Q2 Status Report

We would like to present our community update for the second quarter. This will be a mixed update with some positive but also some negative point we need to address.

Let’s get the negative points out of the way first:

  • We failed to hit our donation goals for Q2.
  • Progress has been slow on the development side.
  • We have lost access to our donations buffer.

As was to be expected, due to slow progress on our end, but also since ArmA 3 is now entering its fifth year, less people have decided to donate to help us finance our servers.

Another part to this however is that we lost contact with our treasurer EUTW-Napster end of last year. Our former PayPal account is still holding 700 EUR worth of donations, but we can’t access it to move the money out. We have since established a new account that is in use for several months already, accepting all new donations.

This problem prevents us from compensating for the fewer donations. Several EUTW members have been standing in to make up for the loss of money and thrown in several hundred euros from their own pockets over the last months. Unfortunately we have not been able to get any replies from Napster.

We have now reached a point, where we will have to face consequences and reduce our server pool to be able to maintain operation. This means we will abandon one of our root servers, 1st of April, only keeping EUTW #1 and #2 live, while #3 and #4 will be retired.

The server rotation will remain as is for now, but we plan on restructuring layouts and update the rotation based on community feedback. Please be aware that having only two servers running will mean less variety and is more likely for two less liked islands/layouts being active. 

For the moment at least, this will also put an end to our community layout efforts. We hope to resume this in the future however and yet unreleased layouts might make it into our future rotation still. There will be another news post about this soon.

Now to some positive points:

  • Donutz has joined our admin team
  • Mik is helping to improve the new stats page further
  • Likbjorn will soon support us with scripting on the dev team
  • We plan on releasing an update soon to integrate the upcoming Tanks DLC
  • Additional balancing and cost adjustments are still planned as well


All in all a mixed bag unfortunately, but we hope that we can get some momentum back soon and start pushing out more frequent updates again. There are still a lot of outstanding feature, like the team handicap bonus to rescue stacking and the rework of the spawning system.

Thanks for your continued support, your donations and your feedback! 

See you on the servers!

The EUTW Team

Click here to join the discussion on the forums

Launching a brand new stats page

We proudly present our improved statistics page, which has been worked on by our community member Mik with the help of EUTW member Benjamin.

Check out the new stats page: stats.eutw.net 

The page formerly known as "Stats for donators" is now part of this webpage as well and can be found under "Sessions". During the beta stage of development this page will be Donator exclusive, but after the beta period, we will make it available for everyone.

If you are already a donator, make sure you check out the new page. Also, don't forget to share your feedback on the forums.
If you are not a donator, but you want to support us and also gain access to the beta version of the game statistics & replay page, visit donate.eutw.net for further instructions.

Features:

  • Fully reworked status page with new server banners.
  • Sessions page [Donator Exclusive during beta]
    • Replay and statistics of each round
      • Replay of all player and vehicle movements.
      • Markers placed
      • Track other players and see their in-game performance
      • Player chat (Coming Soon™)
    • Individual statistics
      • Browse your own personal performance

Click here to join the discussion on the forums

PVP Warfare 2.07.03 - Vehicle loadouts, LITE improvements

Vehicle loadouts

We have just released a minor update with some major improvements.
Laws Of War DLC brought the new cluster bombs to the game, se we decided it is the correct time to implement our next step for dynamic loadout supported vehicles - loadout selector.
Now you can select your desired loadout for the pylon loadout supported vehicles from pre-configured presets.

107410_20170930042640_1.png

Do not worry, the ability to fully customize your vehicle loadout is still planned and will come in later stages of development.

LITE improvements

Another major improvement is affecting LITE layouts. As the vehicles in these scenarios was already getting a +100% price increase to shift the focus more towards infantry combat, we have added a +100% price increase on anti-tank launchers and ammunition as well to slightly increase the hard earned vehicles' survivability on LITE layouts.

For the full changelog, the full list of the new vehicle loadouts and to provide feedback, visit our 2.07.03 Discussion thread.

