John Rico
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A Revamped Conscript Faction for V3
This is gonna be a long one. As an abridged version of the whole thread, I’ll sumarize my current issue with the OSF faction (the 24th Division unit specifically) in these first few paragraphs, feel free to going straight for the actual proposed changes after that since the list of issues will just be the detailed version of this.
My personal issue with the faction is that, having played since the times we were just a political militia, we are still little more than a circlejerk of a few regular players (hardly even 10 of us at any given time) dicking around in the corner and away from the main group like we were back when Niklas was leading, just with a bit less drama. Everything is pretty much the same as back then, despite what some in the faction might say. Knowing this, most in staff would rather see the 24th removed entirely, and we have little to show off to change their minds. As an event-only faction, the 24th has little structure to even be used to fill an Short Stories application roster and GMs would probably have an easier time just allowing anyone to sign up as random conscripts not tied to the 24th Division.
Personally, I’m worried that even if everyone involved is actually doing their best with what they’ve been given, this might not be enough to stop the unit from eventually being disbanded unless the way we operate is revamped completely.
We’re currently still going thanks to the goodwill of a handful of staff members (God bless their souls) who will have few reasons to keep supporting the 24th if nothing is done to change the fact that we are little more than a squad of 8 active players (if not fewer) who ask for an amount of content and attention that would better be directed at any of the main factions with dozens of active members at any given time.
Personally, I’m worried that even if everyone involved is actually doing their best with what they’ve been given, this might not be enough to stop the unit from eventually being disbanded unless the way we operate is revamped completely.
We’re currently still going thanks to the goodwill of a handful of staff members (God bless their souls) who will have few reasons to keep supporting the 24th if nothing is done to change the fact that we are little more than a squad of 8 active players (if not fewer) who ask for an amount of content and attention that would better be directed at any of the main factions with dozens of active members at any given time.
From my POV, most of everything about how the faction currently operates is wrong in some shape or form. If you care to read, go ahead, if not, just skip to the proposal for the actual suggestion.
Lack of Structure
Few consideration has been taken to create a structure where the faction can operate without any of its upper management being present. For the better part of the year I’ve been in the conscripts, the faction being active depended exclusively on What? actually being present to run things, to the point where recruits could go on for a whole month stuck in basic training limbo waiting for the day that both What and the SS server would be available at the same time, which was once in a blue moon.
After a year you’d think that a military faction would have enough NCOs, senior or junior, to be able to run on its own without the FLs being present, but even now it’s just a Colonel leading a squad worth of soldiers, with just 3 NCOs, two of which are recent promotions. The issue becomes retarded when you have events like City 36 where the group of conscripts was led by what is basically a senior private.
Few consideration has been taken to create a structure where the faction can operate without any of its upper management being present. For the better part of the year I’ve been in the conscripts, the faction being active depended exclusively on What? actually being present to run things, to the point where recruits could go on for a whole month stuck in basic training limbo waiting for the day that both What and the SS server would be available at the same time, which was once in a blue moon.
After a year you’d think that a military faction would have enough NCOs, senior or junior, to be able to run on its own without the FLs being present, but even now it’s just a Colonel leading a squad worth of soldiers, with just 3 NCOs, two of which are recent promotions. The issue becomes retarded when you have events like City 36 where the group of conscripts was led by what is basically a senior private.
The absolute lack of a narrative point of conscripts
OSF in V2 is basically a force of loyalist volunteers (at least most characters are) which just makes it a more accessible Combine faction without much flavor. Members of the faction would like to think themselves as a force at the same level than the rest of the Combine factions, while in reality pretty much everyone else in the server treats us like shitty conscripts anyway. And they’re right, for the purposes of the server, it would be way better for us to be closer to a penal unit than a band of spoiled loyalist children who demand respect no one really cares to give them.
OSF in V2 is basically a force of loyalist volunteers (at least most characters are) which just makes it a more accessible Combine faction without much flavor. Members of the faction would like to think themselves as a force at the same level than the rest of the Combine factions, while in reality pretty much everyone else in the server treats us like shitty conscripts anyway. And they’re right, for the purposes of the server, it would be way better for us to be closer to a penal unit than a band of spoiled loyalist children who demand respect no one really cares to give them.
Training expectations
The basic training regime a candidate has to go through to be formally accepted into the faction is way too much for an event faction (or any faction for that matter). The 24th Division faction has any recruit join during one or several week days where they will have to complete an extensive curriculum including formation discipline, basic military etiquette, firearm handling, combat simulations and even parade drills. All of which could at least be done in such a way that it took a couple of hours at the most to pass, but which usually forces recruits to come for a second session (which is a big deal when the faction has an irregular schedule and can only basically operate whenever the SS team decided they could lend their server). Furthermore, the problem is compounded by the fact that this training would either be run personally by What?, or not be valid at all, so recruits would not even be saved by being trained by a more lenient, fun-oriented, NCO.
