nothing but moan for the first 10 minutes because they didn't know what was going on), It was a spur of the moment event with very little planning to it, but we made a fun evening out of it and it was lovely to see how the rumors started to spread throughout roleplay.
Thanks to everyone helping out as SAS, RAF, crazed patients, infected citizens @Nikolai @Slawek @Violet_ @Jesse @PsianaRama @George Harris @Aiden @Stuart @Hank Summers and I've probably forgotten a few sorry)
Purge Main Event
- @George Harris @Duke of Sussex and @1A3 who did most of the legwork in getting the purge scripts (originally written by @Paint and @Archie in 2022) working again.
And a special thanks to again to @1A3 who spent most of the evening on stand-by fixing bugs, and helping improve stability in the early hours of the event.
- We had a lot of staff members helping out in various ways, whether it was trying to protect from spawn campers in tanks, or assisting with reviving, or guarding the NHS as military / SAS / G6.
I will for sure forget a few because there were a lot but off the top of my head @Stavik @Nikolai @Slawek @Stuart @Bowen @Violet_ @Jesse @Jessie Bennett @Drex @Duke of Sussex @Danoo .
- @Aiden Those who crossed the line a little to far were kept in check by various RAF Units, but man if you fucked with Aiden, you got laid the fuck out. Lobbing a missile from an attack helicopter at speed into an open garage door in a small courtyard, I don't know how you did it.
- @NHS @Phoenix @Kyle Kamara @John Lawn Did a great job of leading this effort. This was the first time we did the combat medic stuff and IMO it worked quite well, people kept gear much more and a lot more people were helped by the NHS than was possible in the last event. I don't know all the names of the individual NHS members that attended, but thank you all for staying on and doing god's work. I had really expected it to only be fun for a little bit and that we would have any NHS after 2300, but I was so happy to see that this wasn't the case.
- @Gruppe6 @Duke of Sussex Amazing effort protecting the NHS, honestly we would not have had enough Staff/SAS to make it as effective as it was, so we will definitely repeat this.
And I have to say a big shoutout to a lot of the players. I was quite busy during the night, but I did get to spend a few moments roleplaying with people and spectating some people as they were genuinely trying to roleplay.
Lessons Learned
(Some of things we know we can improve for next time)
Feedback
We are very keen to hear any feedback / suggestion on the event, but please keep a few things in mind:
Stats
Lastly here is a bunch of stats from last night:
Hope you had a blast, and please remember to put your funny videos and screen shots in #purge2024.
Hope everyone got some enjoyment from that. I wanted to use this post/thread to mention a few people that made this possible, talk about some of the lessons learned and get some feedback on how the event was.
Also with @Stavik now being banned, we will be opening up an interest form for the now open management position. If you feel you got what it takes click here: application process
SHOUTOUTS: For starters I need to mention some people that made this massive 4 day happening possible:
Pre-Events
- @Stavik created a really nice story in the few days leading up to the event with various news posts, tweets, mini events and one larger event on Halloween night. We wanted to start spreading some fear, confusion and panic. I think a lot of people had some very interesting nights and it was a lot of fun to see how things started evolving in RP. The fact that people started running around with water bottles as weapons, made my night!
- @GPlumb Without knowing anything about the storyline Liam Wyatt got pulled into one of the pre-events and without any OOC instructions or any cues he played his role perfectly. Top RP mate honestly really enjoyed that.
- Thanks to all the police that attended (even the salty ones that did nothing but moan for the first 10 minutes because they didn't know what was going on), It was a spur of the moment event with very little planning to it, but we made a fun evening out of it and it was lovely to see how the rumors started to spread throughout roleplay.
Thanks to everyone helping out as SAS, RAF, crazed patients, infected citizens @Nikolai @Slawek @Violet_ @Jesse @PsianaRama @George Harris @Aiden @Stuart @Hank Summers and I've probably forgotten a few sorry)
Purge Main Event
- @George Harris @Duke of Sussex and @1A3 who did most of the legwork in getting the purge scripts (originally written by @Paint and @Archie in 2022) working again.
And a special thanks to again to @1A3 who spent most of the evening on stand-by fixing bugs, and helping improve stability in the early hours of the event.
- We had a lot of staff members helping out in various ways, whether it was trying to protect from spawn campers in tanks, or assisting with reviving, or guarding the NHS as military / SAS / G6.
I will for sure forget a few because there were a lot but off the top of my head @Stavik @Nikolai @Slawek @Stuart @Bowen @Violet_ @Jesse @Jessie Bennett @Drex @Duke of Sussex @Danoo .
- @Aiden Those who crossed the line a little to far were kept in check by various RAF Units, but man if you fucked with Aiden, you got laid the fuck out. Lobbing a missile from an attack helicopter at speed into an open garage door in a small courtyard, I don't know how you did it.
- @NHS @Phoenix @Kyle Kamara @John Lawn Did a great job of leading this effort. This was the first time we did the combat medic stuff and IMO it worked quite well, people kept gear much more and a lot more people were helped by the NHS than was possible in the last event. I don't know all the names of the individual NHS members that attended, but thank you all for staying on and doing god's work. I had really expected it to only be fun for a little bit and that we would have any NHS after 2300, but I was so happy to see that this wasn't the case.
- @Gruppe6 @Duke of Sussex Amazing effort protecting the NHS, honestly we would not have had enough Staff/SAS to make it as effective as it was, so we will definitely repeat this.
And I have to say a big shoutout to a lot of the players. I was quite busy during the night, but I did get to spend a few moments roleplaying with people and spectating some people as they were genuinely trying to roleplay.
Lessons Learned
(Some of things we know we can improve for next time)
- Set your fucking clock properly I'm an hour ahead of most of you and summer time / winter time is hard man FFS.
