Was thinking about the good times we had, i hope you all are doing well.

Arma 3 session today.
Please make sure your modlist is up to date.
Re-read our rules and guidelines
I'd like to thank everybody for taking the time to read this.
Lately I've been missing Arma a lot, so I thought it'd be fun to have a sesh.

Figured out how the group is going to go into the future.
Operations will recommence on Sundays.
Our time being relevant in Arma community will come again.
Look at the first letter of each line.
Stupid morons, you just got beaned.

I am very hungover and am terrible at jokes.

Kill me
-Gunner

We had a good run, we lasted from September 2015 to February 2018 and had a lot of good times in there. 2 and a half year of one Arma community is a good run, and we had a good period with about 50 regular players, and 35 player sessions.

The problem is, I never realy wanted to do this. After FFAAA died, I was the only previous moderator left active, and I was by default the only one that could continue the community after that. By now, we have accumulated a large number of new players that never played with FFAAA, and they deserve a shoutout, like Lrobie, Peterson, Mobius and Pat Sajak and a load of others who have positively contributed to our group's image and playstyle.

The problem is, I never really wanted this job, and I've been constantly looking at trying to get a new person to try and do this job for me, and I haven't in about 2 and a half years. I don't enjoy this, and haven't enjoyed it for about a year to a year and a half.

It is weird to say, but COFFEE has been a monumentally huge part of my life for several years now, and I was even admin of FFAAA for about a year, and six months of that I was probably the main person behind the show keeping things going. The problem is, this is a lot of effort. It is a massive amount of effort, I am constantly trying to find new players, keep existing players playing, and keep the server running etc. I have no idea how Whimsy did it for so long without an admin team that I have found.

A massive thank you for all that have played with us for the past few years, I've had really good times. But for my own sanity, I have to stop running this show.

From this point on, COFFEE will no longer be playing any regular Arma sessions - at least until Arma 4 comes out. We will keep the Discord, Steam and TS server up. But for now, Arma is over for us.

If you want to find another Arma community, speak to me and I will try to recommend you one that will suit you as a player.

Thank you,
Gunner

PS. Any questions or comments, post below and I will answer/ respond as I see fit.

Hope everyone is having fun this time of year.
We are going to have a load of events going on in TS this week,

We may have a session this week, no plans yet set but keep an eye out.
We have a minecraft server up on our normal server IP, don't be a jerk.
If you have tabletop simulator, we are going to try Secret Hitler again, and I am wanting to play some bloodbowl on there too.
I might try some races in GTA Online as they were a blast last time.
If you have any new games, feel free to jump on TS or post in the Discord and see if there are any others who want to play.

Armastock is on Saturday, so make sure your mods are working ahead of time.

-GunnerRya

For the second time in about as many weeks, we have a lot of news to talk about. I highly recommend that you read all of this post.

We are trying to massively overhaul our gameplay, make it more difficult, gameplay more serious and make those magic ‘only in Arma’ moments happen more often. To do this we are going to have to make a few changes about how we do things, first off is a behavioural overhaul - for this to work we will need everyone on the same page. Secondly, we are now using a framework based on TMF that Grumpy and Loadin have been working on, it improves AI and adds a load of really useful admin tools including excellent respawning support and more that will mean we can really push our sessions to the next level.

We are hoping that these things together, along with a recruiting drive will boost our session numbers up and we can do more varied mission types and just have more fun.
Here’s a more in-depth look at the news:

Behaviour

A common theme among people that leave COFFEE is that they often mention behaviour as a reason that they don’t enjoy sessions. That can be people not listening to FTL/ SLs, people looting weapons constantly instead of keeping security leading to their death, people mouthing off at each other etc etc. This has to stop, infringing on other people’s fun is not ok, and we are going to come down harder on it from now on. We will enforce rules, and people that continually don’t listen will be removed from session and given strikes.

We are adding another rule to the strikes system, upon receiving a strike in session you will be removed from the session and not able to return until the next session (not mission).

An improvement here would massively boost the quality of sessions, and anyone that cannot roll with these changes will unfortunately have to be removed, we cannot grow as a group until this has been fixed, and I’m hopeful we will not have to be too purgey.

Tech Stuff
Framework

COFFEE now has a brand new completely functioning framework, we’re calling it the Mission Ready Environment, or M.R.E. It’s based on the publically available TMF framework, which has an extremely powerful mission creation backend and admin toolset. M.R.E. contains a bunch of customized AI modules which allow for unique behaviors in addition to a full respawn/join in progress system. M.R.E should allow for consistency and ease in mission creation, and is pretty simple to work with. There is a significant amount of documentation on M.R.E. available, and updating said documentation for ease of understanding will be an ongoing project. The hope is this new framework will allow for a significantly more enjoyable experience for both mission makers and the players.

Any questions, comments, or concerns about the M.R.E. Framework can be directed at Loadin and Grumpy.

For an example of what we can do with the new framework, Gunner has released a supercut of the session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBKmJWn1dxs&list=PLs75ynIVZsU2IIr6q7OLRlXYD2D0zJrep

For a longer cut of the first mission, there is another video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNxmTfzmkcs&t=


Why is Arma3Sync gone, and what the HELL is with Swifty?

A common comment/question the admin team has received is; “We used Arma3Sync for a long time and had less errors than with Swifty, why are we using Swifty?”

The simplest answer to this comment/question is that we changed the way the repo is hosted, Arma3Sync required a member to either pay for hosting or host separately from the actual server itself. This meant that 1. funds that could be used to keep the actual Arma server up were split between two places, 2. We were almost completely reliant on a singular member to handle both payment and repository management. Given those two points decision was made to combine both the repository and Arma 3 server on one machine. Unfortunately the most cost effective method for virtual machine hosting does not work with Arma3Sync. We tried to brute force it and make it work, but in the end it wasn’t possible.

All of the above said, we do know Swifty is FAR from perfect. There are currently major problems. A large chunk of the issues can be fixed by going into your WindowsUserNameHere/Appdata/Swifty folder and clearing out everything contained in the WindowsUserNameHere/Appdata/Swifty/temp and WindowsUserNameHere/Appdata/Swifty/cache subfolders.

Grumpy and Loadin are working on a server based workaround which will hopefully solve the majority of the issues, however due to having limited space available on the main server, we will be unable to deploy it until the next big update. Given that there are legitimate issues with the program, Loadin has been making himself available to fix any specific issues people have. If you are still having Swifty related issues, contact him via Discord or Steam to setup a time to get those fixed.

Armastock

Finally, we are running the next Armastock, on the 30th December. We are going to make it a WW2 themed session with IFA3 as a primary mod. Lots of plans have already been made and we will reveal them over time, I am extremely hopeful that this will be the best Armastock we will ever have had and I highly recommend that everyone make a space for the event in their diaries.

-The Admin Team