Thx for your comments. Really appreciate it cause it forces me to angle the problems and rethink.
I think a place to start, and to reduce the overall time commitment would be a self-study manual. Would be commanders could get a fair bit of practice with a step by step in single player mode. There are also several manuals published by the military which talk about real world tactical decisions, many of which apply to this game (even vanilla benifits from real life experience for the commander).
Good points. I agree to some extend.
Thing is that I still focus on trying to design something useful for 3 different target groups with 3 different levels of complexities.
And concerning the first target group i don’t think it’s helpful that the content is too complicated as if embedding too much tactical knowledge into the sessions. (If any at all?) Even though this knowledge could be accessible from a “read me first” manual.
Commanding a full sized project reality team on a public server is not easy. Even to organize a team on a public server is not easy.
Maybe players like you and me, who have the benefit from our military experience don’t view the commander function as that challenging, but for most new players without M experience it is.
Furthermore the success criteria for the first target group (so far
) are to give the participant some self-confidence when being in command. And I think that the self-confidence would evolve better from real exercises with other participants than using training material only.
But!
I also think it would be useful if some supporting material were created to the first target group. Maybe videos with stuff from the training program exercises, or maybe something else?
Regarding the other two target groups the focus is primarily to introduce basically tactically knowledge and then how-to-use-it in the game. Here I think that the additional material you are addressing could be very useful to most of the subjects.
Bear in mind that IRL the military starts training its people to be leaders early in boot camp. I don't remember as a boot Marine being told to learn my superior's duties ASAP, cause you never know when he's gonna get killed. As a result, by the time you're just a fire team (in game squad) leader you've got 1-2 years training. To become a squad leader (4 fire teams) 3-5 years. We're trying to learn a job on par with a platoon officer in a few weeks.
Yep that’s the basic crack isn’t it? What does the design of a program that needs to be useful to the participant (being a vet or a noob player and with or without real life experience) and conducted in as short a time as possible, look like?
I don’t know for sure yet?
Is the V.02 program the final solution to the training program or just a frame to a single target group it self? Meaning there should be 3 different versions of V.02 with different complexity and time lengths.
So far my only conclusion is that time will tell.
The other thing which is missing would be some sort of ability to look over the fledgling commander's shoulder to see what he's doing and point things out. Kinda like PC Anywhere for BF2.
Not sure i understand the argument here. What does PC stands for? Are you thinking in in-game videos from the commander screen only?
Something which might assist this training, along with general game play would be a "white board" which all team members could see.
There is a training aid for BF2 which allows you to white board over the vanilla maps, wonder if it would work with PRM and other mods? This would be helpful for several students to watch and feed back to the instructor. Anyone remember what it was called?
I have never heard about that white board thing for BF, unless it’s that small tactical planning program, you refer too? (Can’t remember the name) I used it in a Danish BF2 clan a few times.
Not able to answer on that before I know what it is. But since I’m a real life white board person. Bring it on!
Mike
.
