Anti-tankspy
Nucleus
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2017
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- Nebulae
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Due to me being bored and not having anything better to do, I’ve decided to make a small documentary showcasing my experiences in the WW3RP gamemode, the good things about it, and the reasons why it tends to, as a roleplay setting, fall flat on its face (at least with the recently attempted iterations).
QUICK DISCLAIMER: Let me strictly emphasize that this is MY personal perspective of how things went down. I could be correct about everything I log on this thread, and I could be entirely wrong with any piece of information I present, so please take this thread with a pinch of salt. This is simply my own personal review.
I won't make this any longer; let's get into it.
![[IMG]](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/UCYv5xJsmWSFPt_YWTyWViOT83XQPRdLIiUFe2Wl2YfCGMdUl_kXGzOKpZnOKV2Jwq-g6jGlz2I-Fst_0gCkpIWbYLIe2UhoNw3kpNgzywTCwFTdOpuX7jILqXo90LajFsnOomyR8lR-KphAj1MvfPI "[IMG]")
INTRODUCTION: What is ‘World War Three Roleplay’?
This section will be an overview of how the formula of WW3RP usually tended to work in most iterations for those who don’t know. If you’re an old time veteran, you can comfortably skip this part without missing out on any important information.
WW3RP is a mainly conflict-based gamemode where the main entertainment factor came from the fast-paced combat and action that players put their characters through, the characters in question experiencing said action and the player roleplaying the aftermath of such experiences on a ‘soldier’ character. The setting usually set two opposing sides, generally the Western Bloc versus its Eastern variant against one another in various theaters of war and the battlefields that result from them. The most common (and, arguably, the most successful) iterations of recent years were the continuation of LemonPunch’s Cold-War-gone-hot setting where nations of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, waged war against the western North Atlantic Treaty Organization in an alternative 1980s timeline. The pace of server advanced through major events known as ‘operations’, putting both sides against one another in a crucial battle that would later influence the ongoing lore and setting of the server.
Both factions had four detachments within; the main basic ‘infantry’ detachment, a military police detachment that was responsible for handling internal issues and prisoners of war, a combat engineer that was responsible for handling heavy ordnance and having access to vehicles, and in most iterations, a special-forces detachment that was responsible for conducting high risk tasks and unconventional missions. All detachments were accessible to all players of all ranks, albeit locked behind an application process. Each detachment had its own purpose and special equipment, presented in detachment-exclusive vendors.
Your first experience on a WW3RP server consisted of you picking a faction to start with through the character selection screen. You pick the faction you want to play, create an affiliated character, and off to the arrival cage as we jokingly called it you go. In that cage, you wait until an instructor (usually a senior enlisted or a non-commissioned officer) arrives, where they will give you a quick OOC rundown of events, teach you some common phrases, and it’s off to the IC part where your ‘training’ begins. There was no training per-say as your character ICly was already in training for months and happened to be a fresh transfer with next to no combat experience.
The ‘training’ simply consisted of you being toured around your base, showing you where to go when you needed to talk to Military Police or engineers, showing you the quartermaster vendors, the firing range, helipads, and the AP ‘assembly point’ area, where most organization for patrols took place. After being shown and taught everything about all of the above, you were given the full whitelist and access to the vendors. You were now in the control of your own locked and loaded, combat ready ‘grunt’ character in the main infantry detachment.
From this point on, you were your own man. As an enlisted soldier, you had the opportunity to interact with your fellow soldiers of different cultures and, sometimes, civilians from outside your forward operating base. Depending entirely on the type of person you interact with, your interactions can be fondly memorable, or outright annoying. In either case, you were creating an experience for yourself and the others you roleplayed with. There was not much you can do as enlisted in the base unless an officer decided to host a training, called you to do a specific task, or until you saw the ‘Enlisted to AP’ message on your radio; this is where all enlisted leave whatever they’re doing and went to the assembly point I talked about early on. This message meant it was time for some conflict.
Being called to AP was a thrill for many, as it meant a lot of things; you could be going out in a standard patrol team expecting contact with an enemy team, a recon team, or as a quick-reaction-force intended to relieve a friendly patrol in trouble. This was the main driving force of WW3RP, as experience during these patrols gave the chance for a decent roleplayer to give a proper story for their grunt and allow them a chance to have their personality mended in any way or shape form possible. If used by someone with more than two brain cells, this yielded great opportunities for character development and bonding with others involved in the patrol, whether it was highly successful, or a terrible failure where you’re the sole survivor, something good always came out of conflict and interaction with the other faction.
