Robot beacon expedition debrief

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The society beacon mission scheduled for 06:30 MA, Saturday 2nd June 2007, went ahead with 8 team members available to take part on the day.

The team assembled at Fort Ithaca and proceeded south-east to the beacon point. This run was not uneventful, with one team member dying and having to be run back from the OP, and Antonio getting kicked while on auto run and having to TP back to the group after a full reboot.

The team eventually set off for the robot ship and completed the mission, encountering some difficulty at the looting stage (mainly due to inexerience and unfamiliarity with the environment). MRP and DD survived the mission.

The team Shortly before leaving Fort Ithaca

The loot was low, with returns in the region of 60-70%, not accounting for the beacon itself and there were no notable items.

The mission was considered to be a success.

The Team

• Runner
• Antonio Mar
• Spike Black
• Jack Starence Whales
• Randolph Dreamdamcer Carter
• mrproper
• Blaidd Montgomery
• Darth vader skywalker

The Movie

Please contact mrproper for instructions on receiving the mission footage, it is currently distributed to team members and can serve as a debriefind and training tool.

Discussion

Antonio

After reviewing mrp's movie it seems the mission went even better than I believed it had. I was under the impression that I had missed 3 boxes and that half of the maze team had overshot their level and missed half the boxes. In fact, Star, blaidd and vadar had cleared their level and moved down to help Spike with the maze and Spike was confident that this level was cleared. Runner and I had cleared both our levels and were double checking the level that Star et al had cleared. The only known missed box was on the shuttle level where mrp, helped by DD ran out of time. Although there was some time lost finding the tp in the maze level, this was minimal and may not have effected the outcome.

Maybe we need to make it a higher priority to send the person with the highest agility to the lowest level?

mrproper

Please login before making changes and sign your comments :D

It is now pretty obvious that I lost some time due to unknown structures, low gamma, heavy lag from excessive system usage with the movie software. What you see there in terms of framerate and playability is exactly what I had. This is not a powerful PC, and it was not intended to be. However, the capture software makes it very easy to save the movies in a good compressed format that does not fill up diskspace fast. The maps are needed on these missions, also there was an extra level compared to my previous missions, and of course, the last box COULD have been looted if I were confident in my memory at the maze :D. I thought there were 3 unlooted boxes, but then I saw Dreamdancer in the movie, moving onto the last one, just before death.

As a conclusion, it is from my first ever experience that the whole move to each player's level and loot the boxes is flawed and it only serves as a preventer of double-looting, which means two players attempting to loot the same box, unknowingly one after another.

It is VERY obvious that MA intended a beacon to be perfectly well executed by a team of 12, max team count. In this setup, each level has two looters, effectively making it fast and easy to finish.

If the beacons were not so expensive and costly, it would be my pleasure to create a custom army-like system with heavy ingame communication (chat or voice) and offline paper support that in theory could get all the team members to the shuttle and with the complete loot (possible to achieve with 12 members and the current system).

Antonio

I'm not criticising anybody's performance, I'm just suggesting that with most of the levels being looted comfortably and the last being such a close call, maybe it would be sensible to redistribute resources in such a way that all levels can be completed more comfortably. Yes, I'm sure next time you could get the last box, but why risk it if there is an easier way?

mrproper

The answer costs to find out... just plain and simple. But easy way out is for each level to be looted by two players. For example, if Dreamdancer would have looted one of my boxes, then I would have looted the one I was looting last, and even the last one if I were to save time. I will look more into it, and on the next beacon I will be busy collecting metrics and timing runs. And even better, I would need to look at all the boxes, to write down positions.

Runner

It would be a simple matter to delegate a few people to document the coordinates of every single box on the way up. The real question to wonder about is if these coordinates are the same every single time. In theory, if everything is identical each time, then if we all do the same thing every time, with sligh modification to perfection, then we will clear every box every time. We simply have the same people doing the same assignment each time.

The improve efficiency, let us give a NAME to each loot role and document what they are supposed to do. That way, everyone will know their loot role PERFECTLY.

Step 1 to this would be to assign each box a letter designation. Such as 3C for the C box on level 3, ect. So we all have the same map with the same letters. Then the Loot teams can communicate with each other better, and the loot team leaders can communicate to the group when a level is clear. ..although all of this sounds a bit overly coeographing of things to account for missing one little box!

The mission is more of a FUN diversion then a money maker. And in my case, it was more like work then fun..but that's ok if everyone else was happy and entertained.

Antonio

Spoken to Spike today and he tells me that DD did in fact loot his assigned boxes in the maze level, or at least looted the boxes en-route between the 2 TPs, and Spike, with help from the guys down from above, cleared the level with time to double check empty boxes. Looks like we all did OK in the end.

The point I was making above was just that with most levels being looted with good margins to spare maybe we could afford to commit the highest agility player as sprinter to get to the shuttle faster and increase the margin there. If you don't think this will be an issue next time then we won't bother. But it seems to me that the shuttle level will be a close call either way, I'm just wondering if it is neccessary to leave things so tight?