HELIX 4 SEASON 1 CIVIL PROTECTION: DECLASSIFIED

[Simman102]

CIVIL PROTECTION: DECLASSIFIED
an account of Season 1 of Helix 4​

This thread is an opportunity for you, the reader, to gain insight into what happened behind the scenes of Civil Protection during Season 1 of Helix 4. I will not be touching upon the other seasons (unless there somehow is demand for such, in spite of the state of the forums) because nobody cared about them.

Many names have been anonymised in incriminating situations for both sides alike, with a few exceptions.

Some claims will lack proof as it either didn't exist, or wasn't made in time. If you, for whatever reason, seek to dispute any of the claims in this thread, please bring evidence as otherwise I will not engage with you.

I will attempt to remain as objective as possible throughout this thread, but be aware that this is an account of a faction's POV. If you find something that you know for certain doesn't align with reality, it's because we simply didn't know the truth. Sometimes, I will state my opinion on something. I will denote it [like this].

IMPORTANT: this thread is by no means exhaustive. It amounts to maybe 20-40% of the 'incidents' or otherwise confrontational situations. Sometimes, I will mention something (e.g. internal conflicts) and post a tiny fraction of the evidence as there'd be no point in padding the thread with kilometers of censored screenshots. You'll just have to believe me.

I. DEPOT; SETTING THE STAGE

We open with five Rank Leaders. Four invited and one accepted through the application process.
Me, frentium, ovxy, Revanox, Sasha and Kiko.
Prior to the launch of the server, I attempt to establish how many Rank Leaders will be active (it is actually the very first message I send in the Rank Leader channel of the discord):

Despite the mixed responses (I thank @ovxy for his honest response of preferring to play OTA), reality turns out to be rather unfortunate: during the first few days of the server (prior to the rebel populace escaping the prison), I am the only Rank Leader playing. This is a task borderline impossible due to the population of the server and, in effect, extremely strenuous.
As a consequence, the inactive Rank Leaders are issued an announcement to start playing, and the decision to recruit additional ones is made.

Having seen who plays on the server, I make my decision off of years-long friendships and battle-tested reliability: I appoint Brandon_ and Ron as the next Rank Leaders.

The roster which is now assembled is one that doesn't change much throughout most of the iteration, as you likely remember. [In hindsight, this is a decision I'll soon come to regret. Were I to do it again, I'd have requested the creation of a new rank, something between 75 and RL and put others there.]

With leadership locked in and after a painful few days, the faction's story starts. A vast majority of the roster holds 25% rankpoints, armed only with a USP-M.

And I immediately run into a problem. In an effort to promote a few units, I give a simple set of tasks - go install a camera here, put up turrets there. I understand that this task carries a degree of confusion as there aren't any scripts and it's a completely IC action, but some of the protection-team leaders show a complete lack of initiative; met with the slightest uncertainty, they simply idle instead of reaching out to anybody over the radio.

As we're, at the time, confined to the empty depot, we come to a bit of a standstill. There isn't any IC reason to promote people, so things are going slowly.

Until a rebel runs up to the walls of the depot with a winchester and 3-taps an Ordinal.

I realise that despite us being only 4 days into the server, the rebels wield weapons capable of killing the strongest which OTA has to offer while a vast majority of Civil Protection has only a pistol.

This event is our first mentality shift. I rid myself of my stringent requirements for a promotion and begin rapidly diversifying the roster in an effort to even the field once more.

Depot was arguably the map with the most immersive deployments; often, we'd set out to simply plant mines near our thumpers, but when we actually went out with the intent to destroy rebel thumpers we had:
- OTA with long range weapons covering us,
- hunters deployed as support,
- the ability to summon a dropship to fly us out once our objective was complete.

Having so many options and such support, we much underestimated the threat that vortigaunts would pose later.
With this, however, the following rule was introduced:

It didn't matter much at the time, but carried into the future maps.

What's also worth noting is that we ran out of batteries nearly immediately due to rampant untracked usage. The amount was manually replenished and this is not taken into consideration. I now know that it's simply a difference in culture; where a rebel was likely to ask in /help or directly consult their admin friend, a unit would simply go to the vendor and take a battery even if they took as little as 5 damage from a prop.

One more thing was the creation of lockers within our barracks [at the request of Tyrone (I am not 100% sure whether it was him but I'm confident enough to give him credit)] - the progenitor of what would become Foreign Assets later on.