Those with NCO ranks were in charge of maintaining the general pretense of the base; hosting training, organization and the leadership of patrols alongside some basic other tasks. Those with the senior ranks (COs, commissioned officers) were generally in charge of the faction itself on both the OOC and IC level.
MY EXPERIENCE
2017-2020
I started my venture on WW3RP (and at the same time, on nebulous) in mid-2017, right after my finals as I was invited to nebulous by my internet best friend at the time. I didn’t get a feel for it in the first few days until I finally fully put myself into it. The first three weeks of WW3RP were my best in all six years of serious roleplay. I did not care about getting a highly-ranked character, I didn’t care about minmaxing my gun with best possible attachments to win in S2K, I didn’t care about OOC drama; I cared nothing for it all. The only thing I cared about was the fact that I was having fun and building up relationships. This was also the first time ever I’ve tried an actual SeriousRP server as up until that point, most of my time in Garry’s Mod was spent on the less-than-serious MilitaryRP servers. I was very confused at times, but it was something different for me, and I enjoyed every second of it.
I was a ‘NATO main’ that played a character the more nostalgic will identify as Allen Hawkins, my first ever attempt at serious roleplay. The character had a lot of flaws, and despite him being portrayed as a goofy moron, that is what made him unique from many. Unfortunately, like I said, this was the case only for the first three weeks.
I woke up one day, and decided I’d give NJSOC (NATO special forces) a shot. I made the terrible mistake of copying someone’s publicized Spetsnaz application and restructuring it in a way where all references to their character and Spetsnaz images were removed and instead replaced with the NATO ones. This somehow went unnoticed for a fair amount of time, and on a stolen application, I got into the special forces faction. Now I’m a badass. I'm a very cool and epic special forces soldier. Then the OOC drama started.
I won’t get into much details, but to put it simply, at that time, NJSOC did absolutely nothing related to special forces activities. I realized then that despite my cheated entryway into the detachment, it was nothing more than a different uniform and a silenced MP5. There was absolutely no way for you to advance through the ranks (and, in my case, specializations, you can choose a spec as an sf such as eod expert etc.) unless you were very close friends with the faction leads. Therefore, I’ve decided I’ve had enough of it all and instead took my attention to the Spetsnaz faction, which recently had a purge/mass resignation incident, I’m not too sure. Either way, it was empty, and they looked cool, so I decided to transfer all of my effort over there instead.
Same process. Not my application. Slightly tweaked and modified. Only one small problem; The person whose application I’ve copied was one of the Spetsnaz leads at the time, therefore, they were very easily able to identify their tweaked application and it was at that point that it was promptly rejected. My very cool fail was also publicized at the time and the leads of NJSOC saw that ‘my’ application was tweaked, which then caused me to get kicked out of the faction, fairly so. I did not pay much attention to the resulting consequences for much other than that, as I’ve stopped playing WW3RP for over a month out of shame.
After a month or so passed, like I’ve expected, I’ve become a very common OOC target for many to mob and shame. I expected this to last for a few weeks and then it would pass as a forgettable memory. However, the mobbing and shaming eventually evolved into straight up bullying, and this behavior continued up until the server was shut down in 2018, to the point that after the blacklists on both ends were lifted six months later and I finally made it back into NJSOC, a few select individual began spreading misinformation that eventually culminated in the reinstatement of my blacklist. Up until that point, I only played WW3RP because nothing else was available, which basically meant I had to bear through the bullying and just deal with it or find myself something else to play.
Eventually, due to many issues that I’ll be talking about in the next section, the server shut down in February 2018. WW3RP remained a memory until a few individuals made the community of BlueCastle, and WW3RP was once again on the horizon. This iteration, however, proved to be very short lived, due to the same issues of its predecessor on nebulous which again I’ll be talking about in the next section, this server as well closing in November/December 2018.
In 2020, STASILAND (back to nebulous now) was released. I didn’t get much into this iteration except for the late-game, so I don’t have much information to share in this part.