2.07.01, New community layouts, Road to 2.08

PVP Warfare 2.07.01

We have released a minor update for PVP Warfare (2.07.01 changelog) which includes several bugfixes and some gearshop changes, but most importantly the "early bird" bonus, which gives an additional 50 Cr/minute money reward for the players who are willing to join a server with low player count.
Further encouraging this, we have raised the player number threshold for our idle kick system to trigger from 5 to 10 players. Additionally, the standard income (250Cr/min) is now given if there is at least 1 player joined on both teams.

We are hoping it will raise our community's motivation to populate empty/low population servers. We are aware that populating empty servers became an issue, so we will keep looking at this topic and introduce further changes if needed.
 

New Community Layouts

On Server #4, there is a new community layout rotation, including Danrik's rework of our classical layouts. Some of you might be familiar with layouts like Galati and Negades Bay (just to mention some of them). Now thanks to Danrik, you can revisit these nostalgic battlegrounds.

 

Road to 2.08.00

Back in July, we mentioned our plans for our next major update. Since then, we have successfully deployed a system to collect data for our upcoming balance system and we have started to develop towards the new features.

As for readability improvements, we have identified the review of the colors used in PVP Warfare as a necessary step to advance forward and make the gameplay easily understandable for our players.
We also plan to guide new players trough the mission by new and useful contextual hints, make the map more simple to read by clearly visualizing attackable and defendable objectives and also showing  where the player can spawn while the fast travel map is opened. As always, your feedback is appreciated, let us know what would you change in terms of making the players understand the core mechanics of the mission. 

We are also preparing our mission for the upcoming Laws of War DLC (to be released on September 7th). We try to include as much new assets as possible, but expect that there will be some which won't be used in PVP Warfare.

Click here to Join the Discussion

2017 Donation goal is completed!

We all want to thank all of our players and donators for their continuous support. Today we've reached our annual donation goal, which means that we have enough money to fund our servers for this whole year, thanks to you!

We wish you all the best and hope we can bring you even more fun times by further improving our mission. Stay awesome!

Click here to Join the Discussion

PVP Warfare Status report

After long testing and iterating, the development of EUTW PVP Warfare 2.07.00 is now finished, which let's us focus on the upcoming improvements and features to the mission.

In our next version, one of our main focuses is improving the spawn system, giving players more control over where they spawn around an objective which will allow for a more tactical defense of an objective, reducing the frustration caused by the fully random spawns.

We are also planning to make our game mechanics - including the newly designed spawn system - to be more readable and understandable for new players for a more welcoming experience.

Our other priority is the long overdue team balancing system.  Our plan is to collect additional data from the played sessions to let us more effectively detect team imbalances before actually deploying the team balance system. This will hopefully provide a smooth release for this feature with less major changes during the test period.

In January, we've set up quarterly donation goals for 2017 in order to finance our server infrastructure. So far, we've are halfway trough Q4 with donations and we cannot express how glad we are with the contribution of our community. Thank you very much for helping us finance the servers!

Talking about community contribution, one of our newest feature in 2.07.00 - Timestamps for markers - was actually written by our community member, S3Savage. We are very thankful for his contribution. As you may know, we are currently having only one active scripter, which caused a slower development process for the mission than we've had in the past, so help from the community like this is very welcome.

Click here to Join the Discussion

Season 1 - TOP 8 Community layout vote

Since the release of the Layout Editor we have received over 60 layouts from you. First of all, we want to thank you all for your time and work put into these submissions.
We've decided that it is time to bring the best layouts to our regular servers' rotation and close down this time period as Season 1.

As always - you decide! Which ones should be played on the regular servers? All the layouts which got voted into the community server rotation - including the most popular ones which have won in the post vote - can be found and voted here.

As for the Tanoa layouts: as there were a rather few submissions for this map, all these layouts will be automatically put on the servers. 

At the end of the vote, we will aim to put together balanced (lite/regular) mix of missions, keeping the best and retiring the least decent ones of our classic layouts.

End of Season 1 also means that Season 2 is right at our doorstep. After a longer break - as usual - you can now vote for the upcoming layouts.
In the meantime, we will be running a small selection of layouts from the ones which didn't make it to the community server, but definitely worth a try. You can play them on Server #4.

