3 Commando Brigade

Third Person on public?

Third person in vehicles seems to give quite an odd advantage to a lot of players. It clearly allows players in ground vehicles to see things they would normally not see and grants them inhuman situational awareness.

When in a helicopter, players often seem to spot enemy positions while moving into an AO. So they can all easily spot any enemies before being dropped at an LZ.

I would argue for disabling third person. Besides providing improved realism, better immersion and discontinuing an unfair advantage compared to other players, it would also be a better reflection of the private server.

I'd like to request the relevant rank or the Public Team to consider disabling third person.

This would bring the public server more inline to private server settings so i would be for this.

I agree, it serves no purpose having third person in vehicles enabled when all of our other servers have it disabled. 

+1

Firstly: I am fully in favour of our private stuff all remaining first-person only, and I think it's good both for improving immersion, and also for promoting more competitive play. I would also support forced first-person for our public operations.

This being said, I don't support removing 3rd person from the normal public ruleset or public actions. I understand the reasoning of the discussion above, but I would also like to point out that the general public serves a different purpose from our private content and the formal public operations.

For most people learning to fly in Arma, use of 3rd person (decreasing in its frequency of usage) is a helpful way for them to reaffirm their situation, especially around landing or takeoff - remember, they aren't able to ask their crew chief to lean out the door and tell them whether they're clear of obstructions etc. This inevitably lead to more cases where you wait for reinsert, get picked up, and then die during landing due to a rogue road sign. Yes, players should be comfortable and confident in roles etc etc, but this isn't some arbitrary and absolute cut-off where you suddenly know you're capable.

Similarly, think of how often you get reversed over or clipped by random vehicles. Now imagine even more of that!

Then there's the issue of low-feedback actions in Arma: for instance, unloading crates from a helo, or checking if everyone is clear of the bird before lifting. If you were unloading a crate in real-life you'd know where it was going... but instead it will just randomly appear somewhere around the bird. When disembarking, troops should always be moving out to clearance and the last man calling clear to lift... but I don't think I've ever seen this reliably happen even on our private ops; a 1s pop in 3rd person and quickly checking no idiot has gone and stood under my boom is still a common thing for me to do before lifting.


We should discourage general use of 3rd person, and we should definitely encourage people to challenge themselves further by remaining in 1st person, but simply removing it will take gameplay that is already made slower and more scrappy due to non-members (understandably!) not singing from exactly the same hymn sheet and make it even more troublesome and frustrating (for the members who dislike public) or prone to accident and difficult to introduce new players to.

Fully agree with Nick's comments above.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
                                                   - George Carlin

Nick comments are valid but almost entirely related to the role of pilot.   This does not have to be an all or nothing switch.  There are many options here, for example, we could disable 3rd person to all but the pilot?

The comment's are valid for ground vehicles, access to 3rd person vastly reduces friendly players being run over on the public server when you're in close proximity. Removing a great deal of frustration, especially when slightly bumping another vehicle can launch you across the map!

The public shouldn't be a 100% recreation of our ops. It should reflect our play style (i.e. how we move, communicate, our humour and attitude) it's not necessary to restrict everything down to the level of our ops, and we also shouldn't.

The ultimate aim of the public is to entice players to join our unit, the majority of recruits come along and enjoy playing with the members and then join, but the average pubby likes playing dress up and would likely become frustrated by the lack of 3rd person in view restricted vehicles. If they don't give the server a chance because there are no arsenal's, and they're not enjoying using the vehicles, they'll never get to the point where they enjoy playing with us and apply. These settings are different for similar reasons as to why we dont have life limits on the public; it wouldnt be popular, the avergage pubby wouldn't enjoy it and our public server and recruitment would suffer for it.

The more relaxed settings give much needed flexability when dealing with public players and reduced organisation, and don't cold turkey them in to a play style that they initially may not enjoy.

As for the monthly public op, I see no issue with the view and other settings being restricted to our standard private ops

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
                                                   - George Carlin

I believe in vehicle visibility is less realistic than the human eyes ability to identify and track objects. I try to base my 3rd person to situations where I get realistic SA without gaining an advantage. 

I also get better FPS in 3rd person, so less rubber banding, and therefore doing it for the team ;)

That's just because I always have my head in the clouds

And I'd honestly say that my general impression is that people use 3rd person more as drivers than as pilot, with some people seeming to drive exclusively in 3rd person with all the attendant benefits to peeking over terrain etc. With that being said, I stand by saying I think it shouldn't be restricted outside of the public ops