All that's left is the final lighthouse event, where we managed to push all the way up to the objective but were stopped by a propblock, the first instance of our IC actions being stopped by the rigid scripting of the event - also, the first time vortigaunts were teleported in.

[In hindsight, it's actually quite funny how all of our later struggles (vortigaunts, gear inferiority, scripted events, stock running out, restricted deployments, unreliable people) were already present on this map - they just weren't amplified, or we were unaware of the fact that they're actually such a big deal due to the relative chaos of the server just having started.]

Still hopeful and high in spirits, the map changes, and so does the chapter of this thread.

 

[Simman102]

II. APOC; WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW GOOD WE HAD IT

[Apoc was the best map for Civil Protection.
PvPvE objectives which were clearly defined and allowed us to engage with at any time.
Plotline which at the very least gave us the illusion of not being scripted.
The faction had its personality, there were groups which opposed each other IC.
75s were reliable and played distinct characters.
Rebels hadn't powercrept yet.
We had a living community which mingled both ICly and OOCly.
Despite our struggles, there was still a lot of satisfaction.
It was also, unfortunately, the end of it.]

Open Apoc, where things start to go wrong. [If I had to attempt to pinpoint a cause, I'd say it's due to the Server Director being present in some rebel community with a lot of vocal actors attempting to sway him.]

Systems were slowly breaking down. The former rule of three deployments per day was tightened to only two [due to rebel complaints I assume] despite us not even exhausting the limit.

Another issue which became very clear very soon - we were deprived of all our former support. No snipers, no dropships, no hunters. The latter two were backed by IC reasons, but they did pose a significant challenge - on an open, (relatively) evenly levelled map, we had no effective counterplay to vortigaunts.
Bar one. The APC.
Which was, during the map, restricted to Ordinal+. Leaving us with no counterplay whatsoever, and people often dying from fire from outside their field of view. Certain actors took advantage of this and pushed it to the absolute limit:

This was causing us significantly more deaths than before. Our supplies were beginning to run low and we had no intention of hiding the fact; this was communicated with the faction members we'd played with on a regular basis.

Eventually, this happened:

Alongside stunsticks several other items were suddenly limited - most importantly, ammo (all weapons were already limited earlier); this change was visible to all faction members and it quickly made waves.

(Screenshot from the staff discord.)

On the very same day, in an unfortunate turn of events, while I was flagged on a rebel character, Civil Protection was deployed and suffered a loss of life. The only person to die was one who happened to NOT be in a voice chat while the rest of the team was. On top of that, the person happened to have a weapon equipped in every single slot possible - something that was, in all past iterations, a punished action per the Civil Protection ruleset. This caused some exchange between faction members (not faction leadership, not Rank Leaders) that I was not present for, which spawned this thread:

https://nebulous.cloud/threads/script-economy-is-not-my-concern.59050/

[Banger thread name, by the way. '<x> economy is not my concern' is an inside joke between us to this day.]
[Also, looking at the follow-up post on page 22 and certain in-game behaviourisms, I'd become convinced that this thread was made purely due to a victim complex.]

(This is the RL channel - this request happened completely unrelated to the confrontation performed by faction members. 99% of our qualms were brought up internally.)

This, compounded with complaints from other, unrelated incidents, eventually ended up with us abandoning our ~5 years long tradition of using general public VC for deployments, dealing a significant blow to the sense of community within the faction and a loss of tactical advantage in s2k.
Yet another consequence of the aforementioned thread was an Ordinal publicly lashing out on me, who I believe thought I had something to do with the incident. This was the starting point of significant tension which strained the relations between us and the management of the server which lasted until the very end.

Facing complaints from the community we simultaneously were put under even stricter rigour regarding gear vendor-wise, forcing us to (internally) put even more emphasis on preserving it. This further increased the tensions and it wasn't the only instance of community expectations being the exact opposite of what upper management was imposing upon us.

The idea behind gear acquisition was made clear once we successfully completed the mid-map objective, enabling the blacksites. We were allowed to retrieve ammo and batteries from the locations.

While fine on paper, this system ended up backfiring as the event team was spawning so many NPCs that we were spending more ammo and batteries on our journey to the blacksites than we could acquire from these trips.
This caused faction members and Rank Leaders alike to stage an impromptu strike where we refused to respond to any rebel activity that wasn't an outright attack on our base. Fortunately, as a result, the Server Director reverted the limits on ammo and even batteries, allowing us to breathe again.

