The RHS mods along with a few other “essential quality of life” mods have been highly requested along with a handful of other mods such as USP uniforms, CUP weapons, NiArms and of course Enhanced Movement, not as mere options but as a requirements as they would put every player on equal footing (including making Zeus’ing easier for Zeuses)
Zeus-related issues
Being unable to see players equipment, especially weapons, can make it very hard to spot disruptive behavior such as using restricted weapons or ammunition and ruining the fun for everyone else.
A very limited amount of assets and resources makes it that harder to come up with something that is different and less repetitive.
Player-related issues
Vast amount of players in the community, both newcomers and old timers, are highly requesting a wide variety of assets, gear and equipment in order to make for more interesting scenarios and operations.
Preferences towards certain weapons for one reason or another to the point where players consistently refuses to participate in (at least some) Zeus Ops and NAK Ops and to get more involved into community events whereas they would otherwise be very happy to do so provided a certain “Quality of Life” was present.
Argument:
I have been doing Zeus Ops almost on a daily basis for some weeks now and very much enjoy doing them. With more than 300 hours on Zeus now and having studied the entire Zeus system thoroughly including ZEI, etc… The overwhelming majority of players i have thus far encountered on Zeus regardless of their rank on NAK has been the same: Mods.
Another part of the argument is that Teamspeak is required to play on Zeus, already creating a barrier that obviously displeases many “random” players joining us during Ops as they immediately disconnect upon being told the information. This means that while Teamspeak is indeed a very small requirement, the lack of admin presence on TS sometimes present a much bigger barrier than being required a certain set of mods.
Furthermore in my opinion basic QoL mods such as CUP Weapons, RHSUSAF, RHSGREF, RHSAFRF, RHSSAF, NiArms, USP Uniforms and Enhanced Movement, should not be seen as events but rather as simple asset mods as none of them creates any form of total conversion or alternates the game’s environment itself. (ie; not maps or actual total conversion mods)
Solution: I therefore propose a solution to all of this. A mod list meant to be permanent and exclusively focusing on necessary Quality of Life. Anything else would be optional and regarded as “non-essential.”
Proposed mod list:
Enhanced Movement
RHSUSAF, RHSGREF, RHSAFRF, RHSSAF
NiArms
CUP Weapons
USP Uniforms
PROS:
Many assets with a large variety within only a handful of mods meaning a less repetitive, more creative and more attractive Zeus session every time
RHS vehicles are a major asset, these vehicles are well designed and also modular (also very requested by players)
Many uniforms and weapons to choose from thanks in large to RHS and CUP Weapons AKA “get a good bang for the buck”
Vast majority of players enjoying modded assets are more likely to participate in Zeus Ops and NAK Ops (should it be carried into NAK Ops)
CONS:
Mods will be required to play on the server (along with Teamspeak permission anyway)
Requires an additional 10GB~20GB for ArmA 3 on drives
Please voice your opinion on the matter and mostly: Vote!
This is something we get a lot, and the answer is really simple on why we don’t do this. We are a Public Zeus Server, and if we want to grow our player base (which is the ultimate goal) we don’t want to restrict players on what they are loading (With the exception of the restricted mods of course) but if we do put these mods on the server we are making players go download extra stuff that sometimes they don’t have enough space on their drives or when they are browsing the server list they’ll say “Meh I can’t join, next server” Hence why we have the modded events, those give the chance to players to experience a more advanced Zeus experience on both ends. Something I promised at the end of the year was to start making more Zeus events, probably 1 per month or 1 every 2 months. We need to work in a way that doesn’t suffocate the flow of new players but also doesn’t bore the existing long-lasting player base.
then are you maybe considering adding a modded zeus server this way old members who left because of the vanilla zeus server come back and get to the family and if the new members wanna try this out with the mods they can join the modded zeus server hey its a win win situation if this is impossible then please give the reason here so we finally can close this topic because there’s a tiresome ongoing discussion, and it’s getting quite repetitive.
and for other players its getting really irritated
It does feel like we are beating a dead horse here, as Charlie mentioned with how often this debate does come up.
The issue was population to begin with which I think was why Moon and the other top officials made the switch. In attempt to gain more players they went back to standard server being vanilla if at this moment we can call it that. However yes the community gained a few new folks since then but some old time members activity dropped off completely and refuse to play for their own reasons…also please note it was near the holiday season so more community members should be returning soon.
No mater what Moon and the administrative team does there will always be some hurt feelings some where. At the end of the day, I am sure they make the best decisions possible that will help benefit the community as a whole and eventually we will have another modded event when the time is right.
