Думал, в каком языке дать отзыв, и решил на английском - мне легче да и translate.google.com работает хорошо. Так что если английский не умеешь, используй translate, я всю тему Сталкера так здесь дешифрировал :)
I'm going to give feedback for 8 Monolith guys from Estonia, so its going to be a LONG one. Also I have a bad habit of rambling... like right now. Plus I believe in the power of feedback and I know that this is very important to game organizers.
For those who want to put face and text together, I'm that guy:
Will try to segment the feedback a bit for easier reading but I want to get just one thing out of my system before I begin- game was simply great! It was absolutely worth 1000km of driving and resulting gas bill :)
I was also very surprised to see relativelty many estonians in the game. Last Stalker in Estonia was on 2012 and it had 200+ players, so I guess our group wasn't the only one that had a major itch to scratch.
Alright, lets dive in now.
The Game.
Friday evening and night set the bar of experience very high - everything was new and we had no idea how the game dynamics will actually play out, how is our commander and other Monolith brothers. Luckily everything went from great to awesome to very awesome.
Monolith's Church was great with superior Preacher. When emission came, we got a mission to go to the Bar to buy ammunition to whole Monolith, who pooled all their money on the table. Lots of responsibility and tension, almost zero visibility (as it was emission, we wore our masks and although when staying on the road it was more or less clear, when we turned into the forest, all glasses fogged up like hell). I'm glad that no-one broke their legs then. Mission was a success though - we made it to the Bar and then started to go back and although two of us were killed in an ambush and others were eaten by a snork, one soul survived, who was able to deliver the supplies.
Saturday was slower but created very nice living and almost everyday atmosphere to the Zone. Random firefights between patrols, roaming monsters, Arena. Everything added up into a nice and busy day (added bonus was dry, but still somber, weather). Evening picked up the action again with missions and patrols.
Sadly, this is also where our game ended, with emission at 00:00- next day awaited us long drive home and we needed to get there in reasonable time and without accidents (we saw bad one in Latvia, very sobering). Luckily our return trip was otherwise uneventful.
Game area itself was quite nice, although sometimes it felt like bases of different factions were too close together and there were too few roads crossing the Zone, forcing to go through forest whitch is not always ideal. In overall this area felt about right for this amount of players.
As I'm a game organizer myself, I looked around and really appreciated all the huge work that game orgs put into this. Everything from a lot of artifacts to decorated bases, bar and toilets. Awesome work.
Next time though please don't let so many cars and atv's to ride around. It is very distracting and on Friday night one car decided to go through the action where snork was busy killing us on the road and almost drove over my leg when I was busy being dead. Cars are bad, especially at night and especially when game has to be atmospheric.
The Rules
Overall solid and understandable. Will list some good and bad ones:
[*]Until the briefing we were under impression that knives are against monsters, sadly something was lost in translation and we missed the part "only special in-game knives". Even after that there was some confusion and at least two times incidents between us and monsters, where our guy stabbed monster with wrong knife. Sorry for that! Hope you don't hold it against us, monsters!
[*]Monolith fighters were able to walk in radiation zones - thanks for that rule! This helped our patrols and planning immensely and gave at least one advantage to otherwise "ordinary" Monolith.
[*]Lack of ammunition was great, love all games that implement it, but although lootable food was okay, I (we) cannot find a good reason for water to be of limited availability. This is too risky as dehydration is a very sneaky condition and hits very hard with serious consequences. I have to confess that I went to closest store on Saturday to buy water for cooking and drinking and we even gave water to players who we killed that had empty bottles. So although many people seemed to like it, I don't think that they've seen and felt what dehydration can actually do. So I'm asking orgs to rethink the water rule.
[*]Liked the "life" looting. It is fascinatingly morbid to carry around tokens of your dead enemies.
[*]One hour in dead zone seemed a bit too much. Especially that Monolith had their own graveyard and didn't use the otherwise nice Bar. I do have a proposition to fix this, will talk about it below.
Players
[*]Special thanks goes to Monolith commander, who was calm and professional- best kind of commander! Same goes to commander nr.2. I'm sorry that our group came back to the game so late on Saturday- were ordinary players and not hardcore milsimmers, so we like to sleep :)
[*]Monolith Preacher took his work seriously and it was great to see good roleplay. Next time though, choose the playlist with less silly music :P In any case, Preacher did a great job in spreading the good word of Monolith.