Yet another incident was a fight for the spire, one of the map's objectives. We were severely outnumbered throughout the fight and rebel NLR timer was waived; to balance things out, we had a chopper on our side which was replaced with a hunter over the course of the fight. I assume this spawned another series of complaints as the use of synths was promptly restricted.
It spawned this, rather humorous at the time, exchange:

C39:RL.DEFENDER-3 radios on combine: "<:: Requesting report on currently available synthetic assets. ::>"
S17:CMD-2.DAGGER-0 radios on combine: "<:: Crab, hunter and strider units all available for deployment. ::>"
C39:RL.DEFENDER-3 radios on combine: "<:: Requesting hunter. Rest is too slow for rockets. ::>"
S17:CMD-2.DAGGER-0 radios on combine: "<:: Negative. Targets are in positions not ideal for hunter deployment. ::>"
C39:RL.DEFENDER-3 radios on combine: "<:: Requesting crab deployment, then. ::>"
S17:CMD-2.DAGGER-0 radios on combine: "<:: Denied. ::>"

Here's the final blow dealt to us by apoc:

The transhumanisation of the first batch of 75s.

While much deserved by, at the time, reliable and proactive 75s, this was a massive detriment to us. The ruleset and deployment criteria of Phase 1s were completely different to Civil Protection; they were no longer under our jurisdiction, nor could we use them freely. This meant that the faction was a twisted form of meritocracy where excellence caused you to advance within its structure just to end up leaving it.

On top of this, one must look into the past, back to Helix 1 where Overwatch Transhuman Arm was the most elite faction on the server; requiring not only acceptance by the leaders but also voting approval of the current members, the recruitment process was finalised by an s2k test. There were many individuals who'd been trying for years to get into OTA but were unable to, causing a forbidden fruit effect.

Due to this, a pattern emerged; those who'd advanced high enough to reach 75 rankpoints would become OTA and then stop playing CP (not that I blame them; playing a Phase 1 allowed them to even their odds against rebels gear-wise) or even the server altogether. Rewarding people with promotions meant that we would eventually lose them; over time, we were bleeding our finest.

What I also ought to mention is the fact that, due to weapon scripts being made indestructible during Helix 1, our ever-growing supply of rebel weapons was continuously increasing the amount of lockers we needed to store them; at about ten lockers it was, by my initiative, replaced with a vendor called Foreign Assets, established to decrease the strain on the server and its database. With no source of rebel ammo (there was this request made in attempt to source them, left unanswered):

Rebel weapons were simply locked up doing nothing, for the most part (there was a handful of exceptions to this due to scavenging ammo from dropped guns). At this point in time this doesn't matter much as cops and rebels are more or less equal in terms of weaponry, but it will pose a problem later down the line. A particular technical difficulty arose however:

This set the precedent of Foreign Assets never being ported across maps. It meant that whatever we managed to acquire throughout the span of a map would always be, in the end, wiped, causing a total lack of continuity between maps; it did not matter whether we lost or won the majority of the engagements during a map as the plotline was scripted and there was zero progression otherwise. This will become a major source of dissatisfcation later - while rebels were progressing gear-wise, we were, if anything, regressing due to the OTA brain drain.

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. Meaningless at the time, this sows doubt into the prisoner system which will escalate later on.

Somewhere in the meantime, due to me sparing a unit for his incompetence and deranking him instead of PKing him on the spot, the officer is given rogue auths. As a result of these rogue auths, he sets our entire base on fire and PKs me, setting the precedent that 'choosing the roleplay option' is a detrimental one overall. The management goes back on this decision and offers me an unPK, but I deny it due to the pace of IC developments the time. A PSA is issued that future similar situations will not be treated in the same way, but the rather poor aftertaste remains.

One final side note. There was a player among Civil Protection who'd become an inside joke due to his 'talent' to spot NPCs and scripts at impossible angles, where nobody else could. We didn't make much of it at the time, which was a severe mistake that we would only learn about later.

 

[Simman102]

III. 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:

https://nebulous.cloud/threads/increase-limbshot-damage-modifier.59438/

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:

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.]

 

[Simman102]

Following up on the thermal goggles thread, at the time we simultaneously begin to collide with the staff team.