This is way too much for a faction that doesn’t even have that much content to promise to its players, and it’s the main reason why most recruits drop out immediately after their first day. As evidenced in the roster sheet:
To put into perspective, WN’s many examples of military events have GMs only asking their players to make an application without any way of showing they have any experience at roleplaying a soldier, even if you are applying for a high ranking officer.
So if everyone else is doing it like that, and the 24th is also an event-only faction, what’s the point of all that mandatory training?
To give an example that shows how flawed the training is: The current 24th regulars are part of the batch that participated in the Chernobyl without ever doing their basic training, and they’ve been the most successful batch of recruits so far, while previous batches failed to bring any significant amount of players in. Why? Simply because the most recent recruits were shown the actual content that the faction can offer before they were forced to do laps around a parade track for half an hour just to be promoted to Private.
Based on those examples, I can confidently say that if it weren’t for the training regime & general hard-ass drill sergeant culture, the faction would have retained way more players from its previous recruitment drives (which all pretty much flopped completely), and it would be in a better position to become an actual asset to the server, instead of an isolated group of players who got bored of city roleplay.
In conclusion, training is tedious, extremely long and planned in such a way to ‘filter’ out undesirable players as per what’s explanation, but in reality it just drives away any kind of roleplayer, good or bad, basically damning the faction to stay as a closed-off circlejerk including only the few people who decided to bear with training.
The basic training regime a candidate has to go through to be formally accepted into the faction is way too much for an event faction (or any faction for that matter). The 24th Division faction has any recruit join during one or several week days where they will have to complete an extensive curriculum including formation discipline, basic military etiquette, firearm handling, combat simulations and even parade drills. All of which could at least be done in such a way that it took a couple of hours at the most to pass, but which usually forces recruits to come for a second session (which is a big deal when the faction has an irregular schedule and can only basically operate whenever the SS team decided they could lend their server). Furthermore, the problem is compounded by the fact that this training would either be run personally by What?, or not be valid at all, so recruits would not even be saved by being trained by a more lenient, fun-oriented, NCO.
This is way too much for a faction that doesn’t even have that much content to promise to its players, and it’s the main reason why most recruits drop out immediately after their first day. As evidenced in the roster sheet:
To put into perspective, WN’s many examples of military events have GMs only asking their players to make an application without any way of showing they have any experience at roleplaying a soldier, even if you are applying for a high ranking officer.
So if everyone else is doing it like that, and the 24th is also an event-only faction, what’s the point of all that mandatory training?
To give an example that shows how flawed the training is: The current 24th regulars are part of the batch that participated in the Chernobyl without ever doing their basic training, and they’ve been the most successful batch of recruits so far, while previous batches failed to bring any significant amount of players in. Why? Simply because the most recent recruits were shown the actual content that the faction can offer before they were forced to do laps around a parade track for half an hour just to be promoted to Private.
Based on those examples, I can confidently say that if it weren’t for the training regime & general hard-ass drill sergeant culture, the faction would have retained way more players from its previous recruitment drives (which all pretty much flopped completely), and it would be in a better position to become an actual asset to the server, instead of an isolated group of players who got bored of city roleplay.
In conclusion, training is tedious, extremely long and planned in such a way to ‘filter’ out undesirable players as per what’s explanation, but in reality it just drives away any kind of roleplayer, good or bad, basically damning the faction to stay as a closed-off circlejerk including only the few people who decided to bear with training.
Proposal
Inter-faction interaction
At its core, the conscript faction should be integrated to the events first and foremost as the simplest way for citizen characters to join for content where Civil Protection or OTA would usually restrict them from participating.
Furthermore, I disagree with the idea that content for conscripts should be exclusively about combat, there is plenty to do especially if you have them interact with other factions such as citizens, for example:
Picture the OSF/MAA joining for an event like the Alaskan oil event and having them drop off supplies and stay temporarily to run some errands. I and any other guy who might have played Arma or Foxhole before would be absolutely thrilled with using our conscript characters to run logistics and that kind of stuff in any event. Don’t even give us weapons for all I care.
The same could happen with the rest of the Combine factions, interactions that are not entirely combat based, and where instead they play a support role of any kind that helps the event have more organical passive roleplay. Conscripts are a good secondary faction to add for spice in events starring more traditional factions.
The ‘cannon fodder’ implicit nature of conscripts can also be turned into several other less combat focused tasks and missions. For all I care, use conscripts as OpFor dummies for CP/OTA war games and training exercises. Picture something akin to NATO nations participating in joint exercises. Diversify your content and whatnot.
Laxer standards
From what I spoke with other members, everyone’s favorite part of the faction is the slice of life side of military roleplay: sitting down in the mess hall with your mates to talk about past missions and introducing the new recruits to the unit, playing janky football, meeting up in the city while ‘on leave’ and going for a drink, basically the soldier-to-soldier interactions that come naturally when characters share a military unit.
