HELIX 4 SEASON 1 CIVIL PROTECTION: DECLASSIFIED

[Tinbe]

Well, reading through this thread has been an experience alright. Hearing about 'behind the scenes' shit has always been pretty dreadful, but it definitely stings the most with HL2RP2, since I'd overall enjoyed this iteration the most - S2K nonwithstanding. know I've said this in some form or another previously during that iteration's runtime, but I'm fairly confident that the level of dread I experienced as a vort player trying to fight Combine was just as high as their own dread trying to fight against a vortigaunt.

Sad to see the faction being seen as such a nuisance, doubly so with the allegations of abuse - and I don't even want to get into other cases of abuse on the server posted ITT good lord.

I could probably do some kind of Vortigaunt retrospective thread about the previous iteration based on my personal experiences, but there wouldn't be even a fraction of tangible receipts (and much more internally angled) compared to this thread.

 

[shad]

cool lets do it all over again guys

 

[hewrrra]

what maining cp does to a motherfucker

 

[Erkor]

erkor mentioned rahhhh

my main reason for not playing cop anymore - even though i intended on getting a cop alt - was that i couldn't jive with the character concept, honestly. yeah, i "could have played to keep reinforcing the faction" but being a generic cop goon and effectively just a self-insert avatar for s2king would have made me even more bored

 

[Simman102]

erkor mentioned rahhhh

my main reason for not playing cop anymore - even though i intended on getting a cop alt - was that i couldn't jive with the character concept, honestly. yeah, i "could have played to keep reinforcing the faction" but being a generic cop goon and effectively just a self-insert avatar for s2king would have made me even more bored

Worry not, friend, we knew.

Like I said in the thread, I don't blame anybody for switching to OTA. Better guns, better stats, grapple. On top of this, the past exclusivity of the OTA. The entire aura of being a OOOORRRAAAAHHHH soldier rather than a beat-citizen-with-stick cop.

I well understood that an easy way to becoming OTA was a selling point of the server. We never held anything against the individuals, we were simply bitter about a system harvesting the best players from us.

 

['77 East]

Despite the rebels never advancing past RB6 which was their goal on the map, CAB manufactured a reason to sign the ceasefire ceding the territory to them, indirectly

What you completely failed to understand (despite us hammering it over your heads repeatedly) is that it was not permanent.

It was a hostage gambit, and if you had actually listened to our attempts to communicate you would have known that and probably agreed with it, since the end result was to give you an entrenched position & put the lives of insurgent's families in our hands. I know rank leaders were contacted three times.

Instead you had brandon pull a Lee Harvey Oswald gambit and tried to cover the mess up.

This is what allows me to write this thread with a clear conscience and know that we were on the right side of history.

I'll cede that if you post the failed factory raid Brandon did in Asheville, which seems to be omitted from this 'history' review.

Not to mention both the forest and Bucharest, and nothing at all is here about the Bleeding Clamp.

 

[Lewis!]

all of this in order to not have to roleplay

 

[Simman102]

put the lives of insurgent's families in our hands

No, I did understand that part. The idea was for us to set up checkpoints in the city and get background/family information of the rebels, I know.
What you must be forgetting is that the rebels didn't end up entering the city and instead began to entrench RB6 - this results in a standoff where a rebel and several cops/OTA are killed which ALSO doesn't break the ceasefire. I understood the plan, it simply didn't work.
EDIT:
Here's proof of us intending to comply with the plan. There was only a single rebel workshift, from what I recall.

I'll cede that if you post the failed factory raid Brandon did in Asheville

Two things: one, I probably wasn't present for it there. Two, there's a very clear disclaimer at the beginning of the thread:

IMPORTANT: this thread is by no means exhaustive. It amounts to maybe 20-40% of the 'incidents' or otherwise confrontational situations. Sometimes, I will mention something (e.g. internal conflicts) and post a tiny fraction of the evidence as there'd be no point in padding the thread with kilometers of censored screenshots. You'll just have to believe me.

EDIT: Three things, actually - I very clearly mention in the asheville chapter that we begin to frequently suffer heavy losses.
And, in response to this:

Not to mention both the forest and Bucharest, and nothing at all is here about the Bleeding Clamp.