While there's no denying this particular /event was written in a joking manner, the problem of 'events' consisting of an event rebel character shooting us out of observer with a sniper rifle/entering observer mid-escape was very much real (and results in one staff member's downgrade from SA to an ordinary Administrator, eventually). At the same time, you might recall a now archived abuse report out of which I unfortunately saved only this screenshot:

Without delving into the details of the situation, staff performed an act of abuse in order to save their friend from death, which caused an argument in /d during which we were approached with extreme vitriol. The abuse report was accepted and I believe the people involved were temporarily suspended, but it also resulted in OTA losing their access to /d, something which permanently damaged the relation between us and the staff team. Compounded with incidents of observer snipers and gbombs being dropped atop the heads of OTA mid-fights, our attitude changed to that of distrust.
[A travesty that I don't have the 'average ota brainrot' quote saved. Also a banger.]

With these issues outlined above, we're now facing a big problem: we're losing more batteries than ever which is the source of most of my complaints. Many units who carelessly waste batteries on a whim and those who die deaths which would in the past result in a demotion are not punished in any way; in fact, our management actively denies us the option to posthumously derank people. The latter will become a big issue very soon. At the same time, even though we identified a pattern of being hunted in the city, a forum psyop begins, trying to blame us for somehow locking the lower ranks within the base and painting the city as some event-rich roleplay wonderland.

This claim is a major theme of this thread:

https://nebulous.cloud/threads/unofficial-hl2rp%C2%B2-launch-feedback-thread.58922/page-42#post-1425354

Which is blatantly untrue, as at that point there had been only one request for a 75 to leave the base which was authorised. Forum warriors manage to convince the Server Director that it is indeed us who are the problem, which puts us in a position where once more the pressure on us does not align with the facts. This comes to a point where we're internally given an offer: we would receive unlimited batteries for the faction and crafting flags for our characters to have the ability to manufacture non-standard ammunition for the guns we have, were we to allow 75s to deploy unrestricted.

Against my wishes (I refuse on the principle of not succumbing to manufactured outrage) and despite there not being a consensus on how to proceed, a certain Rank Leader announces the introduction of a new system called referred to as the 'patrol certification'; once more largely inconsequential, this drives a big divide between Rank Leaders. Infinite batteries are restored, the G36 is introduced somewhere at the time and my complaints die down for a while.

What, unfortunately, does happen is that the same Rank Leader waits for me to log off and then takes a team out day by day, suffering a total wipe of his team every time, blaming it on the cheaters. It had become so predictable that I'd stay in voice chat even after logging off just to listen to them rage.

[You might recall regret being mentioned in the first chapter. Well, here it is.]

This becomes a rather dark era where even ordinary faction members notice the pattern.

The torrent of complaints is now too high for a single human to handle, and virtually nothing coming from us is addressed while the faction is actively bleeding players due to both the extremely hostile nature of the city and also the total lack of staff attention towards the faction which I'd mentioned in the thread linked earlier. We end up having ~6 active players, only a month into the server:

(Screenshot from the staff discord.)

I understand (and understood at the time) that there were too many complaints - I believe/d that the root of the problem was the fact that numbers served both as a Combine leader and the Server Director which ultimately wasn't working out. I suggested a headcop to filter these complaints, and eventually ovxy was appointed.

This sparks a thing which will indirectly matter later. I give ovxy a tool to check activity to prove the inactivity of the faction and the validity of our complaints:

Regrettably, on the very same day, the infamous factory push happens, which is the first total, unarguable loss of the faction. Pushing against a convoluted propbuild, we suffer total death of roughly two whole waves of CP and OTA alike; this loss results in my temporary removal from the Combine discord, the Server Director mocking us publicly on the forums and all Rank Leaders being demoted posthumously - something which was denied to us when we requested that option to have any sort of ability to punish people wasting batteries. The amount of disrespect shown towards us in the moment results in some members resigning on the spot, which, even though later resolved, ultimately completely kills the communication between us and management. Mind you, we were facing constant complaints from the community for 'caring too much' and 'trying to win' and yet our management committed an act of hypocrisy just to punish us for our first real loss of the iteration. This situation is the exact same as on apocalypse with the 'script economy' incident where we're sandwiched between what's expected of us as Rank Leaders and what the community wants.

 

[Simman102]

This causes a total death of communication between us and management which never recovers.

Despite us later on conducting the meeting and raising 10 distinct complaints, only three are ever addressed.

