Great feedback!

Originally ALiVE was aimed at co-op milsim groups who provided the background/purpose/meta around their sessions. Our longer term goal was to utliise the War Room to create an "MMO" meta game around individuals and groups leveling up via stats and completing objectives across specific maps and missions. Sadlly, we never recruited the web devs to achieve that and general development took a different turn....

I say took a different turn because we never really expected ALiVE to catch on as much as it has with the Arma community. We estimated about 50-100 groups would use it - we rapidly got to over 500 groups using ALIVE in the first 3 months. It became apparent that people wanted functional equivalence to MSO, so we concentrated on getting "feature" complete first (and we are still wrapping up final few features!). We also saw that people wanted a more "guided" gameplay approach to ALiVE with additional meta gameplay elements.

Our first "guided" element was the task system - this gives players tasks to achieve in relation to what is going on. We quickly followed that with a more in-depth logistics simulation around BCRs and Resupply. Although this provided a concept of global force pool and limited side assets etc. we didn't do a great job of exposing that to players.

Going forward I think we all agree ALiVE needs more of a "presence" in the player experience, ensuring that they are exposed to and aware of how their actions impact the battlefield. That in turn would open up meta gameplay opportunities.

One quick win would be to integrate OPCOM with the task system so that players are guided more in line with OPCOM's goals. Failure of objectives have a material affect on OPCOM progress, so we need to be able to measure and show that progress in some way.

Saying all that we have limited dev resources and so we have to be realistic about dev goals. ATM we're really focused on fixing bugs and finalising the original feature list.

ALiVE is being used in so many different ways that we need to support that flexibility rather than going down the route of a "game mode". In my mind many dynamic mission "mods" are really game modes with a focus on player experience. ALiVE today is very much focused on the mission maker. In fact, I would argue you could build a pretty decent game mode by using ALiVE (and adding those player experience features on top). If we ever get the dev resource it would be great to create a game mode... maybe we call it Multi Session Operations and the circle is complete ;)

Thoughts?