2021-2022
Once again, WW3RP was on the horizon, in a different community by the name of Next Generation. The managers decided to go all the way back to the OG roots of WW3RP; Clockwork schema, CW 2.0 weapons (later transferred to TFA), and the old Unified Globalist Agenda (western blufor) vs Coalition of Independent Nations (eastern opfor) lore, It suffered mostly no issues in its short-lived time except for a few development and gameplay hiccups. Other than that, it had great potential to evolve into something very fun for both ends of the stick. No drama. No OOC spitefulness. It was like those first three weeks I had a while ago again.
Though, the problems and the drama eventually found its way back in again. Arguments with the managers, the abuse of power, the neglecting of OOC scheduling and the blatant nepotism (all problems which I will get into in full detail in the next section) eventually made their way into this iteration once again, and it took no longer than approximately three months for it to fully pull the plug and shut down. No WW3RP iterations were announced until the recent 2022 iteration, announced shortly before summer and released on July 9th, 2022. A continuation of the ‘83 lore and the timeline previously enforced by the earlier STASILAND, this time orchestrating an invasion of the mainland United States instead of the usual European/Asian theater.
The problems with this iteration were more or less the same, except for some reason, it felt way more extreme. Perhaps because I was older this time and I actually understood things, or perhaps because no effort was made to hide the bias. It mattered little, in the end. This iteration, without a doubt and no offense to those involved in it, was my worst ever roleplay experience in six years of roleplay, and many who played that iteration will agree.
Once again, many were OOC targets, faction leads of both sides were constantly throwing insults at one another OOCly, admin abuse was covered up, the wrong people were put in the wrong positions; though, it wasn’t all bad. I’ll keep my personal issues out of his part as I want this thread to be interpreted as a documentary and not a personal attack on WW3RP and those who ran it.
Roleplay encounters, for a while, were somewhat entertaining and fun. Things that were unusual for WW3RP at the time were occurring and we were all having fun; car and dog bombings, suicide vests, both anti-NATO and anti-PACT militias were forming. It was a thing beauty for some time; however, unfortunately, as time went on, the negatives greatly overweighed the positives, which culminated in the server shutting down perhaps in a period of about three months and a half. So far, this was the last time myself and many others played WW3RP. No iterations were announced on nebulous or any other communities that we know of so far.
THE FALL: Why does it always die out?
I will be speaking with full honesty in this section, and since there are a LOT more problems than others think, this might need a thread of its own. However, I’ll keep it short and simple by just talking about the latest iteration we’ve had on nebulous last year, as the problems it had are common with many of its predecessors.
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1. NEPOTISM
This has been a consistent problem with all of the WW3RP iterations I’ve played, and I believe it to be one of, if not the main issue of WW3RP as this singular problem resulted in a vast array of problems, to the point that there are too many to mention on this thread.
People, specifically the ‘old guard’ from 2016 and before, being fast-tracked to positions of power, as well as others simply because ‘they’re friends with senioradmin x bro!!!11!’. This of course resulted in many issues, including, but not limited to: less-than-mediocre faction leadership (speaking for NATO on this end, idk what was the deal on PACT), a neglectful and abusive staff team, and the OOC target behavior of 2016/2017. All of these issues combined eventually caused a massive decrease in player count, as less and less people flagged on every day until the damage was effectively inflicted in the end. Little to no action was taken to deal with nepotism, and the general excuse for this was ‘no one else wants to do it’, or ‘because no one else was better’.
Like @PeaceAndMagick89 said on one of his threads, new things require innovators. Necessity is the mother of invention; no one should be afraid to bring new and fresh faces to the table. When the old and outdated cogs fail to function, they cause an issue. To fix this issue, your only option is to take out the broken cog and replace it with a new one, and it will work just as well as you expect it to. Nepotism and the problems it produces can be somewhat easy to tackle initially, though it can prove to be difficult and bothersome to contain if left unchecked for a while.
2. MISMANAGEMENT
Bad decisions and neglectful behavior has also been a common issue. Things such as admins, regular and senior abusing their powers openly (and server management covering up the abuse), staff outright refusing to respond to /help requests and being generally inefficient in staff duties in a server where a significant number of things relied on staff action contributed to a displeased player base.
Majorly frowned upon decisions as well were taken by server management towards the end, and alongside major miscommunication between server management, server staff and server player base, all of this contributed nothing but adding nothing but more salt to the wound. Specifically on NATO, one of its leadership figures decided to promote a vast array of random people for no reason and give them NCO ranks. This resulted in a rank-crisis for NATO where nearly no one was promoted for over two months on the aforementioned faction, even promoting a PVT from PFC was a tiring process and had to go through faction leadership/performed by faction leadership themselves, further increasing the centralization of the faction.