Could you please at the very least read the very first paragraph of the thread before you comment?

to gain insight into what happened behind the scenes of Civil Protection during Season 1 of Helix 4. I will not be touching upon the other seasons

 

[Blackquill]

all of this in order to not have to roleplay

And the award for obviously didn't bother to read the thread goes to...

No but jokes aside, c'mon now.

 

[Lewis!]

And the award for obviously didn't bother to read the thread goes to...

No but jokes aside, c'mon now.

One day they will beam the 15 page civil protection manifesto into my Elon Musk chip and I will just spontaneously combust

 

[Mute]

seeing essayposts in late 2024 is like seeing a tasmanian tiger in the wild

wasn't active during this time so i have no clue what went on but great read was fun missed these types of threads

 

[Rod]

Good read actually, very nostalgic (for the wrong reasons) despite it being relatively close to today
I even managed to catch a stray

Shoutout to APOC

 

[deathwolf]

i had fun on the opposite side, i had no idea any of this drama was going on and im glad i didnt, the most i had to deal with were people like @Anti-tankspy getting angry at me for whatever reason he could imagine on the day but day to day for me as a rebel leader seems much more relaxing than it was for you

 

[MaXenzie]

cynical take, but this thread solidifies to me that there should be no opposing/competitive factions that are led by different people who aren't in regular communication with each other

it will inherently lead to cliques and a us vs them mentality

 

[Sil]

Genuinely one of the most thoroughly detailed, well-written, informative posts in this entire forum's history. An amazing read, start to finish, highlighting so many issues that caused the gradual decline in the faction from both internal and external factors. And a remarkable insight to Civil Protection overall.

Thank you for making this. It's a shame Neb's HL2RP is basically 100% dead at this point with no chance of serious revival; a thread like this would have convinced me to apply and sign up.

 

[shad]

cynical take, but this thread solidifies to me that there should be no opposing/competitive factions that are led by different people who aren't in regular communication with each other

it will inherently lead to cliques and a us vs them mentality

absolutely impossible to keep everyone happy unless this is a thing imo, speaking as an OTA lead

i'm sure i'm looked back on as like the worst lead OTA had in that iterations' run, but generally all i wanted was to strike a balance between keeping the 'AAAAA I WANNA KILL STUFF SUPER ELITE brrrrrRRrBRRBRBR' people in the faction happy while also being conscious of the enjoyment of everyone else n that unfortunately just wasn't possible w/o having some kind of liason w/ the other side that i never did

think it's also important for any lead, rebel or combine to have a character on the other side that they semi-regularly play, purely to see from their perspective n how you're affectin them w/ what you're doing etc

but ya, wish things were done differently

at the end of the day, numbers' iteration despite its faults was amazing and some of the best fun i've ever had on gmod, rlly thankful to have experienced one last run of the hl2rp glory days

 

[MaXenzie]

absolutely impossible to keep everyone happy unless this is a thing imo, speaking as an OTA lead

i'm sure i'm looked back on as like the worst lead OTA had in that iterations' run, but generally all i wanted was to strike a balance between keeping the 'AAAAA I WANNA KILL STUFF SUPER ELITE brrrrrRRrBRRBRBR' people in the faction happy while also being conscious of the enjoyment of everyone else n that unfortunately just wasn't possible w/o having some kind of liason w/ the other side that i never did

think it's also important for any lead, rebel or combine to have a character on the other side that they semi-regularly play, purely to see from their perspective n how you're affectin them w/ what you're doing etc

but ya, wish things were done differently

at the end of the day, numbers' iteration despite its faults was amazing and some of the best fun i've ever had on gmod, rlly thankful to have experienced one last run of the hl2rp glory days

i think in a roleplay community, it's important to sometimes take a hard-line stance on matters of the server, especially when it comes to matters of taste that contradict each other

to me, a roleplay server should not cater to people who find most of their enjoyment in firefights, because they can get those from CSGO, and if they want the thrill of the risk of losing their character and loot, they can play Rust

pairing up the narrative of the server with OOC skill-based combat means that regardless of your roleplaying skills or character depth, you won't actually be important (beyond the characters remembered solely for their gimmicks like John Doe) because you cannot contribute to most of the major events

combining that with heavily encouraged PvP was just a breeding ground for MOBA-esque toxicity that was left unchecked for years

