[Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Discussion of past, present, and future water war events.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by marauder » Mon Jun 22, 2015 4:39 pm

This war sounds totally awesome. I think we should have a write up on what makes a great night battlefield. Can someone link me to the google map location for this? HTL got changed because I wanted to hold a "last stand" round at Hydropoc, which is similar to HTL, but not the same. That ended up getting changed, because we didn't do it 1hk, and then I think from there HTL just ended up not having a time limit.

Perhaps we should have a few wars a year that are focussed on more game type rounds and a few that are one long battle. I am somewhat interested in mixing the two, but as you said, you have to be careful not to compromise. I actually do like chaos rounds as I think it makes teams have to make difficult tactical choices. If everyone is using the same kind of guns it gets a little boring. With that being said, Rob and I talked about having teams draw guns instead of individuals, and then each team gets to decide who uses what gun. It may be a little more fair that way, but teams will still have to deal with apples vs oranges matchups. Or, certain weapons can be placed off limits to vets, such as the CPS 2000, 2700, 2500, etc.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by SSCBen » Tue Jun 23, 2015 7:08 pm

Duxburian wrote:To be blunt, the Trettels tend to just show up with little advance notice, or they text us for the first time when they are already at a park. Scott didn't have their numbers, I had both, but I thought the date and time they were coming was settled. The night rounds ended up going very late, around 3 AM, and we went to bed around 5 AM, so the morning start was very delayed. I wasn't even awake when Andrew texted me (took over 2 hours to wake up from extreme low calorie intake), and they'd already left by the time I responded. This is the kind of change in plans that makes texting just-in-time not the greatest idea.

[...]

We need to do a better job collectively exchanging contact info before a war and making sure everyone is on the same page well before they arrive.
This does not seem fair to me. We left early in case of traffic and showed up 15 minutes prior to the scheduled time (11 am), after RSVPing. Neither of us were aware others might have wanted more notice than that. We waited for people to show up for a while before contacting anyone. We then waited for a while for a reply. None of this strikes me as "just-in-time". We left Westmoreland Park because it wasn't clear when anyone was going to show up and we didn't want to risk getting caught in a severe thunderstorm and/or traffic on the drive back. We didn't intend to stick around too late (we both are very busy) and the weather forecast did not look good, so we didn't risk it. We thought it was okay because we still had Sunday.

If there's a delay it's generally the responsibility of the host to inform people. There was no notification in this thread, which we checked many times to make sure we had the right park and time. I agree it would have been ideal if we all had exchanged contact information first, but that's the backup plan. The main communication route was not used, so it's doubtful to me that we would have received notice if more folks had our numbers.

Let's make this a lesson so that communication in future wars is better. Any delays should be clearly communicated on the war thread in advance, and folks attending the war should get individual notice as well.

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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by HBWW » Wed Jun 24, 2015 11:19 am

At 5am after a night war, thinking of tomorrow's timing and updating this thread was pretty much the last thing on our minds, and providing individual updates via PM is not going to happen, period. (Hence why I told CDMT to stick to this thread.) We many other ongoing tasks. Meals have to be figured out, blasters have to be filled, loaners accounted for, footage copied and exchanged, and backup plans agreed on. There's too much going on to be 100% focused on a few people who might or might not be able to make the games.

I think what we really need is to stick as a group. Making accommodations can lead to problems, and not every war is going to be meticulously planned out with every detail and every block of time set in stone. The particular circumstances of how this war was setup prohibited this, but at least we now know that any night-war centric event will lead to this sort of thing happened. That said, I did expect or at least hope for a bit more daytime gameplay than what we got, and I do hope we can get back to the island next year. On the other hand, we've never had this quality of night wars before.

Overall, this was a bit of an oddball game, and not surprising given the fact that we've never planned a night-focused event before while having to plan many things late. Lots of things had to be figured out in the last week, especially with DX's transportation accommodations. Player exhaustion also went into the schedule shift: Sunday was bound to be the new Monday, but none of us could foresee that for certain, and we still wanted to play that day, but there weren't enough certain players to have been worth the exhausting effort that would've been needed to make that work. I had to drive someone to the train station that I was already late for, and Scott was all out exhausted.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by marauder » Wed Jun 24, 2015 3:01 pm

It seems to me that if people had each other's phone numbers and called each other there wouldn't be any problem. The rest of the discussion seems a moot point. In the future let's trade phone #s before the war, stick to a plan, and then promise to keep our phones on that night/morning so that if someone is coming the next day they can call. I get that people are tired, but I think that in that situation it warrants waking up and answering the call. Not saying that that did or did not happen, but just something to keep in mind in the future. Also, does Brandon have texting yet? And if not, can we help you find a plan of similar price that includes texting?
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by SSCBen » Wed Jun 24, 2015 5:49 pm

HBWW wrote:At 5am after a night war, thinking of tomorrow's timing and updating this thread was pretty much the last thing on our minds, and providing individual updates via PM is not going to happen, period. (Hence why I told CDMT to stick to this thread.) We many other ongoing tasks. Meals have to be figured out, blasters have to be filled, loaners accounted for, footage copied and exchanged, and backup plans agreed on. There's too much going on to be 100% focused on a few people who might or might not be able to make the games.
Okay, I can see this. If notifying others of the delay was not a priority, then I think our confusion should be understandable.

My suggestion for future wars would be to stick with the schedule as much as possible. And perhaps it would be best for the organizer to put their phone number on the war thread. I've seen that done at NerfHaven.