At the same time, we begin to anecdotally notice a pattern - the newer players die unusually quickly in fights, compared to us, Rank Leaders. Also, speaking to one of them, we learn that they don't replenish their armour altogether, simply paying no attention to it, while the rebels wear 130 armour suits and wield weapons which can kill these cops within 2 bodyshots or 1 headshot.
This revelation shocks the currently rebel-aligned developer who begins to pay more attention to our issues:

Hoping to alleviate the problem, I write a guide which is well-received by the entire community:
https://nebulous.cloud/threads/new-functionary-field-deployment-advice.59427/
However the issue persists. Noticing an extreme case:

And inspired by the activity checker I'd recently sent to ovxy which was mentioned earlier in the chapter, I write a tool internally called 'GamerScan' (spare me criticism of the name, it was never an ambitious project). It reveals the following:

To give Gary credit, he gave us the option to inspect the amount of health and armour people had in the moment - ultimately not a gamechanger, but it did come useful in a few cases.

This grim realisation makes us aware of the fact that most of the players in our faction die with zero engagement, outgeared, outmanned, outcheated (in some cases), outcoordinated, outperformed in every aspect.

This is the source of our biggest mentality shift; we realise that the faction is doomed to die on repeat to the overpowered rebels and that this gap is at this stage impossible to close. This is what subconsciously causes us to decrease the emphasis on being leaders and turn our focus inwards, to bettering our own skill, knowing that it was our only chance of keeping the faction afloat as a force to be reckoned with and not just gametracker fodder.

GamerScan will from that point on be used on a regular basis as it's our only source of introspection into the faction; not only with the approval of the Server Director, but in part demand. It will also later be upgraded with teamkill/friendly fire stats. Once the obvious conclusions are drawn, however, it becomes mostly a driver of competition between us, Rank Leaders, where we attempt to race each other in combat performance.

Somewhere in-between all this chaos which I forgot to mention earlier is a few situations which further reinforce our conclusions regarding efforts to RP from apoc. Situations like this one:
Where an outnumbered rebel is unPK'd despite engaging us 1v4. Another examples include a captured vortigaunt who is teleported out of our base through staff assistance straight into a minefield which results in their death; the appeal is accepted due to it being a staff mistake somehow, even though there was no other option of climbing the and the minefield was there for a reason. Another one that comes to mind is one where a rebel gets captured, requests a PK on the spot and then is unPK'd on the basis of a 1-month old PSA.

I know now and I in fact agree with the principle of not PKing people as a result of organic s2k conflict, but at the time it was happening it was contradictory with how the rules were written (the rules predated the iteration, in fact). The lack of a direct resolution and instead treating it all as a fuzzy issue with vague verdicts was causing us much frustration at the time, leading us to backward conclusions.

 

[Simman102]

IV. METRO; ALL HOPE IS LOST

The server has changed.

Whatever balance there once had been between roleplay and s2k was gone.
Rebels went from being a relatively equal opponent to absolute Phase 1-tier monsters forming VC-coordinated squads to hunt cops.
Any goodwill our management once might have had towards us has ran out.
A majority of the staff team was apathetic at best and outright hostile to us at worst.
Our most reliable people were either OTA by now or had stopped playing altogether, and the new ones couldn't even hope to stand a chance against the overpowered rebels.

Despite this, we prevailed.

I'll start with the biggest, most glaring issue of the map:

This is what the majority of it looked like for us. As you can see, the only visible element in the dark is a cop uniform. This poses a significant problem to us due to blacksuits blending with the pitch black perfectly, meaning ambushes look like this:
The now close range combat also completely invalidates the purpose of the G36 which has a relatively low fire rate, meaning we're back to the MP7 at most. The rebels, on the other hand, have a variety of weapons, most notably the semi-automatic XM:
[Stellar covering by JUDGE-0, by the way.]
And, for the one or two areas of the map where long range is relevant, the M40:
This gear imbalance is nothing new, however. In fact, metro in general was just a continuation of the trends set in motion during asheville.
There is, however, one weapon I'd like to mention in particular:

The AS VAL was a weapon capable of doing 900 damage per second - since cops had an EHP of 200 at most, this meant that, without even landing any headshots, a rebel could kill FOUR cops in a second by simply holding left-click. The AK-103 wasn't much better; at over 50 damage per bodyshot and over 100 damage per headshot (we'd often joke how it's named after the 103 headshot damage it'd do) it took only 2-4 shots to kill a cop, a ridiculousness not even halfway matched by anything we ever had in our arsenal.

The good news, however, was that rebels camping right outside the PK zones had become so frequent that it became the main theme of our complaints:

This, in turn, made management and the developer slightly more receptive to our voices, despite the fiasco during the previous map.

