Silicon Nightmares Event 4: Trial by Fire

I would like to start with this: this was a good event, and I had fun. I know others had fun too. This review is purely to notate what I noticed in terms of problems, and to notate potential solutions.

I'll start off with things I liked, before getting talking about what could have used some work:

-Atmosphere: the atmosphere of the map, the forward operating post, and the in game events were fantastic. It felt like a late night raid. It felt like something out of CM, but very much entirely our own. And I absolutely adored it.
-Organization: Having the roles be very flexible and seemingly not very limited was fantastic. It allowed all people in all departments to be able to do what they are good at. And, I think it does a great job of alleviating the problems around events having fixed jobs. Please do more of this in the future for any operational event.

Now, for the things I noticed issues with:

-Supplies. Engineering and Operations were left with next to nothing to work with initially. The staging area only featured very basic tools, and no materials. This lead to supply having next to nothing to do, and next to nothing to do it with. I think we would be well served in the future, to provide operations and engineering proper prep areas and supplies to work with. In this specific case, I think this would have been best achieved by utilizing the location theme. What if instead of a generic outpost with a couple buildings and a couple landing pads, our outpost was apart of a set of warehouses? A warehouse to store all of engineering and operation's goods, and two other warehouses obviously torn down to make room for landing pads and thrown up buildings.
-Direction. The start of the round felt very chaotic. There wasn't any brief on the operations post layout, our prep goals, or anything else. I very much felt like I was fumbling in the dark. While this is very much the captains job to settle out (to their credit they did do a good job briefing and giving a motivational speech), I think we would be best served in the future with a brief issued to the crew. Example: the map provided for the Aoyama visit.

Ive been waffling between giving this a 3 or a 4, but I've decided to settle on a three. I think the execution of the event was, pardon my tradeband, fucking amazing. However, the planning and set up leaves some to be desired. The event runners and admins on staff did an amazing job, im so utterly proud of this community and how well the players did today in keeping in character, from my perspective at least.

For participating in an actual intensive event for the first time here, I can only say that I'm MAJORLY impressed. Good rounds tend to stick with me for a long, long time, and this will be one of those. The objective and the pace was great (especially when we opened the gate and after ten minutes had more than forty IPC corpses. That really gave some perspective). My feedback, both good and bad, would be the following:

• The environment was really interesting to be in. Moving from the well-lit home base to the darker forest parts, having some of the only light be street lamps on the road really helped set the atmosphere, as Bejewled said. We had a shuttle base with a command center, a small, wrecked town, the power station, the bridge and the warehouse itself. All these environments were unique in their own rights.
• The sheer amount of people made it feel like controlled chaos. This might be something I'm not used to enough, but there were just so many damn people. It made it feel like an organised operation - further improved by the fact that there was only 'personnel' in each department. Speaking of which...
• The personnel organisation. I played Operations Personnel during the event, so I can mainly speak from that perspective. It would've been nice to see the directives given in the Discord relay somewhere in game, like the event menu. But that's a minor nitpick. I liked that the departments did not have specialised roles, only personnel. People needed to organise themselves under their Head of Staff, which permitted a lot of freedom.
• There was, from my PoV as Operations Personnel, too little equipment. Bejewled touched on this as well, but the main chaos we experienced was "Someone needs this but we can't really get this easily." Be it wires, welding fuel, metal, armour, ammunition, whatnot. Ideally, we would have the equipment (mainly an autolathe board, maybe other things) to build a forward base. The trek from the power station/bridge to the base was pretty long. If logistics were intended to be part of the challenge, then my point is moot. But the round basically already started with "Operations we need so much more steel for the autolathe." I commend the creativity with salvaging things to get more steel, though.
• Science, specifically. One of their directives was to 'retrieve IPC bodies' to the base. We already started the round with over forty IPC's, even before reaching the town. From an outsider's perspective, Science had next to nothing to do in the round besides dragging around IPC bodies (which there were so many of the lighting engine shit itself.) They weren't armed (makes sense, we had Security personnel for that), did not have any fabrication to do, and they played no role in 'solving' the issue. It would have been cool to see Security escort Science to the Warehouse or something, to inspect and get a better understanding of the beacon. That way, they would be in danger from IPC attacks, while still having something to do (even if it isn't mechanically supported, just some fluff action means they gain significance) that isn't "pile up IPC bodies." They could've worked together with the Machinists, sending them off for more supply points or whatever.

 

All in all, though, the event was a LOT of fun. The amount of chaos we had at the bridge, being attacked by some player rampants (of which like three G2's, blimey) really solidified the spirit of the round for me. I'm rating it four stars, partially because this is the first active event I'm part of, but also because the premise was really solid.

Very fun event, agree with Bejeweldpot on that this is such a major event that the crew should've been briefed on it prior, seemed very weird that a ton of crew landed on the surface and had no idea what the hell was even going on?