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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by marauder » Wed Jun 24, 2015 10:28 pm

Please keep this topic on track. I will lock this thread if it descends into arguiing.

Cochise, there have been occasions in the past where people have been late to show up, but I have never had an experience where someone intentionally left anyone out - and I would be very upset if this ever did happen. Knowing Scott, Sam (HBWW), and everyone else I can assure you that was not the case. However, I do think that this should serve as a strong lesson to everyone that people should be notified of changes, and that phone #s should be exchanged prior to the war. I want to reiterate that it is within the WWN League spirit to encourage participation by as many people as possible. We want to welcome as many new (and old) participants as possible and we strive to be cognizant of everyone's availability.

Please keep all further posts in this thread for war commentary or war media postings only. Feel free to discuss this issue via pm, or perhaps create a separate topic about communication.

Thank you.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by HBWW » Thu Jun 25, 2015 10:43 am

New thread created for discussing ways to prevent this from happening in the future, and for checklists to keep for wars that are quickly planned. http://www.waterwar.net/forum/viewtopic ... 153&t=6792

Anyways, with that taken care of... Let's put up a list of things that worked well for us, that we can reuse in the future:

- Night Rounds Organization: The playlist system worked and created sufficient gameplay spontaneity and variety. We ran a number of short rounds; not with cutthroat efficiency, but it was still effective. For short games to work, we definitely need to keep downtime in check (or we might as well try for longer rounds) and I was fine with it here. (Although I may have simply gotten used to the Nerf and paintball formats of running games.) For those dissatisfied with this, we can try to clump rounds together before taking breaks, where downtime between rounds is strictly limited to around 5 minutes or so. Using something other than my backpack for refilling would've sped things up.

- The Location: It worked lol. I've long known that water wars and CQB are basically husband and wife, and I think we should definitely continue to strive for good urban environment gameplay. I'm willing to invest some money playing at official fields (i.e. Paintball fields) if we can get gameplay experiences at least as good as at the location we used. Of course, this is also heavily dependent on others.

Anyway, I'm missing some photos taken from DX's automatic system. We had a lot of good group photos there. The rest I have, I may eventually post to the Facebook page.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by marauder » Thu Jun 25, 2015 4:32 pm

Can someone give an estimate on what the playlist/schedule was? Would love to see that. Sounds like urban environments were definitely great. How was the woods fighting?
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by HBWW » Thu Jun 25, 2015 6:04 pm

We played a few rounds on Sycamore Island before DX, chivesthechimp, and SEAL arrived, then we played a few rounds at Westmoreland park the day after. The Sycamore Island rounds had some more opportunities for stalking and ambushing due to the height of the overgrowth at this time of the year, and I really wish we could've played more games around that. The underbrush is quite high, and I think it's more interesting to play there and worth going for if you can beat the heat at this time of the year.

We had some fun games at Westmoreland too. It was fairly rudimentary woods fighting without a very wide area of player spread, although the area dubbed Slaughter Hill makes for some heated HTL rounds.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by DX » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:17 pm

The day rounds mainly got butchered by the heat and humidity. When I checked, it was only 88 degrees, but the heat index was 98. Before the weather started shifting with gusty winds, the heat index might have been over 100. Us northerners just came out of our coldest year-to-date since the 1880s and had no way to deal with 90s in June, that was my first exposure to 90s in 11 months. Bethesda's low temps overnight were higher than our high temps at home. Even Scott's friends were strongly affected by the heat. It didn't help that Westmoreland was full of people, which shrank the usable area considerably. The chaos round was supposed to stretch down the creek, but there were girls and families playing in the water on both sides of us. Then, off the creek, we had bikers and runners going through.
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by scottthewaterwarrior » Thu Jul 02, 2015 11:15 pm

Sorry I didn't get back to everyone else sooner, I needed a little bit of time to relax after having so many people over and than for the last week I have been being my normal perfectionist self and trying to get a long war report written. I've realized I really need to just get on here and thank everyone for coming and than worry about getting the stupid war report done later.

Glad everyone had a great time, I started planning way later then I should have, I was worried it wasn't going to be very good because of it. I really must apologize to Ben and Andrew, I screwed up big time by not giving an updated schedule after we stayed out much later then planned, and you both ended up making the trip for nothing because of it.

Oh and I think at least a few people kept track of the teams/hits/blasters in each round so if someone could post that it would help with writing my report.

Thanks for coming all!
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Re: [Bethesda, MD] Soakemore 2015 - June 19-22

Post by HBWW » Fri Jul 03, 2015 1:21 pm

Nobody writes full-length war reports anymore. I used to write summaries and now I just hoard footage.

Here's the raw notes that were taken:

brandon, sam, David vs scott, van, Christian

sam, scott, Christian, david vs james, rob, Brandon
sam: soaked (1) rob, (2) james; got soaked (2) rob
rob: soaked (2) sam, got soaked (1) sam
scott: soaked (3) james; got soaked james, rob
brandon: soaked at least 2, at least (1) David
Christian: soaked (0), got soaked at least 5 (1) rob
david: soaked brandon, james
james: got soaked (2) sam, (3) scott, at least (1) rob

(unrecorded teams)

scott soaked 14 got soaked 1
brandon soaked 6 got soaked 1
van james soaked 5 got soaked 6
david soaked 1 got soaked 6
sam soaked? got soaked LOTS
christian soaked 2 got soaked a dozen+
rob see cam got soaked 2

These games were all at the portables; 2nd night I think but I'm not completely sure. I fixed typos and did a find/replace on "killed to "soaked" lol.
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