 

[Sil]

to me, a roleplay server should not cater to people who find most of their enjoyment in firefights, because they can get those from CSGO, and if they want the thrill of the risk of losing their character and loot, they can play Rust

Tried saying this for years. S2K is fundamentally dogshit for roleplay, S2RP or even S2M offer so much more fun and a less economy-obsessed culture. Complaints like "it takes too long" or "it needs too much staff oversight" hold little merit as if you're getting tired that it's taking too long then you're playing the wrong game, and requiring staff oversight is something that staff should simply be doing as part of their duties. On the brief time I was staff, I found myself doing absolutely fuck all half of the time on my staff character and having an actual job to do, like oversee those sorts of encounters, would've been genuinely interesting.

 

[WstStranger]

Well, this provoked me to log in after a while (busy with life and uni for now).

There are things I agree with (glaringly, cops had encounters with absolutely broken rebels, happened to me I think), and things I disagree with (Surprise surprise S2K is meh to me, so I ended up caring not much at all after a good while). However, I got a few observations and questions as a cop main during the totality of Season 1:

* Why was this info "classified"? Wasn't it better to (albeit in a more organized manner) say what was happening more publicly? Some of us cop players had to get insight on what was going on our own of having someone tell us what was happening behind the curtains. To my perspective, it ended up feeling like an issue too big for it to be solved at that point without shifting. None of this info seems to directly affect our lives, and the more minds can be input into an issue, the better. As a team leader, unless the issue involves something so delicate like a person's direct life or the organization's reputation itself, there is little incentive to keep things secret unless for the sake of itself.

More often than not my newest team members offered interesting insights to the same problems. The server is not a product by a company, it is a product made by us all, so we could have been made well aware of what our hands were doing on the environment itself. This is also a note for the future iteration and actually in general, since secretism without reason is simply not a good idea.

* This goes more in hand with what others said, but this all seems mostly S2K related. We got some other issues which were story related. I think something that drove good characters here was the progression of a story, and those who at least gave mini-arcs and such for certain made the faction more enjoyable as I stayed in there. I believe us cops should have had more focus on our own characters (rather than shooting skills) influence the story. What you have said so far seems to me that it hyperfixates on the faction being more of a cop made OPFOR against rebels. So I must disagree about a side of history since... Well, it is not like we were part of a story proper, just the wall for it (broad statement, shoutout to my dudes who were characters first, cops second).

* In season 1 I must admit your presence in the opposing faction was... Unnoticeable at best, at least to what I observe and remember so far. So I will take it with some salt since even I despite having been on both sides of the coin have some clear biases, which means your bias will lean somewhere around the faction you mained for all the server's lifespan despite your best attempts at otherwise.



So in any case, I am proud of having been part of both factions, but especially Civil Protection one funnily enough. Interesting insight... And curiously enough, I look forward for a Season 2 part of yours to see what I missed out there.

And I especially await a rebel analogue (though I expect it to be more chaotic and less documented, for obvious reasons).

i am sleepy so maybe i got something wrong xd, but wanted to get some words out, see ya soon i guess
edited for better grammar and readablity, also update i fuckin failed a 50% exam so lmao i should not have written this

 

[shad]

i think in a roleplay community, it's important to sometimes take a hard-line stance on matters of the server, especially when it comes to matters of taste that contradict each other

to me, a roleplay server should not cater to people who find most of their enjoyment in firefights, because they can get those from CSGO, and if they want the thrill of the risk of losing their character and loot, they can play Rust

pairing up the narrative of the server with OOC skill-based combat means that regardless of your roleplaying skills or character depth, you won't actually be important (beyond the characters remembered solely for their gimmicks like John Doe) because you cannot contribute to most of the major events

combining that with heavily encouraged PvP was just a breeding ground for MOBA-esque toxicity that was left unchecked for years

for a bit of fun i honestly that side of PVP and s2k is perfectly acceptable

the problem arises when it's done when the plot/overall direction of the narrative is at stake, ie basically the entirety of neb history

breeds the whole 'fuck the other side i wanna win' mindset