It also causes the developer to eventually give playing as Civil Protection a try. Seeing how miserable and lacking any flavour the experience is, we're finally, after 5 years, given back waypoints, grappling (even if in a nerfed state) and /ping.

This is euphoric to some of us, who'd been waiting for literal years for the return of the missing features and is a good motivator, despite our general discontent with no sense of progress (our stockpile still gets wiped every map changed).

I fear that's the end of good news, though. Our issue from the previous map was still there, that being:
We cope for a while, until a particularly bad fight occurs, which the SD happens to spectate. The difference in performance is visible to the naked eye, and the SD goes to the general public channel and calls out some of the people:

The SD from then on takes our side in internal discussions regarding ordinary units being slaughtered:

There's now a momentum reinforcing our mindset which we acquired on asheville regarding what role we should play.

Just a day later, another bad fight happens during which a reinforcement team does not contribute whatsoever and ends up effectively donating a bunch of weapons to the rebels:

This fight has huge significance, as I happen to be coincidentally contacted by an acquaintance of mine who happened to play on the rebel side while using ESP and freecam; amused by how poorly the fight went, I am sent the footage of it which proves to be very useful analysis material.

(Notably, most if not all of them die at the hands of a singular Senior Administrator playing on the rebel side who we later discovered to have boosted his attributes using his powers which makes me question whether any of his performance was legitimate.)

This ends up being the final nail in the coffin. With an in-depth analysis and indirect approval from the SD, we lose all hope in the average unit and understand that we're the only ones who can keep the faction in the game.

The realisation spawns a series of deployments which we internally refer to as 'pistol ops'; comprised of Rank Leaders and most trusted units only, we'd leave the base with worst gear possible to try to hone our skill rather than rely on gear. If you're a former Civil Protection member, you may remember them; they became a source of complaints of us 'not involving' ordinary players and I hope this segment of the thread sheds some light on why such was the case.

 

[Simman102]

V. CITY TWENTY-FOUR; THE FINAL STRUGGLE

[I tire of writing this document. I've spent three days straight, having to relive asheville drained me mentally and I know that this chapter won't be any better. I likely won't do it much justice as a result and you can expect a lot to go unmentioned.

On the other hand, I'm relieved; the asheville chapter alone showed a lot of pressure that we were under that we'd kept hidden from the general public.]

C24. All gloves are off. Roleplaying outside our base is completely impossible by now; taking one step out the door without being hypervigilant will result in your certain death.
Shotcoppers are plenty and even the most innocuous-looking citizen is likely to pull out a gun.
If you wonder where they were acquiring the guns from, well:

The first shotcopper was very thoroughly investigated as a seemingly new player caused one of the most deadliest and longest fights of c24. They escaped our pursuit as, to our total surprise, they had a 130 armour blacksuit with a gas filter which they used to hide in the gas zone.
Our retaliation was then directed towards the general rebel scene, and the fight caused so much destruction that the player was permanently banned. What I think is interesting is that this particular created multiple characters just to shotcop, and he was once again supplied with weapons by the same established player and even the same character:

Nowadays I cannot conclude whether this was an instance of metagaming or a very suspicious coincidence, but the reality was that weapons had become so abundant among the rebels that they were spilling into the hands of serial shotcoppers, rendering even the city a total warzone.
Additional mention: even if you did try to stay in the base for too long, you'd eventually be forced out by Dispatch to respond to the constant carnage going on outside.

The good news, however, is that skill-wise, we're at our peak. Knowing the significance of the map, with the brutality of the previous two maps conditioning us, we're absolutely determined to give it our best. Empowered with the G36, grappling gear, and with AKs being dropped left and right by the rebels meaning that some of us (not me, though) can match them in gear, we achieve performance surpassing even Phase 2 OTA. Just two of Rank Leaders were enough to hold out against 10 rebels (not 11, though...):
I'll have to rewind here a bit, however. The start of C24 also marks the return of the Civil Authority Board. Much less hellbent on legalising weed than their 2019 counterpart, this iteration of the faction came with its own set of quirks. Though I do not blame it on them, they came together with a budget system; our vendor was limited in the sense that every single item cost money. We were allocated 50 thousand tokens; however due to general distrust among Rank Leaders following the fiasco that asheville was, everybody simply grabbed a big share of the budget to keep it in their pockets and to protect it from the fiscally irresponsible. Due to this, a standarised system of paying the lower rank units was never established and instead they were given money on a case-by-case basis.

