3 Commando Brigade

Public misson objectives: Why destroy X is a dumb objective.

For me this is very uninspiring type of objective it doesn't make sense from strategic point:
Every military tactician knows that if you have intel about the objective location, It's time to conduct strategic strike that is:
- Low risk
- Fast.
- Precise.
- Cost efficient.
So there's 2 options that makes more sense than sending a lot of soldiers on foot or with vehicle to front line to risk their lives:
Indirect fire, may require recon to confirm
and most obviously.
Precision airstrike

So only thing is preventing a whisky unit to go and complete these objectives is our etiquette which is a arbitrary limitation. "Let the guys on ground play the game" is fair thing to do but at the end whisky is more likely to finish the objective if it's part of the plan.

And before you come here like a fanatic zealot yelling: A10 (or air asset x) is so OP!, I'll tell you one thing:
Attack aircrafts are designed to conduct strategic precision airstrikes.so they are not OP, they are following their function.

bit offtopic but related to the issue
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In our missions anti air is more a metagame than an element due the mission framework: No friendly boots/wheels on area= AA threat minimal, friendly boots/wheels on area= high chance of AA units. This doesn't make sense for me. Back in our ARMA 2 days pilots had to do route planning because flying thru enemy occupied areas was dangerous as "dropping a soap in prison shower" . Most importantly: it was balanced, constant and fair. <- This what we are missing in our public missions.
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This can be countered by gameplay standpoint. And there's a lot to do in our missions but the pitfall is when all objectives are done -> mission will be restarted and repeated, with same objectives in same place. This makes the mission to lose its appeal fast and this is why we have to keep mission rotation frequent. I rather play only one dynamic mission than few "scenario" type of mission with fetch x or blow X missions.
I tend to not follow the mission objectives if the falls to this category and patrol in opfor occupied areas.

There is few point mission makers should avoid when objective is destroy x:
1.  Don't put the objective at the same location; objective should be random. Makes the mission more dynamic
2. Make the objective hard to detect from areal recon. (Areal recon is not OP, It's functional. In general; nothing in war is OP)
3. Most importantly, Don't put huge and obvious destroy me! marker on map. This takes away a huge part warfare: Intelligence gathering.

So if you ask me how destroy x objective is done right and the answer is Apollo: Hearts an minds: This mission simulates anti guerilla warfare reasonably accurately and has fully dynamic objectives. A perfect for extended public mission gameplay. only bad thing is it doesn't get enough time due the frequent rotation .
There's a reason why I loved insurgency- mission in our ARMA 2 days, the objectives was simple but dynamic and didn't need a mission frequent rotation.

I'll conclude this with a request:
More dynamic objectives please, less obvious objectives. do not ignore Intelligence gathering part. Make anti air constant and balanced.

Dont forget that the public server is and in my opinion should be the common ground, where different players can have fun. Beside that all different objectives are repetetive. I dont see a big difference between destroy X, retrieve X, defend X etc. What you can do (and what we are doing) is to try to offer different scenarios for objectives mentioned above. We rotate maps about every three days and for comparison, a lot of other communties dont run a public server and if they do it, they just run a single map/mission with standard objectives.To me it is not so much about the objectives but the way you want to approach them with other players on the server. In a lot of cases I guess the saying that "the journey is the reward" applies a lot here. You can do the "easy" and quick way and get a air lift 1km to close to the objective and destroy it and get back. You could also try to drive there and maybe form a little convoy. You may also decide you clear areas along the way.

Most effective is very often the least fun. It would be incredible easy to just destroy a objective with a single air or artillery strike, but where is the fun in that? To me that is a similar mindset like playing  with "overequipped" gear that allows you to be extremely effective in pretty much all situations.

I also dont think randomized objectives (and locations) are a cure all, since more static objectives have some advantages you should not forget about:
1. You can use existing terrain and locations on the map that suit the specific objective.
2. Under both realism and gameplay aspects they are often logical and understandable. If a map has a military base placed it is logical if this is a objective that must be captured.

Things like that are less likely with randomized objectives. About the markers I can tell you that I think that the public server must be accessible. Accessible means that somebody who is maybe completly new on the server must be able to see what the mission designers wants from him aka what to do on that mission. You must be able to drop in or out at any time and in a few moments you should know the direction you are heading.

Not going to dive into the greater discussion, but just a quick note about randomness of objective placement. It's possible for the mission designer to place down 15, 20, 30 different "potential objectives", and then have a randomisation script that picks 5-10 of these on mission load. Hell, if they don't mind the risk of either none or all 30 appearing they can simply tweak the "probability" slider on the objective object's attributes page in the editor! This is something which is rarely used, but can make a big difference to replayability.