Sending new guys on the "good servers"

[Spec]

That's what I'm hoping for, but I wonder how many people that try PR actually stay around for longer than a month or two, if that. Sadly, I think that most of the teaching for new players ends up wasted :<

Still worth it imo, even if only a handful of people stick to it. I've personally taught a large number of players about playing PR. Some don't play it anymore, some rarely do, others are now playing it on a regular basis on competitive clan level.

[=HCM= Shwedor]

whereas if they can blow up stationary vehicles in the kashan bunkers in training mode, then they are certainly ready for combat!!

COOP can be used in the same manner as training, except that there are moving targets...



those shields aren't dependent on gamemode, but on staticobjects.con - i.e. they are always there[/

Targets aren't usually stationary if they are manned.(I suppose you played on unpopulated servers???) And I don't believe we had mortars/mortar shields back when there was a training mode, nor was there an effective way to prevent baserape (like the 1 second out of bounds on fallujah west). I understand that the current shield isn't exactly up to date, which I suppose would be easy to fix, correct? (where it lets you spend nearly infinite time in OPFOR main base radius) And maybe even add a couple of extra training maps (I believe in the past there was only kashan and the Chinese map, maybe add an insurgency training map with a large amount of caches instead of just 7 and with instantly respawning vehicles?) My point is that in COOP, sorry to say, the bots aren't up to human standards, which leads to TOTALLY outclassed players fighting against skilled players who learned during the time period where PR had a smaller player base and training servers. I suppose it is a matter of opinion, but I believe training mode produces higher quality players than COOP. At the very least rename COOP on the ingame menu to training so players get the idea that they need to learn the game before jumping into servers.

[-CAL ACO-]

i'm still a relatively new player, but i still play on the "good servers" which mainly means fuller servers;
the reason i do is because one good players play on those servers so i can learn a lot from chatting with guys in my squad, and two you can learn quickly what to do by following their leads.
i think this may sum it up
"to be the best (or at least get much better) you must train with the best"