What fuelled the internal conflict was the G36; the cost of the gun was 400 tokens, and then each ammo box cost another 400. To give you a comparison, re-arming a dead 75 rankpoint units with two batteries, an MP7 and several boxes of ammo would cost you 200 tokens, making the G36 ridiculously expensive as it was cheaper to arm two units than buy the gun alone (without ammo!). Some Rank Leaders simply did not care which was often the topic of arguments.

In fact it's such a contested issue that an addon is made replacing the G36 noise with a cartoonish Ka-Ching! noise.
This budget was voted on by CAB; it was split among us, a CWU-clone faction and infestation control which effectively didn't exist. Hearing that we had to compete with these factions despite their costs being completely manufactured and ours directly translating into our ability to play the game was a source of distrust and dislike towards the CAB; there were also several other behaviourisms which were amplified by Phase 1s behaving like Helix 1 Proselytes who'd threaten to kill us for simply performing our duties that contributed to the strained relationship. I won't go into great detail however as CAB ultimately had a 'form over function' role where the amount of Senators far exceeded the amount of citizens/loyalists in the city.

Another qualm of ours was the fact that some items were overpriced in our vendor; we were promised that they'd be made cheaper if a workshift were to be ran with the specific goal of producing the item. This system was often disputed due to our concerns that there wouldn't be any citizens; as you likely know from history, rebel players indeed abandoned the idea of pretending to be citizens about a day into the map and retreated to the rebel zones, leaving this arrangement dysfunctional.

The peak of our conflict with CAB and general frustrations is eventually reached when the ceasefire is voted on. Despite the rebels never advancing past RB6 which was their goal on the map, CAB manufactured a reason to sign the ceasefire ceding the territory to them, indirectly. This is seen as a massive spit in our face in the light of our herculean efforts to keep the rebels at bay and, at first, ends up with one of us assassinating a vortigaunt during the negotations which is completely ignored by the people signing the document, making us realise that it's a completely staged event and we have no influence over anything, the same way we didn't during the previous maps. This eventually ends up with a coup attempt which is stopped by a pulseball; an incident you likely remember. What's worth noting is that the OTA present fired the pulseball before Civil Protection opened fire, a fact often forgotten which will later be a basis for unPKs of the people involved.

This complete and utter powerlessness is a sentiment shared not only by us, Rank Leaders, but also ordinary faction members, one of which unexpectedly reaches out to me.

This sparks further discussions on what to do with the faction as we're, again, bleeding people, exactly as during asheville.

In fact, me saying 'patrol events!' here is a joking reference, which we'd often make, to the fake argument that we're gatekeeping cops from participating in patrol events in the city during asheville. The 'patrol events' amounted, as history has showed, to blacksuits murdering them.

Eventually the pretense of the map being CityRP is dropped when our vendor is made unlimited on yet another particularly bloody day and our then-issues disappear as we persist in this full-blown war state until the end of the server.

What becomes another issue however is the suddent, blatant escalation of staff abuse. Incidents like this one occur left and right as rebels and rebel-aligned admins are determined to destroy the generators in the city, an objective given to them.

Our enemy stops caring about the rules completely and even a Senior Admin uses a throwaway character to clear out all the mines we'd lay out just to switch to his rebel character later to participate in the assaults.

(This specimen in particular is the same as mentioned in the metro chapter - yes, the one who abused to max out his attributes.)

Another case which grinds our gears is an event-spawned rogue cop wielding an entity gun AR2. It's often our object of pursuit as we pride ourselves in our successful rogue eliminations at that point and the distinct noise of the unexpected AR2 triggers us to perform extensive searches of the area. What we ultimately find out is that the rogue often enters observer mid-chase, rendering our endeavors fruitless. On top of this, we independently discover the very same staff team member increasing their attributes without approval and abusing observer to find and recover scripts on the map:

There are other instances discovered; some involve doing it for personal gain while others directly assist the rebels mid-combat.

To this day, I do not know what caused the staff team to go such masks-off. As if that wasn't enough, when it came to eliminating objectives, we began to notice a pattern:

The rebels would strike only with extremely favourable numbers, leading to a certain victory every time. Fortunately for us, this eventually causes a change in the NLR system forbidding people from returning to ongoing fights; additionally, due to our far inferior numbers Rank Leaders gained the ability to charswap to their OTA upon death on their cop characters. With the new medical script rules of armour and meds being on separate timers and the ability to use multiple during a fight, we adapted our playstyle and began to remain in combat continuously for several hours a day, refining us to the point where we'd each acquire over a hundred kills within a few days.

