HELIX 4 SEASON 1 CIVIL PROTECTION: DECLASSIFIED

[OskarDemus]

for a bit of fun i honestly that side of PVP and s2k is perfectly acceptable

the problem arises when it's done when the plot/overall direction of the narrative is at stake, ie basically the entirety of neb history

breeds the whole 'fuck the other side i wanna win' mindset

Have you considered other side bad?

 

[「💛 Syntax Codebridge💛」]

Wow.


TBH yeah no I didn't know half of the drama going on so this was really eye-opening, but I absolutely agree that being a cop main was one of the best things to ever happen!!!

Personally I think the slithers of drama I was aware of was simply people being annoyed at the RLS.

Nonetheless, thank you for having been a rank leader regardless of what you all undertaken, and (PERSONALLY thank you for having dealt me for a whole ass year:
I still cant believe I didnt notice the ping there)

VI. CONCLUSIONS; WHAT DID I LEARN?

The thread is finally over.

It was inspired by me being sent a screenshot of somebody still being mad about how the server played out, over 1.5 years later. I am underqualified to speak about the mental state of the people still brooding over it, but inspired by them, I decided to do an honest summary of the issues we were struggling with to shed light on why and how maps played out and what caused us to behave in a particular way.

In regards to conclusions...

I am glad.

I am glad that I've finally finished writing it, after four days straight.

I am glad that we so thoroughly documented everything. There are hours of footage and hundreds of screenshots. I think this is very significant because if somebody tried to describe asheville to me without having the evidence to back it up (their people getting 2shot, being camped right outside own base, getting sniped out of observer, getting gbombs dropped on their heads, the enemy having cheaters) I'd likely think they're crazy.

But, above all...

I realise how glad I am to have played on this side.
I am glad that @Civil Protection helped me join the faction in 2018.
I am glad to have been through this with all these people.

I regret nothing and I would do it all over again.

Shoutout to:

@Ron for being the realest G of the iteration. God bless America

@Brandon_ for being the most delusional motherfucker I've ever met and also the most cracked shot out there - you ruined a lot for us but I'll never forget you somehow winning a 1v7

@Kiko for, if nothing else, being there for the ride with us and with me since 2018, been there since day 1 my dude

@ovxy for being as unrelenting and unapolegetic as you were, your ability to get under their skin was second to none

@OskarDemus for being the best hired gun we could've gotten, hope you make it big time as a Roblox dev or whatever the fuck you're trying to do

@sky for being the right man in the right place, I could not imagine a better OTA lead

And, above all...

​

SHOUTOUT TO EVERYBODY WHO WAS EVER CALLED A COP MAIN; HONEST-TO-GOD HEARTFELT THANK YOU FOR STANDING UP TO THE LYING, RULEBREAKING, CHEATING, STAFF ABUSING, HEADGLITCHING, CRYBABY VERMIN THAT THE REBELS WERE

FUCK YOU @Numbers
​

P.S. I commissioned a "Valentine's card to our worst enemy" from two of my friends. I hope you enjoy it and you should be able to find it in the replies below.

 

['77 East]

Could you please at the very least read the very first paragraph of the thread before you comment?

Yeah, there were awful problems, yet you're outright ignoring the two seasons that actually had things go right.

What's even more baffling is that even keeping to your 'thread premise' - you outright walked over the O.B.C's involvement on Apoc, and another situation that I know you remember, the TommyGman sniper tower.

Why was the cop car blown up with SLAMs on Asheville?

I understood the plan, it simply didn't work.

Why didn't you voice said disagreements in a civil manner then?

When the entire CivPro leadership is radio silent, who's going to step in to make the alterations needed?
Instead, you voiced nothing and then tried to abortively throw everything out the window.

The only time we had actual CAB-Cop dialogue had a bunch of snide threats thrown in, then the attempted derailment of the ceasefire - which didn't work because we noticed what you were doing. It came very close to that, but in the end Brandon didn't cover his tracks well enough and it held.

S2M offer so much more fun and a less economy-obsessed culture.

S2M just leads to 'accidental' hits or more commonly, one side using up all their munitions and then getting massacred by the opposing side.

It is garbage theory from 2009.