[*]Bandits, you were great! Sorry that we didn't chat with you very much when you came to talk with us, but you have to understand that we're still Monolith and we had to fight the urge not to kill you on the spot :) Don't be mad for the Saturday night base raid too, I hope we spiced up your evening and at least guy with the guitar got away from our ambush :D
[*]Sidorovich was appropriately sleazy and I'm pretty sure that we got a very crappy deal. Still, we were in a hurry and in a hostile territory ("Монолит не любят, в Монолит стреляют"), so we had to make haste. I still laugh at the situation with him:
Sidorovich: "So you're interested in a mission, eh? Bring me a head of a Monolith fighter!"
Monolith fighters: *cough*
Sidorovich: "I mean Freedom fighter!"
Monolith fighters dissapear. Few minutes later there's a short burst not very far. Fighters come back with a green card.
"Here's Freedom fighter's head!"
Outfits
Overall I have to say that costumes were somewhere in the middle . You could clearly see that some people just came with their airsoft gear, but there were quite a lot of players who put some thought and work into their appearance. Kudos to the Duty, who mostly looked like one, Bandits who also were proper and free Stalkers with right amount of gear and colour. It is hard to be dressed properly for Stalker, as most of us know exactly how various factions look and this sets very strict rules on appearances. For half of our group this was second time to play Monolith in a Stalker game, so we had time to tweak and modify costumes even further, so I hope that next game we'll see even more impressive gear from everyone. Stalker games usually get better with every iteration :)
This time our urban camo was very easily spottable due to weather... last time we played, we disapeared into forest thanks to sunlight and high contrast. This time we were seen from far away and every ambush ended in high casualties. Nothing to do though, Monolith is designed to fight in the ruins of Pripyat, not in the forest ;)
I'll give you one idea that Estonian Stalker game had and worked quite well. Maybe you'll want to use it partly or not at all, just giving out options:
[*]When player dies, he/she will become a zombie after few minutes. Zombie is not lootable, walks and can shoot only from the hip and with single shots.
[*]As zombie, player has to walk to nearest graveyard, where clock starts and can respawn (lets say after 30 min - walking takes some time)
[*]Now, why I put this under "costumes" paragraph? Amount of time as zombie or sitting in graveyard is tied directly how authentic your costume looks. Let's say there's 4 grades- C, B, A and A+. C is regular airsofter dude and has full penalty of being a zombie, and sitting in graveyard for 30 minutes B is a guy who has put some thought into the costume and has to sit in the graveyard for 15 minutes A has breather, oxygen tanks and looks great, can respawn immediately when reaching graveyard A+ is exceptional costume with all the right equipment and correct colors, also exoskeletons. When dead, goes ca 50m away as a zombie, wanders around for 15 minutes and then can come back into the game.
These are rough guidelines and can be adjusted as needed, but you get the picture. These rules also encourage people to have better outfits. Of course, every faction has their own grade system based on the complexity, grade is only for GM to decide and can be downgraded when over the course of the game some important part of costume is left behind.
Monsters
Yes, I'm dedicating separate paragraph to you :)
First of all, great costumes! But more impressively, great movement and behaviour- you really looked and acted your part and it was genuinely terrifying, especially at night. Bloodsuckers howl before he pounced on a unsuspecting victim and sound of snork's gas mask valve in the bushes, all this created great atmosphere. Controller was too very awesome.
I'll also give you something to think about about future iteration of monsters:
[*]Don't let monsters be around just for the killing. One snork devastates a whole group of people, as they are helpless to do anything against it and there's usually no point to run. This does not go together very well with monster's background itself- they're hunting for food and wouldn't it be better that they kill two or three guys from the group and start to "eat" them, growling on survivors, so they have to flee. This would give nice stories to tell for the survivors and would be more terrifying. Just a thought.
[*]Monsters are too tough. 4000R for a knife to (maybe) get rid of the monster is too much, especially if there's no way to earn more by swindling artifacts. Only source of income was killing people... I'd suggest getting rid of "special knife" rule and only leave "grenade stuns" rule, after what surviving person can go and stab the monster with regular rubber knife. Monster comes back anyway. In this iteration they were too much like natural disaster, locking down whole bases.
[*]There was rumor that light scares off the monsters. If that's the truth, it didn't work. Also, its a generally bad idea to shine military-grade u-led lamp into someone's face from a short distance.
But in any case, great work, monsters!
Conclusion:
For some of us it was third Stalker game, for some second and even first. But everyone agreed that this game was great and absolutely worth it. Thank you so much game organizers for your huge work and take our praise as payment. You did well and we hope to walk around in the Zone you created in the future too.
Thanks to all the other players, you made this game possible. If there were misunderstandings or problems I weren't aware of, I hope all is forgiven by now.
Until next time!
Монолиии-ии-ии-ит...
:D
PS. I will write additional commentary if something else comes to mind later or there's need to reply.
