Mid-Deployment Experience

I’ve been part of the 15th MEU (SOC) Realism Unit for 4 years right now. I’ve been part of infantry and Force Reconnaissance and my other duties have been S-2 Public Relations (Newsletter), S-4 Mod Team, S-4 QA Team, S-4 Zeus Controllers and S-2 Intelligence Section.

For 1+ year I’ve been part of what’s called the S-2 Intelligence Section of our community. Recently I was extended an invitation to become the S-2 Intelligence Chief, I accepted. My job, help the S-2 Intelligence Officer with deployment and essentially making an interesting, fun and challenging Deployment for 300+ Members.

Last Year’s Deployment

S-2 has changed quite a bit since last year, for this year we were tasked to make the Deployment story line, setting and OPFOR compositions/locations/numbers. The biggest change is that we also became the OPFOR Commanders, we were in charge of moving the bad guys around the map, have them in strategic locations and make decisions whether they should attack, defend, ambush, etc..

Every year, Deployment changes a bit, and it is pretty much handed off to a different person/section. Last year Deployment was mostly made by Geare, were he wanted a bigger interaction between civilians and insurgents. Sadly, this idea doesn’t translate well into the game, it is difficult to keep people from doing “unrealistic” stuff and this will break immersion for players. However, Geare tried to make it work as well as he could and I liked the idea, just that the execution is VERY difficult due to the limitations of the game and how difficult it is to interact with someone because you aren’t physically touching them or causing an impact on them. It is very hard for some people to get into character (For example: Me).

2016’s Deployment

This year, when I became S-2 Intel Chief, I was handed off the plan for deployment. How it would unfold in a general aspect and what we wanted to do. I didn’t get much say in the planning of it because when I got the spot the plan was already done and deployment was 2-4 weeks away. However, I was able to make small changes here and there in regards to how we used our forces.

There was a big change for this deployment, we would be going into conventional warfare. We hadn’t done conventional warfare because there isn’t a force out there that could rival USMC in a realistic way. So, we had to break realism a bit for the sake of fun. This year we would be going to “war” against Russia.

We had published some “Intelligence Packets” before deployment, small stories of how the island of Napf was being approached by Russian forces and that they might want something in the island. We essentially hinted at combat between Russians and USMC, however people expected this to happen during the middle of our deployment like in 2014.

I will go into more detail about our Operations, how they went and what I did. These will most likely be released at the end of Deployment as not to reveal our “Grand Strategy” while deployment is currently on-going.

The Survey

For a bit of time I had been pondering to myself what we could do better. The amount of feedback we get is pretty much from Patrol Reports (Reports filled with the things that happened during an operation) and general comments after the operations was done, so our feedback was very minimal and from a minority of players.

I decided that we should do a survey and get some feedback from everyone, this would allow us to see what people thought of the Deployment so far and we could correct any issues before the Deployment ended. The survey was made in a day and distributed on Sunday 07AUG16. At this time, the survey has 90 responses and we hope to see more.We expected more neutral results, more people voting 3s and such. The reason why is that this deployment has ramp up on difficulty and that has been my intention. I want people to make better decisions and to face an opponent that will challenge them and will try to outsmart them. However, the results have been better than what we expected and people seem to have enjoyed themselves during the operations. Obviously there’s still people that have issues and we will try to fix these issues. Do keep in mind that I know and everyone should know: It’s impossible to make everyone Happy. Specially in a community as big as this one.

The Fun Graph

I’m happy with the results of this graph, around 66% of people are having fun with deployment and 21% of people are somewhat neutral (Hopefully still having fun). That leaves only 12% of people bored.

The Challenging Graph

I actually expected this graph to have more 5s, it seems it isn’t hard enough :P. But in seriousness, my reason to believe that this graph is a bit more neutral is because of some issues we’ve had during Deployment. For Example: Server issues and Headless Client not working correctly for Foxtrot Company’s weekend. Su-34s jets not being an actual challenge to our air support, and other small similar issues.