 

[Deleted member 7576]

Why was the cop car blown up with SLAMs on Asheville?

cuz it was ridiculous

 

[Antloin]

This precedent is soon reinforced when, while on a rather aimless swim underwater, we're abruptly fired upon:
This situation immediately alerts me as I, having played on my rebel and having frequently looked for Zulu crates, I know it's very rare for that particular spot to be manned; let alone be used to look straight into the water below the bridge. This, by my request, triggers an investigation (this is a rather boring clip):
The player turns out to be Antloin, who at the time was also involved in an incident where an event team member dropped thermal goggles, an entity otherwise restricted for Elite OTA. In the investigation it's revealed that whenever we approach the rebel auths-restricted zone, with no communication of leaving the base and nobody witnessing us, Antloin runs up to us three times in a row. Unfortunately, due to the standard set by Tommygman during the rob case, this was insufficient evidence for a ban.

We discuss the option of cloaking ourselves but it's never followed up upon.
Nowadays, Antloin has admitted to modifying his game:

https://nebulous.cloud/threads/tell-me-what-you-remember-about-past-iterations.61544/page-6#post-1467080

The rebel side having two blatant cheaters ends up being very demoralising to us at the time, simultaneously giving a convenient excuse to subpar Rank Leaders for their losses. [Back then and still I believe that cheating or not, the failure was on those Rank Leaders for failing to adapt to the situation.]

I prefer the term exploiter

Didn't install any 3rd party programs or any other bullshit.

I'd regularly check out the train bridge, main bridge and factory bridge and then use the console command to see if any Combine are there - it's how I seeked for causes to s2k. Given the way how models are rendered only where you look at, it allows for the triangulation of the direction & rough location of where your target is at, which is how I found you guys down in the water. Plus the flashing of the cop heads made it easier. Made me feel like I was playing Highfleet and figuring out where enemy ships were, if you know the game you know what I mean.

But no, you guys did, in a way, adapt to the situation by also utilizing console commands. I remember either ron or ovxy uploading a video on YouTube, playing as a cop with an AS VAL on Boreas, specifically on the top of the hill where a rebel mini-fort was. I noticed the lack of any white bushes, which were quite prevalent on that specific location of the video, and I found out that it was a console command r_drawdetailprops that did the trick. Needless to say, I followed suit and stopped hiding in the bushes.

Either way, the rebels' narrative of the Combine is "they are roleplay destroyers, they attack us when we're roleplaying" and it's still true to this day - on nebulous at the very least, in other HL2RP communities running on impulse framework (like landis or Deep Gaming) it's the opposite. The Combines' carefully-crafted narrative and justification for their actions is that the rebels are "lying, rule-breaking, headglitching, cheating and staff-abusing crybaby vermin" and that the Combine players are pure and innocent. Funny.

The whole server grew into a competitive S2K right from the start, with daily shit-flinging on forums/Discord and I loved it - I loved the chaos. I'd go through the experience all over again, with no changes of any kind. nebulous was the true and the oldest anarchy Half-Life 2 Roleplay server.

Thanks for the fun, come back anytime.

 

[Simman102]

Yeah, there were awful problems, yet you're outright ignoring the two seasons that actually had things go right.

What's even more baffling is that even keeping to your 'thread premise' - you outright walked over the O.B.C's involvement on Apoc, and another situation that I know you remember, the TommyGman sniper tower.

Why was the cop car blown up with SLAMs on Asheville?


Why didn't you voice said disagreements in a civil manner then?

When the entire CivPro leadership is radio silent, who's going to step in to make the alterations needed?
Instead, you voiced nothing and then tried to abortively throw everything out the window.

The only time we had actual CAB-Cop dialogue had a bunch of snide threats thrown in, then the attempted derailment of the ceasefire - which didn't work because we noticed what you were doing. It came very close to that, but in the end Brandon didn't cover his tracks well enough and it held.