On another note from my personal view is since this is vanilla zues if possible can we remove the use of certain mods. Half of players or under half could be less, depends on the time of day I would assume do not run mods and there for cannot see and or hear which can and had caused confusion and other kinds of problems. Unable to see hear ext. More so when doing sheath ops it can become alot harder ans chaotic and or during the rare PVP op. Which also tends to break others emerson.
My suggestion Moon and anyone else that is reading this. Until the next major modded event keep allowable mods on the zues server to a minimum such as edvanced movement and zues enhanced. Gun packs and uniforms get confusing to those without. Will this idea upset some folks maybe I would be a bit bummed as I use the mods themselves. I only mention this simply for overall stablity and the issue of sound bugs due to arma being weird when other mods are active. Of course we do not have to we can continue to inform and help those who ask what mods we can use.
Last suggestion I just mentioned does not reflect at all on the altis server. Have at it there thats just controlled chaos that we all love.
I am going to keep this short and brief. Analytics don’t lie. If you speculate that we haven’t gained playtime or new players it’s just a matter of looking at the analytics. You can see here the server is ranking almost as high as the beginning of the modded event. And as the event went on, rank started to fall. Regular players didn’t notice it because it was gradual. Of course, we took an incline, but that is expected when you make the change.
We are not going to divert resources into a modded server because that is going to make the first server drop. In order to have a second server, it needs to be justified with an excessively big player base that always keeps the server full.
Edit:
Another indicator that clearly shows that we have gained a player base is the “Unique & First-time players”
You can see since we rolled back the server it started to have its highest peak on new players and people playing (Red Line).
And during the event new players (Blue line) were on an all-time low.
i see the lines and i can understand and a suggestion to keep other people new and old interesting is maybe have more maps like the new maps from arma and looking straight to the lines that shows when other maps where in play more players where playing and more people will join because we change the flow off maps or objectives keep it interesting for new and old players
maybe that takes time or money but i wanna say that if we wanna keep this community alive we can advertise on social media and change objectives or maps even and maybe just maybe donations start flowing and everything
look im just suggestion to keep everything interesting because if you look at it its a dead line of the same mission over and over again
I have to say i’m a bit surprised by these statistics at all considering how many people do run mods on Zeus and how many newcomers we get that actually bother with Teamspeak in the first place.
Personally i’m inclined to believe the statistics might be inaccurate for one simple reason: it only takes into account first-timers joining the server, not the ones who immediately leave upon learning of the need to be on Teamspeak unless that i’m wrong about that ~
But even if we go with peak population, i firmly believe that most of it is due to very active and abundant Zeus’ing by the community such as Charlie, Viper, Vunkai, Scootershot, Greendude, MrSuper, myself and many other players who decide to join our operations.
Furthermore, i noticed a major negative reaction by most players whenever stuff is restricted to vanilla (i wanna give a shoutout to every player who agrees to roll with vanilla stuff despite the fact that they are not under any obligation to do so as per the rules)
Your argument is “valid” to some extent but again this can be thrown out the window by the “Amount of Hours Played” variable.
Again we see the same pattern as before: You can see we had “consistent peaks” and as soon the event starts it peaks for a few days, then proceeds to go on a downtrend, with peaks getting smaller and smaller. As soon as we switch to vanilla, we get that “low playtime week” and then it peaks again to normal levels and even higher than the ones before the event and during some parts of the event.
Again… Analytics don’t lie. We base our decisions on Analytics, not on the benefit of a selected group of players. If the player base wants to get a second Zeus server with modded stuff, they need to demonstrate that there is real interest in a Zeus server. Which to my opinion, analytics show the interest is Medium to Low. As soon as the graphs and ranks of the server go up, then we can start looking into a “Niche” player base.
I would like to just say that the numbers seem extremely inaccurate for a couple reasons. first thing is because this all happened during the holiday season you have a higher influx of players. the second thing is a couple triple a games were launched and that takes away from the player base. so you lost players due to triple A games and took down the Zeus. then you got more players coming in because its their holiday and time off and they wanna play Arma. if its player base i would advise you to take a good look at the Tanoa server for the past 3 months and compare it to the modded Zues.
I dunno fam, i don’t know how they calculate statistics but comparing Zeus to Tanoa’s peak would involve a lot of percentage which i’m not sure would provide a very clear picture if the data itself is a result of AAA games and holidays (which i believe you are correct on that as i started actually Zeus’ing some weeks before Xmas and new year) ~
At this point though i believe Moon is simply letting us know that they have all the stats they require and their decision is final.
I still agree with you on this though ~