The map eventually does get slightly better as we're given our own objectives to strike on the rebel side. Alongside them, unfortunately, the rebels receive a vendor with infinite AS VAL ammo which was, until then, the only source of balance of the otherwise borderline impossible to play against gun.

With the ceasefire long broken, the map is now, submerged in a sea of blood, in its final stages. Rebels, who fail to push and establish control anywhere beyond RB6 are spawned in a fortress directly vis-a-vis the Nexus to facilitate their victory, and instances of rebel groups all being spawned a singular AK-M, another exceptionally deadly gun, just to try to win occur. These are also thwarted as now the average rebel is hopeless against a Rank Leader or an OTA.

During the map's finale, which is also the final part of the thread, rebels are waived the NLR timer to take over the city. They prove unable to do so against our defenses, and so an event Elite Overwatch character is used to issue an order for us to retreat; we begin defending the Nexus, during which the defenses which we'd set up (mines, primarily) are removed by staff via toolgun. Enough of us die for another order to retreat further into the CAB area is issued, and so the server concludes; not through any player's effort but rather a script.

A rather fitting end, all things considered.

I am sorry that this chapter is so short in comparison but I simply ran out of mental strength to finish it properly. I might revisit it one day.

[The Breen sequence was sick, by the way.]

 

[Simman102]

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.

 

[Deleted member 7576]

 

[OskarDemus]

​

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.

​

 

[Slimaaconroy]

can we get a tldr

 

[bilack]

there should definitely be a thread like this made for rebels

i cant speak for the cp side of things as i barely played cp

 

[Simman102]

there should definitely be a thread like this made for rebels

I imagine it would either have a drastically different tone or a concerning lack of evidence

 

[Raiden]

I imagine it would either have a drastically different tone or a concerning lack of evidence

I think you’ll find everyone can very easily evidence themself as a victim - most ‘negative’ things that happen tend to be a spiral effect of “well they did this, so i’ll do this” and so on until it snowballs


my feeling about the previous iterations is that most if not everyone felt aggrieved by the way it went for their own reasons be it personal or faction(al?)

only half read the whole thread though, will finish soon lol

 

[Señor Jaggles]

Fuck RANGER-6

This picture gives me literal PTSD

 

[Simman102]

“well they did this, so i’ll do this” and so on until it snowballs

No.

In fact, I am proud of myself and my at the time compatriots for not stooping down to the level of the rebels.

We saw opportunities of vendor abuse, we saw opportunities of exploiting /unloadreserve, we saw opportunities of hacking when we realised the staff team was unable to handle the cheaters.

We did none of this; we always played by the rules, we reported the bug to the developer, none of us cheated and we didn't have staff abuse for us. This is thorougly documented, every and each one of us has hours of footage.

This is what allows me to write this thread with a clear conscience and know that we were on the right side of history. This is why I'm not ashamed to show any of the footage and the screenshots.

 

[OskarDemus]

Shout out to the Rebels who spawned entity ammo crates with PET flags, and getting caught by two cop mains for it.

 

[Simman102]

Shout out to the Rebels who spawned entity ammo crates with PET flags, and getting caught by two cop mains for it.

Oh right, I forgot this classic. I'll add it once (if) I update the c24 chapter.

 

[constantdisplay]

one of the most neurotic threads posted on here in years

 

[Blitz0012]

The rebels would strike only with extremely favourable numbers, leading to a certain victory every time.

Not a single PMKO member online in the screenshots, thus confirming our brave socialist warriors knew only human wave doctrine, glorious battles, and losing.

Shame to see how plainly unfair some guys (on our side, even) played when we were deliberately trying to be fair, I was a big whiner about third person and often felt bad for holding places or pushing for too long, leading our gang to retreat early. It's also bit rubbish to see that effectively every gripe and argument I had with CPs and their RP/methods was based on them being railed for doing the RP/methods I was getting frustrated over the lack of. My bad to those 3 dudes in particular.

And I certainly see now why it took like 4 months to get my collaborator to actually be allowed to collaborate. There was literally no time for RP nor for leading cops to acknowledge my existence. Really went a long way to damage citizen-cop RP, we often thought cops just didn't care for anything beyond S2K and hated that, but it really seems like they didn't get much of a choice (especially on C24 and the last couple maps).

Safe to say, though, it's impressive the amount of documentation and hard evidence that went into all this. All in all a shame we ended up driving such a toxic environment for everyone, and I only caught the last half of it.