In my defense I had the server window (GMT +0) on one screen, my own computer (CET) on another and a clock in front of me in CEST (because I forgot to set that back)
- More and Smaller pre-events For the pre events and the build up the goal was to have a lot of small mini events and little things happening in roleplay hinting towards something big. On the night of Halloween one of them organically grew to something really big that took a 2 hours and we dragged it out a bit too long. Thus anyone who wasn't involved in that one, missed out, by the time we wrapped that up a lot of people had gone to bed because it was a weekday, a lot of people thought there was gonna be a main event that night, so were complaining they were missing out, when in reality they were only missing out on some small side events.
Bit frustrating for everyone, including us, because we were trying to get to everyone, but also wanted to keep the surprise and a bit of the tension. I think people struggle sometimes to keep the OOC out of it, they know there might be an event and they want to be involved in it and start complaining the second they feel left out. Even though, from a character perspective you shouldn't want to be near an infected patient at all.
- We need more respawn points. With this we felt you can't go in the middle, if you have a medium sized respawn area it is still quite easy to spawn camp and really hard to protect and guard as staff, so we thought we can either go really small or really big, because there wasn't a lot of staff we decided to go for really small to make it easier to guard. In the beginning it really turned into a shitshow, and though I haven't got conclusive evidence yet, I actually think it was all the dying and reviving and respawning that was tanking the server in the beginning. So next time I think we will go with respawning randomly anywhere on the map, which does mean you can sometimes get really unlucky but then again you will respawn somewhere completely different the next time so its probably not so bad.
- Bins need to refresh on a set interval regardless of whether they have been fully looted. Obviously, they were broken for the start so try and think passed that, but then we didn't really take into account the fact that people would constantly leave items in there, thus not clearing the bin and starting the timer before it refreshes. That is something we can do better next time.
- Progressively better loot. So with combat medics and more reviving we were aiming to make it so the game had a bit more progression and people kept their loot. Next time we should make it so as the event progresses the loot from both bins and crates gets a bit better. So that if you respawn you have a fighting chance. We started to emulate this a bit by going around and giving people some better gear, or fixing their broken weapons, but I think we got to the realization a little bit late. Maybe the same with vehicle rentals where as the evening progresses better vehicles become available. Could also be something where there are stages 1,2,3,4 and its not based on time but a dev can progress the event to the next stage or something like that.
- Zerging / big groups: This was something that was bound to happen and our initial approach was that we were going to monitor it and the military would step in if groups were to powerful (airstrikes, APCs, tanks etc.).
The problem was mainly that is actually really hard to see, lots of people are in hospital gowns, or random clothing and when you hear reports of large groups and fly over there isn't really a way to know who is who. So we need to think about a way to combat that next time, and I'm open to suggestions, because it is a hard one. Enforcing this with a rule kind of sucks, because the purge is usually about removing rules not adding more rules, plus you have the same issue where staff are really going to struggle to see who's who. So yeah open to ideas here, please let us know if you've got one.
- Spawn camping Similarly really hard to combat by just using military / staff assets, maybe we need a respawn invincibility thing or something like that where you can get away in the first minute, but maybe if you spawn randomly on the map and we give you 10s invincible, you don't need anything else to prevent spawn camping.
- NHS/Gruppe6 Combat Medics: I think this actually went really well and we revived a lot of people, especially when we added a triage point and split into pickup/extraction teams and treatment teams.
Maybe a few small improvements to be made here.
- Make gruppe6 clothing and gruppe6 vehicles also the same color RED, sometimes unfair when you see something grey, shoot it and then get absolutely hammered by its air support.
- Make staff members that can spawn in the vehicles also be able to change the color, at some point none of them were red anymore and it is harder and a little unfair.
- Start with a triage point right from the start, and maybe go into 4 small teams instead of two big ones, especially in the beginning when there isn't much firepower on the other side, that way we can help more people and they respawn less and progress more in terms of loot.
- Being able to search dead people to make looting and assets more progressive.
Feedback
We are very keen to hear any feedback / suggestion on the event, but please keep a few things in mind:
- Please read the above section (lessons learned) and don't put any obvious things already mentioned there.
- Similarly, something like "improve server performance", or "don't have bugs" is not going to be taken very well.
- Keep it civil, constructive and concrete. X is shit, or Y was unfair, or Z was boring, is just going to get deleted. Give us actionable things to consider implementing.
- Please read each other suggestions and try to avoid a lot of duplicates, just hit like on each other's suggestions.
- Keep in mind that we aim to spend very little time on the development of an event like this. Not that we didn't spend any time this year, but we need to try and keep a balance. In the end this event last for about 12 hours and it would be a waste to take away a month of development time from features and things that can affect the server more drastically for much more enjoyment hours in the day to day. Keep the suggestions small and manageable, things that are great ideas but a lot of effort are unfortunately quite useless for a big event like this.
Stats
Lastly here is a bunch of stats from last night:
- Approximately 5200 deaths of which 4900 were kills by other players
- 550 Revives by the NHS Combat Medic Team
- Top 3 players by kills the end of the night
- Sam Jacobs with 87 kills
- Erik Ragnarok with 69 kills
- Mason Mack with 69 kills
- Top 3 players by kill/death ratio (staff/RAF removed)
- Omar Farrell with 17.0
- Riccardo Genovese with 10.0
- Alex Barclays with 5.75
- Only 3 actual bans, one of which was @Stavik , so that means people really behaved themselves and things didn't get too crazy.
- 688 Unique players on the server during the event, usually we get about 500-700 in a a full 24H day, not a restart.
- 1,551,968 GBP in cash picked up
Hope you had a blast, and please remember to put your funny videos and screen shots in #purge2024.
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