The Realism Graph

I expected this graph to be more 2s, pretty much because of the reason that fighting Russians openly would just mean World War 3 and this would be a VERY different story, so we have to suspend that belief and therefore it’s not realistic. However, I believe we’ve gotten very good scores because of our strategy using Russian forces, we’ve been throwing a LOT of armor against players and the way that we are using the Russians is a bit realistic, obviously we have some issues and we hope we can fix them.

Story Line Charts

These results are what we expected. Our story line isn’t that great obviously, there’s a lot of stuff we can’t explain about the Russians and why we are fighting them, but like I said, we have to break that in order to have a better experience. Apart from that, one of the comments I received was that making a story line for conventional warfare is rather difficult and I really agree on that, civilian interactions are a bit more scarce (Civilians flee the towns because they see a bunch of soldiers fighting, instead of an insurgency were civilians don’t see insurgents in full force) and therefore there aren’t that many stories that the civilians share with the players.

Type of Warfare Chart

I like the results of this chart. I feel like using a conventional force as OPFOR was the correct decision to make, mostly because it feels a lot like war. As an infantry guy you see jets dog fighting above you, enemy artillery hitting your position, tanks fighting each other nearby, vehicles destroyed and enemy in camouflage shooting at you. I believe this is the reason why a lot of people joined the 15th MEU, it’s because of these large scale warfare situations that we get our popularity from and how we are focused on a combined arms doctrine.

Answers and Solutions

Currently we have a LOT of written feedback from our survey, we’ve read them and we’ve discussed what people have written us. At this time it is unknown how we will respond to this feedback, I believe there’s a plan to have an All Hands Meeting to address these but I’m not entirely sure since this will take a LOT of time. However, I will try to respond to the feedback here, on this blog. Put down the feedback provided and just address it here for everyone to see.

I will address the some of the general issues people have commented.

Russian Numbers

So, players have been going against bigger odds on every operation, pretty much fighting on a 1:3 scale. In paper they have been fighting on a 1:1 scale, in-game they are fighting on a 1:3 scale. The reasoning is, having only 1:1 odds during an in-game operation is boring, your average infantry man would only see 1 or 2 soldiers at most, and that’s if Air/Ground Support hasn’t killed them already. Even though we have a focus on combined arms, infantry is still the priority and therefore we have more stuff for them. So, whenever you read that you are going against a Russian Infantry Company, that means that on paper you are actually going against a Russian Infantry Platoon.

LED’s Operations

We have 2 sections that are our biggest challenge when we have to come up with a situations for them: Force Recon and Law Enforcement Detachment. Thankfully I was part of Force Recon for 2+ years, so I believe I know what they look for during an operation. LED is a different story, for me it is rather hard writing a situation for them since I’m not that familiar with the way they operate.

However, we’ve started taking measures to correct this and we’ve been talking to LED personnel to find solutions. Hopefully we are on good track and we are able to correct these mistakes.

S-2 Gives Intel but is also OPFOR

This is the biggest issue in my opinion, we are S-2 Intelligence, we are supposed to analyze what happened during an operation, come up with ideas or plans and hand them off to S-3 for them to decide on a plan and execute it with the Task Force Commanders.

However, we are currently the ones giving intelligence to players and we are the ones commanding OPFOR. I do have something planned that I’ve discussed with S-2 HQ about the future of OPFOR commanding and how it should be done. This won’t happen for this Deployment because we are in the middle of it, but we will propose these changes after Deployment is done and hopefully should be in full force for Deployment next year.

Final Words

I feel like this year’s deployment has gone rather well. I’ve enjoyed this job a LOT, even though it takes a LOT of my time, thankfully I have people helping me. We still have issues to correct and we are working on it, thanks to everyone’s feedback. We will try to improve ourselves and hopefully everything will get even better.