Fuck off East, you're not impressing anybody other than people in whatever discord you crawled out of.
- cultists' involvement IS mentioned in the apoc chapter and it's highlighted as a good thing. if you're unhappy that there aren't any specific situations then I'm sorry but they simply weren't relevant in the grand scheme of things
- if I had to bring up every single instance of admins abusing just to kill us this thread would be five times longer
- I think people were being idiots about it but I'm not sure which singular source engine car you're talking about, didn't make it into the history books because it was such a non-issue
- we DID at one point send an RL to talk to CAB but they had to leave because 5 cops died mid-meeting and they had to run out reinforce them. later an RL inactive in reasonable hours appointed himself as the representative to CAB and we had no influence over it
- other seasons span over 2x the length of season 1, there's way less clips and way less logs/screenshots. server was bleeding players left and right, we didn't play nearly as much and on some maps like southside we were straight up told "do not flag up" for a majority of it. I'd hardly have anything to write about

Either way, the rebels' narrative of the Combine is "they are roleplay destroyers, they attack us when we're roleplaying" and it's still true to this day - on nebulous at the very least, in other HL2RP communities running on impulse framework (like landis or Deep Gaming) it's the opposite. The Combines' carefully-crafted narrative and justification for their actions is that the rebels are "lying, rule-breaking, headglitching, cheating and staff-abusing crybaby vermin" and that the Combine players are pure and innocent. Funny.

If you think this thread at any point had the intention of painting us as 'pure' or 'innocent' then you missed the point. What we did do, however, is maintain the higher moral ground which I firmly believe we hold to this day and I'm proud of this fact.

 

[Antloin]

Also, let's admit that both the rebels and the Combine were filled mostly with people that didn't know how to S2K, and both factions always had a group of people that would carry them when it came to S2K - Armbands on rebel, Rank Leaders on combine. Although, the majority/at least half of the Armbands were RLs themselves and would occasionally switch sides.

Blacksuit rebels were equivalent to P2 transhumans, they just didn't have the strict deployment rules that the OTA faction had. You could also argue that weapons like AKs and FN FAL are harder to use than the infamous AR2 - easiest recoil control out of all guns, high damage output and little to no spread. It's power alone is the second reason (1st one being recovered by squad members) why only one or two AR2 were in rebel's gun economy circulation. I can only see AS VAL rivaling it, but not long-range.
I feel like if OTA had deployed just as often as blacksuits, things would be different back then. Oh and don't forget that usually S2K nuts were blacksuits.

 

[Antloin]

Fuck off East, you're not impressing anybody other than people in whatever discord you crawled out of.
- cultists' involvement IS mentioned in the apoc chapter and it's highlighted as a good thing. if you're unhappy that there aren't any specific situations then I'm sorry but they simply weren't relevant in the grand scheme of things
- if I had to bring up every single instance of admins abusing just to kill us this thread would be five times longer
- I think people were being idiots about it but I'm not sure which singular source engine car you're talking about, didn't make it into the history books because it was such a non-issue
- we DID at one point send an RL to talk to CAB but they had to leave because 5 cops died mid-meeting and they had to run out reinforce them. later an RL inactive in reasonable hours appointed himself as the representative to CAB and we had no influence over it
- other seasons span over 2x the length of season 1, there's way less clips and way less logs/screenshots. server was bleeding players left and right, we didn't play nearly as much and on some maps like southside we were straight up told "do not flag up" for a majority of it. I'd hardly have anything to write about


If you think this thread at any point had the intention of painting us as 'pure' or 'innocent' then you missed the point. What we did do, however, is maintain the higher moral ground which I firmly believe we hold to this day and I'm proud of this fact.

If that's what helps you sleep at night, fine by me. But the reality is that everyone was just as dirty as the environment around them. Don't try to paint it otherwise in your favor.

 

[Simman102]

If that's what helps you sleep at night, fine by me. But the reality is that everyone was just as dirty as the environment around them. Don't try to paint it otherwise in your favor.

This is incredibly rich, coming from one of the two people who were explicitly named in the thread for cheating, lmao.
But hey, at least you admit it.

 

[Antloin]

This is incredibly rich, coming from one of the two people who were explicitly named in the thread for cheating, lmao.
But hey, at least you admit it.

Again, whatever helps you sleep at night. Especially seeing that some people, including you, are still mad over the way how things went on the server, over 1.5 years later.

 

['77 East]

Fuck off East, you're not impressing anybody other than people in whatever discord you crawled out of.