Training and the milsim side of the military roleplay has hardly been stellar, and quite frankly, from my experience here and in other servers, if these activities are not planned to be fun first and foremost, it’s better to just not do them at all. (If anyone else wants more in depth military roleplay, they can join the core group of the faction that would deal with introducing new players to the OSF in the long run.)
In conclusion, recruitment and training standards should be laxer to allow citizens to use the faction for what it works best: teaching new players the ropes of roleplay in a more focused environment, or as a stepping stone to join more hardcore Combine factions.
As an event faction, the transition between citizen life and soldier duty should be as seamless as possible for the characters participating. Lastly, a faction like this works best when it aims for massive numbers. Limiting the number of soldiers in order to hold higher standards just cuts us out of more roleplay.
Narrative purpose
My main issue is that currently the 24th has the same narrative goals and purpose as the CP and OTA factions, since they are all expected to be loyalist volunteer soldiers.
As said before, conscripts should be conscripts. It makes sense that the Commanding Officers should be combine loyalists, and that some characters would be volunteers, but the faction has to be treated as a battalion of soldiers forcefully recruited into the Combine army for it to have a purpose that makes it different from the rest of the Combine factions.
If we are gonna have players join through an application, the main point they should make is why their character would remain in their unit without immediately going rogue (and judge them based on the merits of their story), since that will most likely be the critical point of their development and story. Basically, while obviously OOC willing to apply for the faction, a character should IC be forced into conscription in whatever circumstances the player wants to explain in his application.
Struggle makes for a better story, development and roleplay, and currently the only struggle our model of faction offers is soldiers acting like spoiled brats because “meanie CPs don’t respect us even after we fought for them”. It’s just bad.
The faction treating itself like a proper conscript faction would help a lot in giving it a purpose on the server and lore in general, since the moral dilemma of being a soldier forced to fight for a totalitarian regime is by default way better than the current status quo.
(Lore should also reflect this, less elite special forces and more stories about struggling penal units facing impossible odds in dangerous border sectors of the Combine territory. Educate players on what to expect from the faction.)
Entertain as many people as you can > Conscripts as the welcoming gateway faction
That should be the main mindset and end goal of a conscript faction. At present, the outside perception of the faction is that of a cringy exclusive club of wannabe soldiers, which is why everyone is mostly right about their criticisms about the faction, no matter how defensive some of the members might get about this. For the Creative Team, we’re useless since we’re just a closed group of few soldiers who can barely bring enough people for an exclusive mission, so what’s the point of even considering us for events? For other citizens, we are cringy milsim junkies. We have no selling point.
Advertise the faction to anyone willing to roleplay (or even better, willing to learn) in order to become a more ‘massive’ faction more fitting to the conscript concept, and become more useful to the CT this way (and to the server as a whole). Teach players the basics of what they should know to join more exclusive Combine factions in the future, conscripts can be that kind of gateway faction, like CWU is for citizens aiming for the loyalist path. The mindset of rejecting anyone who doesn't want to run a 3 hour long training with parade drills is absolutely archaic and completely anti-roleplay.
Allowing multiple characters
More of a secondary point, but one suggestion that I’ve made that’s been ignored so far: allow members to create several characters in the faction.
Conscript service is dangerous, so allowing players, especially those who aim to be a regular in the faction, to have at least a secondary character which they can develop alongside their main character can help with the inevitable burn out anyone might feel after their conscript character inevitably dies in combat.
This would also be convenient for specializations. One of the main selling points of military roleplay is specializing your character in any of the fields you might find in a battalion. Your main character might train to become a vehicle mechanic or engineer, but having a second one would allow you to also become a combat medic and enjoy two different fields of roleplay. Current set up doesn’t allow for that, and leadership has been needlessly stern about privates getting promoted to the Specialist rank before actually being allowed to choose something (with few opportunities to earn a promo) and then keeping to one specialization at any given time.
...and lastly:
Experimenting with the concept
Personally I don't understand why we never tried any unorthodox stuff with the faction; the conscripts concept is probably the most free-form faction in the whole HL2rp medium, and, from the get go, the stakes and expectations on us were so low that we could have tried anything with our time with the Conscripts and it couldn't have been possibly worse than anything that happened during the Militia's time in the city. Instead, everything so far has been so by-the-books, cautious and boring, that I'm not sure how anyone in the faction took this as a good status quo to sit on. So please, for the love of god, if in V3 there's gonna be a conscript faction still. There's no danger of failing if you're dealing with a faction exclusive to events. Do something fun with it.
Faction could be so much better, but we're just cockblocking ourselves out of more interesting roleplay.
Tagging relevant people: @Robert @RealGamer