A good, active management as well as a decent staff team are impeccable to the survival of any online server, Garry’s Mod or other games. If your staff team is underperforming and inefficient, you risk the server’s health and put it in jeopardy. Communication with everyone also saves a lot of pain for many of the involved parties, and it goes a long way in establishing a healthy relationship between those who play and those who manage.
3. LACK OF BALANCE
I hesitated a lot by adding this problem to the list, but since it was a problem, and since the server no longer exists anyway, I’ll mention it.
The gameplay between NATO and PACT was supposed to be asymmetrical, where each side had an edge over the other in a certain area. For most of the server’s lifespan, this unfortunately was not the case. The physical proof of this was the fact that both factions were usually seen using one weapon of their own. A common example; NATO was struck to using the NABR (fancy name for a scar heavy) despite its vast arsenal of firearms, and PACT was struck on using the SVD Dragunov for a long time (NATO didn’t use its sniper much at the time as it was too expensive and cost-ineffective due to how inaccurate it was) also despite its vast array of firearms, as they were the ‘best’ guns of either faction for a while up until the snipers we’ve had were changed and gun stats were tweaked; NATO getting the CheyTac Intervention and PACT getting the SV-98. The former gun was a guaranteed one shot one kill on anything above the waist as long as you were crouched, the SV-98 required you to get a headshot.
Many NATO and PACT players brought up the issue of guns being broken. You may call me retarded because I brought up the issue of guns in a WW3RP server due to the stereotype of that always being complained about, but get this: An MP5K’s hipfire should NOT be more accurate than that of an ADS’d assault rifle.
When NATO players knew about this, many used the MP5K alongside an external crosshair and sniped PACT from halfway across the map. This was genuinely one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a Garry’s Mod server, and I’ve seen a lot of dumb things. There’s also the issue of our combat vehicles being awfully miss balanced (such as NATO having a broken Comanche), but it’s more or less the same as the guns problem mentioned above.
A perfect balance is impossible to achieve, but you don’t need it to be ‘perfect’. You just need it to be established decently enough to the point where it can be worked on from that point through trial-and-error and improvement. Just doing things and hoping for the best, while completely neglecting the opinions of those who actively play the gamemode will net nothing but constant toxicity and bad results.
4. LACK OF SPORTSMANSHIP
As blatantly obvious, the ‘us vs them’ mentality was very common in all iterations, where each side was determined and did its best, sometimes going far to even break server rules, to get an edge over the other. This also resulted in nothing but constant toxicity on both ends. This behavior rarely came from the playerbase; but the leadership of both factions. It mattered little which one starts it, as the end result will always be the same. Such behavior was even encouraged a lot by faction leadership and NCOs, those who perform extraordinary feats get promises of promotion, further enforcing the ‘us vs them’ part.
This made way for people who paid absolutely no attention to roleplaying and the active developments of their characters. Instead, you see people who flag on for the sole purpose of S2King the opposing faction, recording their epic ownage, and posting it on the meme thread for the shits and giggles, which further inflated the other side’s excuses to perform behavior like that of their own. The lack of a proper, friendly OOC relationship between both ends had very devastating effects in the long term.
No one should actively seek to provoke or curb the fun of the other for the sake of laughs; this is outright selfish and toxic behavior. The experience should be made fun for all, not a group of three or four people. It’ll visibly show if you want those who play the opposing force to have fun alongside yourself, and it’ll also show if you don’t. A healthy relationship and constant OOC communication between leads of both factions goes a long way to counter this issue, and policies discouraging this behavior will eventually see it next to entirely diminished, and those who actively partake in it will be shamed and booted off from their position.
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These are the four main issues I’ve been able to identify from my personal experiences on all of the servers I’ve played. There may be more, maybe less, maybe I’m exaggerating in this thread; after all, remember, this is my personal perspective.
CONCLUSION
This is all I’ve wanted to talk about. I would’ve spoken about this to a friend, but I figured I’d share my opinions and experiences on a wider scale with the family of nebheads. I’ve been inspired to make this documentary, makeshift history thread, or cope fest, however you wish to call it, by @Hudson's own documentaries, big shout out to him.
Thank you a lot for taking the time to read this. I hope this thread wasn’t a waste of your time.
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