Hey man, I just find it's interesting that one season you're choosing not to cover had one of your own friends & his group pull almost everything you were complaining about rebels doing, even down to console command fuckery, while the main opposition were a bunch of cultists doing hit and run assassinations because half the faction couldn't flag on or wouldn't because they didn't want to act incognito.

- we DID at one point send an RL to talk to CAB but they had to leave because 5 cops died mid-meeting and they had to run out reinforce them. later an RL inactive in reasonable hours appointed himself as the representative to CAB and we had no influence over it

Even by that point we reached out and got rebuffed. I distinctly remember me & @Appetite Ruining Kebab tried meeting with other rank leaders twice after that and it only lead to more threats.

Also, who was this? I remember the first rank leader (the one who ran to attend a gunfight) but not the second.

- other seasons span over 2x the length of season 1, there's way less clips and way less logs/screenshots. server was bleeding players left and right, we didn't play nearly as much and on some maps like southside we were straight up told "do not flag up" for a majority of it. I'd hardly have anything to write about

Alps had frequent activity for a good 2/3rd of it, and I know there's plenty of recordings out there because people kept spamming them in the civpro discord. There was also a lot of RP and skirmishes, including the cliff camping.

cuz it was ridiculous

Wasting SLAMs to blow up an asset is just the peak of what was wrong with civpro by this point.

 

[Deleted member 7576]

Wasting SLAMs to blow up an asset is just the peak of what was wrong with civpro by this point.

civpro? ota did it buddy, after an ota misused it
get some glasses

 

[Sil]

S2M just leads to 'accidental' hits or more commonly, one side using up all their munitions and then getting massacred by the opposing side.

It is garbage theory from 2009.

Painfully cherrypicked what I said there to make some sort of discrediting response.

S2M is the compromise for pea brained chimps who absolutely DEMAND that there’s use of guns in an active gunfight; it’s shit, and easily abused, but I’d prefer it over S2K. S2RP is always better no matter what.

 

[john]

very good (if a little neurotic) insight into ur perspective, i read the whole thing. i didnt play this iteration more than hopping on like a day or two to mess around so i have no personal anecdotes other than to say that neb has had a surprising amount of cheaters and exploiters for a server thats about character writing, and not personal empowerment. the pedestal that good shooters were put on over the history of this experience, as well as the importance of ego has been deeply detrimental to the actual roleplay bits. there's at least a dozen more people who have done similar things that will never admit to it.

good visual demonstration of why an entirely player vs player experience is bad for everyone, too, unless the game it's centered around is a versus where both sides have the exact same objectives and resources, as well as team balancing, which they never will on an rp server.

Another source of dissatisfaction was Warren Barr, our first captured prisoner; the staff team facilitated his escape through a clientside-rendered texture of a dead barnacle present within his cell that we couldn't possibly remove.

this is a minor nitpick, but out of ur whole writeup this bit i dont like. it comes across as very egoist and zoned in on the shooting bits. obvs no one wants to rp sitting in a cell, any plausible deniability to get back to interacting with people should be a net bonus for the roleplay.


all in all i wish this sort of unfiltered dialogue was happening always, between both sides - if sides had to exist at all. it's a lot easier to be sympathetic with a whole perspective laid out flat.

 

[OskarDemus]

this is a minor nitpick, but out of ur whole writeup this bit i dont like. it comes across as very egoist and zoned in on the shooting bits. obvs no one wants to rp sitting in a cell, any plausible deniability to get back to interacting with people should be a net bonus for the roleplay.

Whilst I would agree normally if this was a regular rebel who got caught up in a sweep. I was there when we caught him, he was a highly known rebel, and was the head of a Rebel cell. We assaulted the main rebel base as a retaliation to an earlier attack.
-
At this point over the week we've had our PT's and assault teams killed and called out by hackers (actual ancient evils that got banned almost immediately), when we attacked the cave we managed to sneak across the entire map without getting caught to be met with a group of rebels hiding in the cave. Warren Barr played really well, he didn't throw a hissy fit about being caught and roleplayed with us really well.
-
The same can't be said about the other rebel who was in the cave who refused to talk to us and only responded to us in LOOC with something along the lines of " I'm not actually here, I'm not responding to you I don't care."
-
So you can imagine how annoyed the Civ Pro players were when, their one in a hundred chance of dealing a major blow to rebel faction that took a better part of the day to plan and execute, escapes because haha funny entity barnacle single /me escape.
-
to clarify, I don't blame Barr for doing this, an admin supervised this and allowed it, its not his fault I woulda done the same thing