Future of EUTW and plans for 2017

Dear Community,

2016 draws to a close and 2017 approaches quickly. For ArmA, 2016 has been a good year mostly. We have seen continuous support by BIS, and the release of APEX in summer. EUTW has adjusted to the new content, improving game balance, adding sub-factions and new features (though not as many as we wanted.) We also released our Map Tool and a server dedicated for community layouts. In addition. there was a massive push on telemetry with new mission statistics, personal stats for donators and an extensive admin interface that helps us police the servers. Alongside PVP Warfare, we have seen several Special Operations and later Friday Night games organized with the community and hosted on our servers.

2017 holds more ArmA3 content ready for us with a number of announced DLCs, 64bit executables and more free updates from BIS' side, as well as a lot of planned features from EUTW. Among these are improved bonus reward systems for repairs done by engineers, for MHQ-driving and successful attacks on enemy vehicles. Furthermore, we want to move the team and class selection inside the mission to make it easier to switch roles and balance teams. Another topic is improved spawning to give players more control where they will be deployed, rather than in the middle of that field everybody has their sights on. We also still have a lot of ideas for adjusting existing content, like excluding friendly fire from critical hits, add naval and airborne MIPs and additional sub-factions.

We need your help to make this happen!

Unfortunately, our financial situation is one of the topics that has not been improving in 2016. While we got a lot of donations from the community to keep the servers running, we just passed a point where we are unsure, if we will be able to finance the servers moving forward. Donations have been dropping recently and while we are very thankful for every contribution small or big, we have reached a point, where things have to change a bit, if we want to continue with EUTW - keeping our high standards for both quality and performance.

This means we have to be more vocal about or finances and set quarterly donation goals to keep the servers online.

Currently, we are operating three root servers, two of which are high-end dedicated game and telemetry servers each running two of our four game server instances, and a third, smaller root server for our other services, like forums, TS, etc.

This adds up to operating costs of around 2000 EUR a year, or roughly 167 EUR per month. This is a lot of money, but to put this in context, our community got an impressive half a million hours of fun in return for this during 2016, according to our stats database! And people say you cannot buy happiness! Yes you can!

Our first step will be to set 500 EUR donation goals in quarterly intervals starting in January 2017. These will be broadcasted aggressively to increase awareness and encourage more people from our community to participate and support us with donations. You will start seeing the donation goal progress in the MotD on the servers, in Teamspeak and we will send out updates via our other channels (Facebook, etc.) in regular intervals. Moving forward, we want to also show a live bar on the webpage and forums.

We also want to improve our services, making stats available for more players with additional features and are considering other donator perks.

What happens, if we don't hit our donation goals?

One of the first measures might be the reduction of our server pool to save costs, shutting down two of our four game servers. Running more server instances on a single machine would not allow us to keep our high-end performance and quality standards.

Community layouts are very important for us, so one server would remain exclusive for community layouts. The second server would have to feature a mix of Altis/Stratis and Tanoa layouts. Unfortunately, this means players without APEX would be automatically kicked when a Tanoa layout comes up in the rotation. The alternative would be to drop support for Tanoa entirely, but we feel this would be the wrong move. In addition, with reduced server capacity, we would not be able to continue supporting Friday Night game sessions anymore as we would need to shut down at least one game server in the meantime.

The good thing is that we are very flexible with our game servers and could easily rent and set up additional servers again, if donations allow for it.

Overall, we are looking very positively to 2017. Let's rock the ArmA-verse together for another great year!

Have a good one!

- EUTW Management

 

https://forums.eutw.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5498

Community Layouts server & Bugfixes

On October 31th we released our Layout Editor Addon and in less than a week, we received enough layouts from you, to dedicate a server to run them on rotation.

Hop on Server #4 and see what some of our players made in the last few days. We will keep adding the layouts we receive, so get creative and submit your best work!

We also released 2.06.01, which contains several bugfixes, including the long overdue magazine loss issue which happens if a player dies while reloading.