dallahan
a bad memer
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the sounds in these clips give me ptsdIII. ASHEVILLE; THE TURNING POINT
Asheville was, undeniably, the most important map of the iteration.
[I've been sitting here for two hours, trying to figure out how to structure this chapter.
There were so many things that went wrong that I don't know what to start with. I'm pulling evidence from so many sources that piecing together the canonical order of events is becoming a daunting task.
As such, I think I'll start with listing the good things about the map, as otherwise the rest of the chapter would be depression-inducing.
- The mortar system was in the beginning an engaging one and provided a novelty to the gunfights.
- The sole dev of the server was rather receptive to our complaints and helped us resolve some of our issues.
- The restrictions regarding OTA deployments were, for a while, rather liberal. Despite still bleeding people, we had support from Phase 1s and beyond.
- The G36 came to be.
- For better or worse, the entire core Rank Leader roster was finally active (unlike on the previous maps).
- SPIRE events allowed us to hone our much needed skills at relatively low risk.
- We got a dedicated faction leader, even if it didn't amount to much.
- The plotline of the alien controller was one that kept at least some of the faction members engaged.
- Civil Protection still had its personality, even if it was beginning to fade.
- The base defense operation, even if inconsequential, was extremely thrilling.
- Zulu crates were accessible by all.]
To sum up the previous maps - the support of synths is gone altogether, APC usage is restricted, our faction's finest are being extracted to OTA, what little rebel weapons we have (referring to the SKS and such) lack any ammo, we no longer use public VCs due to community backlash and overregulation, we run into battery-related issues on a regular basis, our relationship with our management is strained due to them basing decisions off of rebel complaints rather than facts and vortigaunts remain a menace we have no counterplay to.
We are, iteration-wise, at our weakest.
The following collection of events which I am about to show you isn't necessarily in chronological order. They've been grouped together to highlight issues which they were related to; their order is meant to make sense from a storytelling perspective.
I'll start off with the most obvious; the rapid powercreep of the rebels.
For the sake of a comparison, here's our loot from a won fight from relatively early into the map:
What you see here is mainly the Vityaz, a 9mm weapon with strength comparable to the MP5K, standard issue weapon for 50% rankpoint units. The MP7s were likely recovered from our own dead 75s/Phase 1s.
Here's one just two weeks later:
Here you see two AKs and an FN FAL, weapons far more potent than what the majority of Civil Protection was wielding.
Simultaneously, the first 130 armour blacksuits emerged. This difference of 30 EHP might not seem significant, but on average it meant each rebel now took two MP7 bodyshots more to kill, a massive difference when multiplied by the total amount of rebels who nearly always would outnumber cops.
This meant that the rebels which up until then were relatively quickly taken down from an MP7 burst (clip from apoc):
Suddenly gained the ability to facetank fire from the exact same weapon:
Now wielding weapons capable of killing us within four bodyshots and with EHP smaller by only 10 compared to a Phase 1 OTA, the rebels stopped being an environmental threat of 'you might run into the enemy' and advanced to solo-squad-wiping potential.
We felt this first-hand very harshly; the sudden difference in balance did not go unnoticed, as evidenced by this thread:
Briefly touching upon the vortigaunt issue: throughout the map we were granted the suppressed G36, a Rank Leader exclusive gun. It was finally our very own weapon to deal with vortigaunts, and coupled with asheville's very limited render distance, the vortbeam was, for the time being, no longer the threat it once posed.
Back to the rebels: together with the gear now surpassing ours, something else changed about them. They, out of the blue, seemed to organise into groups and come to the city, our territory, to mow us down. It was suddenly happening on a regular basis that at the very least a majority of our teams would die for the sole sin of leaving our base.
Take note of the amount of biosignals lost in these videos:
At its worst, it would reach a point where packs of 130 armour blacksuits would hide near the entrance to our base and wait for us to leave just to have the ability to kill us without PK risk.
This is but one piece of the puzzle. The second one will be our 'talented' Civil Protection player which also happened to double as a vortigaunt player. Known by the name rob, it turned out that his peculiar ability wasn't confined to the whitelist. As we were fortunate enough to have the rebel frequency at the time, we began to notice a pattern: there was a vortigaunt who would always spot us whenever we deployed, exact numbers and position and call it out over the radio. Eventually we learned that it was rob, and the culmination of the saga was as follows:
Ending with a permanent ban for rob, all seemed well as a cheater [I say this not lightly; I am 100% confident rob was cheating. It may not have been ESP like I believed at the time but bar all this anomalous in-game behaviour he admitted that 'smoke didn't render' for him.] was banned.
That was until Tommygman who was part of the ban appeal management at the time made a 45 seconds long video defending rob's actions, showcasing the behaviour of render distance on the bridge, trying to prove that it was in fact possible for him to have spotted numbers. When questioned about the odd behaviours rob was displaying during apocalypse he claimed complete ignorance; it was then that we learned of our mistake of not documenting it. (I don't think he was necessarily lying in this instance, he did not integrate much with the general Civil Protection community at the time.) It ultimately ends up with rob being unbanned and sets an unrealistically high standard for prosecution; it was from now on impossible for a cheater to be banned unless they either provided self-incriminating evidence of cheating themselves or they were straight up MassRDM'ing.
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:
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.]
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