 

[OskarDemus]

Hey man, I just find it's interesting that one season you're choosing not to cover had one of your own friends & his group pull almost everything you were complaining about rebels doing, even down to console command fuckery, while the main opposition were a bunch of cultists doing hit and run assassinations because half the faction couldn't flag on or wouldn't because they didn't want to act incognito.

are you referring to Bucharest in season two?

 

[Raiden]

I hope people don’t drag this baggage to the next project lmao

clean slate, please

 

[Simman102]

Hey man, I just find it's interesting that one season you're choosing not to cover

I have no interest in covering a season I have hardly any distinct memories from, nor am I under any obligation to do so. I direct you back to the graph in the prelude chapter, the server was gradually dying at that point as was our interest in it.

even down to console command fuckery

I find it very funny that despite everything present in the thread you throw "console command fuckery" as a reprehensible act when it's not even close to what some of the rebels had been doing.
I can't speak for the rest but I personally only ever used:
- r_3dsky 0; it was passed around the community as general advice during asheville as due to the very limited render distance (excellent design choice that much helped with the cancer that long range fights were, in retrospect) you'd sometimes see rebels manifest out of thin air in your view if you didn't have it disabled
- reshade; late into metro and halfway into c24. We'd began to experiment with it when screenshots/videos like these surfaced the forums:

Seeing as there was no response from the staff team (meaning it wasn't a rulebreak I guess? I have no clue how this WASN'T considered cheating) and our in-game experiments proving that its usage did indeed provide an advantage in extremely dark areas we decided to even the odds slightly especially considering how blacksuits blended with the dark while we glowed. I never used the zoom function though, it was kinda fucked up and +zoom was a more convenient and immersive alternative (albeit one that didn't allow shooting while zooming in, contrarily to reshade).

Also, who was this? I remember the first rank leader (the one who ran to attend a gunfight) but not the second.

I won't explicitly name them but their self-appointing was interesting move, all things considered. I don't think there were any malicious intentions behind it but their activity during the server's peak hours simply wasn't enough for the role they were trying to take on.

What I now realise is probably just how detached you were from the day-to-day gameplay loop at the time. I understand that CAB was trying to figure out 200 IQ plans to fight a pre-written narrative somehow, but we saw no need, reason or space to engage with such an approach while we were getting s2k'd in the city a dozen times a day.

CAB, locked up in the Nexus, governing over a city that didn't have citizens in it didn't matter to 80% of the server at the time it was around and it's something you'll just have to accept one day.

this is a minor nitpick, but out of ur whole writeup this bit i dont like. it comes across as very egoist and zoned in on the shooting bits. obvs no one wants to rp sitting in a cell, any plausible deniability to get back to interacting with people should be a net bonus for the roleplay.

It's written from the perspective of apoc. Nowadays I do agree with you that keeping prisoners around just sucks but you have to consider the context.

The ruleset was one the first things that'd been announced about the server, including the surprisingly long prisoner ruleset which mentioned operations of taking prisoners back and in case of sensitive targets even kill raids (better to kill our own prisoner than let the enemy have him). I imagine that, at the time it was written, the impression was that the server would be far less combat-oriented and probably overall slower (the Combine ruleset in the beginning also reinforced this notion as it mentioned 25% rankpoint units not being allowed to deploy).

This hyped the concept of prisoners up to many of us thinking it would be one of the pivotal systems of the server and the Warren Barr situation was a clash of this expectation with reality which was a huge letdown for many of us, as were the situations mentioned in the asheville chapter.

We eventually did come to the conclusion that there's no desire for people to suffer consequences from organically occurring conflict and we fully accepted the notion, it just wasn't communicated by management.

 

[Trains]

i miss this iteration sometimes

then i remember.

then i dont miss it


good read

 

[Ricsow]

(Just joking, it’s a good read and I can respect writing all that down, just seems odd to post it this late)